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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44963 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.

I think there is one part of the article that was ascribed as a quote by MacAskill, which to me is key component of the flaw of progressivism:

“Imagine what future people would think, looking back at us debating such questions. They would see some of us arguing that future people don’t matter. But they look down at their hands; they look around at their lives. What is different?”

This to me is very similar argument that woke movement and other progressive movements employ: you are a dinosaur, future generations will view you as aberration because you cannot oppose inevitable forces of history. In fact this is a very basis of many Hegelian philosophies - including Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and later Western Marxist strains. The moral action will be evaluated only backwards from some future idealized man: be it New Socialist Man, or some future immortal transhuman or whatnot. This MAN is the ultimate judge of morality, but we do not know what he will think. So the next best thing is to help creating him, we need to "do the work" to move dialectic process one notch further ushering this abundant future. And what sucks is that we do not even know what exactly to do to usher this utopia, you have to believe in the process of ushering it. You need to do the work and commitment, sublime yourself in the process and if what you come up with fails it only means you need to try harder next time. The utopia is all-important and even if uncounted billions perish in the process, it will all be worthwhile in the end if you save uncounted trillions and quadrillions.

And it makes sense even for rationalists and especially Yudkowsky given that he thinks so much about Roko's basilisk. Let's lay foundations: there will be superhuman AI in the future, the only question is what AI will be out there. Rationalists want to usher a "good" AI basilisk, that will share their values - any other AI basilisk will sentence them to hell. This is all or nothing proposition, which is a very similar theme to those of Critical Theorists or Woke Crowd. Either our progressivism succeeds in ushering utopia, or fascists/racists/patriarchy or any number of bad acronyms will prevail and rule.

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