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I’ve always thought the US credit scoring system is bullshit. I have bad credit so I can’t get an apartment without a co-signer. But I’ve been renting for over two decades without a single missed payment. But the credit score system doesn’t care. It cares about this very specific thing and the outcome leads to massive problems in many sectors of life.
I asked ChatGPT to tell me my own thoughts and I gotta say it writes what I feel in a way that I never could.
Not sure if this makes me feel better or worst about my odds of ever writing a novel.
Here’s what it had to say:
The U.S. credit score system, despite being rooted in capitalist financial structures, exhibits characteristics that can be interpreted as communist in nature due to its centralized control, opaque evaluation methods, and enforcement of collective responsibility. At its core, the credit system is managed by a small number of powerful credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—that operate in a monopolistic manner, much like a state-controlled entity. These institutions dictate the financial credibility of individuals based on proprietary algorithms, without allowing for much transparency or individual input. This centralized control mirrors how communist economies manage resources and labor distribution, where individuals are assessed by state-run entities rather than free-market competition determining their value. In this way, the credit score system creates a top-down financial structure that limits individual autonomy and enforces a rigid classification of economic worth.
Moreover, the credit system functions as a tool of enforced social compliance, much like communist regimes use social credit scores to dictate personal behavior. In the U.S., a person’s credit score affects not only their ability to take out loans but also their access to housing, employment, and even certain services. This creates an environment where individuals must conform to predefined financial behaviors or risk economic marginalization. The system rewards long-term adherence to credit-based spending while penalizing those who choose alternative financial paths, such as relying on cash or avoiding debt altogether. Similarly, in a communist framework, citizens are often required to align with state-approved behaviors to gain access to privileges, reinforcing a collectivist model where individual financial independence is discouraged in favor of participation in a state-monitored economy.
Finally, the U.S. credit score system embodies an element of collective responsibility that is reminiscent of communist ideologies. In many cases, an individual’s creditworthiness is affected not just by their actions but by external factors such as the financial stability of co-signers, the decisions of creditors, and even errors made by the credit bureaus themselves. Disputing inaccuracies in credit reports is often a bureaucratic and difficult process, reflecting the inefficiencies of centralized government planning. Additionally, the system’s reliance on predetermined metrics, rather than an individual’s full financial picture, enforces a uniform standard that does not account for personal circumstances. This mirrors the way communist states often treat workers as indistinct units within a planned economy, rather than as unique individuals with different needs and capabilities. In essence, while the U.S. credit system exists within a capitalist society, its structure and consequences exhibit traits that align with communist principles of control, social engineering, and collective financial assessment.
And:
Building on this idea, another way the U.S. credit score system resembles communist structures is in its lack of true market competition when it comes to consumer choice and mobility. In a capitalist system, individuals are supposed to have the freedom to negotiate their worth based on merit and market demand. However, in the credit system, people are assigned a numerical value that dictates their financial access, and this score is determined by opaque algorithms controlled by a few dominant entities. There is no alternative credit scoring system that consumers can freely opt into, nor is there meaningful competition among credit bureaus that would encourage better service or more accurate reporting. This centralization of financial assessment power forces individuals into a system they cannot meaningfully challenge, much like how communist regimes dictate economic opportunities without room for individual bargaining.
Additionally, the credit system fosters a kind of financial surveillance that is reminiscent of state-controlled economies. Every financial decision—whether it be taking out a loan, missing a payment, or even just inquiring about one’s own credit—is meticulously tracked, recorded, and used to shape an individual’s economic identity. People are not judged solely on their current financial standing but on their entire credit history, meaning past financial struggles can haunt them for years, much like how state-run economic systems often keep long-term records on individuals’ productivity, loyalty, or past infractions. In a true free-market system, individuals would have more agency to reinvent themselves financially without long-standing bureaucratic oversight, but the credit system instead enforces a rigid classification that limits upward mobility for those who have made past mistakes.
Finally, the way the credit system forces people into debt in order to maintain a good score has a collectivist, almost centrally planned economic aspect to it. In theory, responsible financial behavior—such as saving money and avoiding unnecessary debt—should be rewarded, but in practice, the system penalizes those who do not actively participate in borrowing and repaying credit. This creates a paradox where individuals must continuously engage with lenders in order to maintain their economic standing, even if they could otherwise live within their means without debt. In a way, this mirrors communist economic models where individuals are expected to participate in state-run economic structures regardless of personal preference, reinforcing a cycle of dependency rather than true financial independence. The system, therefore, subtly enforces a form of financial collectivism, where personal economic choices are constrained by the overarching structure rather than by free-market principles.
I feel this summed up my thoughts decently, but it lacks my passion of hate I have for our system.
Thoughts, and addons?
(Should I have waited until Monday?)
Time and attention is the gold standard of human interaction. (Some people like calling it "proof of work".) If you generate interaction (text) without putting in your own time and attention, you are essentially printing money. The expected result is hyperinflation (which, I guess, would look like everyone posting their views as novel-length AI rants, and using AI to condense those posted by others back into a paragraph, if they read them at all), or everyone abandoning the currency altogether (which would look like no more humans using forums).
