When I was in college and got interested in physicalism, I noticed quickly that it was actually surprisingly difficult to talk about it in either left wing or right wing spaces. Right wing people would say I was spiritually messed up for believing it, left wing people would say it was "western" or whatever. It gets a little exhausting talking to grown adults who talk like this about philosophy. Even today, a lot of grown adults on this site will behave like children if you express the belief that minds could be reducible to physics. They won't engage in the pretty strong arguments at all, just imply that it's ridiculous to ever believe that the mind isn't magic. This put me on the market for places I could go to have the actual implications of relatively simple compelling ideas like this taken seriously. One of the main functions of effective altruism as a cluster of ideas for me has been to be a place where I could actually just think through and read about these ideas freely as actually having specific implications for the world, instead of just collecting them as social passwords for my political tribe. Relatively simple debates like "Machines could be intelligent in our lifetimes, what does that actually mean?" get completely swamped by similar reactions where people don't actually think about the premises or logic at all, they just look at the conclusion and decide "nope, doesn't fit my deal" and find ways around it. There are a lot of dangers of new social games and blindspots for any new ideological scene, but I think it's an underrated story just how much EA has been one of the only places I could have actual conversations with content about pretty straightforward popular ideas in analytic philosophy and what they mean for the world.

I hate communism in the same way I hate fascism so I'm broadly in favor of using the CIA to end it. Sorry to the commies but you guys gotta lose.