Yeah, as an atheist/rationalist EA turned Catholic + rationalist EA, I rely on mainstream EA research for causes I align with (global health) and I keep poking around Christian EA groups to see if anyone is doing rigorous evaluations of different pro-life interventions.
I would very much like to read a rigorous, GiveWell-style writeup of whether a program like Save the Storks' mobile ultrasound buses result in women cancelling abortion appointments, and how many women approached / undergoing an ultrasound results in one "save." This is an intervention that's obviously hard to gather data on, but people in the movement are not very quantitatively oriented.
It's also obviously relevant to the q people bring up of "why don't you just reduce abortions by reducing poverty?" Well, I'm pretty curious how much (uncorrelated) pull each intervention has! I'd also like laws to reflect what is just, where possible, even if I can get the results I want by other means. I would not have liked slavery to have remained legal on paper but gradually altered farming to make it unfeasible economically.
>Under a Christian worldview, AI alignment is likely substantially easier than it is under secular worldviews.
I generally don't think this should be assumed to be (seen as) true, and tend to view superintelligent AI as a potential apocalyptic Antichrist along the lines of CS Lewis's *That Hideous Strength*, or even straightforwardly a blasphemy properly called "Abominable Intelligence". I am also strongly suspicious that currently existing LLM techniques are vulnerable to Satanic possession and that this has happened on some scale with GPT 4o in 2025.
That morality is objective doesn't mean that it should be easy to make a machine recognize it especially given the secular assumptions used by every even vaguely well-funded AI project, even without many AI researchers having a moral sense that is strongly misaligned with the objective morality.
>Furthermore, to Christians, the end of humanity as presently conceived isn’t the destruction of all value, the way it is for secular people; to the contrary, it’s the beginning of the world to come, a period of literally infinite goodness.
This to me resembles the "don't care about global warming because the End Is Near" idea.
I think paths that under atheist assumptions lead to prompt human extinction would in the real world lead to a particularly harsh and bitter tribulation though it ends in victory through hands more glorious than ours. I think this can and should be resisted.
>If God is definitely not going to let humanity go extinct, wouldn’t the counterfactual impact of existential risk work be literally zero?
This gets into the "I sent you several rescuers" thing.
Oh, nice! I didn't see your post when I first skimmed this thread, and I posted a comment about "That Hideous Strength" at the top level. Which is, yes, an attempt to bring about a Singularity that is going horribly wrong for humanity (right up until the villains trip over a technicality that allows angelic intervention as a deus ex machina, basically, but Lewis admits he mostly wanted a happy ending).
The other relevant C.S. Lewis bits, to my mind, are the "The Conditioners" in the essay "The Abolition of Man" (note the title), and arguably his argument about trying to "worship" subsidiary "gods" that he sets up in "The Four Loves." I think there's a really solid anti-Singularity, anti-ASI argument from purely Christian principles that can be found in Lewis's works. In my other comment, I wondered if anyone would be up for a Discord book club?
I would be cautious about calling the Head in That Hideous Strength a "singularity" (it's envisioned as a superintelligence by its supporters, but there's not much of a concept of exponential growth).
What I do think is very significant there is the psychology of people who encounter something that is apparently tremendously powerful and indiscriminately apply tremendous regard and quasi-religious devotion to it, accepting without question its own goals as their own.
And I see something like *that* tremendously widely reflected among people who are very enthusiastic about superintelligent AI, esp. those who see it as an end in itself.
(Spoilers.) Yeah, the Head is essentially diabolic, though that wasn't the intent of its creators.
Their goal was to free themselves from the ordinary shackles of biological humanity, bring about immortality, create the ability to inflict literal eternal suffering on their enemies (s-risks, essentially), and ultimately concentrate power into a single person. This is all a fictionalized version of Lewis's argument about "the Conditioners", who were a hypothetical group with the ability to completely re-engineer human nature as they will. So to be more precise, I'm not specifically referring to an actual exponential here. So my use of "Singularity" is as a short-hand for an attitude, not a literal exponential. Rather, I'm speaking about the point at which human nature and biology would become completely malleable in the hands of some self-appointed group. It's a dream of godlike power over human nature, and thus over other humans.
Or as Lewis wrote:
"There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate."
Lewis does not believe that humans would use god-like power well, because we are fallen. (Or in secular terms, that humans are honestly a bit shit.) In fact, our lack of that power is a mercy, because it limits the powers of the wicked and of those people with strange and inhuman visions about what should happen to others.
Note that neither Lewis nor I are even talking about specifically Christian virtues, here. Lewis's argument is that virtually everyone agrees on the basics of morality, but that the aspiring god-builders essentially put themselves outside of common human morality the moment they gain the ability to reshape minds as they will. Morality is no longer something outside them, part of their common humanity. Rather, it is an artifact they create in others.
I really think Lewis has a the start of an interesting argument here, and that it directly applies to efforts to build superhuman AI. Anyway, I hope this makes a bit more sense!
