You're missing the point of the meme, which is not "technology is bad", but "technologists theming their new poorly-tested invention after a popular story where the invention hurts people is gross".
If your tech company calls its product "The Genophage™" it's fair to ask if they're taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously.
That can be very easily explained as "bigger cars are safer for their occupant and deadlier to the person getting hit by them".
I do think you need to defend your assertion, because the difference between a driver and a pedestrian is that the driver "knew the risks" while the risks were imposed on the pedestrian.
A 36% approval rating is sky-high for a president that started a pointless immensely costly war after getting elected on a platform of "no more costly wars" and is in the process of negotiating an immensely unfavorable deal with Iran after getting elected on a platform of "Obama's deal with Iran was terrible, I could do much better".
By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?
At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.
"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.
> Really it's rich people who want to do something good but don't want to bother getting informed and convincing themselves about what they want to do. "I'll give a ton of money and in return I get philanthropy points to share with my rich friends, but I don't want to have to think about what is being done with that money".
The people I have met at effective altruist conferences are not rich, though they lean upper-middle class. I've seen way more "enthusiastic broke student" types than millionaires.
> When someone invests a ton of money and energy into something they genuinely care about, they don't call themselves effective altruists, do they?
Well N=1, but I do.
(And also I've met tons of EA people who were not shy about investing all their energy in a cause they care about, even when all mainstream society tells them it's pointless.)
I really miss the time when people thought that the idea of someone telling an un-sandboxed AI "do whatever is needed to X" was unrealistically stupid.
I mean... Yes, any short snappy explanation is going to be easy to strawman by someone motivated to do so.
The longer non-snappy explanation is that "I will arbitrarily set numbers on things and call it impartial" obviously doesn't match EA's self-conception, that lots of EA cause areas are speculative and don't focus on numbers, that EAs that do focus on numbers do a lot of work to make sure the numbers aren't arbitrary, that EAs as a general rule don't claim to be impartial, and that awareness of Goodhart's law doesn't mean "never trying to objectively measure anything at all".
> I am interested in showing to the world that I am well-intentioned and trying to do something, even if that something doesn't make sense".
This is the kind of pre-conception that's essentially immune to reality. I hear the same thing about vegans (oh they say they care about animal suffering, but everybody knows about factory farms, they just want to feel superior to everybody else) or environmentalists (they say that climate change is a threat to humanity but really they just want to lecture us about our cars).
All I can say is that it doesn't match my experience, and that the effective altruists I've met spend quite a lot of time "thinking about whether or not it can work" and trying to learn from other people's mistakes.
To quote notorious effective altruist Scott Alexander:
> Look. I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. But we’ve noticed the skulls. We’ve looked at the creepy skull pyramids and thought “huh, better try to do the opposite of what those guys did”.
Friendly reminder that, for all that I despise Israeli politics, "existing in Tel-Aviv" isn't a crime or an aggression against Palestinians.
We can think ill of the Israeli state without jumping to "fuck you for living in Israel and having nice things" as soon as someone mentions their city name.
There's something ironic about complaining about other people's social skill while you couldn't be bothered to make a point without sounding dismissive and condescending.
> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay
"Undue delay" is subjective, but "we'll keep backups of your data for a week in case you change your mind" seems easy to justify in court.
> Amy Eskridge - who publicly stated she was not suicidal before "committing suicide"
I really hate the discourse around this stuff. Like, yes, disguising murder as suicide is a thing and obviously three-letters agencies do it.
But someone saying publicly they're not suicidal gives you close to zero information. People with suicidal ideation almost never advertise it publicly because, one, there is a heavy amount of social stigma attached to it, and two, publicly declaring you're suicidal is a good way to get involuntarily committed to a mental health institution.
I see a ton of jokes on social media that go "remember, X is not suicidal". How the fuck would you know? This discourse is so disrespectful to people struggling with suicidal thoughts.
If your tech company calls its product "The Genophage™" it's fair to ask if they're taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously.