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Notes -
Law professors at stanford are 'the upper-class equivalent of a welfare leech'?
"Surely we can all agree - we don't have THAT much responsibility to the environment, right? Otherwise we'd have to stop using lead paint, leaded gasoline, maybe stop dumping oil into rivers - and, wow, what a mess that'd be."
What even is this argument? Surely if going to india and 'saving lives at 100/pop' (givewell estimates it at $5k) isn't worth doing, it is so because of ... some aspect of those lives or what saving them entails, and not because we're not already doing it.
The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).
EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.
And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.
Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1
... okay, and the revealed preference of conservatives and reactionaries is that they love porn. this doesn't tell us that porn is good the interesting claim isn't "do most normal people do X", because ... they're normal people, many just imitate what their friends or family or media does, some come up with their own ideas which aren't any better, the interesting claim is "is X worth doing". If the amount of value something has is determined solely by how much other people, at the present moment, value it - i guess handwashing in hospitals was valueless until semmelweis.
Those publications aren't inspiring at a glance, but they're probably better philosophy than the 75th percentile philosophy paper. And she spent a lot of time teaching law too (apparently they both stopped teaching after FTX) - which isn't particularly parasitic. I'm not gonna look too deeply into this, but even if she has much more prestige than she should for a law school teacher, that's hardly welfare leech
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