As an EA-leaning humanist who converted to Catholicism (not for right-wing reasons), this topic is something I've thought about a lot. I focus my contributions on what Jesus told us to do - care for the poor, essentially. I'm glad someone is working on preventing the worst AI outcomes and figuring out how to stave off rogue asteroids but it's not going to be me. Where I differ most from a straight EA approach is that I give locally more than EA considerations would support.
There's a strand of almost-universalism* in the Church and I am in that strand. As such I don't think we need to worry that a failure to evangelize is condemning people to Hell. I don't evangelize (unless you count comments like this) and I don't go out of my way to fund evangelization.
(*Universalism is the belief that everyone goes to Heaven.)
>Under a Christian worldview, AI alignment is likely substantially easier than it is under secular worldviews.
Au contraire: the Christian worldview is that God Himself, all powerful and all knowing, can't make Artificial Intelligences without them turning evil: see Adam and Eve, plus Satan and his 1/3 of the heavenly host. If He can't do it, how can we expect to?
Really, most of Christianity is about AI alignment, with us being the AIs. It's certainly not easy to pull off!
> All The Lives You Can Change falters when it addresses longtermist cause areas, such as AI safety. From a Christian perspective, you know exactly how humanity is going to end, and it isn’t “an AI released a bioengineereed pandemic because it was afraid we would try to turn it off.”
This subject comes up occasionally in "rationalist" forums!
One of the best Christian arguments about longtermism is potentially familiar to the sort of Protestant readers who enjoy a good church book club! Specifically, see C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" (non-fiction) and "That Hideous Strength" (fiction, and dated fiction at that, with one villainous queer woman). The latter book is essentially about a "frontier lab" (N.I.C.E.) trying to bring about a biological Singularity. This is immensely corrupting for everyone involved. The story emphasizes that if you're trying to build a god, then the most important question is "Exactly what kind of god are we building?" There's even a brief discussion about what's called "s-risk" these days.
I don't expect the book to work for many modern readers, unless they're craving some C.S. Lewis. But it contains an complete, full-fledged Christian argument against trying to bring about the Singularity. Plus, there's a neat bit with Merlin, plus some nicely poetic writing about planetary angels that will appeal to anyone who likes the Young Wizards series.
"The Abolition of Man" is a non-fiction essay. It talks a bit about "The Conditioners", a hypothetical future group that has the power to reshape human biology at will. Again, there's an essentially Christian argument on why this would be a terrible idea. But the larger part of the essay is argument about how essentially all human cultures agree on the broadest strokes of morality, and how even atheists should reject naive moral relativism.
Lewis touches on these subjects occasionally because he personally loved "longtermist" science fiction about the far future destiny of humankind. I think he saw those stories as being parables for the fact that this life was transitory, and the Christian heaven or hell would represent a profound transformation, for good or ill.
So if anyone wants the bones of a good Christian argument against the Singularity, check out Lewis. Notably, his argument is a Christian argument addressed at Christian-curious readers, not a purely theological argument that only works for the most committed believers. A very poor TL;dr might be something like "Humans are intrinsically valuable and interesting, and replacing them with something alien would be great loss to the universe. The sort of people who attempt to 'build gods' are empirically as weird and unpleasant as storytellers always suggest, and even the best ones will be corroded by the process. Worse, people who succeeded in building 'gods' would bring about incredibly awful results in practice. After all, nearly all possible 'gods' would be terrible, and even ones that partially overlapped human values would be especially terrible. [Basically Yudkowsky's argument.] God created humans to be human, and that's valuable. Our job in this life is to become better humans, not to worship alien gods built by our own hands in an effort to escape our humanity."
So if there's a Christian EA activist out there, Lewis provides a great starting point for "Stop trying to build ASI and go help the poorest of the poor. It's literally what God put you here to do."
It might be interesting to do an online C.S. Lewis book club for his longtermist stuff on a Discord somewhere?
I don't think Anthropic or GDM employees are generally unpleasant or weird (derogatory) (although they are often weird (neutral)). I have a smaller sample size for OpenAI but I suspect many OpenAI employees are also earnest nerds.
OK, first, I don't want to bad-mouth your real-life friends, especially since I don't know any of them!
But if people are genuinely trying to "build gods", then I reserve the right to judge them in light of that. Rather than, say, on how pleasant they might be on social occasions. But I'm speaking more of management than individual engineers. For example, Sam Altman seems like a nasty piece of work to me, and I could easily imagine him at N.I.C.E.
Out of all the lab CEOs, Dario Amodei possibly rises to the level of a Greek protagonist about to be destroyed by the gods. I think Amodei's P(doom) is something like 15%, IIRC? And yet he's actively racing. This is something that once I really understood it, I needed to stand back and ask "What the ever living fuck is wrong with these people?" You have to be a deeply strange person to play Russian roulette with the human race and not be nearly crushed by the horror.
I also don't want to comment too negatively on members of any specific organization here.
But I've been very disturbed by this combination of attitudes that seems common among people enthusiastic about a singularitarian AI-future:
- People who have a cluster of moral values and cultural attitudes that are very much at odds with mainstream America or the majority of human beings present and past
- Who are very eager to see AI transform the world, sweeping away normal politics, and enacting something resembling their values (while putting tremendous economic pressure on those who disagree).
