site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34375 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

12
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The title of this thread reads "culture war roungup"

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?

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

One curious thing I noticed about SBF on the Tyler Cowen podcast is that he had a very odd idea about the St. Petersburg Paradox. At the time, I found myself very much unable to steel man this.

COWEN: Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, that I feel very strongly about.

COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?

BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.

COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.

COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.

I'll just interject here that to me, this sounds completely insane. For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.

COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?

BANKMAN-FRIED: I’m not going to quite give you a limit because my answer is somewhere between “I don’t believe them” and “if I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.”...

At the time I found this odd. Does SBF not understand Kelly betting? This twitter thread, unearthed from 2 years ago, suggests maybe he doesn't?

https://twitter.com/breakingthemark/status/1591114381508558849

I don't see how he, or Caroline, or the rest of his folks got to where they did without understanding kelly. Pretty sure you don't get to be a junior trader at Jane St. without understanding it.

My best attempt at a steelman is that because he's altruistic, the linear regime of his utility function goes a lot further than for Jeff Bezos or someone else with an expensive car collection. As in, imagine each individual has a sequence of things they can get with diminishing marginal utility - $u_0 > u_1 > ... > u_n > ...$, $u_n \rightarrow 0$ and each thing has unit cost. A greedy gambler has sublinear utility since they first buy u_0, then u_1, etc. By definition, $\sum_{i=0}^N u_i < N u_0$.

But since SBF is buying stuff for everyone, he gets $N u_0$.

Then again, this is still clearly wrong - eventually he runs out of people who don't have $u_0$, and he needs to start buying $u_1$. His utility is still diminishing.

Is there some esoteric branch of decision theory that I'm unfamiliar with - perhaps some strange many worlds interpretation - which suggests this isn't crazy? Is he just an innumerate fraud who truly believes in EA, but didn't understand the math?

I would love any insights the community can share.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.

I'll just interject here that to me, this sounds completely insane. For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.

I'd never heard of this guy until a few days ago. I saw that same interview and had the same reaction. I was maybe thinking there was something about the "St. Petersburg paradox" that I didn't understand. But it seems basically like a "double or nothing" bet that grade-schoolers can make with a coin-flip. It seemed like it was polite to do at least one "double or nothing" bet. Highly risky to do two in a row, but socially acceptable if you wanted to show off that you were a daredevil. And if you do three in a row you have a gambling problem.

Maybe financial institutions should start offering serious money on double or nothing bets during the interview. And if anyone does it more than three times you happily pay them the money from the bet and then don't fucking hire them.

Maybe financial institutions should start offering serious money on double or nothing bets during the interview. And if anyone does it more than three times you happily pay them the money from the bet and then don't fucking hire them.

My new career: interview at financial institutions and take their gambles, but secretly use kelly criterion w.r.t. my total wealth.

I'm not sure how much his whole group were into LessWrong, specifically, during its height, but the St. Petersburg Paradox was a pretty significant area of focus. See here for an early reference (with most interesting discussion going under the lifespan paradox), or more recently this.

I expect that part of the confusion comes because the St Petersburg Paradox requires you to continue playing and is usually framed in limits to benefits, hence the preferred emphasis on the Lifespan Paradox in the LessWrong literature. And for the same reasons that limited rounds make the traditional St. Petersburg Paradox valueless even at fairly low stakes, limited rounds here are easier to come up with world-situations where the total expected value is high rather than provably zero. That's part of why it's a paradox! Making a 49-51 world-ending bet once, or even some countable number of times, is still bad -- as a non-philosophy question, the answer is "reserve" -- but it isn't as obviously bad as making it until you certainly lose.

That said, I don't know about the Kelly Bet side. Kelly isn't about utility or diminishing returns on money; it uses logarithms because it's trying to demonstrate geometric growth, not because of any philosophical or ideological statement about bounds of return (explicitly: that "The reason has nothing to do with the value function which he attached to his money"). But Kelly assumed infinite repetition, (indeed, referencing St Petersburg). If you aren't in that game, then :

One might still argue that the gambler should bet all his money (make L = 1) in order to maximize his expected win after N times. It is surely true that if the game were to be stopped after N bets the answer to this question would depend on the relative values (to the gambler) of being broke or possessing a fortune. If we compare the fates of two gamblers, however, playing a nonterminating game, the one which uses the value L found above will, with probability one, eventually get ahead and stay ahead of one using any other L. At any rate, we will assume that the gambler will always bet so as to maximize G.

BreakingTheMarket references this in this page that they linked to in their post. You can reject the arithmetic mean entirely -- BTM does, and I'll take it to the ends of refusing gambling -- but it's not clearly obvious and clearly losing.

