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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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The Bankman-Fried/FTX Saga just gets better and better. A "why oh why" article in the Wall Street Journal has plums to be plucked out, such as these.

(And if Will MacAskill wants to repair his reputation, he better make some moves sharpish because the media are painting him as Sam's guru who encouraged and indeed enabled him).

Mr. Bankman-Fried has said his law-professor parents instilled in him an interest in utilitarianism, the philosophy of trying to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He said he started putting those ideals into practice while majoring in physics at MIT. Concerned with the suffering of animals on factory farms, he said, he stopped eating meat.

Will MacAskill, then a philosophy graduate student, pitched Mr. Bankman-Fried on the idea of effective altruism, a way of applying some utilitarian ideas to charitable giving.

...Mr. Bankman-Fried had considered different career paths, he said in the “80,000 Hours” interview, but Mr. MacAskill suggested he could do the most good by making a lot of money and giving it away, a popular idea in the community.

Yeah, does anyone think that someone who doesn't know the first thing about EA or any of the people here, when reading this, is going to come away with a good view of all concerned? Personally I'm very amused that veganism has been dragged into this: "guy who swindled billions is against meat eating" 🤣 So let's count 'em up: that's utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, cryptocurrency, and veganism all tainted by association!

As for MacAskill, it sounds like he was in contact with Bankman-Fried up until quite recently:

The FTX Foundation’s favored causes included pandemic prevention and protecting humanity from the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. At a July meeting of the foundation, Mr. Bankman-Fried became deeply engaged in a discussion on how lightbulbs equipped with a particular frequency of ultraviolet light could eradicate airborne pathogens, Mr. MacAskill told the Journal this summer.

He has distanced himself now, but unfortunately that may be too little, too late:

[Future Fund’s] two largest public grants, of $15 million and $13.9 million, were awarded to effective altruism groups where Mr. MacAskill held roles. Mr. MacAskill, now a professor at Oxford University, wasn’t paid for his involvement in those organizations “other than expenses,” a spokeswoman for one of them said.

...Mr. MacAskill distanced himself from FTX as it was crumbling. In a string of tweets, he accused Mr. Bankman-Fried of personal betrayal and abandoning the principles of effective altruism. He was also one of the Future Fund staffers who quit.

But wait, that isn't the best bit:

Mr. MacAskill at times advised Mr. Bankman-Fried on more than just philanthropic matters. When Elon Musk started his campaign to buy Twitter, Mr. MacAskill sent the Tesla chief executive a text message, according to documents made public in the litigation over his purchase of the social-media firm. “My collaborator Sam Bankman-Fried has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it and then making it better for the world,” he wrote.

Oh yes. Just imagine it. Instead of Musk buying Twitter, it could have been Bankman-Fried. If people are getting het-up about Twitter potentially collapsing, what would they think if Twitter was caught up in the undertow of the FTX collapse? 😈

that's utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, cryptocurrency, and veganism all tainted by association!

Well, if veganism survived association with Hitler (though he wasn't vegan or even, according to many accounts, consistently vegetarian, the popular meme is that he was a vegetarian), SBF would be no more than a tiny blip.

Not an apples-to-apples comparison here.

Vegetarians might have "weird" ethical presuppositions and they probably did in Hitler's time as well. But there is little overlap in what made vegetarians weird and Nazis bad.

EA has weird ethical presuppositions and there is much overlap with what made SBF bad. I can't read his mind but I'd wager he probably did think that large (or less charitably just positive) expected value was worth the risk (and the lies).

And EA's beliefs are really weird! Mosquito nets are well and good. AI taking over the world, marrying the rich to be a better altruist and giving a shit about ants are not. Much of their recent concerns read like madness to the layman. Yes I think naive the utilitarianism of just maximizing EV is weird, I'm not the only one, so I won't waste much digital ink on that.

Also, I'm sure Hitler was one among many vegetarians. It's a common enough lifestyle that you don't make too many inferences if you meet one. EA is not, SBF is a much larger amount/proportion of EAs or the only one, people would know about at all.

I'd wager EA is fucked. Is it for good, I don't know but at least in the medium term.

giving a shit about ants

Thanks for linking this. What a read.

At one point, on the topic of the ants, I said, in passing, something like: “may we be forgiven.” My girlfriend responded seriously, saying something like: “We won’t be. There’s no forgiveness.”

Quokkas are much too fierce for these people.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Not even the ants, the dust mites.

It’s easy, upon learning about dust-mites, for the question of whether to adjust one’s sheet related practices, in view of these mites, to never get genuinely asked. Washing one’s sheets is “what one does.” If we learn that it kills thousands of tiny creatures we didn’t know existed, it’s easy to conclude that apparently, killing these creatures is OK; it’s also, apparently, “what one does.” The idea that we might better protect and promote what we care about by changing our sheet related practices (Tomasik reports: “To be safe, I daily flap out my bed sheet into an unused area of my house in an effort to remove some of the dead skin on it”) is treated as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that the welfare of the mites justifies such a change.