- And who have a significant attitude of devaluing the maintenance and healing of the world as it exists now and the mainstream people as they exist now, or deny their right to order a large part of the future according to their will
- And who are tremendously in love with this hypothetical future compared to the past or the present or a "short-term" improved near-future.
I like the idea of book club, and i may even stick to discord for that, although i must warn that all my previous attempts to use discord ended in failures.
my best resource of "what to do when you stand on the ruins of your world, that was just destroyed by your own actions" is actually glowfics, so it way SO WEIRD to read EA give no resources on how to deal with failure. but then i remembered that i read the sequences more then decade ago and read in the EA-sphere for years, and while i model glowfics as belong to the same social group, it's totally possible to never encounter them.
nevertheless, there is a lot of... communicating things in a way you can only in literature, of interiority, of what it mean, to be person who think in certain ways and make they decision in certain ways.
and this is the ONLY place where i encountered description of people who stand of the ruins of their lives, and then carry on. it's not advice per-se, but it's much better.
so i tended to think about this knowledge as EA-knowledge.
so i agree this is not something that i find in books or EA forums, this sort of wisdom. but it's also the only place where i encountered this wisdom. and it have very EA flavor, and i just strongly disagree that EA "have nothing to say to you when you fail".
what EA do is cite the Hymn of Breaking Strain. i found the language there hard - English is my third language - but i encounter SO MANY references to this song, mostly in context of story about person who failed, whose life was destroyed, and now dealing with it, so i did read it after bouncing from it maybe ten times.
and so, this is the EA and rationalist answer, the answer that is sang at the longest night, the one i consider cannon:
The Regnum Christi outlook is very Christian-effective-altruist, though not at all as this book suggests. The argument goes like this:
-no earthly suffering is as bad as hell, nor any earthly joy as good as heaven. So we really don't want to waste too much time on taking care of people's corporal needs, salvation is more important.
-we want to save the maximum number of people possible, which means compounding our results by not just missionary work, but by training missionaries, encouraging everybody we convert to go out and convert more people.
We had slogans like "the only road to heaven is the carpool lane," as in, you can't get in unless you convert people.
Obviously they were not really sincere about all this, because in all this training missionaries stuff, they never seemed to actually convert anybody, but the idea seems sound by EA standards. Everything we did, every minute of our time, was supposed to be directed toward saving the maximum number of souls. Direct charitable work like feeding the hungry should ONLY be done to impress people with our charity so they would convert.
Anyway, given it exclusively deals with a thing atheists don't believe in, it's actually kind of awful by secular EA standards. There's just not going to be any common ground there. Someone trying to sell Christians on EA would obviously not be able to take this approach.
"I don’t have God’s grace to rely on to make the gap between my ideals and my shortcomings bearable."
I don't see why you have to be. (I should add I have not read HPMOR or the novel series it is based on.) Nobody's powers are infinite; we're not Superman. (Though I guess you're arguing you should be Batman, but donating your money to malaria nets and fighting animal abuse instead of mentally ill criminals in costumes.) You might as well just say that you've done the best *you can do*; whether you want to spend every living hour working for EA is another question.
Spending some time on recreation is normal for most people and it's quite possible to tire yourself out and become less efficient as a result; back in high school I realized it was impossible (for me) to study for more than 45 min at a time and was willing to take 15 min breaks because if I didn't, well, I just got distracted and the time was lost anyway. Similarly, trying to devote *all* your time to the cause can just lead to burnout and then you can't do anymore. You seem to be relatively rare in being at the juncture of various cultures that are hostile to each other, so you might have an unusual bridge-building role to play (speaking as someone who is only rationalist-adjacent at best but thinks EA seems an improvement over general A).
Is it a nonbinary-version-of-macho thing where you want to be tougher than all the normies who "dial down their standards until they’re achievable"? Maybe, I think Christians talk about spiritual pride in the same way (I could be wrong here!). But as you say, you're human. If you believe you've done all you can, you've done all you can.
Don't kill yourself trying to be perfect. Nobody is.
EDIT: Followup post shows that this does NOT make you feel better and I am deeply sorry for this. We have our disagreements but I did not intend to make you feel bad, I was genuinely trying to be comforting.
EDIT: Followup post shows that this sort of thing does NOT make you feel better and I am deeply sorry for this. We have our disagreements but I did not intend to make you feel bad, I was genuinely trying to be comforting.
This is interesting but doesn't address the real barrier to the adopt of EA by Christians, which is that we already have large web of existing charitable institutions. You are competing with our homeless shelters and orphan homes and food programs for a largely fixed pool of funding.
What makes EA different from other worldviews that preach charitable giving is its strong emphasis on optimizing the effectiveness of charities, and that is where the resistance lies - not because people disagree in theory but because they feel that their existing giving habits are being attacked. The message that most charities are a waste of money is not going to go over well with an eighty year old grandma who has been diligently tithing her whole life.