It's just a stupid gamble. But you can get very far in business by making stupid gambles.

I am mostly a person who uses Kelly and not a theoretician, but the Kelly formula is definitely derived from the principle of maximizing $E[\ln(S)]$ with S=wealth. That has the obvious philosophical interpretation of diminishing marginal utility, unless I'm missing something/

I assume that what SBF is talking about is he instead maximizes $E[S]$ which is quite different.

I did find this which attempts to defend kelly from the perspective of volatility drag rather than diminishing utility: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zmpYKwqfMkWtywkKZ/kelly-isn-t-just-about-logarithmic-utility

Will need to read it more carefully.

Do you know the definitive Lesswrong approach to robust decision theories? Specifically, how do they manage outliers and infinities, to ensure that in the majority of timelines the world ends up "good enough"? Or do they prefer expected value maximization that much.

I don't think there's a Definitive LessWrong Approach, though for Yudkowskian reasons there's been a lot of skepticism of any reasoning where rare high payoffs or costs aren't given some level of a harsh eye. On the flip side, a lot of early Pascal's Mugging discussion was in the context of cryonics, and I think had a bit of a thumb on the pro-unlikely-benefit side. Most of the big successes in recent Decision Theory work has focused on analysis and coordination in different scopes; I think the most common approach for infinities in the short term was simply to fight any probabilities at epsilon or near epsilon.

I think they want a generalizable and mathematic solution to the problem, but I don't know if it's been solved. Bostrom had some good attempts at a solution, but most of his solutions had distortionary effects or other problems.

Kelly betting is optimal if (a) you're allowed to vary the size of your bets, and (b) you have an infinite time horizon. Cowen's example reads to me like you can't vary your bets, so Kelly wouldn't apply. The example also states that each time you double the number of Earths, so you never run out of people to buy stuff for.

It's not what I would do in that situation, but I don't think it's mathematically incorrect; it's just a demonstration of how strange having a linear utility function really is. Whether you agree with SBF's utility there is more of a philosophical question.

I agree that applying this argument to finance or crypto - where you very much can size your bets - is a little odd, unless you also believe the time horizon is short. I suppose if you think we'll all be transformed by AGI next year, may as well rug pull while you can?

Kelly "applies" even if you can't vary your bet size. Kelly tells you what the maximum bet size you should be willing to take is, so you would take a bet if it's size is below what Kelly tells you, reject otherwise.

Sorry, but that's wrong. Kelly tells you what the optimal bet would be, but it doesn't imply you should reject anything greater than that. If the optimal bet is $5, and you have to choose between $5.0000001 or $0, you want the former.

More generally, if you have to choose between non-Kelly alternatives, you may need to use your utility function to make the decision. SBF claims his utility is linear, in which case a 51% chance to double the world is worth it, for him.

Kelly tells you that taking bets past kelly optimal causes your growth rate to decline very fast. While yes, kelly optimal + epsilon is still good (by continuity of kelly formula), the risk generally lives to the right.

This is doubly true if your probabilities are estimates, and not actually certain - which is what I attempted to illustrate with the dashed vertical line.

Take a look at the graph I've attached. It's my general thinking on the topic, though possibly I am misunderstanding something? I am not in any sense an expert or theoretician - just a guy who uses Kelly as a heuristic. (And in an illiquid markets context where I cannot choose arbitrary bet sizes.)

/images/16684405036219563.webp

Yes, I absolutely agree that "don't go above Kelly" is a good heuristic - especially since you're probably overestimating the value of the bet.

I'm more saying that the specific thought-experiment described in that quote is deeply weird in a number of ways; if you accept Cowen and SBF's premises, blowing up the Earth with p = 1 - eps really is worth it.

I mean, don't do that! But the argument here is philosophical rather than mathematical. "Linear utility is bad", or "expected value produces strange results with unbounded rewards", or "what the hell does this have to do with crypto", something like that.

For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.

Correction: the probability that SBF will destroy the world under these circumstances is 0.49 + 0.51*0.49 + 0.51^2 * 0.49 + 0.51^3 * 0.49 + ... + 0.51^(n-1) * 0.49, where n is however many times he plays that game. That's cumulative probability of the geometric distribution.

(Whereas 0.49^n goes to 0 as n goes to infinity.)

Yeah I stand corrected, wrote this early in the morning.

Or 1-0.51^n

According to the law of large numbers, your payout will converge to the expected value if you repeat an exercise enough times. Since this experiment can't be repeated anymore once you lose all your earths, it doesn't apply here and expected value is a poor decision making tool in this scenario.