I have no idea who this Tomasik person is, but what an idiot. Unused area of your house? What area is that? And he really thinks piling up dirt in it is better somehow, more moral? If he's that freakin' worried about dust mites, do what generations of maid servants and housewives did: bring the sheets outside and shake them out (in your back yard or back garden if you have such a place). Just like table cloths or beating the dust out of mats and carpets.

This is not morality, this is poisoned narcissism. "Oh my sense of responsibility is so large, I care about dust mites". If the guy was a Jain or something of that nature, I could respect this viewpoint. But it's just inflamed sensibilities, and that inflammation needs to be brought down. It's not healthy or moral.

And it didn't prevent him and his tender-hearted housemates from waiting too long until the situation became intolerable. When the house was infested with ants and the problem could no longer be ignored. Whereas, if he hadn't been a wuss and had put down a line of ant powder around entrance points (doors, windows) then he would have killed fewer ants in the long run. Cruel to be kind, but the bleeding heart sentimentality meant he ended up killing even more ants eventually when the infestation had to be dealt with.

You have to have a high level of wealth and comfort to be this obsessed with "oooh mustn't kill the ants". This loolah has no idea how hugely privileged he is, in relation to other people, to have the luxury of waiting until his home gets overrun with ants before acting.

And then he ends up with "Imagine there was a sentient slime civilisation around us that we destroyed just by playing the guitar (?), should we stop using fire? Well, we already commit tons of harm anyway, so the best thing is just to be aware of it - and go on the same as before, only patting ourselves on the back for our exquisitely tuned sensibilities". Yes, this is So Deep, you are Very Aware and much superior to clods like me 🙄

Remember, folks, only you can adjust your sheet-related practices! Save the dust mites today! (If we do get replaced by the sentient cockroaches, we bloody well deserve it having come to a pitch of neurotic navel-gazing such as this).

I had to do some looking here. I figured the fixation on not killing insects was an allegory for empathy for humans outside your tribe.

Nope. Dude has spent a lot of time really fixated on insect suffering. But not just suffering caused by humans. Oh no: he is seriously considering how to intervene in nature to reduce predation in all contexts. As in, he is torn up about spiders killing flies.

New solution to Fermi paradox: intelligent aliens become so opposed to suffering and so empathetic with microorganisms that they thoroughly sterilize all life that they encounter. Can't have microscopic mites suffering as they die.

But I had doubts as well. In a 17 Oct. 2005 letter to Peter Singer, I asked:

Finally, what implications would follow if insects did turn out to be sentient? Might it be possible that the net balance of utility of their lives would be negative, considering that many insects live only for a few days or weeks before enduring what I presume is generally a painful death? If I could choose between not existing or experiencing the life of an insect under the assumed circumstances, I might prefer the former. If insect life were actually a great source of disutility, would a utilitarian not then be obligated to support, for instance, destruction of the rainforest, since that would destroy insect habitat and prevent many painful lives?

God damn it, Flannery O'Connor is right:

In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in force-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Tomasik's 'tenderness' and squeamishness about things like the spider web in his cellar leads him to - mass extinction of all the animals for which he feels this 'tenderness'. "To save the village, we had to destroy it". To ameliorate the suffering of mindless creatures, we must kill them all and make them extinct so none of their kind ever lives - and thus suffers - again. And this is his notion of compassion.

And if we should kill the mindless, what about those with minds? A greater capacity for suffering and awareness of suffering surely means we are obligated to kill them all - without even a God to sort them out, save the gods that we have set ourselves up as, dealing out judgement as to who lives and who dies.

Of course, Tomasik's 'compassion' and 'tenderness' are ultimately for himself. Did he not feel upset and distressed by the idea of spiders killing and eating flies, he would not entertain the notion of killing all insects. So his real objection is not to their suffering, it is to "their suffering makes me feel bad and I don't like feeling bad, so to make it stop we must kill them all".

(I don't think he really means 'kill them all', this is just him grappling with his scrupulosity, but the easier thing for him and for the insects would be to choke off this over-sensitivity and be less upset about it. That way he doesn't feel so bad, and wild animals don't have to die so he can feel better).

So his real objection is not to their suffering, it is to "their suffering makes me feel bad and I don't like feeling bad, so to make it stop we must kill them all".

But isn't that why everyone wants to prevent suffering? Except they don't take it as seriously or don't think about it so much so it doesn't bother them as much.

I don't see anything particularly illogical in what he's saying. If you are obliged to save a drowning child, that obligation does imply a string of increasingly absurd things. The proper answer is "I am not obliged to save that drowning child unless it has literally no cost to me. If it has almost no cost, then I am only almost obligated."

But this 'solution' is on the level of "in order to prevent drowning children, I will shoot every child I see". It's bonkers.

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