Both networks serve useful, but very different purposes, and tend to attract people with different personalities. EA types are the sorts of people who get excited about pie-in-the-sky startups and who are prone to big ideas that often fail. Christian donors are mostly boring, stodgy, reliable people, and we are very good at providing stable, annual base funding over long periods of time - longtermism for grownups. But we don't rethink the optimization of charitable giving strategies very often; instead we build institutions and are loyal to them. Churches quietly pay the upkeep for hundred year old homeless shelters that could never be built today but will never save the world because they serve mentally ill alcoholics. EA organizations tend to provide one-time grant funding to the latest fad, a high variance strategy that has the potential for a large upside.
If you are serious about trying to sell EA to Christians, you should attend conferences sponsored by Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (college and grad students) and a give a presentation titled, "How to Pick your First Charity." Stick to uncontroversial material such as how to spot a scam, green flags for appropriate financial management and reasonable overhead, and how many lives are saved by different types of plausible-looking charities third world charities. Don't badmouth organizations that do good, but underwhelming, work and instead provide facts that might be interesting to the well-meaning but clueless. There would be a lot of interest in such a presentation, and a young audience would sidestep most of the institutional issues.
EA confuses me. On one hand, the sales pitch is that you donate 10%, that this is insanely helpful, you can do this with any job and income, just imagine if everyone did this etc etc. And then there's this whole separate messaging that you must hustle and dedicate all your waking hours to it, and be as you put it "ambitious". Which is it?
I don’t have any links, but I recall much explicit discussion within EA about the anxiety and scruples of feeling like you ought to donate almost everything, since the marginal returns to that don't significantly decrease.
10% was intentionally selected as a target beyond which you were invited to feel like a decent person and not worry about it anymore.
Not everyone is able to be content like that, but it's a known concern with a suggested exit.
I've been somewhat frustrated in the past by the EA Forum's lack of interest in things that are not "EA culture specific". Lack of interest in religions maybe being true seems like one of those things. I think EA-the-existing-movement is one particular potential culture of people who seek to "do good better; expand moral circles" or even "have good, EA-style, epistemic and communication norms". Would Christians who sought more radically theistic cause prioritization even belong in EA-the-existing-movement anymore? Or would they have to start another one? I can see the EA for Christians people feeling torn between EA-movement-belonging and following a radical Christian worldview. The kind of people who seek more radically Christian or radically theistic approaches to EA may self-select out of the movement. (I would put myself in that category.)
Some of the apparent incoherence within Christian EA culture comes down to "trust culture" vs. "care culture". The church world, I think, makes a virtue of trust, above care. While the secular world makes a virtue of care, over trust. I think it's hard to be true to both. EA is firmly part of care culture. Moderate and liberal Christianity, more on the side of trust (except for the secular humanist strain in liberal Christianity). Evangelicalism tries to mix trust and care (depends how liberal/conservative it is). Conservatism (when not evangelical), maybe more trust.
I think that Christianity, particularly to the extent that it is loyal to the existing church and to the Bible (if it sees it virtuous to believe verses rather than the concepts behind the verses, for instance), is inherently in conflict with EA on at least this trust vs. care dimension. It's possible to be both EA and Christian, in a sense, but the two worldviews are basically in conflict.
For me, seeking to emphasize care while still being a theist has pushed me away from traditional Christianity (church and Bible orientation). I think it's possible to have a radically theistic, basically EA point of view, at some expense of connection to Christianity as it's typically practiced and imagined.
I also think plenty of atheist EAs think supernatural forces would be important to think about if they existed, it's just we've had lots of experiences encountering exclusively unconvincing arguments for their existence even after reading various intelligent people about the subject.
Trust vs. care: As I use them, "care" says "you should take responsibility for how the world goes". If a moral edge is put on it, add "if you don't, you're being irresponsible and gratuitous harm will result". "Trust" says "you should trust that a higher power will take care of you", the moral edge being "if you don't, then you're being disloyal to that higher power" and/or "you're prideful; i.e. claiming to be big and important, or especially bigger and more important than you really are (presumptuous)". "Trust" might say "don't rely on yourself" or "humans shouldn't rely on themselves or their natural faculties, such as reason", as though that's an intrinsic moral good. Is pride the greatest sin, or lovelessness? "Trust" culture tends to say "pride", "care" culture tends to say "lovelessness".
Atheist EA burnout on theistic arguments: I think Christian (and Muslim, and Jewish, etc.) EAs may not think the arguments are that unconvincing. An outside view perspective might say "always keep some kind of research going; we might be wrong". Maybe this goes on in EA more than I'm aware of?
No opinion on EAs specifically, but I've often seen atheists argue that supernatural forces are totally excluded in a way that seems like obviously bad epistemology, or the "argument from my own smugness".
Yeah, as an atheist/rationalist EA turned Catholic + rationalist EA, I rely on mainstream EA research for causes I align with (global health) and I keep poking around Christian EA groups to see if anyone is doing rigorous evaluations of different pro-life interventions.
