This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Scott Alexander has recently argued in favor of Effective Altruism after the new scandal of effective altruists trying to oust Sam Altman from Open A.I.
His argument starts by focusing about how different factions attack EA from different perspectives that are contradictory. That those on the right call them woke and those on the left call them fascists and white supremacist. The point seems to be implying that they are going to be attacked anyway by all sides no matter what, so we shouldn't take seriously such criticisms. Then he mostly focuses on an estimated 200,000 lives saved in the developing world.
My problem with this is that it obscures something that isn't a mystery. Which is that EA's politics align much more with the Democratic establishment than with the right and there isn't any substantial confrontation of what that means.
The biggest donor of Effective Altruism according to my short research and claims I found in the effective altruism forum from 2022 where he participated in such discussion is Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz.
Asana, his company contributed 45 million in the 2020 election and he also had an important contribution in millions in the future forwards pac
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/joe-biden/contributors?id=N00001669 https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/pro-biden-super-pac-darkmon/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html https://bluetent.us/articles/campaigns-elections/dustin-moskovitz-cari-tuna-democratic-donor-2020/
If one looks at open philanthropy or the EA forum and searches for controversial cultural issues there can be sometimes a small dissent but they follow the liberal party line for the most part.
Lets look at open philanthropy, an EA organization and Dustin Moskovitz organization. Scott certainly wants to give credit to EA and open philanthropy for promoting YIMBY.
However this organization has also funded decriminalization policies and pro migration policies.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/criminal-justice-reform/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/immigration-policy/
I wonder if the well funded caravans of migrants we see in some areas of the world have to some extend to do with funding related to EA.
Recently there has been a mini EA scandal where one individual expressed HBD views in the past but this was made a thing and he was condemned by many in the movement, but not entirely unanimously. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology
Basically, this individual wrote an email 26 years ago that used naughty language to make the point that you should use less offensive language when arguing for race realism.
Then he apologized due to pressure and argued:
Then there is Open A.I. and Chat GPT and effective altruists have been influential in Open A.I. Chat GPT has liberal bias. https://www.foxnews.com/media/chatgpt-faces-mounting-accusations-woke-liberal-bias
Another thing to observe are the demographics of effective altruists.
They are only 0.9% right wing and 2.5% center right. With majority being of the left with 40% center left and 32% identifying as left. But that is identification. Just like Biden could be identified by some as center left while by others, including myself as far left. They are also 46% Vegans. 85.9% are Atheists.
https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/eas2019-community-demographics-characteristics
I haven't encountered any group with such small representation of right wingers that actually is fair when promoting a political agenda towards either the right wing, or groups that are more seen related to the right. However, effective altruists are much more concerned about the lack of sufficient racial and ethnic diversity than ideological diversity when you search their forum.
Climate change and veganism are two issues that could well lead to hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions. Considering the demographics of EA and the fact that Peter Singer is an important figure in it and helped coin the term, I do wonder if on that issue the EA influence would be for them to impose on us policies. When dealing with the moral framing of animal liberation movement activist like Singer we see a moral urgency. Like with all identity movements, to elevate one group such as animals you end up reducing the position of another group, such as humans. Or those who aren't vegans.
The issue is that these networks that are reinforced based on EA might already have as part of their agenda to promote their political agenda.. And these networks that developed in part due to EA and put like minded ideologues together to organize can also expand even more to promote their political agenda outside the EA banner.
It does seem that at least a few of the people involved with effective altruism think that it fell victim to its coastal college demographics. https://www.fromthenew.world/p/what-the-hell-happened-to-effective
My other conclusion related to the open A.I. incident as well is that the idea of these people that they are those who will put humanity first will lead to them ousting others and attempt to grab more power in the future too. When they do so, will they ever abandon it?
Scott Alexander himself argued that putting humanity first is the priority and he had some faith on them thinking rationally when they tried to oust Sam Altman, even though he invited them inside. He might not agree with their action necessarily but he sympathizes with the motive. https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1726132072031641853#m
That this action is dishonorable matters because like with Sam Bankman Fried it continues the pattern of important ethical issues being pushed aside under the idea that effective altruists know best.
This means that Sam Altman won't be the first. It also means that we got a movement very susceptible to the same problems of authoritarian far left movements in general of extreme self confidence to their own vision and will to power. This inevitably in addition to the whole issue of hell paved with good intentions encourages the power hungry to be part of it as well.
It does seem there is an important side to it which is about people donating in more unobjectionable terms but in general effective altruism it isn't separate from a political agenda that fits with a political tribe. That should be judged on its own merits without the 200,000 saved in developing world being accepted as an adequate answer for policies that affect the developed world. The short version of all this is that if you got a problem with leftist/far leftist NGOs, you should consider the effective altruism movement and some of its key players to be contributing in the same direction.
One thing that's always bugged my about progressivism and especially EA is that despite all their claims of being empathetic and humanistic they completely ignore the human. They are ironically the paperclip maximizers of philanthropy.
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers? Someone that cares about humanity would want to ask these questions. A paperclip maximizer that discounts a persons humanity entirely and just sees each life as some widget to maximize the number of would not.
