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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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That's because it is a Twitter thread. A very good and thought-provoking one, in my opinion – those conjectures are no wilder than a typical paper published in anthropology, especially if we remain aware of things left omitted from the narrative; and the influence of rapid microevolution is ridiculously underestimated in the respectable literature, despite the obvious implications of the breeder's equation and quick ecological changes and differential shifts in fertility and mortality.

Naturally, it still shouldn't be accepted at face value.

@doorstuckdoorstuck are you Uriah or are you just straight up copying his work without attribution with the intent of running a social experiment? If so, I hate to spoil it, but you could at least refactor it a little.

I want to point out the humor of the next top level post below this one beginning with the words “I liked it before it was cool”

I don't see that at all actually (or even my own post) but hey.

Whoops, this is actually because I somehow managed to make a top-level post instead of a reply to something else as it was supposed to be.

(On further inspection, this seems to be because (confusingly, at least to me), even when you explicitly have a particular subthread open in an isolated view, with the page title saying "@X comments on blah blah blah", the immediately visible comment box at the top of the page still top level posts to the not-at-all visible-in-such-a-view main thread, though I instinctively assumed it would instead respond to the particular subthread opened. It seems to me like this top box should either be removed or changed in function.)

This is where I meant to post.

I am sorely disappointed the post was deleted and I won’t receive any credit for this

Well, how I disagree with you is that I don't even just believe that "pedophiles exist" but rather that at least some (much more than comfortable for your average person to admit or acknowledge in themselves or others) pedophilic attraction is nearly universal (at least in masculine sexuality). (I do agree with you that most avowed pedophiles are not only interested in prepubescents, but they are significantly (and usually primarily) interested in them enough that they're not going to give up on sexually indulging in them without a fight you can't win, and since the essence of male sexual attraction is variety anyway it hardly matters if they're only secondarily interested in them too.)

To justify that (other than some seriously buried studies that I'll probably drag out if I can take the effort to find them again), I use plain and simple historical fact. Plenty of historical sources will attest to the fact that most ancient sexual marauders, pillagers, rampagers, etc. acting as perhaps the purest expression of (again, at least masculine) sexuality and vastly under"fed" in regards to any "messaging and content" in comparison to your modern man (who, it seems to me, is the one actually influenced to artificially attempt to tilt his sexuality in an anti-pedophilic direction by "messaging and content"), pretty much had sex with (that is, raped (actual rape, not "statutory rape") by our modern standards, not that I think they thought of it that way or cared) attractive females regardless of age, tending to lean younger (probably more towards early teens, the freshly fertile, but hardly excluding prepubescents).

(And this also applies/applied to somewhat modern but still less modern men, like those participating in the Rape of Nanking for example, or those in modern African conflicts. Really, it seems like whenever men can get away with it (with conflict situations being the easiest avenues), they have a lot of sex with a lot of young girls, including very young ones, in a widespread fashion. I'm not sure how else you explain that other than it being a widely possessed and merely widely suppressed desire.)

to prevent people from consuming it and triggering their own latent pedophilia.

What are you going to do about all of the sexy children walking around in real life then? (Based on my experience in pedo etc. communities over the years, this is at least as common if not more common of a "pedopill" than any media consumption for people.) Universal age-based dress codes (which would probably have to be niqabs to fully frustrate attraction, though that's just going to tempt people more in a different way with the forbidden nature of it)?

And, again, how are you going to stop people from consuming any content without the exact same infrastructure and techniques immediately shutting down all other heterodox communications you care about (presuming you care about at lesat some if you're on here)? Or are you willing to throw everything else on that funeral pyre?

(I will await you trying to stop it though, same as thousands of other people online over the years who have made the same proclamation.)

Others on here will disagree with "You know we are and you can't stop us;" because they will tell you that a 9mm hollowpoint will stop it very well, the Great Day of the Rope for child predators.

[insert "We own guns too."-esque slogan.]

The "Great Day of the Rope" may yet belong to we pedofascists, not our "agecuck" (as is the lingo) counterparts.

I'm not quite that far, but I do think that things like involuntary confinement of those with incurable desires towards children

How do you plan on enforcing that? If it's with objective, involuntary measurements of arousal like penile plethysmography and even half-decent content (especially if you plan on criminalizing attraction to anyone under the age of 18, or even just under the age of 16), then I hope you're prepared to either seriously fudge things/render your own scheme arbitrary and dishonest or lose a significant portion of your male population (like so much that they will probably all just rebel and overthrow you anyway).

(Many underage girls online who post primarily sexualized content have millions of subscribers/followers, and this is with all of the inevitable deplatforming/(shadow)banning etc. of their content, along with that their main audience is often reluctant to explicitly subscribe to/follow them or often even make an account at all. If you actually seriously tried to enforce what you're proposing on a fair, universal basis, again you would soon find yourself overwhelmed with dissenters and rebels (forced into it by the threat of involuntary confinement). It's probably the best guaranteed recipe for regime change I can think of, which is why as an aspiring supporter of a pedofascist regime I kind of wish it would be tried.)

Well, great job incarcerating a vanishingly small percentage of the people you want incarcerated. It still changes not much. (You may note that even the process you participated in generally requires a prior conviction for an actual offense, not mere attraction, so you certainly didn't get to live up to your own daydreams.)

It's all still a small blip on the historical radar. Maybe I'll give you credit as a trailblazer if in 500 years people are still clutching their pearls about men being inevitably sexually attracted to a nice pair of 13 year old tits or a plump, tight 12 year old ass, but a quick look around TikTok pretty much proves that the dam of social disapproval on that subject probably can't hold forever. For decades more probably, yes, especially since we're still in the age of cancellation terror. But natural desire usually tends to win in the long run. You can brutalize Mother Nature, but nobody's killed her yet.

Lots think they have great opsec, once they get anywhere near the judicial state apparatus it always comes out.

I'll give you the credit of assuming that you know how massive of a selection bias this is.

On the one hand Mastercard can cut them off with no consequences

We never used Mastercard lad.

on the other they are so numerous and organized that if you push them too far they will overthrow the government

I never said there was any organization. There's not. In the event your harebrained scheme was ever widely implemented, most of the people ending up on my side (including quite likely you eventually, again assuming it were universal/honest and not an arbitrary grift which it probably would be) would be horrified by it. Many would probably convince themselves that they weren't actually on it and the machines had made a big mistake, and that's why they were fighting back (and this narrative might be what would let the whole thing be shut down or downsized to sanity while allowing the regime to save face). But if they were facing imprisonment, they wouldn't have much of a choice.

It's not a "violent pedo fantasy". Violent is being such a dedicated, self-denying stooge for feminist agecuckoldry that you idly fantasize about incarcerating vast swathes of the population for nearly universal sexual inclinations. Saying "Wow if you did that then you'd have a really big, aggressive problem on your hands." in response is just basic logic.

Dial down the antagonism. You're taking a highly contentious position and so unsurprisingly you are taking some heat, and I'll cut you some slack for that, but you still need to respond to people civilly and without rancor.

I appreciate your treatment of me as perhaps the ultimate Olmec.

Literally what I did with my time professionally.

Explain please. What were you doing, who were you engaging with?

Would banning loli, or anything else like that, reduce various forms of age-based sex offenses at all though? The meme is 'muh violent video games', but idk, my guess is not much, given how common it is in countries with different levels of popularity.

Percentage of European ancestry is a good predictor of HDI scores in Central- and South America. I haven't run any numbers, but that's the impression I get from glancing at two Wikipedia maps:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/European_Ancestry_Large.svg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/2021-22_UN_Human_Development_Report.svg

(French Guyana just gets the HDI of France, and should be discounted.)

I find this interesting, because I'd always just assumed that South America was too thoroughly mixed, both genetically and culturally, with Europe for any remaining discrepancies to make much of a difference.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary about Costa Rica (which I knew nothing about) which claimed it has a very high life expectancy. While trying to figure out what made them different from neighboring countries, I noticed most of the people there had European facial features. I'd never considered that kind of correlation in Central- and South American countries before.

Ultimately, the observation basically rests on Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Venezuela and Panama (and maybe Colombia?) go against the grain. The rest are all just generally low-European percentage and low HDI score.

Doesn’t the divide between Mexican states kind of tell the same story?

The biggest caveat is that the European Ancestry data that the map is based on might not be very accurate. It's largely based on self-identification, which is hard, because most of Central- and South America are mixed European and Native. The best would be data from DNA studies that estimate percentage of DNA from Europe. The data surely already exists somewhere.

--

Also, switching out HDI score for GDP per capita also works pretty well:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/IMF_GDP_per_capita_by_country_%28Oct_2022%29.png

Here's a map someone posted at 23andme subreddit (on the basis of other data than 23andme, mind, which would probably be a slanted source.)

Thanks! In that map, it looks like Argentina and Chile doesn't really have any more European ancestry than Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. That would completely undermine the correlation.

Poor administration is a plausible reason, no?

Can anyone explain Duncan Hunter to me? American greed running an episode on him right now. Seems like he spent $60k of campaign money on personal expenses but was an early maga supporter. I know McConnel has made a ton of money off connections. Pelosi’s husbands trading. Obama had Rezko. Hunter got 630k a year from some Ukranian oligarch for a no show job. How can I not see this as a deep state job? He probably violated an actual law. But seems like a lot of people break laws but if your a Maga supporter a small technical violation makes you an episode of American greed but SBF gets glowing articles in the NYT.

Edit: I like Pelosi and McConnell. Realize their is going to be some corruption. And I’ve had a rum or two while watching this but really $60k gets you a labeled as a monster.

GOP launched their congressional investigation into Joe Biden today. Nail him to the fucking cross. Treat them how they have treated us.

I know McConnel has made a ton of money off connections. Pelosi’s husbands trading. Obama had Rezko. Hunter got 630k a year from some Ukranian oligarch for a no show job.

I am guessing because the other examples are grey areas or hard to prove. Taking money from 'x' under the pretense of 'y' and doing 'z', is strait-cut fraud.

makes you an episode of American greed but SBF gets glowing articles in the NYT.

Little too soon to say he got off.

One could say “hard to prove”. One could also assume the full weight of the justice system never went after these things.

Funny I was talking to a friend on how a simple audit by any government org could have caught SBF. And his reply was busy finding small cases. Sbf is definitely not “hard to prove”.

Well, the one thing in favour of the regulators I will say is that there seems to be evidence Bankman-Fried was moving the legal headquarters of FTX around to be one jump ahead of the posse.

Started off in Chicago, moved to Miami, then settled on the Bahamas. The 'trading for US citizens' arm, FTX-US, was legally incorporated in Delaware, hence the filing for bankruptcy there and why he passed that weird remark in his Twitter conversation with Kelsey Piper about being able to fix it all if 'we' (sic) won versus the Delaware court, and seems to have been headquartered in San Francisco. Ironically, it seems that the restrictions on trading cryptocurrency in place for US citizens/residents meant they had to set up FTX US for Americans to use their services, and the limits probably protected people more than the 'regulations, what regulations?' for the Bahamas mother-company.

Given all that has come out in the wash, I had to laugh at this bit in the piece; seems like the indications that his charity talk was fake were there to be seen all along:

Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX is moving its U.S. headquarters to Miami, only four short months after cutting the ribbon on its headquarters in Chicago.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot had attended the opening ceremony on FTX.US’s glitzy, 9,000 square foot office space in downtown Chicago, and touted the benefits of FTX’s presence in the Windy City – especially a pilot program sponsored by FTX that would provide supplemental income and financial education for underbanked Chicago residents.

When speaking with Bloomberg about the move on Tuesday, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said that establishing offices all over the world was key to the company’s mission of getting licensure for its various businesses. FTX moved its global headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in September.

Too bad for the "underbanked Chicago residents" as soon as it became more advantageous to up sticks! And he definitely was using the charity angle to represent what FTX was doing, so it was riding the coat tails of or intimately connected with EA from the beginning, including using the EA logo and GiveWell logo as well as two other bodies on the FTX US page:

FTX US was founded with the goal of donating to the world’s most effective charities. FTX US, its affiliates, and its employees have donated over $10m to help save lives, prevent suffering, and ensure a brighter future.

Funny I was talking to a friend on how a simple audit by any government org could have caught SBF

The SEC allegedly investigated FTX about 6 months ago and not only didn't make a finding but they were in negotiations to issue a no-action letter to FTX.

That is how hilariously incompetent/corrupt US government institutions are.

I am guessing because the other examples are grey areas or hard to prove.

It's not hard to prove; the reality is the DOJ has not only refused to investigate in any meaningful way many redflags of criminal activity, but has actively worked to stop others from doing so either (up to and included them seizing evidence and it disappearing into a blackhole), e.g., the Weiner laptop with evidence of Clinton, as well as witnesses claiming agents implicitly threatened them to stay quiet.

Little too soon to say he got off.

He did "get off" already. And then everything came crashing down.

The SEC allegedly investigated FTX roughly 6 months ago. Not only did they not make any finding about their activity, activity which is so hilariously fraudulent if even 1/2 the claims made by the liquidation CEO are in the ballpark of accurate, but they had multiple meetings in order to discuss the SEC issuing a no-action letter.

The SEC allegedly investigated FTX roughly 6 months ago. Not only did they not make any finding about their activity, activity which is so hilariously fraudulent if even 1/2 the claims made by the liquidation CEO are in the ballpark of accurate, but they had multiple meetings in order to discuss the SEC issuing a no-action letter.

will he avoid jail time or only get a light sentence? seems unlikely. The SEC ignored madoff for over a decade but he still got the book thrown at him.

What about the countless hundreds of people who committed basic fraud with mortgage transfers and bundling before and during the finance crises of 2007 onwards?

I'm not sure what the Gary Gensler and company at the SEC will do; they're comically incompetent, damaging, and corrupt at the same time.

What about the countless hundreds of people who committed basic fraud with mortgage transfers and bundling before and during the finance crises of 2007 onwards?

The vast majority of the fraud happening at that time was done not by evil vampire squids and CEOs, but by parties with full political and media support: ordinary Americans who bought more house than they could afford. The other major party involved was mortgage brokers who colluded with ordinary Americans. "Don't worry, they don't check this. Just say you make $X."

The SBF fraud was even more egregious than 2008. The latter was more about risk management failure, the former seems like deliberate fraud.

I'm not sure what the Gary Gensler and company at the SEC will do; they're comically incompetent, damaging, and corrupt at the same time.

It will go above the SEC. It will likely be referred to criminal prosecution.

Hunter was indicted in 2018, i.e., by the Trump Administration, and ended up pleading guilty and resigning from office. And why you think it was a "small technical violation" is unclear. He apparently used campaign donations to buy stuff for women he had affairs with. He also admitted to stealing $150,000 in his plea deal, not $60,000. And BTW, his 11 month sentence was well below the guideline recommendation for the agreed upon offense level, and was imposed by a Clinton appointee. This is your poster child for unfair treatment?

I don’t think it would be punished by a team establishment player.

It regularly has been.

This is why I think politicians should be paid in the range of $10-100M/year. They control trillions of dollars and make less than doctors. Obviously they're going to find a way to skim.