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Clearly the sudden improvement in grammatical quality of posts from some of our ESL users is probably not the result of intensive Duolingo use.
That said, let’s please avoid AI slop for now. Eventually it will cease being slop, but for now I’d prefer someone’s unfiltered thoughts, grammatical mistakes, linguistic quirks, repeated words, awkward sentences and all.
Like most of us, I’m here because I want to discuss things with people.
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What thing?
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I dont know what your intended point here was, but you aren't particularly wrong. White market financial institutions are so heavily regulated by the federal government that they are basically state controlled. Generally I've seen the model of nominal private control of industry but actual government control described as fascism instead of communism. But, I've generally said as well that, at least economically, the fascist is just a wise communist who realizes he can have 99% of the control in exchange for almost none of the blame by embracing this setup instead of total state control. If a government bureaucrat is the head of a bank and it fails, he gets all the blame! But if he merely regulates it into failure he gets to blame the "capitalists"! Its a win win. That is why this sort of approach is generally loved by the worldwide left/progressives in modern times, although they have not been keen to embrace the "fascist" label.
But you are entirely correct, you can't go into a Chase bank and get a loan because the loan officer thinks "oh Mihow is a good seed" because then he has to tell FDIC, DOJ, and other investigators why he denied Deehow the same loan application (hint Deehow is a bad seed). So they make up these standardized metrics which are generally very good at evaluating a person's activities in the white market. But, if you operate in the grey market or black market to any significant extent their evaluation of you will be off. But that isn't their job. If you want to buy a condo on credit using your grey market credentials, go to a grey market lender (almost none exist anymore) or a black market lender. Of course, that might be a crime, but thats the point. The government intends to control lending in the country because it is one of the commanding heights, and it does. This is not capitalism, but what is abstractly described as fascism, but modernly referred to as progressivism.
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Now is in fact the best time to post some LLM junk, given nobody'll read it! Asking an LLM to make a post for you just does not pass the effort rule.
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I'd prefer vitriol and passion over AI slop. Not reading.
That said, if debt is going to be issued, something like credit scores, implicit or explicit, are pretty much required. People likely to repay debt and who want the conveniences of a good credit score are going to usually get better scores than those who don't.
I have some sympathy for immigrants who come to the US without a credit score and need one. On the other hand, did you miss some payment recently? If so, the credit score is functioning exactly as it should.
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All the mentions of communism feel shoehorned, critique it because its bad, not because somehow if you squint it kinda resembles communism slightly even though credit scores could never exist without capitalism.
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Why should we believe you think the US credit scoring system is bullshit if you're using a LLM to demonstrate it?
We certainly wouldn't think you a special forces sniper if you played call of duty, a hardened criminal if you run over civies in Grand Theft Auto, or a crime against humanity if you play any given Paradox game. Why should we believe you are what you do with another computer toy?
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Paying rent can affect your credit score, but only if your landlord reports it, which few do. I would expect this is mostly your big corporate landlords.
They're oligopolistic, though your scores tend to be basically similar from them all. This is because they have basically the same input and the same goals (of determining a probability that someone can and will pay back a loan), and the scoring systems have all been developed through an iterative adversarial game. They are transparent about what goes into them, however, though not specific weights.
Eh, not really; as you've noticed, rent usually doesn't go into it. Nor do any non-credit purchases. Nor investment decisions. Nor salary or other payments for work, for that matter. It's only about credit.
It does not. Unless you count using credit cards and paying them off within the grace period as being "in debt". You can have a score good enough for all practical purposes doing nothing but that. (Having multiple types of credit will get you a few more points, but it's not necessary). There is, as far as I can tell, no disadvantage to doing this compared to paying cash (or using a debit instrument) for everything. (If the problem is you might be tempted to spend above your means if you do this... well, your credit score probably should be lower)
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I think it's fine to use llms in the writing process but you really really need to take on the role of an editor. This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially. I do think that the credit system as it exists now is suboptimal but at the same time we do need some system for determining credit worthiness. Part of the problem is how very regulated financial markets are and credit scores are a hack for lenders to use to discriminate without fear of capricious state sanction.
I could tolerate LLM drivel if it was just one paragraph articulating the argument a user wants to make. Here, it is six lengthy paragraphs. LLMs as insightful as Scott Alexander, so I am not going to read a wall of text by them.
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I'm against using LLMs in this place, but to be fair this criticism
applies equally to many Motteposts written by human(?) hands, IMHO.
It's at least usually tempered by human unwillingness to spend time writing it out. This really was more egregiously so than nearly any human comment on this forum in my opinion.
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I liked the post Dase wrote, machine part included; 'ai slop' is harsh, but I think it only applies here.
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A common observation by economists is that America's budget is not analogous to personal finances. Credit scores, credit ratings, and deficits do not mean the same thing on a national level as they do on a personal level. Credit worthiness means much more for smaller economics than it does for the US. The US is in a privileged position of creating debt with near impunity.