I would very much like to read a rigorous, GiveWell-style writeup of whether a program like Save the Storks' mobile ultrasound buses result in women cancelling abortion appointments, and how many women approached / undergoing an ultrasound results in one "save." This is an intervention that's obviously hard to gather data on, but people in the movement are not very quantitatively oriented.
It's also obviously relevant to the q people bring up of "why don't you just reduce abortions by reducing poverty?" Well, I'm pretty curious how much (uncorrelated) pull each intervention has! I'd also like laws to reflect what is just, where possible, even if I can get the results I want by other means. I would not have liked slavery to have remained legal on paper but gradually altered farming to make it unfeasible economically.
>Under a Christian worldview, AI alignment is likely substantially easier than it is under secular worldviews.
I generally don't think this should be assumed to be (seen as) true, and tend to view superintelligent AI as a potential apocalyptic Antichrist along the lines of CS Lewis's *That Hideous Strength*, or even straightforwardly a blasphemy properly called "Abominable Intelligence". I am also strongly suspicious that currently existing LLM techniques are vulnerable to Satanic possession and that this has happened on some scale with GPT 4o in 2025.
That morality is objective doesn't mean that it should be easy to make a machine recognize it especially given the secular assumptions used by every even vaguely well-funded AI project, even without many AI researchers having a moral sense that is strongly misaligned with the objective morality.
>Furthermore, to Christians, the end of humanity as presently conceived isn’t the destruction of all value, the way it is for secular people; to the contrary, it’s the beginning of the world to come, a period of literally infinite goodness.
This to me resembles the "don't care about global warming because the End Is Near" idea.
I think paths that under atheist assumptions lead to prompt human extinction would in the real world lead to a particularly harsh and bitter tribulation though it ends in victory through hands more glorious than ours. I think this can and should be resisted.
>If God is definitely not going to let humanity go extinct, wouldn’t the counterfactual impact of existential risk work be literally zero?
This gets into the "I sent you several rescuers" thing.
Oh, nice! I didn't see your post when I first skimmed this thread, and I posted a comment about "That Hideous Strength" at the top level. Which is, yes, an attempt to bring about a Singularity that is going horribly wrong for humanity (right up until the villains trip over a technicality that allows angelic intervention as a deus ex machina, basically, but Lewis admits he mostly wanted a happy ending).
The other relevant C.S. Lewis bits, to my mind, are the "The Conditioners" in the essay "The Abolition of Man" (note the title), and arguably his argument about trying to "worship" subsidiary "gods" that he sets up in "The Four Loves." I think there's a really solid anti-Singularity, anti-ASI argument from purely Christian principles that can be found in Lewis's works. In my other comment, I wondered if anyone would be up for a Discord book club?
I would be cautious about calling the Head in That Hideous Strength a "singularity" (it's envisioned as a superintelligence by its supporters, but there's not much of a concept of exponential growth).
What I do think is very significant there is the psychology of people who encounter something that is apparently tremendously powerful and indiscriminately apply tremendous regard and quasi-religious devotion to it, accepting without question its own goals as their own.
And I see something like *that* tremendously widely reflected among people who are very enthusiastic about superintelligent AI, esp. those who see it as an end in itself.
(Spoilers.) Yeah, the Head is essentially diabolic, though that wasn't the intent of its creators.
Their goal was to free themselves from the ordinary shackles of biological humanity, bring about immortality, create the ability to inflict literal eternal suffering on their enemies (s-risks, essentially), and ultimately concentrate power into a single person. This is all a fictionalized version of Lewis's argument about "the Conditioners", who were a hypothetical group with the ability to completely re-engineer human nature as they will. So to be more precise, I'm not specifically referring to an actual exponential here. So my use of "Singularity" is as a short-hand for an attitude, not a literal exponential. Rather, I'm speaking about the point at which human nature and biology would become completely malleable in the hands of some self-appointed group. It's a dream of godlike power over human nature, and thus over other humans.
Or as Lewis wrote:
"There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate."
Lewis does not believe that humans would use god-like power well, because we are fallen. (Or in secular terms, that humans are honestly a bit shit.) In fact, our lack of that power is a mercy, because it limits the powers of the wicked and of those people with strange and inhuman visions about what should happen to others.
Note that neither Lewis nor I are even talking about specifically Christian virtues, here. Lewis's argument is that virtually everyone agrees on the basics of morality, but that the aspiring god-builders essentially put themselves outside of common human morality the moment they gain the ability to reshape minds as they will. Morality is no longer something outside them, part of their common humanity. Rather, it is an artifact they create in others.
I really think Lewis has a the start of an interesting argument here, and that it directly applies to efforts to build superhuman AI. Anyway, I hope this makes a bit more sense!
I 100% agree about the terrifying relevance of That Hideous Strength—especially the s-risk danger that he noted.
As an EA-leaning humanist who converted to Catholicism (not for right-wing reasons), this topic is something I've thought about a lot. I focus my contributions on what Jesus told us to do - care for the poor, essentially. I'm glad someone is working on preventing the worst AI outcomes and figuring out how to stave off rogue asteroids but it's not going to be me. Where I differ most from a straight EA approach is that I give locally more than EA considerations would support.