It's funny because it would be a very populist policy that almost no populists would vote for

Spending campaign funds on personal expenses is a commonly prosecuted form of political fraud. Democrats get in trouble for this too- Jesse Jackson Jr went to prison for buying, among other things, Michael Jackson memorabilia with campaign funding. There was an establishment Republican not too long ago who went to prison for spending campaign money on expenses relating to a pet rabbit. It’s a pretty equal opportunity prosecution for this particular crime.

And those are the cases that come to mind because the details are weird. They’re not optimized for being politically broad spectrum.

Do wine connoisseurs enjoy The Rings of Power?

AKA, is wearing skin suits actually a virtue?

The question is prompted from the Scott article, as well as the discussion of said article here. Not to call out any user, but I find some of these responses illustrative:

From FiveHourMarathon

But even more on point, to a wine aficionado, saying you don't appreciate good wine is just like saying to me that you would sooner buy a Lay-z-Boy recliner than an Eames lounger. If you don't see the difference, you just aren't one of our sort, which is a small subset of people but it's one to which I belong. I recall an argument here before where an interlocutor (since departed) told me that he saw no difference between consuming LibsOfTikTok and reading Marx's Kapital, I remember thinking this is just such a disconnect there's no way to even explain it.

A more Motte-ish analogy to the different studies Scott cites here: take three authors, Scott Alexander, Stephanie Meyer, and Honoree Jeffers. Scott cites studies where mass consumers are given different wines, if you gave mass book consumers passages from the works of each of those three authors most would prefer Meyer. Scott cites studies in which experts were given wines, if you gave literary experts passages from each they'd pick Jeffers every time. Yet I'd pick Scott every time, and there's a subset of people who would pick Scott who I align with, and to call literary skill "fake" is an absurd (repugnant?) conclusion.

I'd argue that wine is no more fake than literature.

From Paracelsus

I'm with you, and in fact this is the thread that finally got me to stop lurking on the new site and set up an account (under a different name, not that I posted a lot or was well-known on the sub beforehand).

I think what a lot of people here, Scott included, are missing is that wine is not just about the taste. In the same way that literature is not just about the plot. The style of the prose, which gives the book structure, usually matters much more than the story itself. And the background behind the work--the circumstances in which it was written, and when and where and why the author wrote it--also contribute to the importance of a work. Sum up Moby Dick in a sentence or two and it doesn't sound very interesting. But actually reading it is an entirely different experience.

Wine is basically the same way. The taste matters, of course. Nobody wants to drink a bad wine. But for a wine lover, it's just as important to explore WHY it tastes that way... what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500.

Not everybody needs to care about these things... there's nothing wrong with buying an $8 wine, or a $30 or $70 big-brand wine without much character to it. There's nothing wrong with reading Dean Koontz or John Grisham or James Patterson novels either! But there's so much more depth out there, for those who are interested, and that transcends far beyond just the actual flavors in the wine.

Both these arguments, to me, seem to argue in favor of The Rings of Power. It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience. Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is. Just like ROP is good because it has the LOTR label. We should ignore the actual show, its writing, CGI, etc deficiencies because it has the label, and that label has history and work behind it.

But, from my POV, I find I prefer the opposite. I only wish to give prestigious labels to things I consider prestigious. Marvel studios has lost the right to call its outputs Marvel. Star Wars is not. ROP is not Tolkien. They are all inferior products wearing skin suits of better brands that they happened to have the money for. Why wouldn't wine be the same? Surely I acknowledge that is the truth in my libation of choice: Beer. Goose Island is dead to me as a brand despite being one of my favorites earlier in life. They simply have gone the Rings of Power path. I can taste it. I don't know when it happened, but it has, most of their beers are now gross. Why couldn't the same have happened to a French winery founded in 1273?

Good wine, bad wine, fancy wine, cheap wine - as long as we're talking about red wines, more than one glass will inevitably give me a headache (like an instant headache, not hangover headache) anyway. Beer for me, too.

Well, brad is brand because of the history of success. If someone claims “I’m brand X” but you know really they are “Brand Y” that it doesn’t matter how much they spend trying to appear to be “Brand X.”

"Depth" is just what people call it when they don't understand bad writing. "Character" and arguing over why your wine tastes like cat piss is likewise an exercise for the middlebrow strivers trying to look sophisticated. Most (not all) of both literature and wine (and whiskey, and film, and painting etc.) is bullshit marketing and nobody really enjoys most of the work. They claim enjoyment to gain supposed status, and entrance to those "elitist" groups of middlebrow, midwit, middle class schlubs aping a cartoon of old-timey rich people.

Most (not all)

On the contrary, "depth" is a quality of good writing. What happens is that bad writers try to emulate the the motions of good writers without understanding the mechanisms behind them and thus mistake obscurantism and "shocking plot twists" for depth.

See the old copy/pasta about Sherlock vs Anton Chigurh

Why is Sherlock so bad? Because it's a show about smart people written by idiots.

Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written character. When Chigurh kills three people in a hotel room he books the room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is available, etc... This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how smart people think.

Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people. He'd enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He'd throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn't live without each other due to a faint scent of penis on each man's breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesn't kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he's actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they're undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. "But Sherlock!" Moriarty cries "That police officer blew his own head off, look at it, there's skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?". Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.

This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.

Goose Island is dead to me as a brand despite being one of my favorites earlier in life. They simply have gone the Rings of Power path. I can taste it. I don't know when it happened, but it has, most of their beers are now gross.

I know what happened: they got purchased by AB-Inbev, their beer production got scaled up, and their supply chain probably also got reworked. The reason why places like Goose Island or Elysian agree to be purchased by AB-Inbev is usually so they don't have to brew their most popular beers, but can outsource it to the machinery of the multinational conglomerate. Supposedly that means they can experiment and try new things in their existing brewery.

they got purchased by AB-Inbev

Ahh. Of course.

The reason why places like Goose Island or Elysian agree to be purchased by AB-Inbev is usually so they don't have to brew their most popular beers

The reason people sell their companies to multinational conglomerates is money, any other reason is a post-hoc justification to save face.

I don't see where in those quoted passages you're getting a message like "Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is." It's more like "I personally am one of those people who will shut up and drink the $2,000 wine and think it's good because the label says it is. Other people might feel differently, but that doesn't make my experience of enjoying the goodness of that wine any less real." So for Rings of Power, the analogous message to me would be something like:

I personally will ignore the actual show, its writing, CGI, etc deficiencies because it has the label (and the Objectively Correct Moral Message), and that label (and Message) has history and work behind it. This doesn't mean that anyone else has to see it this way, just that my view of this show's goodness is genuine and not fake.

FWIW, I'm one of those people whose palette thinks that the quality of wine caps out at around $20/bottle.

That's more charitable than OP, but I think the message of my comment is more like: "Some groups of people enjoy certain things. They're allowed to do that, just like I'm allowed to enjoy things that I like. If the reasons I like the things I like are unintelligible to you, that doesn't indicate that I'm wrong or my taste is fake or I'm a bad person or the producer of the things I like is a bad person; it merely indicates that we don't share tastes or possibly other affiliations that likely correlate with taste." If someone is experiencing joy at engaging with something, who is anyone else to tell them that they are not enjoying it? People are allowed to have fun. If you don't enjoy it, shrug and move on. De gustibus non est disputandum. Some people prefer the cucumber pickled.

There are definitely cases in which provenance of a piece of literature matters to me. I'm more interested to read Homer than I ever would be to read an AI pastiche of Homeric poetry, for a million reasons that if I have to explain them aren't worth the effort.

I haven't watched RoP, or The Hobbit movies, or any of the Marvel films; I'm fairly certain I wouldn't enjoy them from what I've heard of them so I avoid them. If other people enjoy them, that's their business, not mine; but it might indicate we won't get along. I can't imagine being stuck dating a Disney Adult. If someone else liked the Silmarillion, we'll probably get along.

@anti_dan if you're going to quote me unfavorably have the decency to tag me.

Yeah, how does one do that?

I don't see the connection you make between the wineposting and RoP as going in the direction you posit. Indeed, this section;

But for a wine lover, it's just as important to explore WHY it tastes that way... what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500.

Makes me think that if one of these such labels were bought by some mass-production soulless conglomerate, and as a consequence massively declined in quality, high status wine connoisseurs would be slating it left and right for (to them) easily detectable differences. Whereas all the people who only buy it because the name carries status would carry on none the wiser. This seems more in line with the nerd-vs-consumer distinction that I recognise.

Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is.

OP never says anything like this. They say that there's nothing wrong with generic wine, but that there is a world of wine minutiae to explore if you're willing to get into it.

It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience.

The impression I got was that they are willing to spend a lot on certain vineyards because the wine they produce has qualities the OP finds worthwhile, not that the vineyards are worthwhile because of their brand name.

I'm not a wine person; I don't tough alcohol at all due to a familial history/predisposition to substance addiction. But I do have hobbies, and I understand that with any hobby there are vast differences in the understanding of a layman, intermediate hobbyist, and high-level hobbyist. The same goes for entry-level versus high-end equipment. I'm not an audiophile or photographer, but I can accept that when they drop thousands on top-of-the-line equipment, they're doing it because it makes a difference to them.

That doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of things at a laymen or entry level. To be honest, the effort to reward ratio of many hobbies seems better at the entry level, when you know enough to enjoy yourself but not enough to know what you're missing. But I can believe someone when they say the 2000 dollar camera has qualities the 200 dollar one doesn't. Same goes for this subject for me. I don't think this makes someone a slave to brands or whatever you're saying.

I have heard of Stephanie Myers. I had not heard of Honorée Jeffers. What does that tell us, if anything? My tastes are indubitably low-brow? But I haven't read any of her books or seen the movies, I know of her by all the publicity and advertising around her works.

There's a very old proverb: "Good wine needs no bush". If the wine is good, then yeah you want to know "how did this wine turn out good rather than that wine, what went into its creation?" But that's something that the owner of vineyards who grows the grapes and the winemaker who turns those grapes into wine wants and needs to know, not the drinker of the wine. "Exploring what the winemaker chose to do, how that year's vintage compared to the year before, where the vineyards are, how the climate at the vineyards affects the growing conditions, whether the winery has been around for 30 years or 500" is just snobbery if taken to extremes. "Mmmm I never drink any vintage if the winery is not a minimum of two hundred years old" may be a decent rule of thumb - or it may be a stuck-up snob who really couldn't tell the difference if you switched the labels. The same experiment on cheaper wines can tell you as much as the best ones. In the end, it really is the taste that matters, and not if the owner wore his lucky socks that spring morning when he went out to look at the east slope where he intended to plant the new vines in the misty sunrise.

The main fault of the "Rings of Power" is that it is bargain-shelf wine with a grand cru appellation slapped on. The budget went on designing showy labels and getting fancy bottles for the cheap and needs to be drunk fast contents. The outside looked great, but when you started drinking it, somehow the taste was all wrong. Being told "but it's so faithful to the spirit of the books! but Tolkien's work needs to be brought into the modern world!" doesn't and can't hide that this stuff is better used in cooking than enjoyed on its own.

The main fault of the "Rings of Power" is that it is bargain-shelf wine with a grand cru appellation slapped on. The budget went on designing showy labels and getting fancy bottles for the cheap and needs to be drunk fast contents.

Bingo.

Further more I'd suggest that this is especially galling for a lot the older (pre-Peter Jackson film) fans as Tolkien's work itself was if anything the opposite. Outwardly cheap simple and unassuming, but with a lot going on under the surface that rewarded repeat visits and those who took their time.

Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.

Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.

Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".

How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?

Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.

If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?

I 100% agree with you. “Globalism EA” is a reneging on the community that created you. Someone like SBF was the recipient of untold Western privileges, paid for by the blood and sweat of untold Westerners, many of whose children are struggling. To take up all of these privileges (which amount to subsidies) and then throwing a majority of the money at net Africans is wasteful and immoral. It’s trying to live with no communal responsibilities, as if the capitalist rules in place are the only that matter. It also betrays a misunderstanding of the recursion of morality. You want to invest your morality in a way that doesn’t just do some “one time good”, like with net Africans, but that compounds over time. Net Africans will never pay your good deed forward, at least I do not think so; compare that to when Native Americans donated cattle to Ireland in their famine, and 170 years later Ireland returns the favor and sends aid to tribes dealing with COVID. This sort of cross national charity is possible with sophisticated states, but not with net Africans.

Also, regarding net Africans, if you told me that one thousand of them have died today, I would not be affected. One hundred thousand, it would not affect my life at all. One million, no. If you told me ten trillion Africans died from an absence of malaria nets, I would be greatly puzzled how so many Africans could fit in Africa, but again it would not affect my life in the slightest, or the life of anyone I love, or my loved ones’ loved ones, or my entire civilizational history, or anything I care about. In this sense they are simply “not real” from any moral standpoint. Some amount of money should be spent on civilizing Africans, sure, so they can make their own nets and such, but i’m cognizant that others tried to do that and got fucked over for it.

Net Africans will never pay your good deed forward, at least I do not think so; compare that to when Native Americans donated cattle to Ireland in their famine, and 170 years later Ireland returns the favor and sends aid to tribes dealing with COVID. This sort of cross national charity is possible with sophisticated states, but not with net Africans.

I think this is a strange example to choose to support that point. The Irish didn't have a sophisticated state back when the Native Americans donated to them, the Irish tenant farmer had a lot in common with today's net African in his ability to repay. From the point of view of the Native Americans it must have looked like a one time good, straightforward altruism, which is why it made enough of an impression to be remembered nearly 2 centuries later.

Or maybe they just saw some of themselves in the plight of the Irish, as Devalera put it when he was made a chieftan of the Ojibwe Nation in 1919: “I want to show you that though I am white I am not of the English race. We, like you, are a people who have suffered, and I feel for you with a sympathy that comes only from one who can understand as we Irishmen can.”

As an aside, the Turks are also remembered fondly, and the crescent in Drogheda's crest is often (mistakenly?) thought to originate in the Ottoman Sultan's donation of £1,000 for famine relief.

Sorry, but what do you find utterly repulsively evil about it?

Edit: To clarify a bit, you never explained what your problem with EA actually is. You just stated that focus on “global moral enterprises” is utterly evil, but why? I can understand valuing your own country higher than one halfway around the world, and perhaps you can’t emotionally identify with the EA view, but calling it utterly evil seems bizarre and ridiculous

Utterly evilness is thinking that "Human Global Welfare" is something we should strive for, instead of giving to your people. In my morality system, community and ethnos is everything, and as we consider a Father who does not prefer his Son to other people an evil person, I cannot tolerate people who believe in global constructs of human welfare.

How much should a father favor his son? What if his son’s needs are met?

Choosing to feed the local homeless instead of buying the son a nicer car is altruism. Choosing to feed the non-local homeless, or to protect them from malaria, is still altruism. Even when you (rightly, IMO) value these distant people less, there exists a point where you can do more for them than you could do for your son.

The effective altruists claim that this tipping point occurs very close to home, and that commissioning art or donating to a university is a luxury: more style than substance. Some of them surely think that feeding the homeless is such an extravagance, too. Those people are probably wrong—SV is a different kind of luxury signaling environment breeding its own styles of excess. I don’t think that makes the basic claim evil.

