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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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This might provoke a reaction here: Effective altruism is the new woke

Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes.

I do think it could be worthwhile to have a discussion about the parallels between EA and wokeism, but unfortunately the author's actual comparison of the two is rather sparse, focusing on just this one methodological point about how they both allegedly amplify our moral impulses beyond their natural scope. She also runs the risk of conflating longtermism with EA more broadly.

To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day. A nice concrete goal to strive for, and an actionable plan on how to achieve it, so that personal ethical deliberation is minimized - that's a very comforting sort of structure to devote yourself to.

I'd also be interested in exploring how both EA and wokeism relate to utilitarianism. In the case of EA the relation is pretty obvious, with wokeism it's less clear, but there does seem to be something utilitarian about the woke worldview, in the sense that personal comfort (or the personal comfort of the oppressed) will always win out over fidelity to abstract values like freedom and authenticity.

To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day

This dilutes religion into "a system that asks you to be altruistic". Is virtue ethics a religion because it asks you to sacrifice for virtue (e.g. you're not allowed to cheat on your SAT)? If you want to criticize EA for suckering people into being selfless, you've gotta extend that umbrella quite a bit! Unfortunately "EA and wokeism are really similar" looks a lot less profound when you say "and so is Kantism and Christianity and..."

I think you argue that EA/Wokeism demand a level of selflessness that makes them an outlier, but this isn't really true -- Jesus literally asks you to give up all your belongings. You might say the difference is that EA/woke people actually follow that directive to a level that is unhealthy... but then, there are plenty of other people who do the same -- where's your critique of the nuns who spend their entire lives serving the church? Or the Buddhist monks who live only off of whatever meager food is donated to them? Both are practicing their own kind of virtue at a heavy personal cost.

My main problem with Wokeism is that it really struggles to answer whether it actually delivers what it promises to. A Buddhist monk, a nun, and an EA (as far as I know) have a good sense of what they're getting into and what they'll get from it. In contrast, the effectiveness of woke policies on actually improving the wellbeing of the disadvantaged (what its adherents actually want) runs the entire gauntlet from effective to counter productive, while cultivating a culture that has no qualms about deliberately misrepresenting the empirics.

(And yes, "AI safety" arguably runs into similar problems, but (1) people in EA are very aware of this and (2) most EA is not AI safety (note that you specifically critique malaria nets, which are very transparent about "what you get")).

My main problem with Wokeism is that it really struggles to answer whether it actually delivers what it promises to. A Buddhist monk, a nun, and an EA (as far as I know) have a good sense of what they're getting into and what they'll get from it. In contrast, the effectiveness of woke policies on actually improving the wellbeing of the disadvantaged (what its adherents actually want) runs the entire gauntlet from effective to counter productive, while cultivating a culture that has no qualms about deliberately misrepresenting the empirics.

This is the big difference between the two, in my mind. More specifically, I think Wokism (Neo-Progressivism) is a culture-focused, externalizing memeset, where EA is a highly materialist, internalizing memeset. (And I think I'm being accurate in the former...as someone who has internalized NP ideas in the past, I've been told a lot that you're not actually supposed to do that. You're not supposed to actually self-deconstruct).

If you want to get into religion, I think there are versions of religion that run that particular gamut. There are culture-focused externalizing types and materialist focused internalizing types.

I am partisan in that I think the latter, materialist route is the only thing sustainable, but I can steelman the culturalist approach, in that it's focused on politics and structures and how to change them. I just don't think it'll be successful, because human nature will twist it for personal gain.

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