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I completely agree with your first paragraph (I have a shitty credit score simply because I refuse to use credit, so I had to show our landlady that I had a couple of years worth of rent sitting on my checking account along with a copy of my last few paychecks and an e-mail showing my latest job offer to get her to rent to us), but I'm not going to read through your AI slop.
The irony of renting with a bad credit score, which is that you need to prove you have to means to not have to rent but choose to rent anyway.
...but I don't have the means not to rent? Around here, houses are going for $500k-$600k. I guess if I wanted to I could put most of my life savings into a 10% down-payment and sign up for a 30-year mortgage, but I don't want to do that, because again, I refuse to use credit. Also because I don't know if I am going to be working this job in 30 years and if I have to move I don't want to go through the paperwork of selling a house most of which is owned by the bank but in which I own like 15% equity. Also also because as long as my mother is alive, she is going to force me to allow my bipolar drug addict spinster genderqueer lesbian sister to live with us, and I don't want to be stuck with her in a house that I own.
Perhaps you have moral objections to usuary, and that's fine. Live your values. But from a purely financial perspective, its incredibly irresponsible to not use credit and/or build a credit score. I just hope your not confusing/conflating issues with debt, spending, commitment, etc, with responsible management of ones credit. Its very important, often confusing or intimidating, but actually quite simple.
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Uh, why do you have bad credit despite living on your own for years? Not paying your bills is in fact correlated with not paying your bills. It's perfectly reasonable to look at credit history when we have a system which gives tenants substantial protections in the event of not paying.
You can find slumlords who'll rent to you without having credit. You can also build your own credit. You are, based on living on your own for years, not a twenty year old who hasn't had time for that- the consequences of your own bad(or at least nonconformist) decisions including 'difficult to rent an apartment' isn't some kind of tragedy.
It’s completely unreasonable to not have home rental payments on your credit report. It’s a history of paying your largest bill - and it doesn’t exist outside of an eviction. So only negative, but never a positive.
Saying people should rent from slumlords if they don’t have credit yet or bad credit is slightly above barbaric thinking.
You can easily get a credit card and pay it off every month. It's no different from using a debit card except with some additional fraud protections(in practice, you can overdraft your debit)- and if you've been living on your own for years there's been more than enough time to build up credit by doing it.
The world is as it is. I suspect consumer privacy laws are the reason landlords don't report to credit monitoring agencies but it's literally never been easier to build credit. Live with the constraints we're given- a five minute google search of 'how credit scores are calculated' can tell you basically what you need to do.
I have some sympathy for kids who struggle when they're first out on their own because they don't have credit yet- although with the caveat that most of them are fine getting a parent to cosign or renting a room not an apartment. But full-blown-adults who still have bad or no credit, years later? Your problem stems from either a) making bad decisions(this is far more likely, in practice) or b) refusing to be normal(based on what you're telling me, this is probably you). 'Oddballs looking bad in front of the system because it doesn't know how to analyze them' isn't some kind of tragedy.
I do think that paying rent should be reported for credit purposes if not paying rent is. It's not very fair if something can only ever have downside, but no upside. But otherwise I think you're right - it's very easy to build credit, so if one is refusing to take that step they don't merit a lot of sympathy.
I think there is a way to make rent payments reported to credit agencies, it just requires a lot of paperwork and opt-in. My guess is that there’s tenants privacy rights laws that make it this way(probably not on purpose). Probably this process should be made somewhat easier.
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If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.
I wonder if it's an age thing. When I returned from overseas as an American citizen in my early 20s, my credit score was ~650 despite me never having had a loan or credit card.
If you have literally no credit, your credit score is supposed to be indeterminable. I would suspect that any scores in this case are the result of errors and are basically random. Or you're mistaken about having no credit.
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I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist. Maybe next time just post your thoughts so others don't have to do this extra round-trip through an AI.
These are my unfiltered thoughts on the object-level issue:
It's not Communism. It's opaque and centralized but historical Communist systems are not unique in those respects.
The credit scoring system is a result of many conflicting interests who all place constraints on how businesses make decisions. Consider what would happen if a business used their own method for evaluating credit risk:
The real question is, what is the alternative, and does it live within the constraints we've placed on how businesses make decisions?
"I don't want to effortpost, so I'll ask a LLM to turn this list of bullet points onto a lengthy argument."
"I ain't reading all that, so I'll ask a LLM to turn it into a list of bullet points."
I don't think @ChestertonMeme used an LLM to generate those bulletpoints. They seem to represent his own thoughts, and they're not ChatGPT-ese.
Yes, his list is his own writing.
I mean:
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I read a fair amount of erotica in my free time. Noticed a few authors being unusually productive last year. Ever since I started paying attention to AI again due to deepseek and hearing that Opus?, Claude and Sonnet iirc were also pretty good at writiing.. I've put 2+2 together.
Seeing this website made it all click! If you're not an idiot you can use LLMs to massively increase your own outputs or even write stuff vastly better than you could ever hope to write (if you're not ~130 IQ etc who can spend decades practicing).