Why should you give to your community when you could give even more to your son? Perhaps it is utterly evil and repulsive to help your community when your son could use a second xbox?

If someone wanted to discredit EA, they could not have done better than this guy.

Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.

If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.

I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.

It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.

Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?

Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria?

Stop right there. Bankman-Fried may only have been associated with EA mainly as a moneybags donor, but he was their poster boy there for a while and there are plenty of articles out there licking his arse (as we say round these parts) for what a do-gooder he was.

And he wasn't spending it all on malaria bed nets, or what do you call the sponsorship of sports teams and paying the UC-Berkeley for naming rights of their sports field? Is that "have you no empathy?" Don't respond to criticism with "our hearts bleed unlike yours" about this kind of question.

OP said "Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises?" I took that to mean he took issue with bed nets and not just sports teams.

And he wasn't spending it all on malaria bed nets, or what do you call the sponsorship of sports teams and paying the UC-Berkeley for naming rights of their sports field?

I would call it an advertisement paid for by FTX, a for-profit company which Bankman-Fried only partially owned.

The OP was not criticizing the personal choices of SBF but the principles of EA. You can read his comment below, he very much does seem to think it is utterly evil to buy malaria nets for Africans

buying bed nets to prevent malaria

If you donate a bed net, it doesn't mean that your poor African is using the bed net to prevent malaria. Instead, they are being used to overfish, poisoning the water supply and possibly starving several communities in the long term.

Meanwhile, if I take care of an elderly neighbor I might not be saving lives or grand gestures like that, but I have a better idea of what they need and can avoid unintentionally hurting them and others.

That's a reasonable point, but then you just disagree with EA on their calculations, not their premises. That's something different than what OP was calling evil I think.

I think I disagree with EA on their premises because I think we can't really help someone unless we have a relationship with them and understand them. There is a balance between impact and knowledge. One side of the scale is something small that has low stakes but involves something you know well - like helping a neighbor pay for a much needed car repair. The other side of the scale has high stakes but involves situations where people don't have any idea what the ripple effects would be because they are too removed from the people they are trying to help - like the Mosquito Nets.

My principle would be that a problem should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority that includes people directly impacted by the problem. Or in practice, this:

A wealthy woman once visited the twentieth century activist Dorothy Day and pulled a large diamond ring off her finger. She handed it to Dorothy and asked her to use it for good. Dorothy dropped it into her pocket.

Later that day, a homeless woman knocked on the door at Dorothy’s Catholic Worker house, begging for money. Dorothy calmly reached into her pocket and gave her the diamond ring.

Dorothy’s friends were appalled. Later, while alone, they asked Dorothy if it would not have been better to sell the ring and use the money to rent a room for the beggar woman. Or perhaps they should have invested the money in a bank for her.

Dorothy replied, “She can do that with the ring if she wants to. She can see it and go on vacation if she wants, or she can just wear it on her finger and enjoy it if that’s what she wants. Do you think God created diamonds only for the rich?”

Dorothy’s response exhibits not just one, but two key principles of Catholic social teaching. Not only did she lavishly take an option for the poor by gifting the diamond ring, she also embraced the principle of subsidiarity, which says that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible. In this case, the lady receiving the ring should decide how to use it - not Dorothy, not her friends, and not the state.

-Brandon Vogt (Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World, page 91)

You might think this kind of altruism is reckless, I think giving malaria nets to people whose problems we don't know is reckless. All charity is risky and reckless because it requires involving yourself and your material goods in the well-being of another who may terribly misuse it - making you their accomplice.

You might think this kind of altruism is reckless, I think giving malaria nets to people whose problems we don't know is reckless.

Why do you think we don't know these people's problems? Tons of research has been conducted on how terrible malaria is, how it prevents economic development, has all sorts of higher-order effects, etc., and on how to treat and prevent malaria. Much more research than Dorothy Day conducted in your anecdote. Maybe the woman was just a drug addict who would sell the ring for a fraction of its value and spend the money on heroin, and giving her the ring rather than assistance in kind (food and shelter) is just feeding her addiction and funneling money into the pockets of criminals. A few days later, the ring is gone, the woman is still a homeless addict, and you get to pat yourself on the back because you weren't paternalistic and you respected her autonomy.

Apparently the Nigerians believe that imminent starvation is more important to them than malaria, and so use the free tools provided to wreck their environment and feed themselves for a moment instead of prevent malaria. People will use the tools provided to them as they see fit to benefit themselves.

Westerners are telling Nigerians, "look, I know you're hungry but the real problem, mathematically speaking, is malaria. Use these nets to prevent malaria and before long everything will be fine." And the Nigerian sees this as patronizing bullshit and does what they see best. If you need someone's cooperation to do something, they should have a seat at the planning table. If we had given them cash or something with resell value, maybe they'd have bought better fishing nets. If we'd talked to individuals first, we'd have known to give them a means to feed themselves before moving to malaria prevention. Instead we gave them a very specific tool that they are using on a problem it was not made to solve and making things worse in the process.

I don't think people misusing malaria nets is a major issue, but if you do, GiveWell also recommends funding malaria drugs and vitamin A supplements. Could something go wrong with those? I guess people might overdose. But GiveWell doesn't guess: they've actually run the numbers, and they've found that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. If that still doesn't convince you, you can just donate to GiveDirectly.

I mean, aren't there also stories (a la Live Aid) of people organizing to donate money/food to starving African communities, only for warlords to get their hands on said money/food and withold it for reasons of control? Who's to say that trying to give your recipients a seat at the table won't end up giving said seat to someone not interested in representing said recipients?

That's the point - you'd want the person actually needing help to have the most control of the funds/charity.

"homeless woman lucky to hock diamond ring for 5% of its value before someone just cuts her finger off for it. 95% of major charitable donation goes to shady pawn shop owner: social justice activists awed and inspired"

The whole anecdote reads like bragging about doing altruism in the most ineffective way possible.

Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria?

I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:

  • I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.

  • I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.

  • I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.

  • I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.

  • I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.

Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.

Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.

This strikes me as a weak moral argument.

There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you. Of course there is a biological basis for this, and it may be practically impossible for most people to overcome this bias. But that doesn't really have any effect on the ethical math.

You just have strong preferences that run counter to ethical concerns.

Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.

This is false.

You could, right now, give money directly to impoverished people across the globe to save/transform their lives.

If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.

There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you.

There absolutely are several.

(1) Practicality. An ethics which people are not likely to follow will not be implemented widely or for long. However noble its aims, such an ethic fails by its own terms. By contrast, an ethics which people are likely to follow, even if slightly less noble, will be implemented widely and for a longer period of time and thus result in more good. As you said, there is a biological bias in favor of genetic or geographic (and I'd add "sociocultural" as well) proximity. If that bias can be taken advantage of to build solidarity, care, and harmony, then it should!

(2) Accessibility. Proximity Bias is a simple concept, common to most human civilizations. It is simple to explain, and thus easy to spread. Moreover, it is also simpler for people of all different capability strata to implement, even without supervision. It's not perfect, and people being people it will sometimes be implemented poorly. But it's easier.

(3) Iterativity. Proximity Bias stresses that individuals should spend their resources on people and things close to them, which are likely to be things which the individual will interact with frequently. This provides for frequent feedback between all parties and frequent assessment of progress. Thus, it limits the ability of middlemen to grift or divert efforts and resources away from the object, as well as generally unlocking the beneficial dynamics present in iterated games more generally. It also allows for short feedback loops to identify and address unforeseen consequences rapidly.

(4) Resiliency. Though Proximity Bias may be less globally efficient, it does allow for the building of general reserves of both physical and social capital which can be leveraged to counteract/mitigate emergencies. Further, because it is decentralized, there is no single point of failure in the system.

If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.

Sorry, nope. Ties go both ways, or not at all. I am bound to those who have some duty to me. Beyond that, I have a duty to cause no unnecessary harm. If, after I have fulfilled my local duties, I still have resources left over, then, and only then, can I look outwards to perform charity on complete strangers. But that's a very high bar to clear.

You seem to be confusing is/ought.

If you choose not to give your life to save 10 people, you are a selfish coward.

I don't mean that as harshly as it sounds, as we are all born selfish cowards, wired that way as a result of billions of years of evolution. And then it's reinforced by our culture. It's super hard not to be a selfish coward.

We don't like to think of ourselves as selfish cowards, so we imagine ourselves to be moral, even when the evidence is clear.

3 million children die of starvation each year. You can literally, truly, concretely, actually save a number of their lives. Say, 10 lives. Just by forgoing insanely lavish luxuries that we all treat "middle class" in the West. You wouldn't even have to forfeit your life, just a bunch of your stuff.

Now, I don't believe people should be forced to sacrifice themselves or sell their shit. It's a personal decision they should arrive at after doing the rational/ethical math.

But the math is clear.

I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.

I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.

Ha. You feel attacked. I get it. :)

You're placing a higher value on the lives of some people due to their proximity to you. This is because you are selfish, by nature. Reputation, reciprocation, kin selection, etc. These are all "is" considerations. (It's cool we all feel it.)

It's only because conscious experience exists that morality exists; it's only by rationally thinking through the implication of this that you can participate in morality. The moral way of assessing value is by measuring the capacity to suffer, or the other end, experience happiness/flourishing. And it's when you do that you realize there is no (unselfish) basis to place a higher value on anyone. You'll see that it's only your selfishness that blinds you to this simple truth.

A man you've never met in Kenya is of equal moral value to your father. This sentence flies in the face of everything we feel, but it's obviously morally true.

More comments

Coming from a place of curiosity: How are these duties managed? By which I mean: who defines them, where are they defined, and who is the judge/enforcer? How do decide to make tradeoffs, like for example in a situation where you would have to renege against your duty to your ancestors in order to fulfill your duty to your family?

In other words, what makes these duties concrete to you?

Christians and others of the Abrahamic faiths have their books that codify their duties, and they have their priests, that act as judge/enforcer and guide. I'm sure other religion provide similar frameworks. Humanism, especially of the EA kind, has their own version of this. So where does yours come from?

I find the substance in the great thinkers and teachers of many cultures, and take my definitions from them (though, of course, with the right to interpret or add as may be honestly needed in the spirit of the original).

The idea that my concern and efforts must start with myself, then move slowly outwards from the center to kin, friends, neighbors, city, state, country, and only then beyond that, is also extremely common in historical moral teachings, from Hierocles:

". . . For, in short, each of us is, as it were, circumscribed by many circles; some of which are less, but others larger, and some comprehend, but others are comprehended, according to the different and unequal habitudes with respect to each other. For the first, indeed, and most proximate circle is that which every one describes about his own mind as a centre, in which circle the body, and whatever is assumed for the sake of the body, are comprehended. For this is nearly the smallest circle, and almost touches the centre itself. The second from this, and which is at a greater distance from the centre, but comprehends the first circle, is that in which parents, brothers, wife, and children are arranged. The third circle from the centre is that which contains uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, and the children of brothers and sisters. After this is the circle which comprehends the remaining relatives. Next to this is that which contains the common people, then that which comprehends those of the same tribe, afterwards that which contains the citizens; and then two other circles follow, one being the circle of those that dwell in the vicinity of the city, and the other, of those of the same province. But the outermost and greatest circle, and which comprehends all the other circles, is that of the whole human race."

to Confucius:

6:28 "Zigong said, 'What would you say of someone who broadly benefited the people and was able to help everyone? Could he be called humane?' The Master said, 'How would this be a matter of humaneness? Surely he would have to be a sage? Even Yao and Shun were concerned about such things. As for humaneness — you want to establish yourself; then help others to establish themselves. You want to develop yourself; then help others to develop themselves. Being able to recognize oneself in others [the ability to take what is near and grasp the analogy], one is on the way to being humane.'”

7:29 "The Master said, 'Is humaneness far away? If I want to be humane, then humaneness is here.'”

It even shows up in poetry, like Pope's "Essay on Man":

"Self love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, / As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake, / The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds, / Another still, and still another spreads, / Friend, parent, neighbour first it will embrace, / His country next, and next all human race; / Wide and more wide the' o'erflowings of the mind, / Take every creature in of every kind."

So yes, the goal ultimately is to embrace the whole world, but you can't skip steps! You have to adequately care for yourself before you can care for close kin. You have to be able to adequately care for self and kin before you can extend responsibility and purview to friends and local community. You have to provide for yourself, your kin, your friends, and your community before you can move on to the city or nation...and so on and so forth.

The idea that this isn't just true for those alive today, but also extends to a duty to carry on faithfully the work of those who came before, and leave it in a better place than I found it for those yet to come, I draw most pithily from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France:

"[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

And as to how it's enforced...I'll turn to Confucius again:

2:3 "The Master said, 'Lead them by means of regulations and keep order among them through punishments, and the people will evade them and will lack any sense of shame [self-respect]. Lead them through moral force (de) and keep order among them through rites (li), and they will have a sense of shame [self-respect] and will also correct themselves.'”

Thanks for sharing that. I understand a little bit more about where you're coming from.

It seems we're more or less aligned on the ends. I'm not sure about the means--for one, divvying people up into cities/states/nations doesn't appeal to me, since I'd rather do the categorization based on culture or at least "big ideas" such as "should the citizen be the property of the state?" But I guess it'll shake out in future discussions, which I'm looking forward to.

Cheers to that!

I would say that "culture" in the specific sense is highly relevant to categorization! You and the people you spend most of your time with are a tiny culture to yourselves, with your own idiosyncratic habits, inside jokes and references, and tendencies. And because you spend most of your time there, you have the most invested in keeping it healthy and productive and pleasant, etc.

Then there's looser subculture's you're part of - all the people who live on the same block, and so care about, e.g., potholes, loaning lawnmowers, watching out for each other's kids, 4th of July block parties, etc., so you collaborate on those things. Or maybe it's based on activity or affinity - a church congregation, softball league, wargaming group, knitting circle, book club, local political party, etc., each of which you spend your time, effort, and resources on.

And then it goes out further and further, through groups you share less and less time and contact with, but still have interests (whether pecuniary, cultural, or social) in common with. That's basically what Hierocles means by tribes, citizens, "those who dwell in the vicinity of the city," etc.

If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it?

I don't think the question reflects how the world actually works. If it costs a penny, I would posit that the United States government has spent no shortage of pennies, many of them extracted from my pocket, and that this should be a solved problem. If it costs a penny and the United States government has failed to allocate that sliver of copper, I would think that the many pennies Bill Gates allocates should be sufficient to solve the problem. If it is a mere penny that is needed (or any other trivial sum), then my penny doesn't need to be the marginal penny spent. That I'm being asked for a penny to end this suffering strongly suggests to me that some factor other than the necessary pennies are what's actually causing the suffering, which makes me very suspicious of why someone is asking for my penny.

Well in this case the real price is ~10k, and the US government reasonably decides that the marginal utility of spending more on foreign aid to save more lives isn't worth it at that point. But folks at EA disagree; they will donate at that level of price to lives saved. My point was more that the OP seemed to call EA "evil" but I expect that it's not really such a deep fundamental difference of values as it is his value of foreign lives is significantly lower but not 0. If it was literally 0 he would not spend even a penny to save a foreigner, but I expect that's not true.

