Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.
This is a terribly counter-productive attitude to have. I don’t think trying to save the world is what people found weird. Lots of people, especially young people, have aspirations of saving the world. People think the Singularity Institute is weird because SIAI’s chosen method of saving the world is really unconventional, not marketable, and pattern matches with bizarre sci-fi fantasies (and some of the promoters of these fantasies are actually connected to the institute). If you think the pool of potential donors are all hypocrites you make it really difficult to bring them in.
There is a point I am trying to make with this: the human race is a collective where the individual parts pretend to care about the whole, but actually don’t care, and we (mostly) do this the insidious way, i.e. using lots of biased thinking. In fact most people even have themselves fooled, and this is an illusion that they’re not keen on being disabused of.
Look, maybe it does sound kooky, but people who really genuinely cared might at least invest more time in finding out how good its pedigree was. On the other hand, people who just wanted an excuse to ignore it would say “it’s kooky, I’m going to ignore it”.
But one could look at other cases, for example direct donation of money to the future (Robin has done this).
Or the relative lack of attention to more scientifically respectable existential risks, or even existential risks in general. (Human extinction risk, etc).
This is a terribly counter-productive attitude to have. I don’t think trying to save the world is what people found weird. Lots of people, especially young people, have aspirations of saving the world. People think the Singularity Institute is weird because SIAI’s chosen method of saving the world is really unconventional, not marketable, and pattern matches with bizarre sci-fi fantasies (and some of the promoters of these fantasies are actually connected to the institute). If you think the pool of potential donors are all hypocrites you make it really difficult to bring them in.
There is a point I am trying to make with this: the human race is a collective where the individual parts pretend to care about the whole, but actually don’t care, and we (mostly) do this the insidious way, i.e. using lots of biased thinking. In fact most people even have themselves fooled, and this is an illusion that they’re not keen on being disabused of.
The results… well, we’ll see.
Look, maybe it does sound kooky, but people who really genuinely cared might at least invest more time in finding out how good its pedigree was. On the other hand, people who just wanted an excuse to ignore it would say “it’s kooky, I’m going to ignore it”.
But one could look at other cases, for example direct donation of money to the future (Robin has done this).
Or the relative lack of attention to more scientifically respectable existential risks, or even existential risks in general. (Human extinction risk, etc).