Expected return is the best decision making tool in this scenario. The problem is SBF insists on risk neutrality. Any mentally sane person would discount the expected value for risk. The only assumption you need to justify that is diminishing marginal utility of social welfare, which is easy to prove empirically. It's confusing why SBF insists on risk neutrality.

I mean, you could argue that while social welfare technically has diminishing marginal utility, the amounts of money needed for that effect to be significant are much larger than the billions FTX was originally sitting on.

I'd say a Kelly-like argument, that in an iterated game it's a bad idea to bet your entire bankroll, even if you're effectively risk-neutral, is more compelling. Even that doesn't completely disprove SBF's view, though, if he had some reason to think he was running out of time.

Edit: on reflection, Kelly is more-or-less just an assumption of logarithmic utility, so it really doesn't apply here.

I should read usernames more often. I responded to this before reading the username. Leaving it up, but user is perma banned. Do not create usernames like "bigdickpepe1488". They violate our discussion terms. The "bigdickpepe" is poor taste. But the "1488" thing as nazi thing is not ok. I've copied the whole original item because it was creating some good discussion, and this way it will be preserved if they delete their account. Nothing about their actual participation was bad, so I'm fine with them coming back under a different username.

I messed up, didn't realize users can change their display name, so a ban is not necessary. Please change the display name.

Is being a nazi banned? Are you not allowed to advocate for the 14 words and Hitlerist National Socialism? If the answer is no to both cases, is it banned to identify your ideological bent in your username?

Let's put it this way - if someone wants to argue that white people are all terrible and guilty of all injustice in the world, we won't forbid that, but we will probably not let you argue it with a username like "SuckItWhitey."

I did not argue that Jews are all terrible and guilty of all injustice. I asked about probability theory. A couple of months ago I expressed an opinion about Jeff Bezos's Generic Female Lead Beats up Orcs With Character Names Borrowed From Tolkien.

Which would not be analogous to 1488, which, stands for the 14 words and either Hail Hitler or the 88 Precepts. Which is why I specifically asked about those things. There is plenty of wiggle room within those referenced concepts to allow for more charitable interpretation. It's not like the person is named AuschwitzKikeGrinder. In which case I would magnanimously approve a request for a name change.

In which case I would magnanimously approve a request for a name change.

Your magnanimity (and approval) is unnecessary.

We haven't spelled out explicit rules about what is and isn't acceptable as a username, but this is not the first time we have banned and/or requested name changes from users using obviously inflammatory or provocative nyms. The implicit rule is "Don't be an ass, and don't go overboard trying to be edgy."

Then this would be the first time you do so for a name that is not inflammatory or provocative.

You may perhaps genuinely believe that throwing coded Heil Hitlers is not inflammatory or provocative.

If you're just disgruntled that we aren't willing to go along with normalizing it, too bad.

The entire point of this incident was that the person wasn't speaking in code. They literally put 1488 in their name.

More comments

The 14 words alone could perhaps be interpreted charitably if taken at face value, but "1488" is unambiguous and basically conveys the same message as "AuschwitzKikeGrinder".

You have the causation reversed. If someone sufficiently marks themselves as low status or a member of an outgroup you turn your brain off.

It seems like a fair request. He was not banned per say. He was given the option of returning under a different username. The vast majority of communities would not do this.

I agree that if this was to be enforced, this is the most light handed and respectful way of doing so. But that's not the topic of my contention. Which pertains to the impetus of the request, especially in light of the moderator comment accompanying it:

"But the "1488" thing as nazi thing is not ok."

Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?

The mod position here is, in my view, just nonsensical. You can be a nazi and argue for the destruction of European jewry, just don't wear the armband when talking about cryptocurrency? Not because nazis are banned... Just because... We don't like people labeling themselves... Even though that's what people have been doing for years...

My point here, if no other, would be that this is an inequal application of the ruleset. You can carry banners, like people have done, you can have your pet issues and mini crusades, like people do, but if your banner is a Swaztika, and if your pet issue is the jews, the mods take extra notice. Compared to topics like, for example, AI, which suffer from all the same issues, there is no similar action.

So, my question following that would be: Why? Why the disparate application of rules? The mods will say something along the lines of 'too much heat' or something else. And my question would be, for who? Who can't handle WotanWolf1488 talking about the housing crisis in Belgium? Who are these users perusing this webspace that need to be protected from '1488'?

In all honesty I don't think they exist. It's just mod bias. They have an aesthetic preference for American 1990's era decorum. There's no justification for it other than that.

Part of the rules is that the more controversial the statement, the more supporting thought needs to go into defending it. "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."

Having a username state a partisan and inflammatory statement is the opposite of proactively providing evidence for it. It's just a username, it's not a complete argument that people can respond to and tear apart. It's a way to shit post.