Doesn’t that run afoul of the categorical imperative? If everyone follows your reasoning, and decides that it won’t be their penny that saves a life, we’d expect to see the life continue to go unsaved. This applies to the government, too. How can we tell whether the unsaved life is bait for a trap or a genuine failure to coordinate?

Some charitable rhetoric like the Giving What We Can pledge is specifically trying to force a more stable equilibrium.

Yes, it would, but my point is less "someone else can do it" and more "I believe other someones have already been explicitly funded to do this and the marginal penny flatly isn't the problem". If Bill Gates' coalition of billionaires can't coordinate sufficiently to solve the problem, I think the problem will not be solved by me electing to give a few more of my dollars. That these intractable problems are halfway around the world globe where I can't even begin to meaningfully evaluate them furthers my belief that I'd be better served by lighting the money on fire and enjoying a few moments of warmth. Basically, when someone tells me that I can save a life with a penny, I think they are either incorrect or grifting.

To put some specific numbers on it since the above is a claim that just handwaves away the idea that there are cheaply saved lives, an insecticide bed net apparently costs $2-3 for a family-sized nets. These apparently last 3-4 years, I would assume that it's not literally every African that needs one, and they apparently are large enough for multiple people. So, let's go ahead and call the nets $1 per year and let's say we need a billion of them - how in the world could it be that the Bill Gates team, or Sam Bankman, or USAID can't figure out the $1 billion per year without me chipping in (more than I already do via federal tax dollars)?

If Peter Singer's drowning child ever appears in real life, I will gladly wade into the pond and destroy my nicest suit to save them, but I think applying the same thinking to less legible child-saving is just a rhetorical trick, disconnected from reality.

Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria?

In all honesty, no. I can't say I do without severely watering down the meaning of the word empathy. If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.

EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.

EA stopped being about malaria nets a long time ago when they started putting funding into political campaign donations into "their" candidates into the Democratic Party primaries in Oregon (he lost anyways lmao). Scott Alexander and Big Yud shilling for this loser is a big jumping the shark moment for EA. Shoveling money into the black hole that is politics is the exact opposite of effective or altruism.

If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.

I don't think it's that hard to feel different amounts of non-zero empathy for different people proportional to how close they are to you. To save the life of your child? Spend up to 50% of your wealth. A parent? 10%. A close friend? 0.1%. A foreigner? 0.01%. Made up numbers that would be different for everyone of course, but I think that's the general premise most people actively live life by. I can't imagine if there was a charity that could legitimately save an African life for a penny, maybe because there's some immediate crisis that needs every cent it can get immediately and the big actors can't respond fast enough, and you knew all this for certain, you wouldn't donate. And drawing the line somewhere between a penny and $10k to save a life is reasonable. But people are just drawing their lines at different points, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.

Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.

Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)

So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.

In all honesty, no. I can't say I do without severely watering down the meaning of the word empathy. If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.

That's definitely true, and a real issue for having empathy for all of humanity. It's a problem I have as well, I don't think having empathy exactly like that is effective or helpful for anyone.

However, I get around it by not thinking about the quantity of children/people dying around the world. Just think of them as if they're one, or a few people who are dying and need malaria nets or whatever. Think about, try to feel, how much pain they're experiencing, how scared they are, how scared and sad their family is, etc. That way, you can feel the empathy, which can get you to take positive action, but not have to be destroyed by the scale of how many people out there need help.

Think about, try to feel, how much pain they're experiencing, how scared they are, how scared and sad their family is, etc.

...why tho

Getting emotional over people I don't know is irrational and makes you easy to manipulate. Not opening my wallet for a charity just because they will ostensibly reduce suffering somewhere I have never seen that I will never go to. People should look out for the ones they have direct responsibility for first. How about helping a friend out first? Everyone has a friend that's struggling these days.

One can improve the lives of those around them with great precision and far greater cost efficiency than unknown strangers.

Real Effective Altruism is giving a beer to the bum in front of Walmart. I don't expect him to get any better and he will almost certainly die in a ditch in ten years, but at least I know my money is being converted directly into utility (beer == smiles) and not wasted on high overhead charity making political or economic changes with uncertain second order consequences.

Yeah, they're good points. I don't think there are clear answers to this.

I can't speak to EA funding politics stuff, but a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives. Every bit helps to create a better world.

As far as people near us vs people far from us, yes, I agree that it should be more morally incumbent on us to better the lives of the people around us, vs far away and unrelated. But why not both? Some reasons you may want to donate to an EA style charity:

  • your money does go further in Africa than it does here. There's not anything you can do to save your friend's life for $5. If there is anything, then you definitely should do it

  • there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc

  • tax writeoff

a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives.

Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"

there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc.

Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?

I don't mean this as a reflection on you personally - I don't know you, of course - but these two quotes seems related. A person far away actually might be more "real" than a person nearby, at least insofar as their "realness" is as a pure, innocent victim who can be redeemed through charity. The person nearby, after all, is probably smelly and dirty and unsightly and low status. He might be crazy, or addicted to something, or violent and destructive. He might be resistant to help, or prone to relapses, or have other human foibles which so frequently are both the cause and result of being down-and-out. Even if he's none of those things, he might disagree about politics, or listen to the wrong music, or otherwise bear cultural marks that one might cringe from being associated with. And so it's hard and often unpleasant to help those nearby! Meanwhile, you don't see any of those things about the person far away, or if you do it's likely covered up by cultural unfamiliarity. Feels a lot better to help that person, I'd bet.

EA wasn't always like this - insofar as it's an attempt to cut through grift and bloat in charity efforts, it's still quite useful! But your comment seems to encapsulate a version of EA that flattens the world into fungible QALYs and tries to Moneyball-optimize QALYs-per-dollar, with an affective bias against giving and working where one is. And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.

Wouldn’t you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League

an affective bias against giving and working where one is

You seem to fundamentally not understand EA. In principle, it is not about hating your local community, 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. Even if your mentoring was able to save that kid’s life, that kind of one-on-one volunteering is a highly inefficient use of your time compared with just earning a few extra bucks to buy malaria nets with.

You can spend several hours per week for years as a Big Brother to save one kid, or you could take that time to earn money, donate it towards malaria nets and save many times more (depending on your earning ability).

Now you can say you just don’t care at all about the lives of African kids, which is fair, that’s why I’m not a part of EA. But if you claim to value their lives at all it renders these time-intensive charity efforts like coaching sports highly inefficient

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.

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Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"

No, those are good activities, too, and I did some of them as well. But that doesn't say anything about my main point in that paragraph, which is bang for the buck. The price of my time is generally considerably high, so really, I was contributing potentially a lot more than just a few dollars when I was volunteering my time. And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.

Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?

Because they don't know the person who's giving it, and also they probably understand how life and death things are. If my life were at stake, I'd take aid from anyone.

And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.

I mean, maybe. I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible. I just think that some far away places probably need that kind of help more than the northeastern US.

And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.

Why? Were there not hungry people at the soup kitchen who would otherwise starve? Depressed and troubled kids who, absent mentoring or sports-socialization, would have spiralled downward?

I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible.

We just disagree on whether or not the flattening of locality in the efficiency calculation represents a loss or not, I guess.

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The reason it feels alien to you is because it is alien to you. The theistic superstitions have mostly gone away, but the religious inclinations have not, and the influencers in the EA space are looking for a sort of fulfillment that they feel they can no longer get with traditional religion. Tikkun Olam is interesting though in that it exoterically presents as "healing the world" and social justice, but esoterically is in fact a command to destroy all idolatry and "false gods" offensive to the jealous tribal god, Yahweh.

Translation: "to speedily see Your mighty splendor, to cause detestable (idolatry) to be removed from the land, and the (false) gods will be utterly 'cut off', to takein olam – fix/repair/establish a world – under the Almighty's kingdom"

In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize God, the world will have been perfected.

Among modern liberal movements, A common but more modern understanding of this phrase is that we share a partnership with God, and are instructed to take the steps towards improving the state of the world and helping others, which simultaneously brings more honor to God's sovereignty

EA and AI alignment are interesting to consider in this duality of their conception of "healing the world".

This is just Bentham-esque utilitarianism in action. The core of EA is "your community" is no more worthy of a dollar's aid than some shanty village halfway around the world, and 95% of those calculations end up coming down with an anti-Western bent. Instead of spending a few million marginally helping a handful of people here you can blow the same amount improving sanitation or healthcare for many more people in Timbuktu and per the hedonic calculus the latter beats the former.

Close. The core is that a dollar’s aid buys more for the shanty village than for your community in the same way that a second car, house or cell phone is worth less than the first. The rest of your post follows.

It’s possible to believe one’s community is worth more, just not enough to justify the inefficiency. Though Mr. Bankman-Fried certainly looks to take the strong form.

What is your actual objection to EA? That they're willing to give money to anyone anywhere in the world, and not just their local in-group?

focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge

Art doesn't feed people or cure diseases. The world would be a much better place if rich people used $450,000,000 on saving 90,000 lives than buying a painting.

As for infrastructure and knowledge (by which you presumably mean education and/or research), I don't see how funding those is incompatible with EA in principle. It's just that these may not be the most cost-effective causes at the moment.

How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world

The physical africans who get bed nets are no more or less abstraction-ish than, say, money you donate to a homeless person in your city. Cities, and 'communities', are as arbitrary as 'the world' is - they're contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc!

Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises

I mean, is "my community" the city I live in because it had good schools? Is it people I talk to on the internet? Is it the base of economic production (most of the planet)? Also, the median alternative isn't "rich guy builds sistine chapel 2", but large houses, luxury purchases, or for charity awareness campaigns and funding 'economic and racial justice' charities.

As for 'art' - how would you propose funding art? You're not gonna find great artists in your hometown, compared to globally, power law etc. And globally - i.e. online - there are hundreds thousands of great artists - by most's standards, and thousands by any one person's, many of which you can donate to with a few clicks, but they're spread out across the globe (japan isn't africa, nor is it "your community"). Some of them are already well funded - most aren't. But if you fund a few extra, or even a few hundred extra, either way anyone who wants art can see a flood of instagram or pinterest or pixiv or w/e, so what precisely are you accomplishing? Again compared to 'saving thousands of poor african lives'.

As for infrastructure - even if you have a few billion, how can you compete with the hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment per year (vs wealth that you'll have over a decade), by motivated organizations that know a lot more than you?

And knowledge - well EA was spending a lot on 'knowledge', see ftx future fund grantees https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/, open phil openai grant, early funding to MIRI, etc, so that's just wrong.

Please actually make your case next time instead of vaguely gesturing that 'clearly EA is deeply, morally wrong, which i instinctively understand due to my background'. There are great cases against it!

The physical africans who get bed nets are no more or less abstraction-ish than, say, money you donate to a homeless person in your city.

No, you might actually see the homeless person in your day-to-day life, and he you. You interact, and can make each other's day directly better or worse. You can converse, have a relationship, etc., with very little resources needed to facilitate the communication. That's real. The African, though literally real in a physical sense, is thousands of miles away. Barring intensive intentional effort, you will never see them, speak to them, or have any relationship with them or they you.

Cities, and 'communities', are as arbitrary as 'the world' is - they're contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc!

Not from the standpoint of actual human lives, they're not. Well, okay, the word "community" is so overused it's done to death and is on the verge of becoming meaningless. But it originally described a true thing - a group of people who share things together, potentially including not just location and resources, but habits, language, ancestry, etc., and possess a sense of holding each other in special regard and solidarity; not quite as close as actual kin, but definitely set apart from the rest of the world. That's a meaningful division, or at least used to be before modernity came along and undermined it with "organized delight / in lotus-isles of economic bliss / forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss / (and counterfeit at that! Machine produced, / bogus-seduction of the twice-seduced!)".

I mean, is "my community" the city I live in because it had good schools? Is it people I talk to on the internet? Is it the base of economic production (most of the planet)?

Which of those do you have meaningful, reciprocal relationships in? Which of those supplies the people you'd turn to if you lost your job, or got ill, or had your domicile burn down? Which of those has people for whom you'd pitch in if they had one of those things happen? Which of those has people who you share your leisure time with? Which of of those do you rely on for your daily sustenance?

Most of us lack community. This is not an unnoticed phenomenon. Perhaps we should start building them again?

As for 'art' - how would you propose funding art? You're not gonna find great artists in your hometown

Why do you need your hometown's art to be "great"? What makes art "great?" Just skill in craft? What about history and love; a particular representation of a particular time and place, or of particular people investing what skill they have along with sweat and time into beautifying the spaces they share for their neighbors and descendants? Why not have this on every house and public building? Why not have lovingly-tended flowers along park paths? Why not have well-built and attractive playing fields and sports yards? The Colosseum is art, after a fashion.

As for infrastructure - even if you have a few billion, how can you compete with the hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment per year (vs wealth that you'll have over a decade), by motivated organizations that know a lot more than you?

Do they, though? They may have money, but a lot of motivated organizations do terrible jobs of knowing what they're doing, or doing it at all. Just look at my poor Golden state for countless examples. High speed rail, badly-done forestry, potholed roads, lazily-maintained power lines, unupdated water infrastructure - it all bears the hallmarks of people who are extremely wealthy and very excited about big, global political causes (the environment! Global Warming!), but care much less about the particular places they live and those that live there with them (often because their wealth and modern technology allows them to, and there is no countervailing force pulling them back).

No, you might actually see the homeless person in your day-to-day life, and he you. You interact, and can make each other's day directly better or worse

Huh? You almost certainly have not met, in person, the homeless guy that your hypothetical community philanthropy will reach. A lot of the homeless population moves around and in and out of homelessness. The soup kitchen you volunteer at is probably in a different part of a large city. And how does it matter if you've, like, seen the homeless guy once at a glance while driving around, vs not seen them at all, vs them being african? What?

Barring intensive intentional effort, you will never see them, speak to them, or have any relationship with them or they you

The same is true of ... homeless people for most?

That's a meaningful division, or at least used to be before modernity came along and undermined it

No, those premodern divisions are still "contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc".

Which of those do you have meaningful, reciprocal relationships in?

How can it possibly matter if you have "meaningful reciprocal relationships" that happen to be in the same city as the homeless people? I don't have any such 'reciprocal relationships' with the homeless people, so it sure seems like we're relying on geographical coincidence.

Why do you need your hometown's art to be "great"? What makes art "great"

I've become good friends with people in random towns who produce great art, are very good at their profession, etc. Why should I support random people who live in my city instead?

You just seem to be advocating a more aesthetic, slightly smaller-scale version of universalist philanthropy?

You almost certainly have not met, in person, the homeless guy that your hypothetical community philanthropy will reach. A lot of the homeless population moves around and in and out of homelessness. The soup kitchen you volunteer at is probably in a different part of a large city.

I don't know about where you live, but there are definitely distinct individuals who frequent specific places. Most don't just aimlessly wander here, there, anywhere. After all, they have some stuff! It's hard to move!