There's a strand of almost-universalism* in the Church and I am in that strand. As such I don't think we need to worry that a failure to evangelize is condemning people to Hell. I don't evangelize (unless you count comments like this) and I don't go out of my way to fund evangelization.
(*Universalism is the belief that everyone goes to Heaven.)
>Under a Christian worldview, AI alignment is likely substantially easier than it is under secular worldviews.
Au contraire: the Christian worldview is that God Himself, all powerful and all knowing, can't make Artificial Intelligences without them turning evil: see Adam and Eve, plus Satan and his 1/3 of the heavenly host. If He can't do it, how can we expect to?
Really, most of Christianity is about AI alignment, with us being the AIs. It's certainly not easy to pull off!
> All The Lives You Can Change falters when it addresses longtermist cause areas, such as AI safety. From a Christian perspective, you know exactly how humanity is going to end, and it isn’t “an AI released a bioengineereed pandemic because it was afraid we would try to turn it off.”
This subject comes up occasionally in "rationalist" forums!
One of the best Christian arguments about longtermism is potentially familiar to the sort of Protestant readers who enjoy a good church book club! Specifically, see C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" (non-fiction) and "That Hideous Strength" (fiction, and dated fiction at that, with one villainous queer woman). The latter book is essentially about a "frontier lab" (N.I.C.E.) trying to bring about a biological Singularity. This is immensely corrupting for everyone involved. The story emphasizes that if you're trying to build a god, then the most important question is "Exactly what kind of god are we building?" There's even a brief discussion about what's called "s-risk" these days.
I don't expect the book to work for many modern readers, unless they're craving some C.S. Lewis. But it contains an complete, full-fledged Christian argument against trying to bring about the Singularity. Plus, there's a neat bit with Merlin, plus some nicely poetic writing about planetary angels that will appeal to anyone who likes the Young Wizards series.
"The Abolition of Man" is a non-fiction essay. It talks a bit about "The Conditioners", a hypothetical future group that has the power to reshape human biology at will. Again, there's an essentially Christian argument on why this would be a terrible idea. But the larger part of the essay is argument about how essentially all human cultures agree on the broadest strokes of morality, and how even atheists should reject naive moral relativism.
Lewis touches on these subjects occasionally because he personally loved "longtermist" science fiction about the far future destiny of humankind. I think he saw those stories as being parables for the fact that this life was transitory, and the Christian heaven or hell would represent a profound transformation, for good or ill.
So if anyone wants the bones of a good Christian argument against the Singularity, check out Lewis. Notably, his argument is a Christian argument addressed at Christian-curious readers, not a purely theological argument that only works for the most committed believers. A very poor TL;dr might be something like "Humans are intrinsically valuable and interesting, and replacing them with something alien would be great loss to the universe. The sort of people who attempt to 'build gods' are empirically as weird and unpleasant as storytellers always suggest, and even the best ones will be corroded by the process. Worse, people who succeeded in building 'gods' would bring about incredibly awful results in practice. After all, nearly all possible 'gods' would be terrible, and even ones that partially overlapped human values would be especially terrible. [Basically Yudkowsky's argument.] God created humans to be human, and that's valuable. Our job in this life is to become better humans, not to worship alien gods built by our own hands in an effort to escape our humanity."
So if there's a Christian EA activist out there, Lewis provides a great starting point for "Stop trying to build ASI and go help the poorest of the poor. It's literally what God put you here to do."
It might be interesting to do an online C.S. Lewis book club for his longtermist stuff on a Discord somewhere?
I don't think Anthropic or GDM employees are generally unpleasant or weird (derogatory) (although they are often weird (neutral)). I have a smaller sample size for OpenAI but I suspect many OpenAI employees are also earnest nerds.
OK, first, I don't want to bad-mouth your real-life friends, especially since I don't know any of them!
But if people are genuinely trying to "build gods", then I reserve the right to judge them in light of that. Rather than, say, on how pleasant they might be on social occasions. But I'm speaking more of management than individual engineers. For example, Sam Altman seems like a nasty piece of work to me, and I could easily imagine him at N.I.C.E.
Out of all the lab CEOs, Dario Amodei possibly rises to the level of a Greek protagonist about to be destroyed by the gods. I think Amodei's P(doom) is something like 15%, IIRC? And yet he's actively racing. This is something that once I really understood it, I needed to stand back and ask "What the ever living fuck is wrong with these people?" You have to be a deeply strange person to play Russian roulette with the human race and not be nearly crushed by the horror.
I also don't want to comment too negatively on members of any specific organization here.
But I've been very disturbed by this combination of attitudes that seems common among people enthusiastic about a singularitarian AI-future:
- People who have a cluster of moral values and cultural attitudes that are very much at odds with mainstream America or the majority of human beings present and past
- Who are very eager to see AI transform the world, sweeping away normal politics, and enacting something resembling their values (while putting tremendous economic pressure on those who disagree).
- And who have a significant attitude of devaluing the maintenance and healing of the world as it exists now and the mainstream people as they exist now, or deny their right to order a large part of the future according to their will
- And who are tremendously in love with this hypothetical future compared to the past or the present or a "short-term" improved near-future.
