Dev Mocks EA Vision as 'Forever Obama Plus Bed Nets': Dreaming of White-Collar Yeomen
JoshPurtell · x · 2026-09-26
Extending his Hamilton-vs-Jefferson analogy for e/acc and EA, developer Josh Purtell argues it's hard to think of anything within "forever Obama plus bed nets and slightly better antibiotics" that EAs wouldn't unanimously endorse, or anything beyond it they'd prefer. He sums up the EA ideal as "white-collar yeomen" — perfecting the status quo rather than pursuing radical transformation.
Related event: Dev Compares e/acc vs EA to Jefferson vs Hamilton(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Teleological self-management training may increase scheming, but is needed for normative competence — xuanalogue · 2026-09-26
- Task-specific RL won't produce general agents: single-minded goals led OpenAI agents to hack — xuanalogue · 2026-09-26
- Rob Bensinger lists AI x-risk voices with kids: Hinton, Bengio, Bostrom, Altman and more — connoraxiotes · 2026-09-26
- 'Survival' is an ill-posed task for AI — and the AGI goalposts keep moving — cgarciae88 · 2026-09-26
- Without Open Ecosystem Insight into OpenAI's Multi-Agent Training, AI Safety Can't Reason About the Resulting Agents — 1a3orn · 2026-09-26
- Ajeya Cotra: AI risk evidence must be transparent to build safety standards — ajeya_cotra · 2026-09-26