My current boss and long-time associate and conversation-partner, Michael Vassar, is running for the board of the organization Humanity Plus. In a recent phone call telling me about his decision, he said that he wanted to make transhumanism more effective by encouraging better cooperation among its many organizations and groups, and spending more time pursuing brand clarification. Read his candidate statement and consider voting for him.

Recently, a bunch of people stepped down from the board of the organization, namely Nick Bostrom, James Hughes, and Mike Treder. James Hughes was a strong figure in the organization, formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association, for many years. For those not in the know, Nick, James, and Mike are now part of the IEET, which is more of a formal think tank than Humanity Plus, the organization formerly known as WTA.

I am a member of Humanity Plus. I used to encourage the IEET to reproduce select blog posts of mine as it wished, but then in mid-year I politely asked them to cease doing so in response to Managing Director Mike Treder’s frequent attacks on my moral philosophy of choice, Singularitarianism. See Roko’s coverage. Mr. Treder compared Singularitarianism to “birtherism, creationism, and climate science denialism”. He wrote, ” In each case, arguments are marshaled that seem to resemble scientific or legal reasoning but that end up as speculative assertions intended to support fanciful, ideological, or faith-based positions.”

I invite you to read documents like “Basic AI Drives” by Stephen Omohundro and decide for yourself whether the arguments seem primarily faith-based or scientific.

Now I’ve gotten into conflict already, but that’s not my intention. I just wanted to review and mention the IEET. Even though my articles don’t appear there any more and I no longer mention them in my bio, I think that IEET could be worth supporting if you can’t bring yourself to support SIAI. As a center-left type guy (leaning center-right on economics), I find much of Treder’s writing to be stereotypical SWPL leftism, but there are many other authors on the site. James Hughes recently had a good piece up that directly addresses Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rationality project, and the like. The IEET, in general, seems to be making some inroads to the mainstream media, and is indeed the public face of “democratic transhumanism”.

Humanity Plus is more of a blank slate. They had a successful recent conference, and could still go a number of different directions. This board runoff will help determine which. Join the organization now if you wish to vote next week.