cuwurious_strag_CA
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User ID: 190
What they fail to realize is that the credible pre-commitment to strong business ethics they are talking about is deontology
Aside from that plenty of claimed christian deontologists or liberals have committed similar scales of fraud over the years, meaning it's not clear EA somehow makes people more likely to commit fraud (crypto exchange rugpulls are incredibly common), 'deontology' and 'believing in business ethics' are rather different. Deontology is a claim about 'all morals and decisionmaking', business ethics are a specific set of rules (ones that basically all EAs and philosophical utilitarians endorse, afaik).
Also for deontology in a practical sense, the problem of 'which rules' confuses things, am i being consequentialist if I accept 'business ethics' instead of 'christian ethics' for finance? how do i decide that business ethics are better? aren't you just embracing rules 'deontologically' that were - literally - created by people who planned out the consequences of said rules? isn't that just consequentialism-by-proxy? Can I even think things like 'wow, liberalism and universalism maybe aren't ideal' under deontology, if those are the prevailing rules?
I mean the de-facto rules in crypto were, kind of, 'commit as much fraud as you can without getting caught'
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The guy had constantly tweeted fairly unhinged stuff.
Okay, so he tweets fairly unhinged stuff once per week for three years, until something happens in the bahamas. It's not clear how FTX (as it seems) mismanaging client money, and then getting that leaked by an employee, could have anything to do with some other defi founder tweeting about sex trafficking and dying.
pedo symbol
the claimed pedo symbol is a ... spiral. there are lots of spirals, just generally. it's a fairly common shape. the alameda logo isn't even a spiral, it's a triangle with a line beneath it. there are also lots of triangles. there also aren't any allegations that SBF did anything vaguely pedophilic. (and if they were pedophiles, why would they go under)?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Okay, here's a better way of arguing this:
If we go back a bit before the blue checkmark change, when the bluecheck filter still worked, here's mark cuban retweeting some non-verified tweets: i just ordered a 90 day supply of TWO of my medications for 18 fucking dollars 😭😭 shoutout @costplusdrugs I work in Medicare and I refer beneficiaries to Cost Plus Drugs daily. I discovered on my own medications that I pay less without using my health insurance, and that with CPD I pay less than my co-payments. Thank you @mcuban @costplusdrugs !!! I paid 15$ for a 3 months supply for what would have cost 70$ for a months supply! #richmangivingback. Obviously, this is advertising his company, but he clearly interacted with nonbluechecks some before the change.
However, let's look at a random tweet of his before the change. Early voting starts today in Texas ! #Vote with face pic.
"@xxpeacesoasis Why is everyboody sillent on this??? OMG!!! http://youtube.com/watch?app=HBBBC&v=ltJcA6i_h9gYQXQ…..."
are you high
Why is your right eye shut?
Oh no. You got Pfizer Eye too?!
I hope you vote Republic!
There are six hundred of these!
If we go into his recent replies, we can see tweets like this, where he interacts with bluechecks who have questions that both form complete sentences and are somewhat relevant. This is an old bluecheck, not a new bluecheck, despite the change making it hard to distinguish between them. So I can see why he'd prefer the old system
Funnily enough, he has a 0 follower burner account he uses regularly "Precisely so I can have the same experience" as the average user.
until eventually you're just screaming about brain dead npcs
I think any "neutral and factual" description of "Oh no. You got Pfizer Eye too?!" "I hope you vote Republic!" ends up sounding about as insulting as "brain dead npcs".
and I haven't seen any leaders talk about COVID as a tragedy or natural disaster
Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy. "Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss.
blurb of the third DDG result for 'biden covid tragedy'
A large fraction of people believe COVID was a lab leak from some combination of China and the US, but there is no discussion about
covid lab leak discussion has solidly entered the mainstream over the past year. There's still a lot of people saying its not ok to say it and racist, but 'centrists' have openly discussed it for a while.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I would not be overly surprised if they found themselves in a situation where Scott and 10 other high-decouplers uselessly decry this new trend of EAers embezzling for malaria nets
The entire EA forum is filled with people saying 'this is bad and evil and disgusting EA would never support this we made a severe mistake in blindly trusting SBF we deeply apologize we must be very careful to make sure this doesn't happen again'. And those posts are now the top posts of all time on the EA forum. They're also explicitly saying things like 'utilitarianism taken too far can look like this which is why we endorse pluralism and moderation', and they've said things like that beforehand. So I don't think the 'allergic to 2nd order effects' criticism applies!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I mean, this is a guy who flat out admitted that he would risk the entire planet, you, everyone you love, everything you value, and himself, on a 51:49 bet to win a planet that nobody on Earth would ever interact with..
People are misinterpreting this - a sentence before that, he says:
BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I'm assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they're in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn't actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.
Notably, that caveat is true of any actual decision - i.e. he likely wouldn't take the 51:49 doubling bet on any on-this-planet institution because said institutions do interact with the surrounding environment, because the institution could grow in a way that doesn't involve taking that bet.
The bigger problem is just - what is valuable in the first place? A thousand humans are better than a million squirrels, so doubling the squirrels may be useless. Also, a thousand humans can, given enough time (see: history), kill and take land from any feasible number of squirrels, i.e. his first objection does in theory cover that. So I'd argue the question just doesn't mean anything.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
And Alex did do a good thing. But most of our moral dilemmas occur in the valleys and shadows where the moral light doesn’t shine.
The kidney donation was a (not that well argued) example of plausible emotional salience. In terms of 'moral dilemmas', holden/alex/dustin had many ways to get financial and social benefit that didn't involve sending billions of dollars to poor people in other countries (which is financially negative, on the whole). Which, really, does matter a bit more than if you toss a coin into a tithe box 'in the shadows', in the christian/universalist sense. Also, moskovitz could've easily started the Dustin Moskovitz Breast Cancer and Reparations Foundation instead, but didn't, it's not obvious or argued that the 'effectiveness' focus of effective altruism was socially motivated in a way that christianity wasn't. They actually seem rather similar in their attention to the plight of the poor and suffering?
The “salience” of religion is intended to be so strong that you do works for your God, who is so close as to be a Father. The problem with doing works with an eye on social reinforcement is that when the reinforcement is omitted, the behavior may not occur. This social reward is the “left” hand, in near east tradition the one used for dirty activities, with the right hand kept for pure activities
I'm not sure what this means tbh. For the first - EA has a massive group of people that really do work for the benefit of the poor, unfortunate, etc, which fits nicely in christianity. They aren't doing it primarily for social reward, and i'm curious why you claim that. (of course, it's possible to genuinely, not for social reward, still do something mistaken / bad / disgusting / etc)
One example made does not make the movement based on emotional salience
It's (according to scott alexander) the thing that started the movement, not just 'one example'
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
But that's why it's never going to be effective, it's not going to inspire truly self-sacrificial behavior
Again, how does this contend with the pile of money spent on malaria nets? If that's not effective and altruism, what is, what's more effective? As for 'self-sacrificial' - they're dedicating their professional lives to the cause, or see the kidney donation thing?
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience
Wrong in both ways, imo? EAs are very emotionally moved by the dying african children, generally. Hard to argue for with a source, i guess. Closest I can try - EAs like Alexander Berger (open phil co-CEO), for instance, donated a kidney to someone he'd never met to help save their life. That doesn't feel like an action you take with 'absence of emotional salience'. Another one would be the strong moral sense EAs have about how important their work is, to the point that burning out of EA because it was totalizing / took over your life is a somewhat-common issue. (although I would not argue that's a criticism of EA itself.)
But - every large movement that's ever had strong 'emotional salience' combined with strong moral teachings has had many, many prominent figures who have broken those teachings or done other bad things. Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, etc. Christians, progressives, conservatives, people of any other group - commit crimes, scam all the time. Sam doesn't say much about utilitarianism/EA other than 'some of its followers often do very bad things', which is true for any set of morals. One can say utilitarianism/EA isn't necessarily better at preventing misconduct than other belief systems, but one can't say it's worse, absent ... any evidence of that - and it never claimed to be better, just that donating money to starving children was worthwhile. And if you compare the outcomes to other crypto exchanges that've collapsed (there are many) - hundreds of millions to 'effective projects' + crypto scams versus ... hundreds of millions to luxury goods plus crypto scam?
"I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience" is compared to " Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point", yet
The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place.
How can you seriously claim this "lacks emotional salience"? drowning child you are personally causing to die? really?
Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought
christianity, again, doesn't actually stop this from happening. christians constantly "sin". plus, utilitarianism/EA contests your deontological claim about what "we ought" to do, and effectively, the local wholesome 'feed the homeless' drive really does just save fewer lives than malaria nets, so how on earth is the former more christian?
I think half of the 'EA isn't morally salient' claim comes from things like - donating lots of money made from facebook stocks to global health charities. In one sense, it's incredibly technical and complicated, and isn't a group emoting session around an altar - more like a spreadsheet of estimated disability-adjusted life years saved. But even given the deep philosophical problems the spreadsheet has, the money is still going to global health causes, and the EAs seem to care emotionally about the recipients.