Having a username state a partisan and inflammatory statement is the opposite of proactively providing evidence for it. It's just a username, it's not a complete argument that people can respond to and tear apart. It's a way to shit post.

...

Esoteric Traditionalist Mystic Reactionary

I shouldn't need to say anything else but in the spirit of clarity: A point I made some effort in making was that the ruleset was not applied equally. And that the mods are just enforcing their own bias when attributing 'inflammation' and 'partisanship'. This bias is not in line with any objective reason or knowledge. It's just the social justice of the 1990's, as advertised on TV. I don't see why, when not beholden to reddit, the mods enforce that everyone be beholden to their partisan view of the world.

What stance do you think I hold, based on the tagline, that would qualify as partisan or inflammatory? We have several people here who could probably be described as such, from atheists who meditate for 4 hours a day to full blown Catholic monarchists. I am neither, but it amuses me to describe myself this way.

Calling yourself a reactionary means a lot of things to a lot of different people and it would get you banned in a lot of places. Same with traditionalism.

I am neither, but it amuses me to describe myself this way.

So it's just a shit post that doesn't subjectively irk the mods as much.

The comment you replied to was making the point that the ruleset was not objective. That it was instead just the mod team asserting their aesthetic preference. The mods have now said exactly that. You are just wrong in your prior assertion about the rules.

More comments

Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?

Because Adolf Hitler was the greatest enemy of white people in all history, anyone who cares about "continued existence of white people" should condemn him ten times stronger than mainstream normie history does.

So, my question following that would be: Why? Why the disparate application of rules? The mods will say something along the lines of 'too much heat' or something else. And my question would be, for who? Who can't handle WotanWolf1488 talking about the housing crisis in Belgium? Who are these users perusing this webspace that need to be protected from '1488'?

Because one nazi attracts another, and mods do not want this site to become nazi sewer, more than enough of such places on the internets.

Because Adolf Hitler was the greatest enemy of white people in all history, anyone who cares about "continued existence of white people" should condemn him ten times stronger than mainstream normie history does.

Those alleged fact is irrelevant to the context of the argument. It's not the job of the mods to enforce that everyone subscribe to the 'correct' theory of white supremacy.

Because one nazi attracts another, and mods do not want this site to become nazi sewer, more than enough of such places on the internets.

If the nazis follow the rules as they are enforced on everyone else, why would this place become a sewer?

If the nazis follow the rules as they are enforced on everyone else, why would this place become a sewer?

Because people coming here will see discussions full of people named like "WolfLair1488" "AuschwitzOvenMaster" "ShowerHead88" "ZyklonFan" etc... and give this place wide berth.

There are many nazi places on the world wide web, there is no need for one more, while this site is supposed to be unique.

That's wrong. Read the thread.

You are not allowed to talk about how much you love gassing jews, you are not allowed to discuss things in a vulgar way if you are not making a point with it. But you are allowed to talk about and advocate for National Socialism and White nationalism.

There are many nazi places on the world wide web, there is no need for one more, while this site is supposed to be unique.

This place would be far more unique if it did allow those kinds of names, given the fact that the number of places and the number of places that matter that ban such names dwarfs those who don't.

But that's neither here nor there.

I think the mods are hoping to attract more people and seeing obvious references to Nazism detracts from that objective

If that's the case, why don't they say that? Just be open about the angle of the slippery slope we are going to be sliding on.

You have some grounds on principle but there also should be some level "obnoxiously poor taste" filter. This is a forum that values the ability for diverse perspectives to come forward productively and attempts to not censor for viewpoint, it is not an absolutist free speech platform. There are probably effortful and yet still glaringly pro nazi usernames that I would be very willing to defend. BigDickPepe1488 is not that username. It is a name that can only be constructed to be maximally obnoxious to some group of people, and the standard here is no more obnoxious than necessary. Being maximally obnoxious to people does not add to the ability for diverse perspectives to come together productively.

I don't disagree, I just don't like people maintaining the pretense of objectivity when it comes to rules and mods when that is simply not the case. And the case is instead that we are collectively adhering to some boomer social justice aesthetics that demonize a 100-year-old political figure ahead of everything else because we've seen a lot about that guy on TV.

It just seems so absurd in relation to how much people like chastising 'conservatism' for being 'progressive-liberalism just 10 years out of date' when the majority of people seem content to play by the exact same 'conservative' ruleset when they are in power.

The Motte, AKA Conservareddit. 10 years out of date.

