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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.

In this hypothetical you'd be hooked up with a great job by the Motte Cartel.

Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.

Agreed, but at a certain point this sort of decision becomes much more complicated than naive QALY work imo. There's a fundamental shift in ethics when you go from [doing what you can inside the system] to [working outside the system] to [designing the system yourself and breaking other systems]. Once you're not just buying bednets but also taking responsibility for determining a nation's future, the correct course of action becomes far harder to calculate. I certainly wouldn't trust an organization called "Effective Altruism" to wage war based on their ideals. Whatever super-organization creates Dyson Spheres would probably find it as morally justified to invade us for "backwards" beliefs as we find it justified to invade NK for humanitarian reasons.