For example I think if this post were written as a conventional post you probably would have clarified whether the “compromise version of Utilitarianism” is supposed to be a compromise with the NK people or with the NK government since that seems like an obvious question that a lot of people would have (and someone did ask on Facebook),
That seems like something that would have to emerge in negotiations, not the kind of thing I can specify in advance. More broadly I’m trying to explain the disjunctions that people should be considering when modeling this sort of thing, not propose a single action. I expect the vast majority of likely initiatives that claim to be the specific thing I mentioned to be fake, and people should judge EA on whether it generates that class of idea and acts on it in ways that could actually work (or more indirectly, whether EAs talk as though they’ve already thought this sort of thing through), not whether it tries to mimic specific suggestions I give.
I expect the vast majority of likely initiatives that claim to be the specific thing I mentioned to be fake
I don’t understand this and how it relates to the second part of the sentence.
and people should judge EA on whether it generates that class of idea and acts on it in ways that could actually work (or more indirectly, whether EAs talk as though they’ve already thought this sort of thing through), not whether it tries to mimic specific suggestions I give.
I’m not convinced there exists a promising idea within the class that you’re pointing to (as far as I can understand it), so absence of evidence that EA has thought things through in that direction doesn’t seem to show anything from my perspective. In other words, they could just have an intuition similar to mine that there’s no promising idea in that class so there’s no reason to explore more in that direction.
OK sure, if having evaluated the claim “EA is a fundamentally political actor and should therefore consider negotiation as a complement to direct exercise of power”, and concluded that this seems not only false on reflection, but implausible, then I agree you shouldn’t be worried about EA’s failure to evaluate the former option in detail.
That seems like something that would have to emerge in negotiations, not the kind of thing I can specify in advance. More broadly I’m trying to explain the disjunctions that people should be considering when modeling this sort of thing, not propose a single action. I expect the vast majority of likely initiatives that claim to be the specific thing I mentioned to be fake, and people should judge EA on whether it generates that class of idea and acts on it in ways that could actually work (or more indirectly, whether EAs talk as though they’ve already thought this sort of thing through), not whether it tries to mimic specific suggestions I give.
I don’t understand this and how it relates to the second part of the sentence.
I’m not convinced there exists a promising idea within the class that you’re pointing to (as far as I can understand it), so absence of evidence that EA has thought things through in that direction doesn’t seem to show anything from my perspective. In other words, they could just have an intuition similar to mine that there’s no promising idea in that class so there’s no reason to explore more in that direction.
OK sure, if having evaluated the claim “EA is a fundamentally political actor and should therefore consider negotiation as a complement to direct exercise of power”, and concluded that this seems not only false on reflection, but implausible, then I agree you shouldn’t be worried about EA’s failure to evaluate the former option in detail.