This seems like quite a thing to draw out of not wanting our standards for discourse to include blatant and known trolling names. Objective isn't the right word for what the moderation of this place is going for, which is consistently content neutral but tone policing. No one accidentally names themselves "BigDickPepe1488", I'd go even further than the moderators here in saying that the "BigDickPepe" portion itself ought to be disallowed but I have idiosyncratic feelings about the range of usernames that make me cringe which include many of the ones at use here.

And the case is instead that we are collectively adhering to some boomer social justice aesthetics that demonize a 100-year-old political figure ahead of everything else because we've seen a lot about that guy on TV.

No, actually I think we have pretty good reasons to dislike that political figure. Feel free to make an effort post if you think our opinions on him are wrong and blue pilled. But that's not even what is at issue here, we have rules about being unnecessarily obnoxious that such a name trivially violates, if it helps to appeal to equal treatment something like KillAllChristians would also deserve to be moderated.

It just seems so absurd in relation to how much people like chastising 'conservatism' for being 'progressive-liberalism just 10 years out of date' when the majority of people seem content to play by the exact same 'conservative' ruleset when they are in power.

The Motte, AKA Conservareddit. 10 years out of date.

I must have missed it 10 years ago when Hitler references were really big with the red tribe and blue tribe was barely censoring them.

This seems like quite a thing to draw out of not wanting our standards for discourse to include blatant and known trolling names.

It's not.

Objective isn't the right word for what the moderation of this place is going for, which is consistently content neutral but tone policing.

That's not the case. From Amadan:

That wide latitude doesn't mean pretending that each and every viewpoint in treated as exactly equal and morally neutral, and if you would like to read that as "The mod team is not particularly sympathetic to Nazis," you're right.

Mods are not content neutral.

No, actually I think we have pretty good reasons to dislike that political figure.

And we have a pretty good reason to dislike Genghis Khan, that doesn't mean we place him as a central figure for our moral compass. Nor do we constantly fret about potential Mongol hordes when someone erects a gigantic statue of the guy in Mongolia. In fact, most users have pretty good reasons to dislike what they dislike. But that's not the point. The point is that some likes and dislikes are more equal than others because of mod subjectivity.

But that's not even what is at issue here, we have rules about being unnecessarily obnoxious that such a name trivially violates, if it helps to appeal to equal treatment something like KillAllChristians would also deserve to be moderated.

You don't actually have specific rules on this, as the mods have said. What you feel deserves to be moderated has no relevance to anything since you are not a mod and the mods apply their rules subjectively. And though I am sure the mods would step in for something obvious like that, it's not the point. The point was that when there is ambiguity, the rulings are not consistent.

I must have missed it 10 years ago when Hitler references were really big with the red tribe and blue tribe was barely censoring them.

You are missing the point. The reason why so many lament 'conservatism' and label it as being '10 years out of date liberals' is not primarily because of the content of their beliefs. It's because of where these beliefs come from. It's because of the 'conservatives' complete lack of contextual awareness and understanding. These 'conservatives' don't know where their views come from or why. They don't see themselves as the end result of the culture wars of the generations that came before. They instead see themselves as being stalwarts in an ongoing battle that they are genuinely fighting to win. Instead of recognizing that all of their firmly held beliefs are just the undertow of those who are actually in charge. And that their 'conservative' inheritance is just the white flag of their predecessors.

More comments

Okay then, tell us why we shouldn't demonize Hitler? Because even eliding over things like the Holocaust or the near-conquest of Europe, if you take the most overly-charitable view of Hitler, all you see is a guy who riled people up, picked fights his country couldn't and shouldn't have, and then proceeded to lose so badly that he didn't even have the courage to face his people about the loss, let alone the wrath of two superpowers coming to tear down his government.

If anything, even National Socialists wouldn't (and didn't) want to identify with a loser, and there are indeed few things as bad as being seen as the loser by history. Even Confederacy aesthetics and revanchism from American Southerners is pitiable by comparison--Nazis only have copium.

To be fair, yes the Nazis lost, but they also won a lot. People are good at ignoring or rationalising the bad parts as long as the good ones are memorable enough.

Because Hitler was fighting for a truth that would in the long run reduce the amount of human suffering by a magnitude far greater than anything that has come after him.

Because even eliding over things like the Holocaust or the near-conquest of Europe, if you take the most overly-charitable view of Hitler, all you see is a guy who riled people up, picked fights his country couldn't and shouldn't have, and then proceeded to lose so badly that he didn't even have the courage to face his people about the loss, let alone the wrath of two superpowers coming to tear down his government.

That's not the most charitable view of Hitler. I am sure you can steelman Hitler better than that.

If anything, even National Socialists wouldn't (and didn't) want to identify with a loser

Why? Most National Socialists I know identify a great deal with flawed figures like Hitler and Goebbels.