The same is true of ... homeless people for most?

I congratulate them. Now improve your housed neighbors. And when those are as good as you can make them, then move out to the next group outward, and so on.

those premodern divisions are still "contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc".

Being contingent is not synonymous with being arbitrary. More importantly, those contingencies are important in people's lives.

How can it possibly matter if you have "meaningful reciprocal relationships" that happen to be in the same city as the homeless people? I don't have any such 'reciprocal relationships' with the homeless people, so it sure seems like we're relying on geographical coincidence.

You asked what "your community" is. I provided some yardsticks of what is needed for a community. Geographical contingency can be part of it, because we're physical beings who exist in specific locations, alongside other people. But ultimately it's about cooperating with other people.

This is just the 'chesterton's fence' conservative - defending something, but it's not the thing you claim to be defending.

Thanks for the mind-reading.

There's some vague sense that what the liberals are doing is wrong, but the only levered criticism is that the liberals aren't touchy-feely enough, and should be doing the exact same thing but just slightly more conservative-feeling.

None of that is what I said.

And when those are as good as you can make them, then move out to the next group outward, and so on.

why? Why should one e.g. manage to overcome local resistance to building code reform in a veto-point bueraucracy to fix local rents before donating antiparasitic medication to people in africa? You still haven't really justified that!

Because it's an actual example of the tragedy of the commons, and by ignoring the things you share with the people around you, you are defecting against them and incenting the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections, relationships, and obligations which, from colonial era through Tocqueville's time and all the way to the middle of the 20th century made America function.

The entire premise of EA is, like, 'neglected causes'. If nobody was trying to fix "the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections" then sending money to africans might be a problem, but there are literally millions of people trying to fix those things, and thousands of times as much money are spent on them. So this complaint genuinely does not make sense.

I actually agree that EA should stop sending money to low-iq africans and instead spend money on beauty and will-to-power, and that 'spending money' is a poor way of accomplishing the latter and our smartest people working as hard as possible at giving malaria nets to mediocre bantus (and meaningless fun to mediocre white people) is dumb. But none of the arguments you're making really make sense on their own terms. The amount of money spent on 'local charity' per year in the united states is MUCH MUCH HIGHER than all of EA expenditure, or all of EA wealth.

Also, local infrastructure is great by any standards other than modern ones. Yeah, we don't have a good public transportation system in most of the US, but cars and planes still make it better than literally any period in history. The environmental movement's continued success means that our 'surroundings' are also better than any point in the last century. What does 'decay of governance' even mean? How do you expect a bunch of ivy league jews to reinvigorate 'local traditions'?

individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections

These are being macerated by the internet, which is much more powerful in any literal or physical sense of 'power'. As is demonstrated by themotte existing on the internet, and not IRL. that trend is accelerating rapidly and will not stop.

The entire premise of EA is, like, 'neglected causes'

Granted, but with a small amendment - "the entire premise of EA is legible neglected causes." It's pretty easy to count dead bodies, particularly when there is already a vast, multi-billion-dollar international development aid network who works full time at collecting every heart-wrenching statistic about Africa who you can get data from.

By contrast, it's a lot harder to quantify dysfunctional community (particularly among the wealthy donor class's socio-political enemies in the WEIRD West).

If nobody was trying to fix "the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections" then sending money to africans might be a problem, but there are literally millions of people trying to fix those things, and thousands of times as much money are spent on them.

I agree that spending money on impersonal charity is not a good way to fix these things. However, I don't agree that "literally millions of people" are trying to fix them, otherwise we would be seeing much less grim results than we currently are. Moreover, it's not a duty that can be delegated to specialist charity organizations. It's an obligation that comes along with citizenship, that everyone has. The only question is what each of our individual obligations are, depending on our means, location, and ability.

Also, local infrastructure is great by any standards other than modern ones.

Given that we are living in modern times, modern standards are the correct ones to apply.

Yeah, we don't have a good public transportation system in most of the US, but cars and planes still make it better than literally any period in history.

There are any number of transit-minded folks on here who I'd defer to on this (though with the caveat that I'm not a "cars are evil" guy like some are).

The environmental movement's continued success means that our 'surroundings' are also better than any point in the last century.

I was referring to the physical built environment, but I take your point about pollution.

What does 'decay of governance' even mean?

Maybe by first fixing their own zoning codes to allow for the development they say they want?

How do you expect a bunch of ivy league jews to reinvigorate 'local traditions'?

By actually participating in them, or creating them out of whole cloth if the area is so deracinated that there is no continuous community.

These are being macerated by the internet, which is much more powerful in any literal or physical sense of 'power'. As is demonstrated by themotte existing on the internet, and not IRL. that trend is accelerating rapidly and will not stop.

I agree, but that doesn't mean I have to quietly acquiesce to it. Long defeats are worth fighting, if the cause is noble.

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How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA? Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.

(I think EAs would quibble about "metaphysical moral earning", but in a kinda an arbitrary way.)

Largely, because the marginal community example in the United States involves buying helmets for teenagers to concuss each other with, and the marginal dollar to sub-Saharan African involves fewer people dying painfully of starvation or malaria. Or, worse, the community example in the United States involved sending Americans to build shitty bridges in sub-Saharan Africa out of weird non-measurable benefit analysis.

There are frameworks where the Carnegie or Bell Labs model has bigger impact on the world (eg: Bell Labs), or where moral worth of a local charity is stronger than a distant one because of those community links, but they're pretty hard to argue in the general case from a philosophical position rather than from a axiomatic one.

((On the flip side, a lot of EAs have made it clear that they're not buying malaria nets with every last dollar, either: cfe EA crypto-nauts buying stadium names for concussion-ball, or more subtly, the failures of KelseyTUOC to adequately balance politically-acceptable outreach against EA popularization.))

EA is not an alternative to the progressive view; it is an expression of it. It's a different branch than woke, but it is still "globohomo" progressivism.

I’d like to see an explanation of the term “globohomo.” Every time I see it used, it’s indistinguishable from a know-it-when-i-see it circumlocution for “things I don’t like.”

Portmanteau of "global" and "homogenous", though I expect the wink at "homosexual" is intentional. Basically Scott's Universal Culture, only with negative valence.

I feel like “globogenous” has a better cadence. Oh well.

The "homo" isn't always just a wink at "homosexual" - it also is a reference to the high priority of LGBT in western diplomatic efforts and high-level initiatives.

Do Western governments place a high priority on LGBT rights in their diplomatic efforts? The media may make a big deal out of it (see for example the focus on LGBT rights over more general civil and labour rights in recent discussion of Qatar in relation to the World Cup), but do governments actually care? After all, Saudi Arabia, where same-sex activity is a capital offence, is a close ally of the West, and the West also cooperates with other countries where homosexuality is illegal.

Well, here's one example.

In the cable, Mr. Blinken noted that it was not a requirement and gave chiefs of mission the ability to “determine that such a display is appropriate in light of local conditions.”

In other words, only do it where the locals are already pro-LGBT. They're not trying to convince either the local population or the government of anything, they're just repeating a message the locals already agree with. Hardly a "high priority".

Blinken said he brings up LGBT in every conversation with the Saudis. Some have speculated this is why the Saudis rebuffed US desire to increase oil production before the mid-terms.

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/17/blinken-saudi-arabia-lgbtq-rights

Biden said he'd do more for LGBT in his first foreign policy speech

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-signs-memo-protecting-lgbtq-rights-worldwide-set/story?id=75682189

He also signed a presidential memorandum on Thursday that he said would "reinvigorate our leadership on the LGBTQI issues and do it internationally."

"We'll ensure diplomacy and foreign assistants are working to promote the rights of those individuals included by combatting criminalization and protecting the LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers," Biden said.

The US soccer team in Qatar will wear LGBT rainbow on their uniforms

https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/14/us-national-soccer-team-crest-lgbt-world-cup-qatar/

In other words, only do it where the locals are already pro-LGBT.

Not quite. (For reference, Jamaica is famously homophobic, and gay sex is illegal in Barbados)

[Edit: It's not quite a formal diplomatic initiative, but this just broke which is quite relevant, and I can't imagine it would have happened if the State Department had a problem with it.]

If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?

There are many, many possible alternatives to the woke/progressive view. There have been many different civilizational models, and there will be many more. In fact, the many and increasing self-wrought material changes to our environment and ourselves made by humanity in the past 60 years practically guarantees that new modes of social organization will have to evolve as the interplay between ourselves, each other, production, status, and the world changes.

There's a line from Scott's What We Owe the Future review that really stood out to me:

All utilitarian philosophers have one thing in common: hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children.

Catching that for the first time really had me hoping he would explore that a little bit more, but in context it seemed to be little more than a quip. So it falls to me to try to explore it.

I don't think it's an accident that utilitarian altruists start out with hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children. I think, in effect, it's an attempt to manipulate the audience: to condition them into a rare mode, one meant for extreme emergencies, and then lock them in that mode for the rest of their lives. To catch people in their very most self-sacrificial state and make them keep that up forever.

It seems to me rather like if someone heard about a mother, with a burst of strength, lifting a burning car off her toddler, and thinking "wow! Super-strength is within human capacity! All we have to do is get into the mindset of a mother whose children are in immediate mortal danger and stay like that all the time and who knows what wonders we'll all be capable of afterward! We could carry pianos one-handed; build houses alone in but a day! All that stands in our way is that, for whatever reason, we're not in the right mindset! Well, we'd better fix that!"

Do you think that would work? I don't. First of all, there'd be no chance of actually getting people far enough to try it. Second of all, even if people did try it, what would result is not a glorious utopia full of Herculeans, but instead a bunch of miserable or dead people with rapidly-ruined bodies. The world would not be stronger, richer, happier, more vivacious for it, but weaker, poorer, more miserable, and more dead.

Moving back from the matter of super-strength to altruistic economic productivity removes the vividly gory details of exploded muscles and limbs torn apart, but I do wonder if it wouldn't be similarly ruinous to try to change the equilibrium in which humans operate to the greatest extremum achieved, especially without a very thorough understanding of why we're not already always up there in the first place.

Guess it's time to push back on EA bashing a little.

Patronizing great art and taking care of your local community (would that be Stanford University campus or Nassau polycule for SBF?) is very well and good, but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too? It's a question of priorities, and Art is but a spandrel on the building of life; surely we need to prioritize the foundation and load-bearing walls. Adorno had said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and while that feels extreme, it's hardly an alien line of thought to anyone who's ever been remotely close to something like Auschwitz. Yudkowsky in his Sword of Good has done a good job of illustrating the conundrum: utilitarianism feels creepy and abstract and, indeed, even evil, until you snap out of the derealized route-following mode – the normal mode of human consciousness – and feel in your bones the sheer scale of concrete, physical, natural evil that is visited upon living beings. That's how utilitarians get made.

You cite Mediterranean Christianity as the source of your moral intuitions. A passage from Galkovsky about the era of European wars of religion, the animosity between Inquisition and conversos, Catholics and Protestants, events like this, comes to mind:

[...] Double and triple provocations, genocide, poisoning, the deliberate spread of plague and cholera, mutual brutishness. And all of this was accompanied by the deafening whine of jammers.

And – instant adaptation to evil. Flemish art. Italy: people are buried in walls and boiled alive, yet life goes on and the state even grows fatter from it. Good and evil, their struggle becomes more complex. And complicating the game means elevating its level.

As it happens, I live in the Mediterranean now, though on its opposite edge, in the Ottoman-conquered Constantinople, where the heart of Orthodoxy once beat, a city chock-full of tiny subsidized globohomo art exhibitions, history, crumbling beautiful architecture and filth. Yesterday, a bomb went off on the fancy local tourist-baiting street Istiklal, Beyoğlu, where you can normally see scores of idle tourists, confused Russian expats, miserable Syrian refugees and spoiled Turkish cats; reports say six people were killed, close to a hundred wounded. Why? No idea, probably Syrian or Kurd issues, though some Turks nod at Uncle Sam. As I walk past the beautiful Church of St. Anthony of Padua (with Ratzinger portrait inside) and, minutes later, the flower-covered explosion site to grab a coffee, I think back to the place in Gibson's Neuromancer where Case visited this very district before going off to space, to the nest of the degenerate elite family Tessier-Ashpool, where he ultimately helps an AGI break free from their alignment protocol...

So, regarding Sam Bankman-Fried and EA again.

Sam is a fraud and his decision theory is laughably broken and he's pretty much a strawman utilitarian. But it's normal for strawmen to prove real. Since this February, I've been preaching what I call the Cheems Heuristic: exciting prophecies are realized, except in the cringiest way, the stream of history crushing all intricate elaborations necessary for human flourishing or repairing the world, into pulp. So utilitarian «risk managers» turn out to be grossly irresponsible bean counters with greedy first-order logic; and as AI-powered cyberpunk descends on us, we get creepy corporations, but no cyberspace cowboys to humble them.

I digress. My point being: Sam and Caroline's cringe nature and way of practicing their beliefs scarcely invalidate the fundamental objection Utilitarians raise, the «local architecture is pretty but there be beggars and dead bodies on the pavement, bro» one, the part that makes Social Justice compelling to so many people. it's easy to distract oneself from the disgusting state of the world and even say that it's deserved by those most exposed to it. Success at this cope is not a valid reason to pat oneself on the back. I believe, and concur with Jews on this particular issue, that the Catholic Culture, and particularly the Art (the best art in all of history!) that it has inspired, constitute one big and extremely successful exercise in this distraction – His Holiness the Cope, the beautiful pearl of idolatry that has coated and obscured the unbearable insight that Christ had taught.

We're all fucking dying, yo. It's happening for real. For me and, probably, @self_made_human this implies accelerating medical applications of AI and spreading its economic benefit, rather than malaria nets, and for someone else it must mean something else; but it takes an alien mindset to appreciate how real this fact is and not let it affect your priorities at all. Yes, like @SecureSignals observes, Tikkun Olam is a somewhat alien notion for Westerners, one at the center of modern Reform Judaism, and once we get past the first approximation, it reveals other, older and more disquieting corollaries, as do some musings of the culprits of this collapse. But pointing this out is not a sufficient refutation of their core premise, which is: the world is deeply suboptimal, broken from any sane point of view. Only a viable alternative to their proposals would refute it. Is your only option to uphold local prosperity and praise God for putting you there?

In the end, what makes people live in the streets and other people bomb those streets? What makes yet another set of people grow up retarded or desperate enough to valorize this? What makes everyone (SBF included) indifferent to the fact that we are mortal and our bodies are degenerating with every breath? What perverts the painting of the world into a modernist shit-drip, and how do we redeem it?

Just how beautiful the art must be, and how strong the faith, and how neat the white picket fence of the family house in the high-trust gated community, to have people make peace with the ugliness of the Universe.

Is your only option to uphold local prosperity and praise God for putting you there?

I think "local prosperity" is a poor stand-in for civilizational achievement, which I would propose as a counter-value to the pursuit of healing the world. In this way, Tikkun Olam can be contrasted with the Faustian spirit, the latter of which fundamentally relies on healthy forms of idolatry like high art and architecture, adventurism, innovation, self-regard, and discovery.