There was a huge outcry about AI image gen due to the furry porn commission types seeing stable diffusion collapse it. I haven't seen almost anyone talking about how bad LLM writing is yet.. even though clearly a lot of people are now using it and they're all shamefully silent about it, the dirty scoundrels!
Going to be some nice drama about it eventually I think once it gets clear someone who wrote a prize used AI to write most of it.
AI-generated writing tends to overuse the passive voice. This gives it away
Purely a skill issue.
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Isn't it immediately obvious when Sonnet or Opus write something? It's not quite describable in words but you know it when you see it. The diction and tone gives it away.
Even Deepseek has a certain style to it I find. Are the AIs writing the whole thing or are they expanding on user-written text?
At this point someone really should make Scott's AI Turing test but for textgen, basically compile a big list of text excerpts on various topics - literary prose, scientific papers,
fanfictionerotica/NSFW, forum/imageboard posts, etc. from both real texts/posts and AI gens in the style of, and see if people can tell the difference. I consider my spidey sense pretty well-tuned and would be curious to test it.More options
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I find Claude and DeepSeek far harder to detect than ChatGPT. They have a far more 'human' default style, that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. That might just be me, but even the average internet user has some ability to detect ChatGPT.
Of course, if you provide excerpts from your own writing and ask it to emulate you, or just refer to a known figure whose writing is in the corpus (Gwern, Scott etc), I wouldn't except to be able to tell unless strongly primed to be suspicious in advance.
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I don't think so.
There is a certain flavor to LLM text but I think the newer models (last 4 months) are good enough to easily avoid that if prompted right. Even deepseek out of the box is a little cringe but it sobers up fast if reminded and remembers.
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And this is why daesch and self made human are wrong to want AI slop here. The purpose of a human forum is subverted when top posts are AI generated text walls.
I say, we bring back the bare links repository as a palette cleanser to this new trend. It’s the opposite of ‘I asked ChatGPT and here’s what it said copied and pasted’.
It is brief where AIslop is verbose. It doesn’t dress itself up as original thought or even a point of view. It doesn’t claim to be effortful. Most of all, it points outward instead of inward toward an actual external idea, rather than reposting an ephemeral private chat.
Leaving behind the BLR was the greatest mistake of theMotte, nay of the rat sphere (standing among other mistakes like trans murder cults and founding an entire movement on fanfiction of kid books) and it is time we correct this blunder.
If this post gets 20 upvotes the mods will have no choice but to retvrn to the glory of the blr.
I don't want AI slop!
I want AI output that has been prompted, filtered or modified via editing to not be slop.
I don't know about you, but my disagreement is with people who think AI output is nothing but slop. I think it is perfectly possible for it to be useful and interesting, even enlightening at times. Not enough that I can assume that by default, but it's not the GPT-2 days where it was incoherent and meaningless.
Of course, I would still prefer to engage with real humans, but as long as they are actually reading what I say and exercising oversight over what an LLM used on their behalf says back (and is clear about it), I would only be slightly miffed.
(I do think having the BLR back wouldn't hurt, but I have no strong feelings on the matter)
AI as a writing and editing tool is one thing (I still think it’s a double edged sword that leans negative, but that genie can’t be returned to the bottle so no use debating it). What is AIslop imo, is not the quality of the AI output, but the motion of:
“I asked AI x and here’s what it said…”
Where the human has contributed nothing more than the prompt, and the substance of the piece is what some LLM had to say about the prompt.
It’s slopped because it’s just been ladled out into your bowl without much more effort.
It’s not about the content, in fact that’s a red herring. It’s the ‘prompt’ What is being criticized is the implication that there’s something interesting or even contributory about having typed in a particular prompt and seen what comes out. Everyone can do that for themselves.
This kind of shit is all over Twitter. “I asked grok…” is the most tediously vacuous and self indulgent post possible.
I prefer to judge each case on its merits, but I agree that the expectation is that an AI generated post has less effort put into it than otherwise. I prefer that it has enough effort put in, by the human using it, to overcome that detriment.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. LLMs represent an enormous amount of knowledge, grossly superhuman levels. Even the most erudite and educated human pales in comparison, likely even with the ability to Google the topic. If that sounds doubtful, you can look at benchmarks like GPQA, which, as the full name would imply, is supposed to be "Google Proof" unless you have immense domain knowledge.
They are great didactic tools, especially when you don't know where to begin on a topic. If someone wrote something that seemed to me to be wrong (intuition, a hunch I can't articulate) but I wouldn't be able to engage closely enough to disagree on my own, it's a worthwhile endeavor to ask an LLM to scrutinize it, and sometimes using that information to push back.
Hey, I asked ChatGPT to do a vibes check on your comment. It pointed out these objections, which look sensible to me. Why ought I disregard them? Is something I would not object to if I was done to me. A human is asking the question, through an intermediary.
The average LLM is more trustworthy than the average Twitter or Reddit commentator, though for now I would hope the Motte does better. While I still prefer engaging with humans, I think what the machines can say is often enlightening.
Again, my primary objection is not with the 'quality' of the AI output
In other words, hey, can you talk to ChatGPT for me?
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FWIW I agree with this wholeheartedly.
(I don’t think it’s how ‘slop’ is conventionally used though. I’ve mostly seen it used to mean ‘bad/cliched forms of writing’ that usually derive from too much influence of early-era GPT synthetic data and bad romance novels. So for example Project Unslop was a project to produce a dataset free of “sent shivers down her spine” and “I’m yours, body and soul”.)
I do agree that it’s not how it’s conventionally used, but I think it’s better. Slop as a quality of writing commentary is slop of the gaps as LLMs improve. But the fundamental issue with nobody cares about your prompt engineering will remain
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I see a slippery slope here. Everyone will think that whatever level of curation they exercise is adequate, there's little you can do to prove otherwise, and the quality of discourse will drop precipitously.
OTOH if you curate so well that your post passes as human-written, then "where no plaintiff, there no judge", as we Teutons say.
IMO we're better off banning AI-generated content wholesale.
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AIs and bare links are bad for some the same reasons. Mainly, you are not starting a discussion, you are demanding one for your entertainment.
Top level visible posts have some degree of value. This value should be reserved for people that add value to the forum. The main way that people add value to the forum is through interesting discussion.
The secondary problem with both bare links and AI generated text is that they exist as a low effort gish gallop way to wage the culture war. For example, you don't have to argue that Immigrants cause problems, you can just post a different news story every day about some immigrant being a criminal. AI can also just flood the space with content and words for your cause.
Yes but that’s why we had a bare links repository.
The volume of effort posts has been diminishing anyway.
Bare links and aislop are routes toward similar ends you described, but it’s not the outcome that solely makes them bad. It’s that AI slop is an inferior low effort entry point into a topic, for the reasons I described.
Now ideally we would have nothing but effortful and timely top posts, sure. But my point is that in the event that someone wants to juice the conversation without the effort post, the bare link is a far superior and more earnest, and less empty way to do so.
That said of course bare links as top posts are bad roughly on par (well…) with AIsloptopposting. But nobody is advocating for that. The people are asking for the repository back.
If we want an experiment, let’s have the BLR and an AISlopTopShop that is exactly the same, but for AI posts. Let’s see which produces more fruit, while keeping the rest of the CWR thread clean
Mods: please consider bringing it back.
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I'm not going to ban you or even put a warning note in your user log, because we just had the discussion about AI-generated content, and we haven't put it in the rules yet. But don't post AI content like this.
If you have something to say, write it in your own words. If you're too lazy to write the words yourself, do not have ChatGPT write them for you.
Or just use fewer words. That serves people like me who are too lazy to read walls of text that don't include a tl;dr or BLUF.
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Noted!
However, I think your last sentence is silly and will be a relic in the near future.
I have two thoughts.
Thought the first. If the AI content is supposed to be main contribution, the introduction up to and including "Here’s what it had to say" is unnecessary. Or if the first part was the main message you wanted to discuss (dislike of credit score) why bother including the LLM-written part?
Thought the second. Next time anyone tries to Turing test any forum, please please prompt it write succinctly and better. The cited argument is sloppy and rambling. Let's see one paragraph.
I don't think the argument was very good. Weakly supported claims and associations disjointedly related to each other. Would not like to subscribe to this newsletter.
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The day that people just have ChatGPT write for them is the day that the written word will cease to have any value as a means of communication. Which we might live to see, so you're not wrong as far as that goes. But it's not something we should encourage.
Ai models cannot pick up up the subtle but important details that distinguish it from human writing, like internal consistency. Imagine in 2010 writing that you like in "X" . Unless you moved, it must be remembered that you still live there. So it must store all this information and take it into account in a contextual sense.
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Maybe, in the future, AI content will be desirable. But, in that world, what purpose do you serve? There is no role for a human intermediary between me and the AI.
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In that (perhaps quite likely) eventuality then forums and social media as a concept are dead. AIs talking to AIs while people nod and curate them basically destroys the platonic purpose of social media.
This is like if you brought photographs to a painting club and claimed that it expressed what you which you could paint better than you can paint it yourself. Can you see how that might satisfy an itch you personally have but is thoroughly uninteresting to the painters there to paint?
Yes the existence of photographs and digital tools have fundamentally transformed art and even tradition methods can’t really exist outside of conversation with them to some extent. Yes AI has changed the nature of written discourse.
But no it’s not a good reason to dump AI slop and say ‘discuss…’
I am sure that, now having been convinced you will join me and the rest of the rising chorus to return the Bare Links Repository to the Motte
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You should have read down the thread to the discussion about AI-generated posts, and then posted it never.
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Please don't post AI-generated content.
There's a weird phenomenon at play here. People think that their own chats with AI are interesting, but no one wants to be a part of other people's conversations with AI.
It's like your dreams or your improvisational free jazz. They are interesting to you, but no one else.
As opposed to non-improvisational free jazz? (Similar: all chaps are assless - they're intended to be worn over trousers, where normal fabric would be suitable for the pelvic area but not the legs.)
