curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Most of this is factually true but idk how it matters?
I don't think anyone would argue "If you save the child you saw on your way to work, you are now obliged to spend all day going around all the rivers, ponds, swimming pools and bodies of water in the neighbourhood to save any potential drowning children
because there aren't that many drowning children. On the other hand, there are many children with malaria.
It's pure feeling, and it's phooey.
Just saying 'feeling' doesn't mean anything. Pain is a 'feeling', yet it is also 'objectively' worthwhile to avoid cutting yourself with a knife, and "pain" is more of an understanding of that than a thing on its own. If you say 'that knife is there avoid getting cut', that's appealing to pain, but ... not 'appealing to pain' in the sense that if you e.g. didn't feel pain it'd still be worth avoiding, because 'pain' is just a way of understanding that!
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world
The physical africans who get bed nets are no more or less abstraction-ish than, say, money you donate to a homeless person in your city. Cities, and 'communities', are as arbitrary as 'the world' is - they're contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc!
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises
I mean, is "my community" the city I live in because it had good schools? Is it people I talk to on the internet? Is it the base of economic production (most of the planet)? Also, the median alternative isn't "rich guy builds sistine chapel 2", but large houses, luxury purchases, or for charity awareness campaigns and funding 'economic and racial justice' charities.
As for 'art' - how would you propose funding art? You're not gonna find great artists in your hometown, compared to globally, power law etc. And globally - i.e. online - there are hundreds thousands of great artists - by most's standards, and thousands by any one person's, many of which you can donate to with a few clicks, but they're spread out across the globe (japan isn't africa, nor is it "your community"). Some of them are already well funded - most aren't. But if you fund a few extra, or even a few hundred extra, either way anyone who wants art can see a flood of instagram or pinterest or pixiv or w/e, so what precisely are you accomplishing? Again compared to 'saving thousands of poor african lives'.
As for infrastructure - even if you have a few billion, how can you compete with the hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment per year (vs wealth that you'll have over a decade), by motivated organizations that know a lot more than you?
And knowledge - well EA was spending a lot on 'knowledge', see ftx future fund grantees https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/, open phil openai grant, early funding to MIRI, etc, so that's just wrong.
Please actually make your case next time instead of vaguely gesturing that 'clearly EA is deeply, morally wrong, which i instinctively understand due to my background'. There are great cases against it!
No, you might actually see the homeless person in your day-to-day life, and he you. You interact, and can make each other's day directly better or worse
Huh? You almost certainly have not met, in person, the homeless guy that your hypothetical community philanthropy will reach. A lot of the homeless population moves around and in and out of homelessness. The soup kitchen you volunteer at is probably in a different part of a large city. And how does it matter if you've, like, seen the homeless guy once at a glance while driving around, vs not seen them at all, vs them being african? What?
Barring intensive intentional effort, you will never see them, speak to them, or have any relationship with them or they you
The same is true of ... homeless people for most?
That's a meaningful division, or at least used to be before modernity came along and undermined it
No, those premodern divisions are still "contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc".
Which of those do you have meaningful, reciprocal relationships in?
How can it possibly matter if you have "meaningful reciprocal relationships" that happen to be in the same city as the homeless people? I don't have any such 'reciprocal relationships' with the homeless people, so it sure seems like we're relying on geographical coincidence.
Why do you need your hometown's art to be "great"? What makes art "great"
I've become good friends with people in random towns who produce great art, are very good at their profession, etc. Why should I support random people who live in my city instead?
You just seem to be advocating a more aesthetic, slightly smaller-scale version of universalist philanthropy?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
And when those are as good as you can make them, then move out to the next group outward, and so on.
why? Why should one e.g. manage to overcome local resistance to building code reform in a veto-point bueraucracy to fix local rents before donating antiparasitic medication to people in africa? You still haven't really justified that!
It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately
Which artists? And 'right wing' how? Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists. Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?
Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick)
Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left. MIA is barely a "thinkier". Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?
Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?
To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'd say about 1:1, at minimum, of avoiding donors who a) will make up a charity-redefining portion of the funds, and b) are more than slightly likely to collapse.
Well ... there are two at-scale donors (moskowitz and SBF) ... so 1:1 refusal means zero donors?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Those caveats are critically important though, and are fairly universally endorsed by anyone who isn't a philosopher and takes things seriously.