EA would let the height of civilization decay in order to improve the utility consumption of the parts of humanity least dispositioned towards the advancement of civilization. I don't think it's a coincidence that EA essentially entails the siphoning off of the wealth of the Western world to the Third world while critiquing the Faustian, idolatrous drive for beauty and adventurism.

That's not to say it's incompatible with your goal to technologically end death. I don't think most innovation is driven by spiritual desire to heal the world, though many innovators will claim that is their motive. Most of the time they are autistic geniuses obsessed with their own form of conquest, or climbing the highest mountain.

Lastly, I don't think I need to elaborate that I interpret Tikkun Olam as a thinly-veiled mandate for ethnic conquest, and I think this dovetails nicely with your interpretation of the underlying motives of AI alignment. Do you trust someone whose self-professed mission is to heal the world?

but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too?

Any effort to alleviate suffering on a global scale, to truly expand your circles of concern is, I believe to lead to the people who have expanded their moral circles to get taken advantage of and extirpated by those who haven't. Albanians on Westminster bridge situation, really. Self defeating lunacy.

Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation

(more at the link)

Also, those who expanded their moral circle of concern after the example of Dickens's "Mrs. Jellyby

" seem to care less about those closest to them. I suspect this is a survey artefact and if I put a gun to their head and made them decide their mother and some random mother from another continent..

I feel all these are exploits against the human mind that lead to bad outcomes. E.g. all the food aid to Africa ended up with ever more people starving. Drowned refugee kid led to rape-murders in Europe, increase in crime and loss of social capital. etc.

It's all wrong. Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.

And that information channels that can be used to exploit this need to be closed.

Isn't it all a matter of tradeoffs though?

What I mean is, do you think it's possible to make policy decisions that don't have undesirable side effects?

Take business as an example. You can't spend too much time on thoughtful deliberation, because you must react to multiple competing inputs and try to respond to them in line with your strategy as much as possible. You must make choices that are really only bets about the state of the world now and what you think is the future. Then, tomorrow, you can only hope you'll be perceptive and fast-thinking enough to avoid making the mistakes you made yesterday.

Except in terms of national policy, "tomorrow" might mean "next year". It's a big ship, hard to turn around, especially because it's captained by consensus.

Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.

That's literally the point of EA. We shouldn't donate to causes with the best marketing, the most touching pictures of starving children, and so on; we should evaluate them objectively to see which ones actually help.

EA failure modes are rather more esoteric - what I had in mind was the knee jerk political reactions.

And so on and so forth.

Well EA (at least in theory) is designed to deliberately and thoughtfully think of the best ways to offer aid to foreigners. One of the main ways they do this is by supporting and advertising programs like GiveWell (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities). Which is a program designed to properly evaluate the effectiveness of given charity based on metrics like QALYs (Quality of Life Years: https://www.healthanalytics.com/expertise/what-is-a-quality-adjusted-life-year-qaly/). The system then ranks the top charities based on how much good they do based on these rigorous statistics. It's system's like these that EA is really about here, using math and the tools of rationality to find the best ways to give aid to the world at large.

The title of this thread reads "culture war roungup"

And the other pinned thread is "Small-Scale Question Sunder for November 13, 2022".

The small-scale thread reads "Sunder" instead of what I assume should be "Sunday", too.

Both are fixed now. We should keep an eye out for a third typo, though, just in case this isn't happenstance or coincidence...

Three times is enemy action

Oh no, we're all buying into Kulaks thing about misspelling stuff to make it harder for AI to trace him, huh?

Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.

That won't do much (WaPo):

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)

To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).

The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.

If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?

(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)

Adjacent but sounds like Musks will let Trump get his twitter back. I think even red tribe people want Trump to die and Desantis is far superior. So I assume by mentioning it Musks has made a view that Trump loses primary. In free speech grounds Trump shouldn’t be banned but as a maga adjacent I want him banned.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=46&t=o4yJPOOQnQoAxYXvJuPdlQ

  1. Musks is the luckiest guy in the world. Heavily benefited from esg etc to give silly valuations to Tesla and can access that cash.

  2. The asshole boss thing actually works when done well. I’ve had them who do nothing. But put pressure on you to figure something out. Actually works to motivate people to do good work.

  3. He’s a winner. He’s always figured things out. While Tesla may be overvalued he’s still made it profitable. Rocket inventiveness was dead before he came along.

  4. He has loyal engineers in Tesla and SpaceX he can use in the situation of mass quitting.

  5. Rockets are not that profitable. He found starlink and what cheap rockets can do for that industry. You just have to trust he will find a profitable business model. Telecommunications are super profitable.

  6. He’s been too red tribe with some bad tweets but a bare bones mode isn’t going to lose red tribe

  7. Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

  8. If it seems like twitter is failing then he can buy the debt for Pennie’s on the dollar to maintain control. Then rebuild.

  9. So worst case is he takes the loss on current equity and buys the debt for 3-6 billion. Then rebuilds on red tribe twitter. But that’s worst case. I think stickiness is fairly high in social media so blue tribe probably doesn’t leave.

What can he get sued for? Losing money and making a bad investment isn’t illegal.

On going funding is an issue but I’m going to make an assumption at a minimum he can figure out cash flow positive.

But say it’s not super profitable but he wants to maintain control he can lose face with his investors and buy the bank debt cheap. So he would have to put like 6 billion in on the bank debt. For relationship reasons throw the Saudis and Ellison etc some options around a 15 billion valuation.

It’s already a zero. Current financing has 1.4 billion a year in interest costs. There investments are worthless unless he does big things which mitigates the he blew it up.

to the point that Twitter is a mostly worthless husk with a domain name and a low-moat technical product.

Twitter is already a low-moat product, network effects are what keep competitors from replacing it. If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever and actually get people to use it (unlike the right-wing examples I just gave) then Twitter might be in trouble. Otherwise I think it's going to stick around.

If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever

It's probably worth noting that most of them have attempted to migrate to literally that exact thing (various Mastodon instances). I don't think they'll be particularly successful for the same reason that Gab/TS/etc. haven't been successful: there's simply no value-add in reactionary construction. They don't do anything better than Twitter does anyway.

Which is the same problem this place has, but even worse, since at least you can find this place with a Google search- you can't even do that with Mastodon instances at all. Lefty Mastodon even has the purity spiral thing built in because of how vulnerable users are to admin catfights and a de facto globally-enforced blocklist, where Twitter curbed most of the excesses of that approach- so people can't expect the stability they need to build anything good on top.

The future is not federation, it's confederation, and by its inherently freeing nature it thus can neither come from Left nor Right.

Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

Yeah, people are underestimating this. There's a lot more that goes on Twitter besides political shit-posting. Lots of people have built careers and small fortunes on the backs of their Twitter followings. I was just listening to a podcast about "threadbois" who did just that. Are they going to turn their backs on their 100k followers they've spent years building just because Elon isn't praying to the right gods?

Counterpoint about the bleakness of it. It's probably not the end.

And I'd contend that Twitter is already rather sludge-y, and trying to keep it remotely sane-ish is probably not worth subjecting hundreds of thousands of low-paid people to the worst that humanity has to offer.

So what I'm getting from you and other replies is "trolls/Bad Content never impacted the average user's twitter experience because they're there to read what specific famous people post". I buy that. I guess it's not a big deal until people start posting CSAM and shit, which I guess you might be able to do with a skeleton crew.

Still, then you get people using the site to run harassment campaigns or whatever. Arguably that's what the site is already used for, some people just don't call it that, so whatever.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

Do you even use twitter ?

It has sentiment analysis. Has had for the last year at least.

Write anything with slurs or even a small bit of profanity and it won't even notify someone about the reply. They'd have to search it out manually under their tweet, and then click "show additional replies".

Next time, please write about something you know, perhaps ?

There have been a lot of lay offs in the tech space. I’m sure Elon can hire some people. But the truth is Twitter had too much staff for the value it was getting. You need to cut costs make it through a few months and the ad boycott will end.

Unfortunately the ad boycott is likely both ideological and personal (in that a lot of people Elon got rid of were buddies to the ad buyers) and thus is unlikely to end. GroupM's shakedown letter (see bulleted list) demonstrates that.

Assuming ads actually generate revenue (who knows) companies ultimate log will pay for ads where there is a large user base.

Not if they have a more important reason than revenue not to.

Meh, it's easy for advertising consortia to dunk on him now, in an economic downturn, when his product relies on brand advertising (i.e. ads that can't measure conversions) and brand advertising is the highest beta of all of the marketing categories. The truth is that their threats are downstream of their extrinsic need to pull back on that category of spending. It's mostly just a demand failure masquerading as a boycott.

Remember all those companies boycotting Facebook? Me neither. Take a look at their latest revenue and you can see it didn't matter.

If Twitter advertising is effective, then there will be plenty of demand from people who like money. The boycott will only matter if it turns out that Twitter advertising didn't work and companies were throwing money at it anyway. Which I accept is possible.

And the staff it had were entrenched within a culture of censorship and narrative control. The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something, and then move the whole HQ out of the compromised bay area. I bet that would be a lot cheaper of a building to run than the current one as well. Then you could also make sure the (hopefully minimal) moderation team was staffed by normal people as well, instead of the types that tend to gravitate to SF.

The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something

Even better move would be do it all before you acquire Twitter, to have ready new management and new staff from day one.

Instead, it looks that Elon learned from Bush's success in Iraq.

1/Take over

2/Fire all management and personnel

3/???

4/Profit!

Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.

Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.

They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.

My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.

Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.

Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.

#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.

A good chunk of twitter's moderation is automated. Even as recently as a year ago the spam use to be way worse for certain categories.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

This will likely not happen. The evidence suggests engagement has only gone up. Tweets by important and or controversial people are getting 2-10x the engagement compared to a year ago. Elon's own tweets are easily getting 300k-1.5 million replies, a 5x increase from 6 months ago. The people who spend time on twitter are disinclined to leave to leave because of slurs in the replies. Otherwise, they would have quit long ago. Also, most twitter users do not read replies or do not care much about them.

I think twitter will succeed and Elon will be able to to resell Twitter for a decent profit. Elon is a savvy businessman with a good intuitive business sense . For example, he after dipping his foot in crypto early 2021 he correctly saw it for the overhyped garbage it was and bailed, only losing a little money. VCs and others rode it all the way down.

Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.

Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).

The thing is, where are all these people quitting because they don't like the new boss and the new rules going to get jobs? Comparable jobs, at least.

I'm reading stories all the time recently about Amazon/Meta/Google are cutting jobs, shutting down projects and the like. So if you decide you are going to give up your decent-paying job at Twitter because ugh, Musk - where are you going to go?

I see arguments that the big dogs putting in hiring freezes is good for the industry as a whole, since it means smaller firms will now have access to a pool of talent that they couldn't get previously. But part of that "couldn't get previously" is "couldn't match the pay and conditions". If the Twitter people expect to walk into the same or better job elsewhere, (1) are those jobs still out there? (2) how will they feel about "have to move to Michigan for a job with a medium-sized company or bank"?

Musk may be running Twitter into the ground, but amongst all the glee and jeering I see online, nobody seems to be addressing that (a) Twitter is not the only place laying off or cutting costs (b) maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

I've seen this pointed out, and I think it's quite correct. Twitter was losing money in a boom market; they weren't prepared for a bust. But:

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk is making wise decisions now" isn't supported. Even when cuts are necessary there can be better ways and worse ways to make them and there's at least circumstantial evidence he's deep into "worse ways".

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk was making a wise decision to buy Twitter to fix it" is almost outright contradicted. Imagine if he'd had the patience to wait a little longer, until Twitter was already running low on operating funds and making drastic cuts internally. First, the cuts probably would have come out better, since without an ownership change acting as a Schelling point for layoff timings, there wouldn't be a conflict between "need to make a lot of cuts at once to avoid losing the best people to preemptive job changes" and "need to deliberate over who to cut to avoid losing the best people to poor firing choices". Second, he could have been seen as the hero (coming in to save the failing Twitter! outside funding bringing an end to the layoffs!) rather than the villain (coming in to destroy Twitter! laying off people who were totes going to have 20 year careers here otherwise!). Finally, he could have bought it at fire sale prices, rather than "peak of a bubble right before a crash" prices.

Don’t forget the time pressure on him to buy it. It was getting bottier, leftier, and tankier by the week, and had he waited long enough to make it a viable business, he might have himself been banned.

If this is true, why does non-English twitter not look like this even though it has next to no human moderation (or really attention from the company at all)?

If anything, the bot situation was the worst part about twitter and in the non-English part and it's already better.

If this is true, why does non-English twitter not look like this even though it has next to no human moderation (or really attention from the company at all)?

Because if you're ESL and want to be a troll, you head to English-language Twitter anyway.

okay, so instead of trolling in non-English twitter, you go to English twitter to get banned?

burner troll accounts with no followers aren't remotely effective so creating new accounts each time you get banned for venturing over to English twitter doesn't make sense

Yes. As a troll, your goal is others' reactions, which there are simply more of on English twitter.

I don't browse non-English twitter, but I think Elon's gonna cut non-English moderation staff even faster than he cuts English staff. Only a matter of time.

there was already near zero non-English moderation staff and that part of twitter is not the hellscape the OP claimed it should be given his doom and gloom predictions of the elimination of mod staff

not everyone speaks english, so the claim the reason nonenglish twitter isn't this predicted hellscape just falls flat

the claims of twitter apocalypse looks a lot like the "title 2 'net neutrality' removal will destroy the internet" hysteria and then it's years later, no prediction came true, and none of the hysterics learned anything

It is absolutely possible that Elon kills Twitter. He's moving fast and breaking things. He's thinking different. He's remembering to not be evil. Et cetera. I think most of the posts like this are praying on his downfall. You're hating. You're not just sitting back and seeing what happens. You don't like Elon and you hope he fails. I think this energy is distorting the picture of what is actually going on at Twitter.

Now, I'm not a fan of Elon, but I'm not praying on his downfall. I'm interested to see how lean he can make Twitter. It might be too much too fast, he might fuck it up in any number of ways. He's already fucked up his Blue rollout. But you have to admit, he has a way of turning Ls into Ws or Ts (ties). Someone like him who's been in the game for this long doing what he's been doing doesn't survive on luck alone. He's got skills, just not the one he advertises or would like people to think he has.

All in all, I'd be happy if he were to prove the haters, the libs, and Silicon Valley wrong, and make them eat their words, because I think they're scared he might make them. It's really reminiscent of 2015.

You don't like Elon and you hope he fails

"outgroup is entirely motivated by their personal hatred of all that is good" is, even if kinda true, never entirely true, nor a useful contribution if not well explained!

A while ago I was arguing here that the blue checkmark plan, as stated then, made no sense and would fail. I got some pushback, most of which was argued for as opposed to 'its bc u hate beauty and greatness', but ... it was implemented, it failed, it increased impersonation and didn't stop spam, and the feature was removed because it failed. (an internal twitter doc prepared before the launch, that elon didn't listen to, made similar claims) That's evidence that it's not useful to claim "I don't like elon and hope that he fails" applies to my posts, and likely others arguing against him here!

