Hey all,

I'm Robbie Shade, and an almost-finished PhD student in robotics at Oxford. I have no background in philosophy but the quantitative rationality of Giving What We Can had immediate appeal. The extension to actively pursuing a career which will allow you to do the most good is pretty clear with hindsight -- but it took Will Crouch and Ben Todd's talk on ethical/high-impact careers to really get me interested.
I'm now involved in High Impact Careers[1] -- I'm one of the lead developers of the website.

I guess I'd identify myself as a transhumanist[2] , and I'm a supporter of Aubrey de Grey's work on curing ageing[3].
I've finally got around to joining this forum after being reminded of its existence by Sasha Cooper -- thanks!

R.

[1] http://www.highimpactcareers.org/
[2] Eliezer Yudkowsky's definition: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified
[3] http://www.sens.org/

Welcome aboard, Robbie Lots of non-philosophers and quite a few transhumanists around here (by Eliezer's definition we presumably all are, but the modest definitions some THists give often don't seem to match their actual views...).

I'll turn around your request, btw - if you ever want something to punctuate HIC coding, I'm sure Ryan would appreciate some help with the technical side here!

Welcome Robbie,

I'm so proud of the work everyone's doing at HIC. As Arepo says, I'm always keen to volunteer. Geographically, I'm miles away, but in spirit, I'm behind you guys 100%

I'm transhumanist and I'm happy to see gerontology work done as per Aubrey De Grey. But that's pretty standard around here. The kind of common objections to transhumanism that subconsciously rely on giving nature intrinsic value are not going to resonate with us.

Thanks for the welcome guys!

I'd be really interested to find out more about the common objections to transhumanism that you mention. What do you mean by "giving nature intrinsic value"?

Oh, for a start, when critics say that efforts towards transhumanism are "playing god" or "interfering". That sort of argument should just be dismissed out of hand, I think! Or, at least, the burden is on the person who would make that argument to show how and why playing god is likely to be harmful!

By "giving nature intrinsic value", I mean people who believe that being natural makes something good. As Sam Harris puts it, the question is "Is mother nature our friend?" My answer being no, or at least not always!