For all of them there's still an implicit out, that lying/cheat/stealing for the greater good is okay if you can get away with it.
The explicit example on the EA forum was schindler. Another fun example is intelligence / spying, which is somewhat critical for a nation-state, especially during wars (which happen often), yet is lying/cheating/stealing.
"well but in those cases the greater good is just TOO IMPORTANT because it's an actually important thing" yeah that's the point, 'means' and 'ends' are both causes and effects that interact and mix together!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
think about this stuff, with your own brain, in your own head ... Even if the 'only' problem with FTX was a hair-brained scheme that was simply going to go bankrupt without any fraud
But FTX's business made sense, they were a crypto exchange that made money off of crypto trading, why would they go bankrupt without fraud?
The entire premise of EA is, like, 'neglected causes'. If nobody was trying to fix "the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections" then sending money to africans might be a problem, but there are literally millions of people trying to fix those things, and thousands of times as much money are spent on them. So this complaint genuinely does not make sense.
I actually agree that EA should stop sending money to low-iq africans and instead spend money on beauty and will-to-power, and that 'spending money' is a poor way of accomplishing the latter and our smartest people working as hard as possible at giving malaria nets to mediocre bantus (and meaningless fun to mediocre white people) is dumb. But none of the arguments you're making really make sense on their own terms. The amount of money spent on 'local charity' per year in the united states is MUCH MUCH HIGHER than all of EA expenditure, or all of EA wealth.
Also, local infrastructure is great by any standards other than modern ones. Yeah, we don't have a good public transportation system in most of the US, but cars and planes still make it better than literally any period in history. The environmental movement's continued success means that our 'surroundings' are also better than any point in the last century. What does 'decay of governance' even mean? How do you expect a bunch of ivy league jews to reinvigorate 'local traditions'?
individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections
These are being macerated by the internet, which is much more powerful in any literal or physical sense of 'power'. As is demonstrated by themotte existing on the internet, and not IRL. that trend is accelerating rapidly and will not stop.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't like the existing drugs, but I also don't think there's some particularly holy nature of the unaltered biochemistry
There clearly isn't in a broad sense - genetic differences between humans that lead to great differences in intelligence or some other traits are themselves biochemical. But the particular mechanisms of psychoactive drugs are strong enough that they aren't doing the kind of thing that, like, a gradient descent of fine modifications would, but more just 'making you focus really hard on some specific thing' (stimulants, bad because - naturally - you'd be considering if you should do that thing and how you should do it in relation to larger-scale structures), or 'kinda feeling good or having crazy insights while actually just being dumb' (alcohol, weed, psychoactives). In the particular case of stimulants for 'not being able to focus', I really do think it's just a 'natural' lack of desire to engage in various aspects of school, work, modern life that is in great part justified, but poorly developed, rationalized, and then treated with the drug
I thought my parenthesis use was bad.
Back when the "algorithm" was actually fully honest, there were regularly underage girls shaking their assets all over the front page, trending section, etc. of YouTube, for example
yep, plus there's still tons of mostly-clothed 13-16yos dancingon tiktok, and it even happened on local tv sometimes ("wholesome yoga/gymnastics competitions for 14yos")
I can't see at all how suppressing drawn loli is a useful use of effort, compared to anything else, tbh
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Is eigenrobot far-right? He certainly leans that way a bit but is still, like scott, still antiracist, prolgbt, etc
On eigenrobot's essay itself:
Donors being anonymous doesn't solve anything, they can still influence secretly, and even if they don't the 'power' just moves, someone / a group of people still publicly distribute the money and they have the same incentives.
Decision-making within charities conducted by large voting bodies and randomized assignment, to make attempts at direct influence of decision-makers more cumbersome
democracy bad, this just makes your charity less effective because it's run by random people, and less possible to organize large scale action
'power corrupts, so power is bad' is dumb. you still need power and organization!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's the same person, see the nested paren use.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Would banning loli, or anything else like that, reduce various forms of age-based sex offenses at all though? The meme is 'muh violent video games', but idk, my guess is not much, given how common it is in countries with different levels of popularity.
Agree that core EA people seem to be both significantly 'old EA', 'weird', and deeply committed to effectiveness and altruism. Contesting EA should attack that, not say 'they're more democrats'. Although it's quite funny to cite a mattyglesias talk to argue against something becoming more normie democrat!