The purpose of empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand their feelings. Except, to do that you have to have some level of understanding of how they function, some mental model of their mind. Else you are simply projecting. It's easy to just imagine what you'd feel like if you were in Palestine or Israel etc. Except that isn't empathy. Even just listening to what a person says isn't truly empathy. If I were an alcoholic and I said I wanted a drink, to someone that has no knowledge of me it might seem a nice thing to do, but clearly it would not be. I'm not sure what it even means to have empathy for someone you don't know. I'm not sure it's possible. What is it really that you are feeling? Do you believe people are all the same, with the same wants? same needs? some values? It's such a dim view of people and of the world.
I suppose some people do, "We're all human," is something you'll hear espoused by this ideology, but that is literally the least you can have in common with another person. Trying to apply it to any other human interaction is instantly ridiculous. You wouldn't apply that logic anywhere in life, you don't hire someone just because they're human, you don't befriend someone, care about someone, hate someone. It's basically an open admission that you have nothing convincing to say. Even if someone was forced to compliment their worst enemy they'd manage to ad lib something more convincing than, "he's human."
Anyone that has had relationships with other humans, so basically everyone, knows how complicated it is to actually know someone. You can have spent years living with a partner and still be completely caught off guard when your mental model goes awry and your attempt at empathy then completely falls flat. The idea that some ideological group is more moral or more caring because of the sheer number of lives they've saved completely discredits and belittles one of the pillars of being human, getting to know each other, socializing, learning friend and foe. It discounts their humanity itself, that it's even necessary to get to know or to understand someone before you can help them. Your wants and needs don't matter, you are a widget, you need x calories, y oxygen, to continue existing and I will supply these needs, such altruism, wow.
Looking around at social media and world events I can't help but wonder if this is some major glitch with human psychology in the digital age. Too many strangers, too much opportunity for, "selflessness." So many people caught up in an empty and self serving empathy that has no imagination for others. Meanwhile people that have normal empathy are dismissed because they aren't as "selfless" as the newer movements. Spending time with and focusing on people that share your values isn't altruistic because if they share your values than you are less selfless than the progressive who cares about the stranger. (Not to mention the bay area tech bro that managed to save 0.0345 persons per dollar spent, blowing away the nearest tech bro competitor who only saved 0.0321)
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group. If you really want to help others you need to understand them, that means spending time with others, not with concepts. If you're lucky you might eventually find a few people that you understand well enough that more often than not your actions are positive and beneficial to them. Congratulations you have now invented the family and traditional community.
I fail to see how supplying basic needs is worse than leaving someone to die.
Is that not the definition of completely ignoring the human?
Imagine a country where the people have overexploited their environment, and there are now more people living there than the country's ecological base can support. Once they see all the starving children, famous westerners come in and throw big rock concerts to raise funds to ease their pain, and they succeed - the food gets distributed and the people stop starving. They then have children, and the population becomes even more unsustainable, which creates an even more dramatic famine 10 years later.
Is feeding those starving people the correct thing to do when enabling their population to increase more is just going to make the problem worse in the future? You have a choice between a bunch of people starving to death, or twice that many people starving to death a generation from now. Which choice is more humane?
I will consider that thought experiment to be isomorphic to this one:
Imagine you're a doctor who has a patient about to die young before having kids.
Why save them? After all, they're going to die anyway, and more importantly, they'll have kids, who are also going to die, young or old.
So it's a choice between having one person die now, versus two people die in the future.
What I can only hope is obvious is that most people value life, especially a quality life, and consider it worth extending, even if the terminal prognosis for everyone is fatal, even if they're only going to reproduce and have more people who have a bounded lifespan. Let's leave aside that I expect lifespans to become unbounded shortly, it's not relevant when we haven't solved Heat Death.
Presumably, by revealed preferences, these people you discuss consider their lives worth living, and the reason they're about to die is because they have no choice in the matter. Further, so too will their offspring,
More importantly, it buys time for more durable solutions.
Since this line of thinking would have consigned all previously starving populations in history to a shared grave with Malthus, I'm not paying it any heed.
HOLD IT! You've committed a rhetorical sleight of hand here - it isn't the fact that people die at all that's the problem. We're talking about starving to death, which is a humiliating, painful and degrading way to die. "Death" and "Death by starvation" are different things and not really equivalent. But that's just a minor problem - you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the argument being made here, because your isomorphism is false.
Have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? The salient quality of this "thought experiment" (if you're paying attention this isn't a hypothetical but real world history) is that the ability of the environment to support life is part of the equation. You have a choice between supercharging a given population, taking them beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, or letting some portion of the population starve/die. When you pick the first option the commons gets destroyed, and the ecosystems that can support a larger community get damaged (the natural equivalent to the seed corn being eaten). When you actually take the specifics of the scenario into account, you're advocating for the destruction of the environment and mass starvation as opposed to letting a population return to a level that's sustainable in the long term. I don't think that's actually a position that you'd support - though I may be wrong.
I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, or Malthusian population limits.
Neither applies here.
For one, we're not Malthusian, given that there is food to feed them with. If every locale was restricted to having to feed itself, goodbye Singapore I guess?
