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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.

EA is closer to common Christianity in terms of 'what you need to give'. It has been common for quite some time for this to be just 'give 10% of what you earn'. This helps avoid over-pressuring people into giving more and more.

Though, you are encouraged to become a preacher or spend more time researching the bible in Christian churches, it isn't too overpowering. EA has some similar things, where they encourage people to take jobs/research-positions/etc that are useful for various EA affiliated charities/companies/whatever.

wokeism, however, has the issue of not really having a centralized structure as far as I know (EA is more centralized than Christian churches, but Christianity is pockets of roughly centralized churches). This means that there's less well-defined areas that you can jump in on, as well as having less authoritative sources (or locally authoritative, like for churches) of 'what is useful' or 'what needs to be done'. I think this also plays into them being more pressuring about individual action, there's not really as many nice places to say 'this person gets to work on handling the issue'. Christianity has preachers which handle the church, confessions, and any inter-person conflicts. EA is a more spread out organization than a Christian church, but you can point at some group of people in like 80000 hours and say 'these people are focused on the issue of figuring out important world problems' (https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/). They're relatively more authoritative. Wokeism surely has people who are authorities/celebrities/whatever, but from my outside perspective, they seem to have less structure.

I'd also be interested in exploring how both EA and wokeism relate to utilitarianism.

Wokeism is closer to Christianity in terms of moral behavior. There are actions which are treated as in-of-themselves good/bad, and also relatively sacred/powerful/something (like how people typically think comparing human lives to dollars is weird/bad) so that they overpower other norms. Christianity has this with things like (perceived-)satanism (which makes sense from within that belief structure) - but which they don't really have the power nowadays to go against any perceived instances, but imagine the noise made about Harry Potter a couple decades ago - and unborn children (as a political example that still exists now).

(Obviously other religions do similar and different things, but Christianity is what I'm most familiar with where I live)


I think EA could become a movement like wokeism, but I also think it is more likely that becomes a social movement that is more tame/socially-reasonable. Most social movements don't become like wokeism (probably?), though there might be a far higher chance in the current time due to social media than there ever was in the past. EA also benefits compared to other movements, with its relative centralization and quality standards.