Also, global health,biorisk,climate change,nuclearhave been normal for several decades before EA even existed - EA's novelty was taking them more seriously and literally, to an extent.
The FTX did a lot of funding of the worst orgs like Anthropic [...] They are so clearly disconnected from reality
Elaborate? AI is ... definitely a problem, and while AI safety isn't working well (there isn't a clear vision for what AI does, and how its significant 'agency' or ability to compete coexists with 'human utopia', and how any of this AI alignment work coexists with AI's rapid integration into the global economy. Eleizer can at least see that, hence pessimism) but they're not more delusional than the 'AI is just gonna be a fun tool and modern civilization is just gonna vibe for the next thousand years not changing too much no need to worry' or whatever
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I never watch tv, but just saw it randomly once, so I doubt it's that common. Also relevant, child beauty pageants (and i don't think the moms bringing their daughters there are even pedo-adjacent)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
All of the skilled twitter programmers I knew of online (from before elon) rom their public accomplishments/projects/writing/social media have left, as of now. And their posts indicate most of the skilled people they knew within twitter have left too. Ofc anecdote, idk anything internally, easily could be wrong, etc
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity
What was different about twitter than other social media or pre-internet TV/news/radio that makes it such a blight? It does suck, but it's not obvious that the unwashed masses will suddenly become enlightened when given >280 characters
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You don't like Elon and you hope he fails
"outgroup is entirely motivated by their personal hatred of all that is good" is, even if kinda true, never entirely true, nor a useful contribution if not well explained!
A while ago I was arguing here that the blue checkmark plan, as stated then, made no sense and would fail. I got some pushback, most of which was argued for as opposed to 'its bc u hate beauty and greatness', but ... it was implemented, it failed, it increased impersonation and didn't stop spam, and the feature was removed because it failed. (an internal twitter doc prepared before the launch, that elon didn't listen to, made similar claims) That's evidence that it's not useful to claim "I don't like elon and hope that he fails" applies to my posts, and likely others arguing against him here!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Exchanging off-site contact information is entirely reasonable even if there's a 2% chance of it going down, because they have a large number of many-year-long friendships/acquaintances they don't want to lose contact with, and sharing contacts is a low-cost way to avoid a low-chance, high-cost outcome.
Obviously some of them are claiming it's >50% gonna die forever, which is premature, as well as probably claiming the sorts of glitches that've happened for the past five years as evidence twitter is decaying.
But the people who work in twitter SRE that I've followed say there's a decent chance bad things happen, but that twitter >80% won't die permanently
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's kinda odd how soft the NYT has been on SBF, but claims that it's the democrats/establishment/media 'protecting him' like this ignore the very harsh coverage from every other mainstream non-nyt source - vox/financial times/bloomberg/reuters/cnbc / many others. So ... the 'mainstream' isn't protecting him, and nobody significant is gonna be misled! And claims that he'll not be investigated because democrat money donation (FTX actually donated a lower but similar-magnitude amount to republicans via ryan salame, co-ceo) / the media loves him just aren't true given that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
First of all ... EA doesn't claim to 'have a handle on AI risk'. EA claims to be worried about AI risk, and not have a handle on it, hence the worry.
from @moskov on twitter: "The other day a very close friend said "of course I believe pandemic and AI risk are huge problems, but you've got them covered" and I screamed "NO WE ARE FAILING". That wasn't even about money per se, just making any kind of attempt."
Second, why do you need to have 'faith in EA'? You should evaluate their actions individually. Entirely possible for GiveWell to be good but their AI risk work to be bad, even if FTX didn't go down.
None of that makes their claims wrong. Is this even a psychology thing? Things like 'existential risks to all life' do exist (for historical examples: atmosphere oxygenation "caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth ... constituted a mass extinction", Chicxulub "a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.", ice ages, human population bottleneck), and technology makes it easy for us to do similarly bad things. Preventing such things is important, and it would be stupid to write them off. So this isn't even a psycholoical "hack", it's just ... something important that one can be wrong about. But it's not any more worth ignoring than it is to ignore the doctor saying you need surgery or you'll die, because faith healers say you need to get a protection spell or you'll die. That X-risk leads people to make difficult and complex decisions is good
You could easily go the opposite way - "the Trump message and trumpism isn't popular, the most trumpy candidates mostly lost, masters and kent lost, the only viable option for the gop is to reject trump". Idk about either, but why does it lean 'more trump' instead of 'less'?
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