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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I think the more salient commonality is that both seem to be very adjacent to a general US (and to a lesser degree more widely Western) tendency towards universalism. It is considered quite inappropriate to openly say that you want to live out your life pursuing some goals that are only supposed to bring utility to you or some bounded set of people around you, at least not unless you have come up with some particularly dank rationalisation for why this would actually serve the following; no, everything you do ultimately has to at least superficially be rationalised as being for the greater good of all of humanity, and every step you take has to be evaluated in the light of whether it brings you closer to that goal. This way of thinking is reinforced at every turn, from the superhero movies you watch at age 6 and ads about environmentalism that bombard you on public transport to admissions essays, research papers (especially in politically important topics such as AI) and grant applications.

EA, of course, is the culmination of this, attained by actually taking real steps to follow through on your declared beliefs, making you something like the universalist counterpart to the religious weirdo who actually concludes that screaming and pointing sharp objects at people to save them from hellfire is well worth it; but wokeness, too, is premised on "there should be a reasonable way to absolve myself from any responsibility for the plight of $minority forever" being off the table.

Eh, I don't think you get side-eyed for wanting to be able provide for you and yours, but then, it's probably only really laudable if you're not already of means.

(Granted, what I am describing is the underdog story, and Americans probably love that even more than universalism.)

As with command economies, logistics and intelligence tend to be a problem with such universalism. One's knowledge of and ability to influence a situation do diminish the further it is from you, for space and time are yet real obstacles. So if you contribute one eight-billionth of an improvement to all eight billion people, you can be far less sure that you're having an impact - or if you are, even the sign of the impact - compared to what you could do and know if you were keeping your efforts and sights focused nearby.

Like many things, it's a tradeoff between efficiency/efficacy and security: generally, (much) more total good can be done through people looking after themselves, but on the other hand, that will produce more conflicts and do less to look after the most vulnerable. So how can we balance that? Well, since it's a tradeoff, probably not by wholly disregarding either side of the equation, no matter how more fashionable the other side may be. (That's still not a specific plan, though, but I don't have any particular insights beyond that right now.)