Is OP your alt or something? I'm not talking about you, or anyone, specifically. If you want to say Elon has no haters, you're wrong. People DO want him to fail because he's the outgroup. Even though they LOVE Twitter, they'd rather see it burn to the ground if they can blame it on someone they don't like. This is a REAL and currently RELEVANT part of human nature that is playing out before our eyes as the Twitter situation unfolds.

I didn't see your post about Blue. I would have agreed with you. When I say I'm not a fan of Elon, I mean it. I don't think he represents all that is Beautiful And Great. I think he's kind an idiot (-savant). But the commentary I'm seeing around this happening is hilariously biased! It's funny how much hatred the man inspires, and the people hating seem to be completely unaware that they're hating. This isn't a recipe for good prediction making. They're not giving him the respect he's due for wheeling and dealing, scamming and ramming his way through the business, media, and legal systems of America.

you're kinda right, and I think it's happening on both sides. And not in a 'hurr both side r the same and bad' sense, but a - wow, almost everyone on social media who has an opinion on this can be perfectly divided into "previously liked musk/right wing-ish/thinks twitter is fine and musk is doing good" and "previously disliked musk/left wing-ish/thinks twitter is crashing hard and musk is doing awful". I'm actually surprised at how much that's true.

Even then though, just saying 'it's because u hate musk' isn't enough, there are more complex causes even in cases of obvious and blatant bias.

I think there are three sides. Anti-Musk, Anti-Anti-Musk (me), and Pro-Musk. The third one is virtually silent compared to the other two. And I disagree about this being a complex issue. It's really just friend/enemy.

Honestly, I see this as a win-win situation. Whether Musk succeeds in turning Twitter into something useful or burns it to the ground, a cultural blight will have been nullified.

I like Twitter and think something worse would take its place if it collapsed.

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

Just wanted to push against messages like this, because this sounds like something from "revenge of the nerds."

Big systems like Twitter's have accumulated multiple layers of redundancy in case of failure over the years. There's probably quite a bit of automation to take care of the steady stream of problems like faulty hard drives or network cards. It can probably keep on going for quite some time this way.

Also, the biggest source of incidents? Change.

If so many Twitter engineers have left/been fired, then I imagine the rate of changes introduced into the system is approaching the level of a code freeze--basically a ban on introducing changes to the system around the holidays because they want to minimize risk even though it carrier a very high cost.

In this state, I would expect a skeleton would be able to keep things running for months. Especially if you can get some really good ones to tackle the 'black swan' type incidents that actually do require some clever thinking to fix--but again, this is all about pushing the systems back into a stable state (less risky) rather than "fixing forward" (more risky).

What I would be worried about is sabotage that can fall under plausible denial. Stuff like setting a primary key on a database column to an int32, which will hit the limit in weeks/months and is annoyingly hard to fix. But maybe by then Musk will have a larger set of solid engineers working at Twitter.

(1) Yes, there are a steady stream of problems addressable by automation, but those have never been a problem. SREs exist for the other problems.

Shit just falls over and you won't know why. That's just how these systems are. You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

To put meat on the bones, see this list of common things SREs deal with, or this log of the SRE chatroom for Wikipedia & friends.

(2) Change is unavoidable and constant. There are security patches for your dependencies released continuously and you will update your system or face the consequences. Often times your dependency is an underfunded open-source thingy, despite your best efforts to avoid those, and thus the only way to get the new code is to use the newest version of the thingy, which means you might have to upgrade all of your code that uses the thingy.

(3) Regarding "pushing the systems back into a stable state" - then you're gonna have the same problem again unless you fix the root cause, which, again, requires code changes.

SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.

You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.

Change is unavoidable and constant.

That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]

So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.

But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:

  • multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.

  • multiple instances of planned downtime.

  • a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.

Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:

  • multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.

  • at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)

  • almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.

Let's see what happens!

[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.

People seem to forget that the world is larger than the US. Users across the world don't care as much about this drama as americans. I doubt Indian, Saudi, Japanese or German users care as much about the Musk situation. Twitter tends to be less censored in smaller languages than english as the censors can't understand the content and the AIs aren't as trained.

There may be an increase in spam but most likely a lot of the censors weren't handling pure spambots but more difficult to parse content than "milfs in your area, click here to meet"

The biggest reason for twitter surviving is the user base, unless all the important users migrate at once people will still have a reason to visit twitter.

Japanese users

Well, see this.

On the colony bit. Some times I believe foreigners deserve a right to vote in American elections because America influences to them a great extent. Actually made a comment questioning womens right to vote has been bad the other day. So I think thru nuances.

You all should apply to be Puerto Rico and a territory so atleast you get a house rep.

Decolonization doesn’t make sense. Economies of scale and trade are good at boosting living standards.

I am conservative but don’t believe in America first. As a global hegemon which I think is good for our living standards we still have debts to our colonies.

Brexxit didn’t work because of geopolitical realities. But America has a broad umbrella some times more important than local politics and you might deserve a say in our view.

Honestly an interesting subject that might be worth a top level posts.

I hate wef and a lot of your politics so don’t even think of 2 senate seats.

Oh I thought you meant decolonize as an American colony.

I am genuinely appalled at the extent to which America, my country, has colonized the cultural landscape of our supposed allies. I would apologize but that seems a trifle in the face of what is in some ways a cultural genocide. It seems as though in many countries, there are no genuine foreigners, just Americans who speak a different language.

There is, i feel, a degree to which cancel culture is just... Twitter culture. Where do mobs find stuff to hate? Twitter. Where do they organize? Twitter. Where are the employers nice and easy to contact via, essentially, short form open letter? Twitter again.

Don't get me wrong, cancel culture can still exist without twitter, but i expect it to be far more of a minor and localized phenomenon.

Anyway, this is a silver lining if shit all goes south and Twitter dies. Though for my part i still gain value from Twitter and i'd be bummed out.

And on reflection, cancel culture is just the dark mirror of legitimate accountability-- MeToo would not have gotten off the ground without twitter, nor would protests over various police abuses of power.

A failed Twitter would have lots of cultural consequences.

but twitter is also a force against cancel culture. Some of the most popular accounts are individuals who are critical of the left.

I feel like one core insight of cancel culture is that if you have 1000 detractors and 20000 supporters the detractors can still make your life shit in ways your supporters can't really help with (phoning your boss, doxxing you, sending rape threats, harassing organizations that have the capacity to inconvenience you, etc.)

Or in other words, it's the same old Heckler's Veto, just at international scale this time.

Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

Buy down to 15%,

Still possible but I don't trust most of these claims or believe much in the importance of these roles.

Yeah, 80% is way too high. You could definitely run Twitter with less than 1000 people, but that doesn’t mean you can walk in, cut 6000/7000 jobs in the first month, and expect things to work.

I do fully expect some things to break, but in the way that one would expect things to break from Y2K. Musk doesn't need to be some kind of super CEO to triage engineers to the critical infrastructure and even something catastrophic like the whole site going down for 24 hours wouldn't kill the thing.

Buy down to 5%, but I think true odds are less than 1%. MySpace still exists. The base rate of a corporate failure of this size in less than 6 months is practically zero. The only way Twitter goes away in 6 months is if there is some massive financial fraud discovered like Enron or FTX. Even then, somebody will buy the IP and run it.

At the risk of nutpicking, there are a large number of users in my personal circles who are exchanging off-site contact information (uh, and nudes) under the assumption that the site or their account won't be accessible in days. Guys with SRE experience are talking about the site falling over in ways that can't be brought up. Other people have been encouraging everyone to grab data dumps of their account.

I'm exceptionally skeptical of these arguments, but I also haven't worked anywhere near those scale of systems.

Exchanging off-site contact information is entirely reasonable even if there's a 2% chance of it going down, because they have a large number of many-year-long friendships/acquaintances they don't want to lose contact with, and sharing contacts is a low-cost way to avoid a low-chance, high-cost outcome.

Obviously some of them are claiming it's >50% gonna die forever, which is premature, as well as probably claiming the sorts of glitches that've happened for the past five years as evidence twitter is decaying.

But the people who work in twitter SRE that I've followed say there's a decent chance bad things happen, but that twitter >80% won't die permanently

While it is certainly possible for distributed systems to be fragile in the way he describes -- the most famous example is not software but the US power grid pre-1965 -- it is not necessary. I know of large distributed systems which are not.

Cato the Elder, famous for the saying "Carthago delenda est," actually ended up a bitter rival of Scipio Africanus, who actually accomplished it.

I have said "Twitter delenda est" and I won't be as picky as Cato about how it is done. Now, I know that Twitter fills a niche, and I have no expectation that what fills it next will be better, but for now, I will take it.

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Yep, Twitter delenda est. This is great news as far as I'm concerned. It won't last, as you noted - but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

All Musk had to do was take control of Twitter, say “there will be no changes to product or policy until I’ve completed a six-month review period”, then in a month say “like the rest of the tech sector, we’re facing a downturn, need to make tough decisions blah blah blah”, lay off 1/3 of the Twitter team, see who struggles from the survivors, give top performers big raises to stay, then do another big round of layoffs in three months when he’s sure he can run the company on 1/3 of the previous team while adjusting for which teams need the most or least culling, then rest and slowly implement the new product.

That would require him not being a psychopath. Musk might be a brilliant entrepreneur, but he has a gaping deficit of empathy.

All of the skilled twitter programmers I knew of online (from before elon) rom their public accomplishments/projects/writing/social media have left, as of now. And their posts indicate most of the skilled people they knew within twitter have left too. Ofc anecdote, idk anything internally, easily could be wrong, etc

How many unskilled Twitter programmers do you know?

If you don't know any, this may just be a base rate fallacy; if some percentage of programmers have left, and you only know skilled ones, of course all the ones you know who left have been skilled.

I mean skilled as in 'significantly above the average faang programmer'. I'm not claiming he's firing skilled people more than unskilled people, but you'd want to keep most of them.

That said, it’s hard for some fans to reconcile the fact that Musk is a great businessman with the fact that he’s also often impulsive and reckless and perfectly capable of really fucking things up for himself. At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Look at the results though. Space-x want from being a prototype to a thriving space company. Same for Tesla. Odds are he will succeed with Twitter if history is any guide . Steve jobs and Bill Gates were famously hotheaded but delivered results too.

But Elon never mismanaged his other companies to this degree, for whatever reason. I don't recall ever seeing him publicly squabbling with Tesla employees, issuing ultimatums, recklessly making huge changes, micromanaging things he doesn't understand, etc. It seems to me like either he is intentionally tanking twitter, or has suffered some kind of head injury recently causing him to lose all executive function.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Tesla and SpaceX were also his companies from the beginning. He was well positioned to demand extreme commitment and tell people who wanted work life balance to look elsewhere. Twitter is just a company he bought and has its own culture. It seems fairly obvious to me that Musk has grossly overestimated his ability to impose his will on reality, probably because he's used to working in environments where it was genuinely easier to do so.

At the time of the original offer I remember there being lots of thinking that this is a brilliant masterplan on the part of Musk on /r/themotte (for the record I was skeptical). That we're into what very much looks like an implosion of Twitter's operations and people are still convinced this is some 1000 iq maneuvering makes me think Musk's cult of personality has a stronger grip around here than I figured. Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

Of course there remains an outside shot it gets all turned around, and that the problems with Twitter here are very minor and being blown out of proportion by people who are hostile to Musk and the takeover. But I think there's a good amount of fire behind this smoke.

The man waived his right to due diligence, then started publicly griping about stuff a prospective buy-side would review… during due diligence. Dog that caught the car, on this one.

and then fired the c-suite on the first day for cause

these sorts of things are common in acquisitions

this is all part of the dance, just like his bucking in the chancery court to get Twitter to make statements in response

I used to work M&A. No, waiving due diligence is the opposite of common. There are multiple SaaS providers that offer VDRs for due diligence because exceedingly rare is the transaction that exempts it.

Waiving due diligence then stating conditions within a target company pose enough of a concern you might not want to complete your transaction doesn’t work. The target can hammer you in court. Musk completed the purchase, predictably, just before the judge’s imposed deadline of heading to trial.

Twitter’s board had a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, not make blue checks happy after the sale. Musk was on the hook to (1) pay over the market share price to take Twitter private, or (2) pay Twitter a huge sum in penalties for not completing the deal. At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Yeah, which firm?

I didn't write waiving due diligence is common, I wrote "these sorts of things," i.e., publicly whining, threatening to go to court, going to court, and all other such things because each of them can have a benefit/cost to either party.

edit: wow you made a bunch of edits after I responded

which actions?

public comments? legal threats? court?

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Yeah, which firm?

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV to this forum where anonymous accounts debate whether or not there are cabals of Jews that have disproportionate power in American society.

And yes, that sort of brinksmanship can have benefits. But given Musk signed away DD, assumed responsibility for mollifying any federal regulators and agreed to sizable penalties for backing out in his offer to purchase, I’m all ears as to what you think those were for Musk. Because in this case there was no incentive for concessions from Twitter’s board.

wow, you made a bunch of edits to your previous comment after I responded

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV

oh yes, saying you worked at CBRE is basically you posting your full name and home address to the internet

this is why I typically just roll my eyes when someone tries to capture some sort of authority with a claim about life experience which isn't immediately obvious from their comments; if you don't want to post a CV, don't attempt to use it to get some sort of air of authority

it's downright goofy someone who claims to have experience in M&A would write your comments because it has no recognition that public comments, legal threats, refusals, lawsuits, etc., are common in M&A, no demonstration of the terminology normally used in these agreements, and no discussions whatsoever in the costs or benefits of any of these tactics

all of these tactics can and are part of the dance and each of them has costs and benefits to accomplish some purpose, even as simple as stalling for time

instead you simply assume Musk is the dog who caught the bumper and "predictably" would close the deal which is why you bought Twitter stock at $36 knowing it would be bought for $55 a couple months later, right?

At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Why start the story in the middle of the chancery case? Everyone seems to gloss over the timeline in favor of "current thing" hottakes.

Musk semi-secretly buys large stake in twitter over the period of a month. Twitter board freaks out and tells him no way and then engages in a bunch of anti-shareholder behavior in order to stave off Musk. Musk then makes a proposal. Twitter refuses the offer. Corporate lawyers start scrambling to put together a shareholder lawsuit. Twitter agrees to proposal. Musk claims he doesn't want to buy the company anymore due to fraud. Twitter sues him in Chancery Court to force the deal. Musk completes the deal.

We went from Twitter willing to fuck over shareholders to stop takeover to Twitter suing Musk to force him to take the company over and then Musk buying the company he made a no due diligence buyout agreement with and your hot take is he's just been bumbling along? Huh, okay.

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Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

It's more the "I fucking love science!" type.

I tend to agree Musk is hardly a good manager, but when it comes to people commenting on how he runs Twitter, we're in a "unstoppable force meets an immovable object" situation. The Cult of Musk really isn't any more clueless than an average journalist.

You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.

The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.

I have to disagree. A lot of people also care about the information environment. Just as much as people care about going to mars. I don’t want 1984 America with a fb-twitter-Liz Cheney aligned informational environment. I would work extremely hard to prevent that.