Even Confederacy aesthetics and revanchism from American Southerners is pitiable by comparison--Nazis only have copium.

Is this just 'boo outgroup' or were you trying to make a point? Because if you are trying to make a point it's not very salient considering all the losers of wars. I mean, I find the struggle of jews during the war far more pitiable than anything else. According to them they just lined themselves up to a slaughter house that was staffed by other jews who participated directly in slaughtering their co-ethnics because they thought it would buy them life. That's a level far lower than Hitler and friends banding together to fight those they think are their enemies to their dying breath in the name of their co-ethnics. You can argue that the result was the same but in that case I'd say that the option Hitler took displayed far superior moral character.

More comments

I don't disagree, I just don't like people maintaining the pretense of objectivity when it comes to rules and mods when that is simply not the case.

For what it's worth, I've never claimed our rules are objective. I don't think rules of this sort even can be purely objective, barring someone building a text-parsing AI and defining the rules in terms of the text-parsing AI.

Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?

Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.

If a poster can't name himself for people who assassinated their opponents, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler. Even if you restricted it to people responsible for a lot of innocent deaths, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler.

OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?

Hitler isn't really famous for assassinations in the first place, but let's try Stalin or Mao. Che Guevara only killed a few hundred, but you'd think that's enough.

More comments

a violent ideology

This is not a coherent concept. All ideologies, including presumably yours and the one that rules the West, are violent by your standard except radical pacifism.

All you're really doing here is unprincipled exception because you see some ideologies are especially repugnant, which is a wholly moral and hence aesthetic statement.

I think the idea is that the Holocaust has permanently tainted Nazi ideology in anglosphere eyes.

Violence. You're describing a violent ideology.

(Former bigdickpepe1488 here.)

Many ideologies advocate violence. Should we also ban usernames such as "bigtitsactblue" or "BLMPawg" on the grounds that the mainstream American left has actual literal militias threatening political opponents with violence and murdering people in the past few years?

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592288152471109633?cxt=HHwWgoDUwe3o-JgsAAAA https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592073976180019200?cxt=HHwWgMDU5ZO2l5gsAAAA https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/17/blm-louisville-defends-bailing-out-activist-assass/ https://fox11online.com/on-fox-11/pofficers-shot-at-protest-in-dallas-reports

Amusingly, the perpetrator of the one recent attempt at right wing violence also has the flag of leftist militias on his house.

I'm not. Or at least I'm not holding them to a different standard I would hold for anyone that supports, for example, Western hegemony in whatever ideological form it expresses itself. The ideological pretense of peace, freedom and democracy didn't save any of the victims of US foreign policy. No matter how much it was repeated in Western propaganda.

I thought usernames could be changed? I have the option to do that in my settings, at least. I haven't tried it to see if it works.

If this is a username change, then I must ask: who is this is?

I think most of your repliers are missing the point here by focusing on maximizing expected utility or log utility (or, equivalently, the Kelly criterion).

Forms of the St Petersburg Paradox will plague any utility-esque analysis so long as the utility function is unbounded.

For instance, if you think the Kelly criterion protects you from such silliness, consider a gamble that (with 50-50 probability) either

  1. Squares the number of people

  2. Cubic-roots the number of people

[ This is accomplished by creating/destroying planets of various sizes to avoid interaction effects ]

With high school algebra, we can show that you should always accept this bet for any n > 1 if you want to maximize ln(n).

However, this bet is also guaranteed to eventually lead to 1 person, even if you start with a bajillion.

So, there's nothing specially wrong with raw expected utility. The same issue plagues log-utility (e.g. the Kelly Criterion), just with a different specifics.

Assuming you accept some kind of utility-esque principle for making decisions, the only way to avoid shenanigans of this ilk is to have a bounded utility function.

[ Edit: for investing per-se, log-utility/Kelly is problem-free specifically because of the assumption that returns scale linearly with how much you invest. But for abstract philosophy problems, that is scant comfort. ]

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?

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.

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".

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.]

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/

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

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.

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?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.))

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

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.

More comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

No one answered my question last week, probably in part due to my posting it a full day after the OP's top-level comment, so I thought I'd post it again here. I'm really interested in the answer, if someone could steelman the new blue checkmark strategy and mechanics for me.

I still don't understand, what is the point of the blue checkmark in new Twitter? When I first heard about the $8 charge I thought it'd be a good idea. I thought it'd be a way for anyone to pay $8 for the service Twitter will perform to verify that you are who you say you are. I thought basically, you'd pay the $8, Twitter would assign someone to review your credentials, then you'd get the checkmark. This seemed like an improvement over the previous process because anyone could request a checkmark review as part of an after upon process, and you're also helping to fund the work it will take to do it

Now I see on Twitter's site, it says explicitly:

Accounts that receive the blue checkmark as part of a Twitter Blue subscription will not undergo review to confirm that they meet the active, notable and authentic criteria that was used in the previous process.