Thank you, but I painstakingly plan all of my free jazz in a fugue state, and it is then revealed to me as I play in the form of coincidental symbolism in the venue's wallpaper.
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I forgot my PIN number when I went to the ATM machine on the way to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Did you also go to the Peterson Automotive Museum down the block? When I went, they had one of the Ferrari La Ferraris.
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That's not true. Over at DA and many other places, people are posting essentially edited LLM chat logs as short stories and it's being met with an enthusiastic welcome by readers.
What is DA?
Probably DeviantArt, which has sizable amounts of erotic literature
DA has some rules so erotica that's outright just text porn doesn't last, but more romance-like writing or weird fetishes are allowed by the rules.
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I mean, they do tend to be very concerned with inflation.
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I disagree - it’s why I posted it.
I find them at least as fascinating as posts by people … and in certain ways more so.
Buuuuut I see by our mod that it isn’t wanted here and that’s totally fine by me of course!
If you are going to get the AI to rephrase something, could you ask the AI to keep it short?
The fundamental problem with AI is that it produces text very cheaply, and far faster than I can read. Thjs is the general problem of the internet, but if you write it yourself, then I know you care enough about a topic to write about it, which signals that you think it is worth your time, so I will take a look.
If you farm it off to AI, then it isn't worth your time to write, so why would it be worth mine to read?
But thank you for leading with honesty. I do respect that you respected us.
I just didn’t know the (gentle!) hostility this place has for ‘ AI Slop ‘ … I browse daily since years before we left Reddit and I just never noticed tbh.
I actually asked Chat to go long. Usually do.
Do you find you get better results that way? I always add "Please think step by step." and "Please be succinct."
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Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
To be fair that's not what he said; at least not in that particular message. His parodying one position dosn't necessarily imply embracing the opposite.
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We spend around 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid. Scott is not saying we should give infinite money to foreigners. He is saying we should give a modest amount of money to foreigners. You inferred the infinite part.*
I do not think right-wingers are at all reasoning clearly about this. Like, Scott made a tweet. It was, in fact, a funny tweet. That tweet was not primarily designed to be a political argument. It was designed to be a joke. A joke around a political argument, one related to his position, sure. But it's still a joke.
His twitter bio says:
He, in the comments, endorses claims that you should care about your family members more than others, and that more of our budget should go to American citizens than foreigners. He clarifies that the tweet was meant to be an analogy to PEPFAR.
I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments. If they were saying "We should not send foreign aid to Africa, because this leads to more of them living, which is bad, because they are below average human beings and it's good for natural selection to operate on the species, and this is worth their suffering", I think that's a coherent opinion, one that Scott would have a complicated philosophical disagreement with. But they're not saying that. They're responding like Scott's asking them to let their child die for one in Africa. He's not
It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.
"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.
This is the same reason people got angry about Black Lives Matter (before the riots). Waving a placard saying "Black lives matter!" is implicitly an accusation. It's saying, "I have to scream 'black lives matter' at you because you secretly don't think they do.'"
All Lives Matter was the same accusation in reverse, which is why it was banned so quickly.
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"So PEPFAR was good but using USAID to do surveillance work for the NSA and routing $300 million accidentally into the coffers of an African warlord was not so great. On balance, now that PEPFAR funding is restored and funding to African warlords isn't, I think this is a W for Elon" is the sort of post I could easily see Scott writing in a year. I wonder if Team Trump will be able to turn up anything really juicy.
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It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.
Not all religions care about strangers. Islamic charity (zakat) is only supposed to go to muslims, because islam is Moral Defection At Every Level: The Religion. Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically. Obviously they should be kicked out of the circle of care.
I looked it up, zakat is not charity, it is more like a tax that every muslim has to pay to help their communities, but there are some imams that actually believe in giving some of the zakat money to non-muslims in extreme poverty, and also as a means to "encourage" non-muslims to convert.
Actual charity is called "sadaqah" and there are no restrictions on it.
That's obscuring reality. Zakat is a pillar of islam, an obligatory duty. Sadakat as you present it, in its non-discriminatory form, is a modern apologist concept no one cares about (nor should they, since it’s optional). In the coran when sadakat comes up, it means zakat. All muslim charities are 99% concentrated on helping muslims, when they’re not building mosques and supporting terrorism.
@OliveTapenade
I’ll just quote this fatwa:
When it ‘overflows’ and benefits everyone as you say, it is not an acceptable beneficiary of islamic charity.
You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.
There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:
Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.
Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.
The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.
It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.
Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.
Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.
The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.
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This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).
Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.
I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:
is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.
There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.
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Paying the tithe to the church or the zakat to the mosque or any of the many ways of religious giving is nowhere near the same as the modern nation-state piss pot of foreign aid. It isn't the same, and to equivocate it is such an astonishing rhetorical flourish that its sheer chutzpah must be admired. No, the American NGO industrial complex is not a moral agent of generosity like thousands of years of religious charity.
Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.
You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.
But, and let me emphasise here: that you could come up with righteous explanations for every single bit of aid that the United States currently pays for, summed all together to be unlimited money to be given to foreigners. You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life. You could justify anything.