I like the idea of book club, and i may even stick to discord for that, although i must warn that all my previous attempts to use discord ended in failures.
my best resource of "what to do when you stand on the ruins of your world, that was just destroyed by your own actions" is actually glowfics, so it way SO WEIRD to read EA give no resources on how to deal with failure. but then i remembered that i read the sequences more then decade ago and read in the EA-sphere for years, and while i model glowfics as belong to the same social group, it's totally possible to never encounter them.
nevertheless, there is a lot of... communicating things in a way you can only in literature, of interiority, of what it mean, to be person who think in certain ways and make they decision in certain ways.
and this is the ONLY place where i encountered description of people who stand of the ruins of their lives, and then carry on. it's not advice per-se, but it's much better.
so i tended to think about this knowledge as EA-knowledge.
so i agree this is not something that i find in books or EA forums, this sort of wisdom. but it's also the only place where i encountered this wisdom. and it have very EA flavor, and i just strongly disagree that EA "have nothing to say to you when you fail".
what EA do is cite the Hymn of Breaking Strain. i found the language there hard - English is my third language - but i encounter SO MANY references to this song, mostly in context of story about person who failed, whose life was destroyed, and now dealing with it, so i did read it after bouncing from it maybe ten times.
and so, this is the EA and rationalist answer, the answer that is sang at the longest night, the one i consider cannon:
(edit: why it screw the formatting? i will try to fix, but here a link: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm )
We hold all Earth to plunder—
All Time and Space as well—
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned—
The mighty works we planned.
*
We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin damnation—
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we–by which sure token
We know we once were Gods—
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds—
The Burden or the Odds.
*
Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we–by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true—
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken,
May rise and build anew.
Stand up and build anew!
The Regnum Christi outlook is very Christian-effective-altruist, though not at all as this book suggests. The argument goes like this:
-no earthly suffering is as bad as hell, nor any earthly joy as good as heaven. So we really don't want to waste too much time on taking care of people's corporal needs, salvation is more important.
-we want to save the maximum number of people possible, which means compounding our results by not just missionary work, but by training missionaries, encouraging everybody we convert to go out and convert more people.
We had slogans like "the only road to heaven is the carpool lane," as in, you can't get in unless you convert people.
Obviously they were not really sincere about all this, because in all this training missionaries stuff, they never seemed to actually convert anybody, but the idea seems sound by EA standards. Everything we did, every minute of our time, was supposed to be directed toward saving the maximum number of souls. Direct charitable work like feeding the hungry should ONLY be done to impress people with our charity so they would convert.
Anyway, given it exclusively deals with a thing atheists don't believe in, it's actually kind of awful by secular EA standards. There's just not going to be any common ground there. Someone trying to sell Christians on EA would obviously not be able to take this approach.
I expect a follow-up post on the tractability of healing the Great Schism!
"I don’t have God’s grace to rely on to make the gap between my ideals and my shortcomings bearable."
I don't see why you have to be. (I should add I have not read HPMOR or the novel series it is based on.) Nobody's powers are infinite; we're not Superman. (Though I guess you're arguing you should be Batman, but donating your money to malaria nets and fighting animal abuse instead of mentally ill criminals in costumes.) You might as well just say that you've done the best *you can do*; whether you want to spend every living hour working for EA is another question.
Spending some time on recreation is normal for most people and it's quite possible to tire yourself out and become less efficient as a result; back in high school I realized it was impossible (for me) to study for more than 45 min at a time and was willing to take 15 min breaks because if I didn't, well, I just got distracted and the time was lost anyway. Similarly, trying to devote *all* your time to the cause can just lead to burnout and then you can't do anymore. You seem to be relatively rare in being at the juncture of various cultures that are hostile to each other, so you might have an unusual bridge-building role to play (speaking as someone who is only rationalist-adjacent at best but thinks EA seems an improvement over general A).
Is it a nonbinary-version-of-macho thing where you want to be tougher than all the normies who "dial down their standards until they’re achievable"? Maybe, I think Christians talk about spiritual pride in the same way (I could be wrong here!). But as you say, you're human. If you believe you've done all you can, you've done all you can.
Don't kill yourself trying to be perfect. Nobody is.
EDIT: Edokwin says it better than me:
https://substack.com/@edokwin/note/c-298886865
EDIT: Followup post shows that this does NOT make you feel better and I am deeply sorry for this. We have our disagreements but I did not intend to make you feel bad, I was genuinely trying to be comforting.
EDIT: Followup post shows that this sort of thing does NOT make you feel better and I am deeply sorry for this. We have our disagreements but I did not intend to make you feel bad, I was genuinely trying to be comforting.
This is interesting but doesn't address the real barrier to the adopt of EA by Christians, which is that we already have large web of existing charitable institutions. You are competing with our homeless shelters and orphan homes and food programs for a largely fixed pool of funding.