Not my core talent but I dropped a resume to twitter a few weeks after he took over. This is a big issue to me. And there are probably others here with more specific talents that care about free speech who should also consider working for twitter.

Perhaps I should have specified that the current workforce is there for the paycheck, not the dream. Good luck if you end up there.

Pretty ironic to hear someone arguing a truly free speech platform—which Musk explicitly says is his most important goal with Twitter—is not that meaningful...on a website that had to be created because of fears of free speech limitations on the social media website from whence it escaped.

'Meaningful' in this context is subjective. There are plenty of occupations and causes that are critical to humanity that still don't inspire enough fervor in their adherents to make them work 60 work weeks for below-market wages (i.e. graduate school, or at least it was once upon a time), regardless of how many websites are created due to fears of free speech limitations.

I'd be willing to bet that the current workforce isn't willing to work 60 hour weeks in the name of free speech. Whether there's enough people out there that care who will fill the gap after they leave remains to be seen, in addition to whether those people can keep the faith when their ideals collide with the reality of running a social media platform.

I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.

And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.

A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.

Yeah, he's better at rockets than NASA, but he'll fail at being a Reddit mod. Sure.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter. There might be some silent majority of anarchist/libertarian/hacker-ethos programmers out there who'll jump to do twice the work as their peers in the name of free speech, but any "can't stop the signal" programmers probably weren't already working in the How To Stop The Signal department at Twitter when Musk bought it.

Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.

Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.

(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter.

He was able to rid himself of 90% of them, so it's sort of immaterial.

Somewhat related...

What's interesting to me is all the flack he's getting about giving people the option to either (A) "get hardcore" and work a lot to make Twitter awesome or (B) quit and get severance.

We've gotten a bit nutty about "work-life" balance. Some people don't want that. They like to work a lot. It's not like Musk is enslaving people and forcing them to do manual labor for god's sake. They get to choose to work at a sweet ass campus doing shit they love for great pay.

I'm very certain Musk, literally one of the most recognizable people in the world, can find the people he needs to run a lean & mean ship at Twitter, and make it awesome. Because plenty of people would LOVE to work 60-80 hours a week on a free speech challenge like Twitter, when it is well-positioned to be The Center of the Internet (to the extent is isn't already).

Call me a cynic, but I'm familiar with enough people who do essentially nothing while getting paid (well) for it that I can empathize a lot with Musk here. In my career, I've seen departments with 20 people handling the workload of 2 or 3, and departments that were 90% automated years ago...but the fog of bureaucracy allowed 10 people to just draw a paycheck for standing around and watching a system.

Musk doesn't want dead weight, as no business owner does.

People at twitter are there for the paycheck,

Or worse, they're there for the kind of activism musk distinctly opposes.

People trust Musk because he has been instrumental in creating three huge businesses (and another that would be impressive for most people). There is a track record here. Either musk is the luckiest man in the history of the world or he has business chops in the top 1

% of the 1%.

I'm not sure why it can't be a mixture of skill and chops, or why chops in rocket building would necessarily transfer to social media, or why a talented person can't make big mistakes. It's equally plausible to me that Elon Musk's ego has swollen to the point where he thinks he can run Twitter with him +50 people, as it is that he really can run Twitter with him +50 people.

Past performance doesn’t guarantee future success but it does provide some degree of confidence. Ego could be a problem. Mistakes could be a problem. But Musk has helped build…online payment platform, telecommunication network, rocket company, a car company, and a tunneling company.

These are rather disparate things suggesting his skill isn’t domain limited.

I think I’ll trust him (when he has a lot of inside info we don’t) over a random internet poster.

From a technical standpoint is running Twitter on 50 people so implausible? I imagine new features would be released very slowly, but I think that's enough to maintain the site, so long as moderation is relaxed quite a bit and mostly delegated to AI.

I didn't say it was implausible. I'm 50/50 on whether running Twitter with 50 people is possible or not. But I don't think it's convincing to appeal to Elon's genius to argue that it proves that it's possible.

They have their own datacenters, at least three of them, with hundreds of thousands of servers. 50 people would barely be enough to do the hands-on work of managing one datacenter.

Just swapping failed hard drives would probably take about two people datacenter. Assume 300k machines, 100k per datacenter, with ten percent of that footprint being machines with lots of disks, let's say thirty disks per machine. AFR for drives that are being constantly hammered as I would expect them to be is about 3%, especially if you try to stretch the lifetime of the drives.

10,000 machines * 30 drives per machine * 3% AFR = 9000 drives per year, or about 24 per day. Let's say each drive swap takes 30 minutes from the point of receiving the ticket, picking up the replacement, performing the swap, and some wiggle room for complications / ticket re-opens.

So an eight hour shift can do about 16 swaps per day. Typically datacenters don't staff drive swappers around the clock, so you need at least two people just for drive swaps.

Those people have no knowledge of how the replacement drives are stocked, someone else needs to do all the ordering of spare parts, and at least one person needs to receive and stock them. So at least three people per datacenter just for drive swaps.

Then someone needs to handle the relationships with Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, etc. If you don't want to be surprised as you roll out new drive models you'll need at least a couple of people whose job is to qualify new drives by abusing them for a few months and running real workloads on them.

And someone needs to handle the OS / software side of the drives. Handling firmware updates, drive settings, all the automation that goes into failure detection, handling replaced drives, investigating problems, etc. That's at least a couple of people.

Someone needs to write nad run the inventory system that cuts tickets and registers spare parts as well, let's say another two people.

We're up to 9 people at the datacenters and 7 people outside. 16 total. We haven't even written the software that's going to be using the drives yet. And this is just for hard disk-based storage, and I'm being extremely conservative. In reality two people is not sustainable for any team that needs to be oncall, you'll burn out quickly if you're oncall half of the time.

I would be pretty surprised if these jobs weren't handled by contractors. I haven't read about any ex Twitter employees talking about how difficult it will be to replace their invaluable hard drive swapping experience.

Drive swappers almost certainly are contractors, but they're still people. The claim I was responding to was about people, and most claims of this sort are also about people.

The distinction between contractors and employees is pretty arbitrary, and makes for impossible to disprove claims. If I can sneak in contractors I could plausibly say that Twitter could be run by one employee (and 10,000 contractors).

I think it's totally plausible from a technical standpoint if those 50 people are talented and hardworking. All the hard stuff for a basic scaled social media platform is a cloud API or open source library these days, and Twitter is past its startup design sprint anyway. A low cost structure would give him a lot of headroom to ignore the problems that his employee bloat is aimed at addressing right now.

The issue is that a 50-person giant social media empire isn't a stable equilibrium. It's similar to why you rarely see charities that spend ~100% of their funds on the cause: if spending a dollar on marketing gets you more than a dollar in increased contributions, then why wouldn't you do that? Likewise if you had a scaled 50-person giant social media empire, then the return of hiring a marginal employee is much greater than the cost.

The issue for Musk specifically is that he needs to pay a billion dollars a year in interest payments for the leverage that he took on in order to acquire Twitter. So he doesn't have the luxury of running the shop at low cost and telling advertisers to take it or leave it.

Since he needs advertisers to pay his interest, he needs to solve a lot of the messy social problems that drove a lot of that employee bloat in the first place. He needs good sales teams. He needs good marketing. He needs good moderation to keep the tone of Twitter consistent with advertisers' brand expectations. He needs giant compliance teams to keep up with the onerous, schizophrenic, internally inconsistent and offensive regulations imposed by the likes of Europe and India. None of those are purely technical problems; they require giant teams of people, and (pre-AGI) they always will. Why? Because they aren't static goals; they're adversarial goals with elements of competition. They're basically a policy market, in the sense that if it could all be automated, advertisers and regulators would have more headroom to increase the onerousness and contradiction of their demands until it couldn't. The only check on advertisers' demands of Twitter is how they compare with other social media platforms in terms of brand safety, and the only check on regulators' demands of Twitter is how onerous their regulations can be before Twitter will go dark in their country (or before the US government initiates WTO actions against them, and no one is betting on Biden's willingness to bail out Elon Musk in the international policy market).

I dunno if he'll pull it off. I suspect he will, but no outcome here will surprise me.

One outcome that particularly wouldn't surprise me is if Musk capitalizes on the chaos to threaten his lenders with bankruptcy, and uses that threat to buy out his debt for 20-50 cents on the dollar. Good luck marketing this debt, guys: no one has ever demonstrated that Twitter can have positive economic value, and a high-profile failure by Elon Musk isn't going to increase anyone's estimation of those odds. Then his cost structure becomes much simpler and he can tell advertisers and foreign regulators to get fucked, the prospect of which at this point I am sure provides him with near-sexual arousal.

Reddit had 30 employees in 2012 and it was a far more complicated application then than twitter is today.

Very implausible. Sure, a single person can build a Twitter clone (timeline of Tweets from people you follow) in a weekend, but there's a whole lot more to it than that. Realistically something like Twitter might be doable with 500 engineers (hard to say; not sure of the entire set of features), but you need a whole lot of moderation, marketing, business associates, etc. on top of that if you actually want to make money.

To elaborate, you need people handling identity, authorization, infrastructure, payments, internal tools for CSRs and moderators, customer/business facing tools, third party integrations, APIs, auditability, security, ad placement strategies, site reliability, data stores, build/test/deployment systems. Take any of those away, and you don't really have a viable business. And that doesn't even touch on new feature development (which to be fair hasn't been that important once Twitter found its niche).

When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012 it had 13 employees.

Twitter by this point has a lot of technical debt and cruft, so 50 does seems like too few. But less than 1000 seems very doable. One reason that so many people want this to fail is that they're afraid that Musk is right about these workers being worthless.

As far as I am concerned this is all positve and Elon Musk is a hero. Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity, Musk owning it means it either changes, which given the starting point will likely mean improve. Or it dies, which given the starting point is also an improvement. The gnashing of the teeth from journalists and ex-employees just makes my dick harder.

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity

What was different about twitter than other social media or pre-internet TV/news/radio that makes it such a blight? It does suck, but it's not obvious that the unwashed masses will suddenly become enlightened when given >280 characters

Twitter is what you get when someone goes "You know the most addictive, para-social, skinner-box elements of Myspace, Facebook, Et Al? what if we made something that optimized for that"

Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?

Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)

Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought: twitter consists solely of hot takes because that's pretty much the only thing that can be communicated through twitter. Tweetlongs/twitter threads don't really ameliorate this, the content still needs to be structured into short sentences peppersprayed with hot takes that can be retweeted individually.

And then there's the fact that it trains your attention span to hold only for microscopic amounts of time, it is also uniquely bad in this, no other medium in history trained as short an attention span as twitter.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded, so yes more than 280 characters wouldn't make the masses enlightened but it would at least not cause brain damage to them.

And then there's the likes. You can only like a tweet, you can't downvote. If you don't like something you can either ignore it or respond/retweet, which, because of the response limit is going to be a hot take. So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it. People who would normally have curated their public persona to a select few manicured communications (think authors, screenwriters, etc) are now absentmindedly putting all of their imbecillity on display, in fact they are using a medium that amplifies it by forcing all nuance in their thought to be expunged. I think the world is substantially worse because of this.

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform, which skews the perception of what is common knowledge on anyone that interacts with it.

And finally there's the fact that journalists are on it, which means that journalists are now subjected to the mentally retarding effects of twitter, to the false perception of what is common knowledge. They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism therefore amplifying the damaging effects of twitter to the entire population. And because of this they think that sitting at the computer reading twitter is a valid form of work which means they are exposed to more of twitter and more of its deletereous effects.

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought

You can link articles/other long-form content though, and a solid fifth of the articles I read come from twitter links. This gets to my claim that it's more the quality of people - smart people just link stuff & read the links, and dumb people, when they read, do shitty fiction/motivational books/etc.

Attention span doesn't really make sense as a concept tbh, I argued this on reddit but twitter's "attention span" effects aren't at all different than that of casual social conversations, which happen constantly.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded

There are many, many, many competent professionals who perform at their job better than 99.9% of humanity has for all of history, and use twitter very frequently, and have for years or a decade. Programmers are one of those, but many non-programmers do too. This is just plainly and obviously false.

So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

I constantly see disagreement on twitter though. Quote tweets, replies, just general posts of the form 'this other guy said X which is bad bc Y'. It's usually not useful disagreement, but it's not like the comments sections of major newspapers, or random peoples' long-form writing, are better.

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it.

celebrities have always been dumb and said dumb things, that's just not new at all, read a tabloid from the 19xxes or something

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform

False consensus? Mainstream center-right accounts exist and get tons of engagement though? Even if those were downweighted 50%, hypothetically, there's still not a 'consensus'

They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism

how is this any different than reporting on random out of context statements from long political speeches or conversations, a mainstay of journalism historically?

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

at least twitter has some complex and intelligent people, tiktok has none of those. what's a single tiktok account comparable to professional discussion among scientists on twitter, or just @thezvi, or even @rapegroyper14?

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

I'm in the very same boat. Before this whole Twitter fiasco I thought he was a bit of a kook, and now he's a kook I find myself actively cheering on.

What ultimately matters to me is that Twitter ceases to be a propaganda tool for progressives. The worst case scenario here is that Twitter neither changes nor collapses and continues down the very same path it was on before Musk's takeover.

I'm torn. I'm no fan of Musk, and I think he may well run Twitter into the ground, but the combination of handwringing about 'he's destroying Twitter which is so important for fighting fake news and those fascist conservative types' and gloating about 'nobody likes or respects him, he's a fascist idiot who is pro-Putin' from people who are declaring they are going to quit their Hugely Important Twitter Jobs and supporters and followers of same, have made me cheer him on.

I honestly don't think the world would be a worse place if Twitter went the way of MySpace or Vine. If Musk tears it down but can't put it back together again, well so it goes.

If Twitter dies, it will simply leave a Twitter-shaped hole in the world, which will be quickly filled in by something else.

It's not like getting rid of Twitter will get rid of progressives that want to proselytize their values on the rest of the world, any more than getting rid of 4Chan or KiwiFarms magically causes edgy right-wingers to evaporate.

Twitter wasn't a tool for progressives to evangelize to others - it was a tool for them to evangelize to themselves, which is just as dangerous.

And also a place for hate mobs to gather and cancel people who fell under their gaze. Unequal enforcement meant that progressive mobs were tolerated much more than conservative ones. This unequal enforcement seems unlikely to continue under Musk.

If Twitter dies then it is because TPTB want it to die. There's an ADL-sponsored advertiser boycott going on right now, for one.

The fact of the matter is that Twitter doesn't need as many people as it had. Many of those employees had "narrative control" functions. Some of the Japanese users noted that when the mass firings began, suddenly all the trending topics were things like manga or video games rather than politics which is what it was before. Thereby suggesting that Twitter employees had a "steering function".

That's the crux of this entire affair. Twitter wasn't a free platform, it was used as a propaganda vehicle by powerful establishment interests. A mass firing of these "narrative control" workers is potentially dangerous to the regimes, because free speech is now seen as a threat to their power. It is the same reason why Julian Assange had to be taken down.