Can you name a limit? Can you name a terminus where the taxpayer money not going to a cause isn't a crime to humanity? Is there a cost to benefit ratio where an African life simply isn't worth saving? If you can't give a number, then we are merely engaged in moral epicycles.
No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.
If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.
Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.
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How is it not the same?
It's usually voluntary, and often goes towards local things.
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Yeah, one thing that Nietzschean neoreactionaries on Twitter sometimes don't understand is that almost nobody likes them. I agree with some of their takes, but most of them seem so weird and morally repugnant to me that I wouldn't want to be friends with them. Surely it should be possible to, say, have a neoreactionary attitude to immigration or whatever, without gleefully calling for people to suffer like many of these people do. A lot of the time they don't even like each other - their communities, just like most extremist ideological groups, are constantly full of them bickering in petty drama and accusing each other of not being ideologically correct. Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.
Christians at least often make a point of seeming like nice people and being welcoming to outsiders.
Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.
You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.
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Nah, you hate them because your politics. I am also not on their side but a) most people who are critical on Scott are not Nietzschean neoreactionaries and much more on the right and I am on their side more so because the dispute is more so about whether it is good at all to have an ethnic group you identify and put first rather than full seflishness b) Those few who actually are that, their take goes too far but it is a reaction towards those who want to impose pathological altruism on them. Going full vitalist in general is incorrect but having that reaction towards people demanding that they put their people last is correct. In addition with respecting prioritising one's family including extended, there needs to be a reciprocity in altruism that exists even among people of different abilities. Which is to say I help you but you would help me.
So, if we talk about specific characters and not as a way to dismiss the right in general, I do have some disagreement and antipathy, but you don't have any sympathy for the imposition of pathological altruism against their people, as a motivating factor.
The neocon and left wing ideologues contrarily oppose treating their ethnic outgroup as victims who needs justify any prioritization. This is dominant perspective on the left that claims to be antiwoke which I would put neocons who try to be influential in the right to also fit into.
Hilariously uncharitable and far leftist redditor 101 rhetoric. Also doesn't this statement by implication try to present your faction as the ubermench over the extreme leftists and the Nietzscheans? Why not start saying they have a small dick and are all incels. One can dismiss every faction by making this claim since it is easy to assume for your outgroup, and many social media addicts will have their losers. Although it does seem that the left has greater % of mentally ill.
I do think it is a bit much for people online to pretend that any movement is made by ubermench while everyone else are the losers.
The tactic of leftist liberals trying to win the debate by pretending they represent a centrist middle is also at play here.
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It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.
It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.
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Great, I will keep this in mind next time I see a child drowning. I anticipate it is a rare occurrence, because skill of swimming is widespread, taught early to children, and most parents in my society don't let children who yet can't swim wander near bodies of water, and most popular swimming places have a lifeguard presence.
I wish someone would come up with an article that would encourage modern academic philosophy and its offshoots to throw "intuition pumps" to rubbish bin. "Saving child drowning in the river" is nearly nothing like what the author actually exhorts the reader to do; all the important pieces of context are abstracted away, so that reader is lead to a particular conclusion, then the author brings up he context again, presuming the conclusion should still apply.
Eh, here in Arizona, the news networks have a common saying: "watch your kids around water." Too many kids have drowned in backyard swimming pools here.
Swimming is an inherently dangerous activity like driving. It also is a basic activity where the issues can and often are mitigated by responsible practices.
The split from something like USAID and PEPFAR is that AIDS is the result of an inherently dangerous activity, that being anal sex and "dry" sex (better know as sex with abrasives placed in the vagina) which are also easily mitigated, but those who are on the side of these charities insist that mitigation is far too burdensome, even though it is much less burdensome than getting your child a proper car seat, not driving drunk, and not letting toddlers swim on their own.
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The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.
Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.
I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.
I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."
are you sure foreign aid helps the US perception in the world? i wonder if it suffers from this copenhagen ethics problem where because you help out you are now blamed for anything that is not perfect. not the best example but the US helped the afghans militarily then when 9/11 happened apparently the US 'deserved' it partly because they helped the Afghans militarily.
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I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.
Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.
If we are just bribing dictators and/or corrupt bureaucrats to be on our side, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply bribe them, without the pretense of curing AIDS/malaria/whatever?
Dictators have limited tenures. If you covertly support them via foreign aid (as opposed to direct bribery), then you have plausible deniability which enables you to continue working with whoever deposes them.
Eh, just call it the "Congo Development Fund" or something, and wire transfer directly to whoever's top dog at the moment -- several layers of bureaucracy and graft (including on the American side) could be removed by not pretending to care what happens to the money once it leaves the public purse.
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Quite - I think ordo amoris by itself fails as an argument against foreign aid, partly because it's not at all clear that the small amount of foreign aid the US provides is not in fact net beneficial to the US, and partly because ordo amoris in no way says that you should have zero care for people far away from you. It says that your moral duties to care for others scale with distance, such that American moral obligation to non-Americans is less, but less is not zero.