Secondly, the behavior they're engaging in, namely having more kids or mouths than they can feed, such that they end up being naturally culled, is one that just about every population in history has been guilty of.
When I think "population sustainable in the long term", I'm contemplating Dyson Swarms and the Heat Death of the Universe. It has little relevance to the denizens of Sub-Saharan Africa, no matter how dysfunctional it might be right now.
And I don't even like them, I happen to think that the problems that they suffer from can be fixed, be it immediate calorific concerns, or the poor quality of human capital, be it by genetic engineering or otherwise. Hence why I'd rather they'd not starve to death, at least not when it's random philanthropic movements footing the bill for feeding them.
What exactly do you envision when I propose a doctor "who has a patient about to die young before having kids"?
Do you think the people who die at that age are choosing a particularly dignified way to go? Severe appendicitis? A road traffic accident? Bullet to the gut?
I'll tell you that I'd certainly find shitting my guts out in front of a hundred strangers to be "humiliating" if nothing else.
So I think my isomorphism works just fine, since we're talking a cause of death that can be relatively cheaply mitigated, ensuring a longer life and time to churn out the next generation.
Yes, they very explicitly do! I'm the person who came up with this "hypothetical" and I can very flatly state that it is not taking place in a science-fiction universe with AGI and dyson spheres. Instead, it takes place in the real world - human beings need to eat, and that food has to come from somewhere. You don't get to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Overfarming can damage environments, and if you overfish a lake to the point that the fish can't recover, you've permanently reduced the population your environment can support.
The world has a certain amount of overhead - but not an infinite amount. You're proposing that we spend the entirety of the world's excess on feeding more and more Ethiopians, without any care for the consequences of doing so. Why is it worth making sure that Ethiopia has more Ethiopians than it can comfortably support? Remember that we're pushing their population above the carrying capacity of their local environment - they are going to become a permanent drain on global resources and food, and the problem is going to immediately become much worse (and the total number of Ethiopians lower) the moment that access gets cut off. What happens when there's a crop failure somewhere else in the world, or a different plague/famine/war that leaves other nations reliant on charity as well?
Do you walk into conversations about cars and talk about how discussing fuel economy is useless because we're going to have spaceships soon? If you want to talk about cool sci-fi novels, that's great! I mean, I like talking about them too - but a conversation about the hard ecological limits to human existence in the present isn't the place.
Either they starve to death now, or you have an even larger famine in the future with even more people starving to death, and causing further damage to the environment to boot. "We feed them now, and then when this problem returns in the future I'll just plug in my Mr Fusion and 3d print an infinite supply of burgers for all the starving people" isn't an option that's on the table! You're advocating for more suffering and a lower total population over time due to ecological destruction.
The last time something like this happened in my social circle, it was cancer. If I was going to die at a young age, I would greatly prefer the last moments that they went through as opposed to starving to death with the rest of my family in Africa as I watch them eat the seed corn that could have helped a smaller family survive and thrive.
Well you can see I don't find myself beholden to your strict interpretation of the hypothetical.
And leaving aside futuristic things like Dyson Spheres, we're thankfully living in the !science fiction setting where we had the Green Revolution and have industrialized agriculture. There is no shortage of cheap calories on a global level.
Sure. All well and good. But there are plenty of billions on the table yet, even trillions or quadrillions just on Earth if it was truly optimized as an ecumenopolis. Fuck the environment as far as I'm concerned. If it has to give so we can have more humans around, all the worse for it.
Once again, I stress that humans have existed in Malthusian conditions for most of history, and only recently broken out of it, even if that is "temporary" compared to the limits of exponential population growth. I see no reason to think that hypothetical carrying capacity will be breached before it keeps getting raised, as has been the case for about a century or so, and for a good while to go.
Does maybe a few hundred million extra Africans in a century change much? A billion or two? Not really, and I don't expect the conditions that make them be non-self-sufficient in the same manner as most other nations to cease before they balloon and outnumber all of us.
What on Earth gave you that impression?
I never advocated for the largesse of the globe heading to them. At most, to the extent that Effective Utilitarians are choosing to help feed them, I don't object to them using their funds in that manner.
They get shafted, and I don't care. At that point the EAs may well decide that they're not the cheapest population to prioritize, and everyone else gets a handout. Or more likely, the EAs don't have money to spare at all.
Fuel economy concerns matter a great deal less when we can reasonably expect energy to get much cheaper. I support it to the extent it pays for itself, and pricing in externalities.
As for the "ecological limits", they're likely in the tens of billions with minimal change to the condition of the average human and not much in the way of major change in terms of agricultural technologies. Given that I think those are inevitable, trillions or billions.
We can worry about it when we get there, or improvements stall before population growth does.
Why not? I invite you to show me we're near nominal capacity with even current agriculture. We are clearly not optimizing for calories over all else, as we would if we had reason to.
I have seen a great more youthful deaths from cancer than you have. As would be expected, I work in an Oncology ward.
Let me tell you that the modal passage is not something I'd call dignified.
In other words, you're arguing with a position I don't hold, and I think you utterly underestimate the nominal carrying capacity of this globe without even going into non-existent technologies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link