But the new verified users are dumber, less capable, less knowledgeable, less connected, etc, relative to the old ones! The utility mark cuban gets out of twitter had slightly decreased, less useful information for work, less interesting cultural information, fewer connections, whatever. (iirc aella also mentioned using verified replies on twitter a while back). There's a reason everyone's getting their knowledge of e.g. the FTX collapse from bloomberg and the WSJ, or twitter users with substacks and 50k followers, or sam and cz themselves (w/ blue checks), and not in a decentralized manner from @cryptopepe515 (verified with Blue!). Social classes form around useful distinctions of competence, connections, activity, etc. The fact that you are surrounded by smart people is, itself, social class based siloing - any clustering at all is social class based siloing - and it's tremendously useful - whether randomly on the internet or IRL, i'm surrounded by very smart people who are half programmers, and both the intelligence and programming thing I greatly prefer to 'sports fans who do manual labor'.
Not that the blue checkmark is the driver of the 'social class based siloing', all these people will still find their frens with or without a checkmark differentiator, it's just a mild inconvenience. Nor that the current social classes are godo as they are! Plenty of unverified accounts with 10k followers are more useful than the average interested bluecheck on the FTX incident. It's just useful to understand why people are complaining, and the ways in which they are losing something somewhat useful.
[why not read all the replies from blue users]: Because there are hundreds or a thousand plus of responses to a single post sometimes. I wish I had the time to read them all. But I don't. When it's a very specific topic where there are 10 or 20, I will read them all.
It is genuinely annoying to sift through 100 replies from 100iq people that could've come from GPT2 to find a few interesting ones
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I genuinely don't understand how that can happen, and strongly suspect there's things that you either know but haven't said or don't know that are important to strategy here. I can't see a way of "doing five kegels" that could cause injury outside of a medical problem or some other bizzare situation.
How many steps do you take per day / how often do you walk, roughly? The best advice I can imagine outside of 'provide more information' is 'do more very light exercise across all muscle groups, go on walks more, don't ramp up at all because ramping up seems to cause issues', but that is very weird advice
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
https://twitter.com/HeheWaitWhut/status/1590489781502611458 https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/09/verified-accounts-ben-shapiro/
I mean, it's incredibly funny and dramapilled, but it doesn't really accomplish the 'reduced spam' and 'reducing misinformation' goals i think
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Prior to joining IARPA, Matheny was Director of Research at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, where his work focused on existential risks.[18]
Besides his work on emerging technologies and catastrophic risks, Matheny is recognized for having popularized the concept of cultured meat, after co-authoring a paper[20] on cultured meat production in the early 2000s and founding New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to supporting in vitro meat research.[21]
Although i'm not sure what 'popularizing' or 'founding the first nonprofit dedicated to supporting' really indicate about his importance in popularizing it
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
and the billionaire -> access direction does seem more intuitive to me
They still have moskovitz. But - how did they get those billionares in the first place? And how did they get so many 'earning to give' people working at big 4 accounting firms before / at the same time? And why do those 'ideas' stop getting new people / billionares in the same way?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Really? You don't have a prior that someone with this disposition is ipso facto an unserious person and therefore temperamentally unsuited for high office? Because I certainly have that prior.
"prior" is obviously from bayesian statistics, where you update a "prior" distribution with new information, producing a "posterior" distribution. The "prior" may be that most people who go to night clubs or get drunk with models are unsuited for high office. But that's just a prior - she already is PM, her actions and history tell you enough about how good of a PM she is that that prior distribution doesn't matter much. In bayes-terms, you have enough new information about her, instead of her being one of the hundred million people who go to clubs or get drunk, that the "prior" doesn't mean much and bears little resemblance to the posterior - but even that's kind of a distraction.
But even that prior doesn't really make sense, tbh, can you try to justify it more?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Why is twitter green? It shows up as <span style="color: darkgreen;">Twitter</span> in the html.
Another concern is that twitter is actively still working on "reducing impressions on hateful content". Other than that, as musk says, twitter hasn't changed its moderation practices significantly - when will it, and to what? No clue what twitter's moderation or speech landscape looks like in a year or two, but will it necessarily be less suspend-rightwing-y? (not saying it will or won't be, I genuinely have no idea). Musk's recent space also mentioned his desire to crack down on "untruthful" content, and as a rdramacel, idk - being forced to distinguish funny troll content from true content is incredibly useful in teaching people (and was for me) how to figure those things out.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Yeah that makes sense. Weird EA still has a presence though, see this shrimp welfare report lol, the top post on EA forum recently (although the ranking system is odd)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
What do you mean? I'm basing that partly on a lot of reading the EA forum. Mottizens, I'd expect, generally won't like EA too much because of the 'giving poor africans lots of money', 'animal welfare', 'universalist', etc bits
Your first piece is from an addiction center. In my experience browsing the web, addiction center webpages are often just an amalgam of various science-sounding claims that don't really mean anything but very emphatically suggest that addiction is bad, and scientific, and should be treated. They're just not worth reading. That doesn't mean any individual claim on the website is wrong, just that one shouldn't cite them. Wikipedia is leagues above them.
Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex first. This part of the brain is responsible for judgment, reasoning, and suppressing impulsive behavior
The prefrontal cortex does a whole bunch of things. Plausibly even most things.
The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.[2] Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's will to live, personality, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.[3] This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[4][5][6] Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).
That sounds like it covers all complex human behaviors, honestly (also imo this part of neuroscience is very messy and a lot of it is wrong, given how complicated people and their actions are, what is 'moderating social behavior', exactly, can we really attribute that to a brain region rather than much more complex higher level interaction, blablabla). And if you're suppressing all of that - that's not going to 'reveal true hidden desires', it's just gonna mess everything up. But impulses aren't discrete or ... real in any sense, they're just vague descriptions of complex, useful actions made by a complex system. A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person. Consider tourettes or harm OCD (and I could go on another tangent about that) - these people do not have a suppressed desire to say slurs or kill people in a normal sense, yet 'express' or 'feel' them anyway!
I'd argue that the PFC both 'suppresses impulsive behavior' and 'generates impulsive behavior', but not even in an absolute sense, as part of a really complicated set of interactions we don't really understand. So going from 'alcohol affects PFC + PFC suppresses behavior' -> 'alcohol releases suppressed behavior as a primary and separable effect' just isn't a reasonable conclusion - honestly, 'behaviors' aren't even a fixed thing, and 'suppressing an existing impulse' doesn't necessarily have any meaning outside some useful context. And in particular, concluding that 'in wino veritas' is not justified at all.
Your other source is "DRUNK - How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization - BY EDWARD SLINGERLAND", who is a a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Again, not exactly a systematic review.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Why does alcohol 'reveal desires' but other drugs not though? I don't think neuroscience is developed enough to conclude that "alcohol reveals desires" mechanistically.
but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already
Even takin this literally - if discrete impulses exist then they are complex, interact, and make up larger impulses. If you're very drunk and stumbling around, then alcohol 'weakens your ability to suppress' your impulse to, say, sway to the right and left as you walk instead of walking correctly. There certainly is an impulse to sway to the right and left, because you do it while walking, but suppressing that 'impulse' is a critical part of normal walking - you subtlely shift to the right and left at various moments to maintain balance. But - is it even really suppression, or is it just a decision not to sway that way? If you have one neuron that tends to activate an output neuron, and another neuron that tends to suppress that - you could say "the neuron suppresses the impulse encoded by the first neuron", or you could just say - it's just a logic gate that's part of a much more complex system.
And alcohol is messing with every 'impulse' that exists, there's no reason it has to emerge from 'racism being unsuppressed'. What if the alcohol suppresses the authentic anti-racism, and all that's left is 'randomly picking bad sounding words'? Maybe when drunk they just decide to insult people. A very gay person can totally call another gay person a fag as an insult, a black person call another black person a nigg-r, when they're very pissed.
A simpler approach, assigning no 'internal motives', is just - alcohol makes you dumber and causes you do to dumb things more or less randomly. If you get blackout drunk and start hitting on women - does that really say anything about your non-drunk behavior, or just that you're really dumb and 'hitting on women' is a fairly simple instinct?
if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair
I could see someone doing this because they thought it was incredibly funny in the moment!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's very plausible, EA does a lot of policy stuff, and that can mean writing the text of bills / regulations
1-3 are good arguments against poor ideas of race, or racism, but not smarter ones. Races - uh - subpopulations with significant shared heredity and traits - can still be smarter or have different characters than other subpopulations, just like subspecies / populations of animals, which also can have messy boundaries and mixes of traits while retaining distinctions. If jews were 50 iq points smarter than blacks on average, 1-5 could still easily be true - and in that situation 'jewish' as a 'race' is worth distinguishing, although even without the term 'race' it'd be extremely obvious
Well, you are causing it in the sense that your actions could cause the child to live and they aren't. And the EA argument is that this is the part of "causing the child to die" that matters, and that even without the "cause" the fact that the child is dying is the problem, and not anything about whether you, like, intended it.
"Republicans care deeply about unborn life, but abandon the child after it's born". Is this an argument for abortion? Just because singer makes another bad argument, doesn't directly affect the first argument.
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