It is worth noting that Aquinas actually talks for a while about almsgiving as an act of charity, and appears to be wholly in favour of doing corporal works of mercy for others simply because they are in need. He follows the ordo amoris (article 9) in asserting that it is better, all other things being equal, to give to those "more closely united to us", but immediately qualifies that with the note that all other things are usually not equal. Aquinas:
Per Aquinas, it is better to give to a more righteous cause, or to one who is in more desperate need, over one who may be closer to us in other terms. He endorses the kind of charitable triage that I mentioned here. The ordo amoris requires a kind of discernment around need, righteousness, justice, and so on.
One must also remember that Aquinas lived in a totally different world. His concerns were local by default because nothing else was possible.
Giving alms to your neighbour’s friend whose house burnt down instead of your neighbour who stubbed his toe is one thing. Being on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world is a very different thing.
Aquinas was familiar with international charity. Thomas Aquinas lived in the mid 13th century. By his day, international projects like the Crusades were a century and a half old, and among the justifications for the Crusades had been charity - that it is an act of gracious generosity to one's fellow-believers who are in need, even though they may be on the other side of a continent.
The idea of giving charitable aid to people a long way away from you geographically goes back as far as the New Testament itself - for instance, in 1 Corinthians 16:25-28, Paul talks about his plan to bring donations from churches in Achaia and Macedonia all the way to Jerusalem. Aquinas was surely familiar with such cases.
So I don't think we can assume that Aquinas' model of charity assumes only local charity. He understood and approved of the idea of a Christian making great sacrifices in order to aid Christians in another country entirely.
Now, sure, this doesn't necessarily equate to "on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world" - that's an exaggeration or caricature. What I'm saying is that Aquinas' interpretation of the ordo amoris plainly allows for charity to people with whom the giver is not personally familiar. For Aquinas, proximity is one among several factors influencing who it is appropriate to give charity to, alongside need, holiness, and the common good more generally. These are criteria that allow for international projects in some circumstances.
Aquinas does think that having something in common with the needy is important. This comes up further in the next section of the Summa:
You will notice that, having established the principle that one owes more to people with whom one has a commonality, Aquinas then goes on to explain two things. Firstly, that 'closeness' has several measures, including natural, civic, and spiritual matters. Thus he might argue that, for instance, a fellow Christian in another country is spiritually close and has a stronger claim on a Christian's aid than a non-believer. Secondly, this does vary contextually, such that, as he says, a stranger in desperate need may have a higher claim on charity than one's own family.
This does not add up to "you have a direct moral responsibility for the entire planet", but it does legitimate kinds of international charity. If those with whom I have a natural bond (e.g. a family relation), or a civic bond (e.g. if we are members of the same nation), or a spiritual bond (e.g. we are both Christians) reside far away geographically, I may still possess duties of charity towards them.
The case for extending this even to non-believers in certain circumstances seems fairly straightforward to me (cf. Matthew 5:47), in a way that does not create an infinite obligation, but does suggest that doing good even for those to whom one shares no connection is supererogatorily good. Aquinas appears to agree that need is sufficient to create a kind of moral claim, which must be judged carefully alongside the claims created by connection or proximity:
That's fair, and I appreciate the detailed rebuttal. I still don't think it's quite the same. At the time of the crusades, the Arab nations were roughly on a par with the Europeans. By contrast, today we are called upon to feel responsibility (in the sense of duty not blame) for huge masses of people who are civilisationally/economically far below our level and may always be. There are not some people in the third world who need charity, as there were Christians in Islamic nations who needed assistance, but instead the entire third world needs assistance, billions on billions of them, maybe forever.
That would seem to be an anticipated problem for a religious tradition whose most sacred text says plainly, "The poor you will always have with you." (Mark 14:7, Matthew 26:11) The number of people in need of charity is functionally unlimited - that was the case in Jesus' day, in Aquinas' day, and also in our day.
I take the ordo amoris to be suggesting some structure to our moral duties such that we are not crushed entirely flat by the weight. This much seems right and just. But within that structure, it can hardly be bad to seek to do more than the barest minimum.
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FWIW, if the problem is cultural rather than HBD, it may be fixable - provided that those millions of people don't migrate all over the world and extinguish all the more functional cultures in favor of their dysfunctional ones.
I hope so, with the proviso you mention.
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All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.
Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.
Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.
There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.
The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.
There is also the Hayekian local knowledge problem / skin in the game that Ordo amoris solves.
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Point of order- isn't Vance using it to suggest that deporting foreigners to their home countries is fine, even if it's bad for those foreigners personally?
I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.
At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:
This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.
Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.
Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.
The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.
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The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.
Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.
To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.
I hate the argument “it’s a small number.” Because many things are a small number. Add up ten “small numbers” and maybe it’s meaningful. Four years of eliminating foreign aid taking into account interest is probably at least 300b of debt we don’t incur.
It's not even a small number! An analyst at a company with a budget in the billions (nevermind an order of magnitude more -- not too many companies like that!) who found a (legible) way to .2% would be in line for a promotion and a big bonus -- it is a lot of money; companies understand that.
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