samuelthomas

I want to make sure it's said that effective altruism is intertwined with the rationalist movement (Scott Alexander[1], Eliezer Yudkowsky[2], Robin Hanson[3]) and that, among these so called rationalists and the parts of the effective altruist community where they hold sway, there are a lot of advocates of AI risk mitigation research (what this means, who knows). These people see AI as the greatest risk to humanity, if you agree to a very long list of tenuous assumptions and implications.

I don't think the one paragraph in this article where this is mentioned does enough to emphasize this part of the community. Many members of effective altruism use it as a front to recruit people into their belief system, which is centered around devotion to / fear of future AIs that exist solely as thought experiments. And while their leaders don't necessarily explicitly endorse it, the communities they foster tend to also be fairly right wing / race realist / misoginistic / bigoted.

Many of the people in the rationalist and effective altruist community believe that if they don't help create AI any future AIs will create a hell and punish them in it. Seriously. That is a serious belief.

Check out more: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-re...

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rule...

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...

[3] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/989535565895864320?la...

> I think the Intro's link to the local env setup in the appendix is broken.

The book is written using Leanpub's markdown syntactic sugar it seems.

This is a pretty great one, and one of the books I recommend for anyone who is learning JS.

My favorite book to recommend though is Eloquent JavaScript (also free). Just a fantastic, readable, intro to programming and JS.

http://eloquentjavascript.net/