I can’t know for sure that it won’t come back to bite me, but I suspect helping people generally tends to be helpful. There are things that are easier to use to cause harm than to help, like nuclear weaponry, but in general helpful things seem to have improved humanity’s standard of living, and made them care more about morality.
I don’t actually think that teaching rationality is dangerous. I think that LW expects it to have an edifying effect, to change values for the better. So it is the claim of purely instrumental rationality that is the problem.
I can’t know for sure that it won’t come back to bite me, but I suspect helping people generally tends to be helpful. There are things that are easier to use to cause harm than to help, like nuclear weaponry, but in general helpful things seem to have improved humanity’s standard of living, and made them care more about morality.
I don’t actually think that teaching rationality is dangerous. I think that LW expects it to have an edifying effect, to change values for the better. So it is the claim of purely instrumental rationality that is the problem.