Holden Karnofsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Let's talk about new totalitarianism. There’s this question from an old Scott Alexander post where he asks, would you rather the medieval church spent all of its money helping the poor rather than supporting the arts? So maybe there were fewer poor people back in the medieval times, but you wouldn't have any cathedrals or you wouldn't have the Sistine Chapel. I don't know how you would answer that if you were in medieval times. It doesn't sound like the strongest version of this argument to me, to be honest. Maybe that would be fine or good. I don't know. My wife really loves these like old churches–– if I had more of her attitude, I would be more horrified by this idea. Low income people had a rough time in the past so them having better lives seems pretty appealing, so I don't really know if that's the best version of this argument. How much of future proof ethics is basically that you're very confident that a future Holden will have a much more developed and better set of ethics? How much do you think people in general or humanity in general will get better ethics over time?…

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