The best technique I use for “being careful” is to imagine the ways something could go wrong (e.g., my fingers slip and I drop something, I trip on my feet/cord/stairs, I get distracted for second, etc.). By imagining the specific ways something can go wrong, I feel much less likely to make a mistake.
TedSanders
Karma: 128
Ah, thanks.
What differentiates a small meetup from a regular meetup?
Thanks for the long and thoughtful post.
My main question: Who are these ‘people’ that you seem to be arguing against?
It sounds like you’re seeing people who believe:
“You—you, personally—are responsible for everything that happens.”
“No one is allowed their own private perspective—everyone must take the public, common perspective.”
Other humans are not independent and therefore warring with them is better than trading with them (“If you don’t treat them as independent… you will default to going to war against them… rather than trading with them”)
To do good, “you will try to minimize others’ agency”
And the people who hold the aforementioned beliefs are:
“the people around me applying utilitarianism”
“many effective altruists”
people with ideas “commonplace in discussions with effective altruists”
I guess I struggled to engage with the piece because my experiences with ‘people’ are very different than your experiences with ‘people.’ I don’t think anyone I know would claim to think the things that you think many effective altruists. I loosely consider myself an effective altruist and I certainly don’t hold those beliefs.
I think one way to get more engagement would be to argue against specific claims that specific people have spoken or written. It would feel more concrete and less strawmanny, I think. That’s a general principle of good writing that I’m trying to employ more myself.
Anyway, great work writing this post and thinking through these issues!