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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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You seem to fundamentally not understand EA.

There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.

In principle, it is not about hating your local community

I recognize this...and yet...

it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you.

...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.

The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods.

If EA becomes widespread enough for this to become a serious concern, the low-hanging fruit of malaria nets will have already been dealt with, and new cost/benefit analyses will need to be conducted to find new causes to contribute to. At that point, local volunteering may well become the most cost-effective option, at least for someone without very high earning potential.

EA focuses on what an individual can do, and right now, the marginal benefit of a single individual devoting their time to earning money for malaria nets is much greater than the marginal cost of a single individual not volunteering in the local community.

Of course, EA assumes that your primary goal is to help others. Maybe someone finds coaching local kids fun and does it as a hobby, but in that case helping others as much as possible is not their goal.

If EA becomes widespread enough for this to become a serious concern, the low-hanging fruit of malaria nets will have already been dealt with, and new cost/benefit analyses will need to be conducted to find new causes to contribute to. At that point, local volunteering may well become the most cost-effective option, at least for someone without very high earning potential.

This is already widespread, and a serious concern. EA (in its full philosophical flowering) is just the lazy, mechanistic morality that naturally grows from wealth without community, and a world where physical technology has far outstripped social technology.

Are people quitting their positions as volunteer coaches en masse to work more to donate to malaria prevention, to the point that the operation of children's sports clubs is seriously affected? If not, then it's not a serious concern.

Yes. (Seriously, people are disengaging from their surroundings and the people around them generally and substituting economic relationships for personal ones. The depersonalized, remote, fungible, monetary "malaria nets" thing is just the sugar-water Jellyby-ish virtue-substitute that was inevitably going to replace actually being a person among people)

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