If the point of verification and checkmarks are to prove that you are who you say you are, and now that verification process and proof no longer will happen, then what's the point? To prove that you have $8 to spend? Are people supposed to believe that accounts that get the new blue checkmark are authentic, when no verification actually happened? It's so confusing.

Please correct me if any aspect of my understanding is incorrect. If the new system really does make sense, I'd be glad and would like to know why. Could anyone steelman it? As it stands it seems just like an attempt to have a one time cash-in on a new mechanism that's going to ultimately destroy the credibility of the blue check system entirely.

The point of the $8 checkmark is to eliminate the sumptuary laws that previously served to distinguish between nobles and commoners.

In a similar line of thinking, expect Musk to eliminate twitters Lese-Majeste laws. It may soon be legal to tell a journalist to learn to code or to describe a "public health expert" with an NPC meme.

Please correct me if any aspect of my understanding is incorrect. If the new system really does make sense, I'd be glad and would like to know why. Could anyone steelman it? As it stands it seems just like an attempt to have a one time cash-in on a new mechanism that's going to ultimately destroy the credibility of the blue check system entirely.

exactly, pure spite, way to destroy the prestige value of old blue check and abolish the blue check holders as a class ;-)

One of the new blue checkmarks might be an indication someone is not a Bot. It shows an investment in the community. Right now it's mostly used to troll people who think that a blue checkmark is a sign of authenticity, accuracy, and truthiness. But over time it could develop into something useful.

Or Musk is trying to bankrupt Twitter, has no idea what he's doing, or any of the above.

As a note, Tumblr is now selling not one, but two blue checkmarks for $7.99. They also stack, so there are some people running around with 28 checkmarks. Everyone on Tumbr thinks this is a grand idea, regardless of what utility they might get out of it. Why purchase a blue checkmark? Because it's amusing.

It made for great trolling ,but predictably it led to people impersonating companies and major public political figures, which went beyond comedy to actual economic and financial implications. It sucks that people abused it but not surprising either.

People trading based off of Twitter screenshots deserve everything they get.

These were bots trading based on twitter sentiment. Lmao.

Right? The takeaway here for me isn't "people said things on Twitter and it's bad that they were believed". It's "boy is it bad that people are stupid enough to make financial decisions based on social media posts".

Indeed, how is this not a great lesson in "don't blindly trust authority" (defined here as "people with shiny badges")?

As it stands it seems just like an attempt to have a one time cash-in on a new mechanism that's going to ultimately destroy the credibility of the blue check system entirely.

Being a "bluecheck" actually comes with several quality-of-life improvements to everyday Twitter use, and I believe there were more of these QoL improvements planned for future implementation. The purpose of these QoL improvements appears to be to encourage high-notoriety users to continue strengthening the network effect advantage Twitter has in the social media space.

Instead of giving those QoL improvements away for free to high-value users, Musk appears to have wanted to just charge for those QoL improvements.

The fact that this is all tangled up with "identity verification" is mostly a historical accident (though not entirely, as some of the QoL improvements are unimportant unless you're getting hundreds of DMs every day). Basically, Twitter as a product is kind of an emergent mishmash rather than being something that was carefully designed from the ground up. Musk, as someone who wasn't on the inside from the beginning, appears to have botched this by failing to notice the true nature of the product being peddled. "Our engineers have implemented product improvements we currently give away for free to a bunch of high-value users" immediately pinged to Musk as "why not sell those to everyone?"

Actually I don't think this is quite how it happened, simply because Musk himself said some things that made it sound like identity validation, rather than QoL improvements, was actually what was on offer. But that's the best steelman I can manage given my current understanding of Twitter. Still the nature of Musk's problem seems to be along these lines--not clearly knowing who is most benefiting whom, and how, makes it difficult to "extract value" in ways to which Musk is otherwise accustomed.

I think there's a steelman where the "if you're caught impersonating someone, and you probably will be caught if you do anything even moderately high-vis, you're out 8 USD and the iPhone and CC# you used no longer can buy from twitter" acts as a really weak attempt at crowd-sourced verification.

It's a lot less good from my perspective at verification than requiring a photo ID and a matching name on the credit card, but it does have advantages over the many failure modes of things like a Facebook Real Name Rule (eg, what happens if my legal name isn't the name I want to go by online? What happens if I don't have a photo ID or a credit card?) if Musk's longer-term goals revolved around Twitter Blue as a separate user level.