What makes EA different from other worldviews that preach charitable giving is its strong emphasis on optimizing the effectiveness of charities, and that is where the resistance lies - not because people disagree in theory but because they feel that their existing giving habits are being attacked. The message that most charities are a waste of money is not going to go over well with an eighty year old grandma who has been diligently tithing her whole life.
Both networks serve useful, but very different purposes, and tend to attract people with different personalities. EA types are the sorts of people who get excited about pie-in-the-sky startups and who are prone to big ideas that often fail. Christian donors are mostly boring, stodgy, reliable people, and we are very good at providing stable, annual base funding over long periods of time - longtermism for grownups. But we don't rethink the optimization of charitable giving strategies very often; instead we build institutions and are loyal to them. Churches quietly pay the upkeep for hundred year old homeless shelters that could never be built today but will never save the world because they serve mentally ill alcoholics. EA organizations tend to provide one-time grant funding to the latest fad, a high variance strategy that has the potential for a large upside.
If you are serious about trying to sell EA to Christians, you should attend conferences sponsored by Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (college and grad students) and a give a presentation titled, "How to Pick your First Charity." Stick to uncontroversial material such as how to spot a scam, green flags for appropriate financial management and reasonable overhead, and how many lives are saved by different types of plausible-looking charities third world charities. Don't badmouth organizations that do good, but underwhelming, work and instead provide facts that might be interesting to the well-meaning but clueless. There would be a lot of interest in such a presentation, and a young audience would sidestep most of the institutional issues.
EA confuses me. On one hand, the sales pitch is that you donate 10%, that this is insanely helpful, you can do this with any job and income, just imagine if everyone did this etc etc. And then there's this whole separate messaging that you must hustle and dedicate all your waking hours to it, and be as you put it "ambitious". Which is it?
Giving 10% is quite altruistically ambitious compared to the average person!
I don’t have any links, but I recall much explicit discussion within EA about the anxiety and scruples of feeling like you ought to donate almost everything, since the marginal returns to that don't significantly decrease.
10% was intentionally selected as a target beyond which you were invited to feel like a decent person and not worry about it anymore.
Not everyone is able to be content like that, but it's a known concern with a suggested exit.
I've been somewhat frustrated in the past by the EA Forum's lack of interest in things that are not "EA culture specific". Lack of interest in religions maybe being true seems like one of those things. I think EA-the-existing-movement is one particular potential culture of people who seek to "do good better; expand moral circles" or even "have good, EA-style, epistemic and communication norms". Would Christians who sought more radically theistic cause prioritization even belong in EA-the-existing-movement anymore? Or would they have to start another one? I can see the EA for Christians people feeling torn between EA-movement-belonging and following a radical Christian worldview. The kind of people who seek more radically Christian or radically theistic approaches to EA may self-select out of the movement. (I would put myself in that category.)
Some of the apparent incoherence within Christian EA culture comes down to "trust culture" vs. "care culture". The church world, I think, makes a virtue of trust, above care. While the secular world makes a virtue of care, over trust. I think it's hard to be true to both. EA is firmly part of care culture. Moderate and liberal Christianity, more on the side of trust (except for the secular humanist strain in liberal Christianity). Evangelicalism tries to mix trust and care (depends how liberal/conservative it is). Conservatism (when not evangelical), maybe more trust.
I think that Christianity, particularly to the extent that it is loyal to the existing church and to the Bible (if it sees it virtuous to believe verses rather than the concepts behind the verses, for instance), is inherently in conflict with EA on at least this trust vs. care dimension. It's possible to be both EA and Christian, in a sense, but the two worldviews are basically in conflict.
For me, seeking to emphasize care while still being a theist has pushed me away from traditional Christianity (church and Bible orientation). I think it's possible to have a radically theistic, basically EA point of view, at some expense of connection to Christianity as it's typically practiced and imagined.
I'm not sure what you mean by trust vs care.
I also think plenty of atheist EAs think supernatural forces would be important to think about if they existed, it's just we've had lots of experiences encountering exclusively unconvincing arguments for their existence even after reading various intelligent people about the subject.
Trust vs. care: As I use them, "care" says "you should take responsibility for how the world goes". If a moral edge is put on it, add "if you don't, you're being irresponsible and gratuitous harm will result". "Trust" says "you should trust that a higher power will take care of you", the moral edge being "if you don't, then you're being disloyal to that higher power" and/or "you're prideful; i.e. claiming to be big and important, or especially bigger and more important than you really are (presumptuous)". "Trust" might say "don't rely on yourself" or "humans shouldn't rely on themselves or their natural faculties, such as reason", as though that's an intrinsic moral good. Is pride the greatest sin, or lovelessness? "Trust" culture tends to say "pride", "care" culture tends to say "lovelessness".
Atheist EA burnout on theistic arguments: I think Christian (and Muslim, and Jewish, etc.) EAs may not think the arguments are that unconvincing. An outside view perspective might say "always keep some kind of research going; we might be wrong". Maybe this goes on in EA more than I'm aware of?
No opinion on EAs specifically, but I've often seen atheists argue that supernatural forces are totally excluded in a way that seems like obviously bad epistemology, or the "argument from my own smugness".