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From the pen of Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
Scott offers several examples of why TPOASINWID results in absurd analysis. His examples are selected for maximal absurdity, so it's amusing that three out of four directly undermine his case, and the fourth is still a pretty good argument against his position.
This is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure cancer", because numerous considerations mitigate against curing cancer, things like economic considerations, bureaucratic constraints, and the work/life balance of the staff. And even when all these align such that curing this specific cancer is the system's goal, "curing cancer" might not mean what you think. I was especially amused by this exchange in the comments:
...written in the comment section of the author of Who By Very Slow Decay. Yes, very much like Chemo. This example, by itself, is probably the one I'd like Scott to address specifically.
It seems to me that this is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to defend Ukraine from hostile military action." America and NATO are very specifically and very openly throttling aide to keep Ukraine from being defeated outright, but also from being able to hit back too hard. Stalemate appears to be the deliberate objective, and certainly has been the openly-stated objective of many Ukraine supporters in this very forum.
One could make a similar statement about the Russian military as well. Any description of the Russian military that doesn't account for the realities of coup-proofing and endemic corruption is not going to make accurate predictions about the real world.
His intention here is to achieve absurdity by narrowing the scope to one specific result, rather than the sum of results, and in fairness, he provides examples of X randos arguing in this fashion. "The purpose of the British Government is to keep a lid on the British People while pursuing goals orthogonal to their interests" seems a more parsimonious description, but even Scott's version seems more accurate than something like "the purpose of the British Government is to execute the will of the British people as expressed through democratic elections".
Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope. But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs. This is true even for descriptions that only consists of one significant cost, because the benefits of systems are generally far more obvious than the costs and thus the missing information is easier to find.
This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.
Yep, Scott's at his worst when he's complaining about his outgroup. Not that most of the twitterati who employ POSIWID are particularly shrewd analysts, but the concept has plenty of explanatory value.
For another recent example of Scott getting sloppy, see his article on how the BAPist "based post-Christian vitalists" were hypocritical for caring about the victims of the Rotherham grooming gangs when they normally sneer at caring about poor people an ocean away as cucked slave morality. Of course, the obvious counterargument is that the Rotherham victims were white Westerners like themselves, aggressed upon by a far more alien outgroup.
While his criticism kinda missed the mark, I do think there's something inconsistent about it. You can have a consistent ideology of supremacy for your own ethnic group, but in a globalized world it's not really compatible with being a Nietzschean individualist who sneers at caring about the weak in general. The archetypal ubermensch is a pre-Christian warlord - an aristocrat who strides above the petty concerns of his own nation's peasants and paupers. The 'master' isn't interested in whether the daughters of the slaves two counties over are getting raped and tortured, white or otherwise. Unless he considers those counties part of his holdings and, therefore, his alone to rape and pillage.
A guy who's concerned about tortured little girls an ocean away because they're white girls and he considers the fate of the white race his business, whether or not he stands to gain anything from it, has more in common with a guy who's concerned because he considers the fate of all Homo sapiens his business, than with a guy who actually only cares about himself, his kin, and maybe his nation.
People can't seem to get it through their heads that Nietzscheans aren't master moralists, they are would be designers of their own moral codes and specifically reject the impositions of acting as a master, or as a slave.
You are allowed to care for the weak or for anything or anyone insofar as you deduced on your own and not through social mimetism or scolding that this is right and true. But it has to come from you and not from whims but your own self legislated catechism.
I feel like this is the same brand of lazy criticism levied at objectivists for acting collectively despite being individualists. It's like people just imagine what the ideology is and what it precludes instead of actually asking or reading about it.
I'm aware actual-Nietzsche is more nuanced. But the guys Scott was debating aren't serious Nietzschean scholars, nor do they claim to be. Perhaps I should have just stuck with the tongue-in-cheek Based Post-Christian Vitalist coinage. The point is that these are people who sneer at the entire concept of Effective Altruism and indeed charity. You can't do that and care about Rotherham. It's untenable. If you're an American and you care what happens to the Rotherham girls, albeit only because they're white, then you're not coming from a completely different paradigm than the EAs. You just have an unpopular opinion on who the most relevant moral patients are.
Such as Objectivists would say, altruists, let alone utilitarian ones, do not have a monopoly on caring about people. And their claims that they do are an intellectually dishonest trick to refuse admitting that good natured feelings can be arrived at through other means than their pathology.
I would, actually, say that "altruist" objectively, etymologically describes anyone who cares about other people. It's what the "altr" means. Altruism is a broad church. Some altruists care about shrimps and others only care about humans. I see no reason why altruists who only care about white humans should act like they're something completely different.
It's simple. Non-altruists don't find alterity inherently valuable and it enters differently or not at all into their ethical calculus.
Arguing that they are still altruists because their calculus still leads them to conclusions similar to that of altruists in some cases is intellectual dishonesty.
You can redefine the word to be broad enough as to become useless. But that's not worth engaging with.
I claim that the calculus is the same. When it comes to caring whether perfect strangers live or die, suffer or thrive, in ways that will never affect you - either you do, or you don't. Those of us who do, I'm confident are, in an overwhelming majority, applying the same drives in the same ways. Sure, some of us care about the suffering of our countrymen, others about the suffering of our whole race, others still of the whole human race, and others still about the suffering of all animal life. But the only thing that changes between all those cases is how you draw the border between the people you care about, and the people you don't. It's still altruism even if it's race-specific, much as someone who cares about other humans but doesn't give a fuck about animals is still an altruist.
This isn't to say you can't have genuine non-altruists who, by coincidence, have similar practical aims to altruists. For example, you might object to rape gangs not because you care whether the victims suffer, but due to a deontological objection to rape. Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole. I wouldn't call those people altruists. But once you start talking about the suffering of random girls an ocean away as something which in and of itself should make your blood boil, something which you have a moral impetus to stop if you can, even though it's in no practical sense your problem - then, sorry, you're an altruist. Albeit a narrow altruist. And a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric.
(Of course, they may have been lying — perhaps Scott was too optimistic in taking those fragments of altruism as glimmers of an underlying better nature, rather than disingenuous, cynical attempts to play on actual altruists' emotions and win them over.)
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Wouldn't deducing any moral code after reading Nietzsche by definition not be "on your own, not through mimetism" etc?
He enjoins you to have your own consideration of the moral problem. This, in my view does not recurse because you can look at it and disagree that making yourself moral legislator is a good idea.
There are people in the specific group this thread is talking about that believe in the possibility of a christo-nietzcheean synthesis for instance.
We quickly arrive at topics where logical contradiction is not disqualifying, however, so such logical descriptions are instrumental at best.
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