You can only have one Twitter Blue per Apple account. Apple accounts are a pain in the ass to obtain compared to Gmail or other accounts, and the closed apple ecosystem means you need an iPhone or a special emulator (not a free one like Bluestacks). Had they allowed it for Android instead of just iOS, it would have been a lot easier to make unlimited accounts.

If you don't have a credit card, you wouldn't be very valuable as a subscriber. Do Twitter advertisers seek the non-credit carded cohort?

That's an interesting question. I've gotten a surprising number of advertisements for products that are not generally sold through online sales: Coke or Dr. Pepper can be paid for with credit cards, and people with credit cards are probably more likely to buy them (in the same way that they're more likely to buy anything), but I don't think it's something people would filter for in the way that subscription services could be.

((Of course, I'd always assumed soda advertisements before movies in theatres reflected a pay-for-play, so who knows.))

That said, I expect the more relevant case for Musk's perspective would be less a GiftCard-for-Twitter, and more the case where the account is getting its funds from an employer or a business, without having (or being trusted with, or wanting) a personal credit card.

The bluecheck and the bluecheck privileges (priority in replies, bluecheck only feed, etc) should be separated. Have the former require a large, one-time fee to cover the cost of Twitter doing some due diligence, and have the latter be the subscription fee.

Verification being a recurring payment is so absurd on its face that it makes me think Musk is not as interested in making money from bluechecks as he is in destroying the bluecheck class.

Twitter employees were reportedly selling bluechecks for $15k..

The feature has been discontinued due to impersonation suddenly becoming much easier (who could have seen that coming) https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-real-and-what-isnt-on-twitter-under-elon-musk-it-is-really-unclear-11668184148

The first thing people see is the blue checkmark. Few are going to click through to see if it's an authentic verified account instead of a purchased one. It was a gimmick that was in theory supposed to help prevent scams and frauds, which, predictably, (at least as I and others said) made it worse. $8 no question asked auto-verification was insane. I am not surprised at all it was abused and soon discontinued.

Twitter themselves, before Musk entered the picture, changed the meaning of bluechecks so that they no longer meant verified, but also that Twitter considered them good people who deserved a bluecheck. With all the complaints over Musk, people keep forgetting that this happened (probably because it's a complaint about wokeness, which the media aren't going to signal-boost).

Part of the reason that people are careful in answering is because of the elephant in the room. Elon is occasionally does really dumb stuff and people try to explain it with 4D-chess when in fact it is just him being an idiot. To be clear, he is not an idiot in everything, but he is not the smartest person either. My guess that he is slightly above average. The direct order of giving a blue check to anyone with an iPhone and $8 to spare, maybe he didn't think it through.

But my 4D-chess explanation: The reasons to destroy the blue checkmark are multiple. It carries too much power in turning off critical thinking and make bad tweets more notable than they actually are(Eli Lilly incident anyone, it is bullshit with that it raised awareness, campaigns around insulin price has been observed many times before). Also due to the extra blue checkmark functionality verified accounts have their echo chamber with the verified tab without the public able to correct bad takes.

I don't think it's 4d chess, but I also don't think it's necessarily just incompetence, or only his fault. I think someone that high up at a tech company isn't usually that connected to all the exact nuances of all the details all the time. In many ways, it's the job of a director to set a vision, and the job of his reports to disagree and push back when that vision doesn't work. He might have just said to his direct report, "let's make blue checks available to everyone and institute a charge for it, that way everyone can have it." And then his report filters it down the chain through his reports, etc, and there's 1000 separate engineers led by 100 managers who have to be involved because this touches hundreds of ingrained systems, all of them frantically trying to make this decision make sense, each in their own way for how it touches the services they own, and they have to frantically work out new contracts with the services their services touch, so it's like a wave of quick, probably bad, decisions impacting each other. Probably their fear of being on the chopping block if they can't deliver what the new boss says is another motivating factor. So eventually everyone tries to deliver SOMETHING, trying to make this old system make sense in the new edict, and as a result something nonsensical gets delivered.

And that what I've seen in other comments out there that 4D chess used in a disparaging way. Because we don't know how much intent exactly there is of this particular result. Of course it is a speculative way of reasoning of it.

Another way to reason for what happened here is that he is running experiments and don't take predictions on consequences because he believes that managements structure are afraid of change. It needs to play out to see what happens what works and what doesn't. "Elon Musk said Tuesday that he shut down a new verification program on Twitter just hours after it launched, saying the platform would “do lots of dumb things” in the coming months to see what is successful as the company tries to capture much-needed revenue, including potentially offering payment processing on the platform."


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats