EA - The 'Wild' and 'Wacky' Claims of Karnofsky’s ‘Most Important Century’ by Spencer Becker-Kahn

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The 'Wild' and 'Wacky' Claims of Karnofsky’s ‘Most Important Century’, published by Spencer Becker-Kahn on April 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Holden Karnofsky describes the claims of his “Most Important Century” series as “wild” and “wacky”, but at the same time purports to be in the mindset of “critically examining” such “strange possibilities” with “as much rigour as possible”. This emphasis is mine, but for what is supposedly an important piece of writing in a field that has a big part of its roots in academic analytic philosophy, it is almost ridiculous to suggest that this examination has been carried out with 'as much rigour as possible'. My main reactions - which I will expand on this essay - are that Karnofsky’s writing is in fact distinctly lacking in rigour; that his claims are too vague or even seem to shift around; and that his writing style - often informal, or sensationalist - aggravates the lack of clarity while simultaneously putting the goal of persuasion above that of truth-seeking.I also suggest that his emphasis on the wildness and wackiness of his own "thesis" is tantamount to an admission of bias on his part in favour of surprising or unconventional claims. I will start with some introductory remarks about the nature of my criticisms and of such criticism in general. Then I will spend some time trying to point to various instances of imprecision, bias, or confusion. And I will end by asking whether any of this even matters or what kind of lessons we should be drawing from it all. Notes: Throughout, I will quote from the whole series of blog posts by treating them as a single source rather than referencing which them separately. Note that the series appears in single pdf here (so one can always Ctrl/Cmd+F to jump to the part I am quoting).It is plausible that some of this post comes across quite harshly but none of it is intended to constitute a personal attack on Holden Karnofsky or an accusation of dishonesty. Where I have made errors of have misrepresented others, I welcome any and all corrections. I also generally welcome feedback on the writing and presentation of my own thoughts either privately or in the comments.Acknowledgements: I started this essay a while ago and so during the preparation of this work, I have been supported at various points by FHI, SERI MATS, BERI and Open Philanthropy. The development of this work benefitted significantly from numerous conversations with Jennifer Lin.1. Broad Remarks About My CriticismsIf you felt and do feel convinced by Karnofsky's writings, then upon hearing about my reservations, your instinct may be to respond with reasonable-seeming questions like: 'So where exactly does he disagree with Karnofsky?' or 'What are some specific things that he thinks Karnofsky gets wrong?'. You may well want to look for wherever it is that I have carefully categorized my criticisms, to scroll through to find all of my individual object-level disagreements so that you can see if you know the counterarguments that mean that I am wrong. And so it may be frustrating that I will often sound like I am trying to weasel out of having to answer these questions head-on or not putting much weight on the fact that I have not laid out my criticisms in that way.Firstly, I think that the main issues to do with clarity and precision that I will highlight occur at a fundamental level. It is not that they are 'more important' than individual, specific, object-level disagreements, but I claim that Karnofsky does a sufficiently poor job of explaining his main claims, the structure of his arguments, the dependencies between his propositions, and in separating his claims from the verifications of those claims, that it actually prevents detailed, in-depth discussions of object-level disagreements from making much sense...