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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Ok I swear I don't just get up every morning and ask, "How can I be schizo today?"

But in one day I saw the following two things:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1731747916568727610

Among the masses of migrants flowing across the southern border each day, a whole line of Chinese nationals, military aged men, automatically standing at "parade rest" as one reply pointed out.

And this:

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1731808064108372245

Senator Dick Durbin making a speech in favor of allowing illegal immigrants into the military.

My schizo sense is tingling and saying that Nefarious Forces are Intentionally using the Power of Money to plan Bad Things for America.

Or, since this space has norms in favor of speaking plainly and against Darkly Hinting, let me put it more directly:

Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?

Less Of This, Please. There are plenty of 500k follower twitter accounts that react with horror to tweets with out of context clips and screenshots of news headlines, I know where to get it if I want it, and I don't want it here.

Ok I swear I don't just get up every morning and ask, "How can I be schizo today?"

It's funny how all sorts of "conspiracy theorists" and people with weird ideas are halfway self-conscious of the fact they're like that, and make jokes about it. You should either genuinely believe your ideas, deeply investigate them, debate them - or consider what 'schizo' ideas you had five or ten years ago and how many of them have held up, and admit you're very wrong.

Also, whatever standard approves of this post but not posts about perfectly reasonable topics that just don't have enough context isn't serving its purpose.

It's funny how all sorts of "conspiracy theorists" and people with weird ideas are halfway self-conscious of the fact they're like that, and make jokes about it.

It's because the term "conspiracy theorist" is used as an insult rather than a rational argument, if you endorse it, you take away it's power. If you say "yes, I am a conspiracy theorist, here is a conspiracy theory I believe in, and here is the evidence - come at me!" all sneering is suddenly reduced to quiet whimpering to the effect of "that doesn't count as a conspiracy, that's just a bunch of people coordinating to achieve a common goal".

consider what 'schizo' ideas you had five or ten years ago and how many of them have held up, and admit you're very wrong.

Hanlon's Razor, the bottom-up view of society. Very schizo ideas I was very wrong about, this is why I'm a conspiracy theorist.

Eh. There's a real class of very bad ideas like the QAnon cinematic universe, or things like 'the government has secret spies all over the place. I have a friend who used to be one of them, he tells me about the reptilians and their spiritual plans for humanity's enslavement. I'm not sure I believe it but apparently the elites conspire with them, they took out JFK, they took out the people on the Clinton kill list..." (those are all real things I've actually been told by people who were being genuine, not hyperbole). I think OP is very much coming from the mindset that generates that.

The goverment having secret spies all over the place, especially in important organizations like twitter, is actually plausible and on some level true. There are agents of the goverment promoting censorship and it is hard to ascertain where certain of the biggest NGOs, private organizations, intelligence services, and parts of the bureaucracy like FBI begin and end.

In general, things that are true, or plausible are called conspiracy theories all of the time.

The mechanism of this can be seen with the Nordstream attack. The theory that the Russians did it was not called a conspiracy theory all that commonly, but the theory that America did it was called a conspiracy theory. Even though the later is much more likely than the first.

Another issue is that we have exaggerations being treated as a reason to not take serious things that are much more plausible. For example is the WEF running everything? No. Do they promote certain agendas and try to put their own people in positions of power? Out of their own words.

So yeah, there are true conspiracies, plausible ones and some more kooky claims. And there isn't a shared wise humanity that will accept the validly of all that belong in the true or plausible categories. Plenty of people would dismiss them if they go against the establishment.

There is also a conspiracy to promote ridiculous conspiracies and focus on them. But such tactics can be taken by fewer people as well who are inclined to do so. Is there a conspiracy to do so? Well, if there are people who work for an organization who promotes these claims, yes it will count as such.

Cass R. Sunstein and Andrian Vermule argued that the best way to combat conspiracies promoted by supposed extremists was to flood those spaces with ridiculous conspiracies. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/119/

For example, instead of talking about Epstein who according to an Ex Mossad agent he was part of Mossad, promote, or focus upon reptilians, q-anon or aliens. https://7news.com.au/the-morning-show/jeffrey-epstein-was-a-mossad-spy-says-investigative-journalist-dylan-howard-c-595812

There are those who promote these theories, those who bite into the bait, and then those who overly focus on them and dismiss more legitimate issues. And once this tactic has started working as a result we will also observe people who do the second on their own and others who dismiss legitimate issues on their own, thinking that they are promoting what is true in accordance to their belief, rather due to some other motivation. We will also see people booing the concept also because they do side and support American elites for example and due to opposing scrutiny.

No, there is a thing that 'conspiracy theory' materially refers to and they are extremely wrong. There are people in 2018 who believed that secret numbers in Trump's tweets are hints about how he's still the real president and fighting a shadow war against the soros deep state. "Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?" is recognizably one of those, in a way that "ukraine did nordstream" is not. I agree there are gradations, but there's clearly a huge gap between the two. Just because some NYT journalists called things you agree with conspiracy theories doesn't mean the concept isn't useful. Your reply is pure 'arguments as soldiers' - kooky conspiracy theories are bad, therefore they must be generated by the other side to hide the REAL truth! Come on.

Or, "excuse me, they're called 'conspiracy facts' now". Or of course the comic about "How to talk to your friends who believe conspiracy theories": "Hey bro, you were right about everything, I'm sorry".

Often I mention Snowden or one of the other NSA "conspiracy theories" which turned out to be true.

It's funny how all sorts of "conspiracy theorists" and people with weird ideas are halfway self-conscious of the fact they're like that, and make jokes about it. You should either genuinely believe your ideas, deeply investigate them, debate them - or consider what 'schizo' ideas you had five or ten years ago and how many of them have held up, and admit you're very wrong.

Underestimated argument. Related tweet

The principle is simple enough: most gamblers day traders lose money, those who don’t almost all just get lucky, and updating your priors because a tiny proportion of gambles pay off is stupid. Anyone who actually knows Jones/Ike tier conspiracy theorists in real life knows their hitrate is sub 1% and being the most obsequious normie who believes every word in the New York Times would make you right vastly more of the time than they are. If you believe everything, which they do, you will eventually be right about a few things. This challenges no conventional principle or authority.

The NYT and the American establishment lie and trying to manipulate people so commonly that being reasonably suspicious and willing to believe plausible conspiracy theories makes you have a much more accurate version of the world.

It isn't gambling to not trust them but it is gambling to trust them. With bad odds. Going full Alex Jones means you are going to doubt the NYT when they peddle some of their BS but also buy into some of Alex Jones BS. In 2002 for example, if you listened to Alex Jones, he argued this:

To Jones, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were part of a larger move to eliminate civil rights and control the populations, including Americans, more effectively. The possibility of war in Iraq, to Jones, is part of the attempt by what he calls the New World Order to dominate the world.

“The government needed a crisis to convince the people willingly to give up their liberty in exchange for safety,” Jones writes in an introduction to his latest, two-hour film, “The Road to Tyranny.” https://www.mcall.com/2002/12/20/voices-from-outside-the-mainstream-weigh-in-on-iraq-war-threat/

Which would suggest against the Iraq War, neocon domination and authoritarian measures like the patriot act. Which isn't insane, but an example of Jones leading people in this instance to a more reasonable place than the establishment.

Having known people who believe in ghosts and aliens, they tend to be less dangerous for the world than those made to follow fanatically the new current thing. Whether it is war related, or a different agenda.

Did you read the post you were replying to? The idea is conspiracy theorists are wrong almost all of the time, and sometimes right simply because they copy the things others are saying and make them more extreme. And then, after the fact, their fans select specific things they said that aged well to declare them accurate. And you respond by ... selecting a specific thing Jones said 20 years ago and arguing for his accuracy.

This is a gross misrepresentation of my post, and you especially shouldn't be accusing others of not reading the posts they reply towards when you do that.

I disagreed with the above post of course. The point is that NYT and the establishment gets a lot of important things wrong and doubting them and buying into reasonable claims that are seen as conspiratorial would make you have more correct view of the world. That is because the establishment lies in favor of its agendas.

Whether "great replacement isn't happening", race, crime, war (iraq war the most notorious, even back in Vietnam with Torkin incident), or really partisan fake news (see Russiagate) are just some examples of categories you will find plenty of lies.

That even people like Alex Jones can get important things correct. The Iraq war and the rise of authoritarianism in response to war on terror are not insignificant issues. They are very important.

To think that this is an arguement for Jones being accurate in general, or me being a fanboy of his, when I said that he peddles BS too, is clearly inaccurate. Another short arguement was that in important ways some of the kooky nonsense can be less harmful than believing fanatically in current thing propaganda and doubting that instead.

You promoted in the past the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory for example, and it was a case of you getting it wrong since it is at worst a plausible theory. A lot of irrationality of our times is on irrational extreme dismisal of valid issues.

If you want to be better than even the Alex Jones of the world, you ought to be more humble about reality and stop painting things that reflect negatively on the American elite as false by default and part of conspiracy theories. Suspicious right wingers have been for the most part proven more correct for their suspicions than those booing them over the years.

And even those who get things wrong too, but also get things correct in an important way the sentiment of questioning power is more valuable than not questioning it, so I wouldn't be too condemning. And my problem would be more that by including the more indefensible claims, they erode the value of things that are true in their arguments. We don't live in an age of overt paranoia against elites but in an age of lack of sufficient accountability.

Your analogy doesn't work. If conspiracy theorists were treated like day traders, the NYT would not try to imply belief in Jones' theory is cause for immediate loss of credibility, they'd imply it's unlikely, but might end up being true, because you never know.

What you're doing is like acting it was no big deal that one UFO nut was 100% proved to be correct about extra-terrestrial contact, because all the other UFO nuts before him were wrong.

I don't understand why you think i'm arguing that, like, the lab leak is fake because Qanon people are crazy. I'm not saying any thing about the lab leak or similar. I'm saying that OP's claim about chinese soldier immigrant coups is Q-anon tier.

No, that’s stupid.

Maybe don’t put too much faith in LibsOfTikTok? Or Twitter in general. It’s optimizing for shock, not a realistic model of the world. There are better China hawks and immigration skeptics out there.

I feel like military service for citizenship isn’t a bad trade at all. Presumably the military is a strong enough insinuation to integrate all types of people. Additionally, someone willing to spend years in the military is likely someone we would want to keep in the country.

When a foreigner is required to serve in the military in order to secure citizenship, are they going to follow the constitution of the country that they're not a citizen of, or are they going to do what they're commanded to do?

I think a poor kid from Central America will probably do the same as a poor kid from Texas who is joining to get free college.

There is one generation between the two groups.

Those two people are not fungible.

Why not? Regardless of national origin, army grunts tend to just do what they get told to do. That's what gets drilled into them relentlessly.

My father was once sent to pacify striking workers. While he was from out of town, most of his unit was not. It didn't result in anything that you'd read in the papers / history books about, but let's just say the powers that be did not make that particular mistake again.

There are limits to what grunts will do to their neighbors, and that's how you should want it, if you want to your government to maintain values beyond "do what I tell you".

There are also limits to what foreign grunts will do, but these are more observable in doing things for their neighbors rather than to them.

Depends on what leverage the one who commands them has. I assume the American officers will be doing the commanding as well, and they're close while the alleged Chinese handlers are far away. Perhaps if they all have their families hostage in China it could work.

I am having trouble finding a citation, but my understanding is that while non-citizens can serve in the US military (and choose to become naturalized after, generally, a year of service), they are generally not eligible for a security clearance, and are limited to enlisted (non-officer) roles that aren't particularly sensitive. I don't know if that changes after naturalization.

After naturalization they may or may not be eligible for a clearance based on their specific circumstances, but they aren’t ineligible outright.

Serving in the military is pretty much the closest that a person can come to making themselves the tool of the country's government, so citizenship contingent on military service makes it so that people who are government supporters are more likely to become citizens than people who are not government supporters. To me such a system of incentives seems to be likely to push the country closer to authoritarian statism.

Indeed, it just occurred to me that that would be the logical thing to do for a military that has just acquired a state.

The first problem would come with other laws on the books. Meaning that one citizen can bring whole families along. Wife, kids, parents grandparents etc. this makes one successful crossing into potentially 15 visas etc. and it doesn’t allow for discretion as I understand it, so not only mustwe accept all of these visa requests, but we cannot vet those people coming.

The second problem is that it turns the military into a jobs program. Yes the military can probably integrate people into mainstream society. But in the meantime, you’re dealing with all kinds of problems that might well make it much more difficult to fulfill the main purpose of the army— fighting in wars. This could come in the form of language problems (it generally takes years for a person to become competent enough to use a foreign language as the primary means of communication) cultural issues (diet restrictions, cleanliness issues, taboos) and general attitudes towards authority. A small number of immigrants can probably integrate, but if 15% of your military isn’t able to speak English, doesn’t have the same culture as the rest of the units, and has discipline issues, that’s going to hurt your ability to fight.

The third issue is loyalty. What’s necessary is crossing the border and joining the military. There’s not really much vetting here, especially if the person uses a false name. This potentially lets foreign agents spy on us (we’d teach them how we teach our soldiers), some of our tactics, how our weapons work, and so on. This is all invaluable to anyone worried that the Americans want to go to war with them. Of course the equipment is valuable and a soldier might sell it. Or an enterprising group might try to get enough of their people in the military to make them less effective. We’ve talked about trying to root out the Sinhala gangs that run fentanyl in Mexico. If the grunt units are full of gang members, that’s going to be a problem.

Sinhala gangs that run fentanyl in Mexico

I didn’t realize the Sri Lankan mafia had such a global presence! Do their sworn enemies hail from the state of Tamil-ipas?

It was auto corrected. But dang, I might have to tell that story…

The federal government considers "legacy Americans" or however you want phrase the European stock of this country from the 1700's until the floodgates were thrown open in the 1960s to be the greatest threat to whatever America is supposed to be now. I can't view allowing illegal immigrants into the military as anything other than importing foreigners to oppress the natives. I don't think China needs to bribe American politicians at all, since they have common cause against me and my children.

Your fellow original-European-stock Americans overwhelmingly vote for politicians who are either in favor of more non-European immigration or at most only care a little bit about it but do not actually try very hard to do anything about it when in office.

It is your own people who are mainly responsible for what is happening.

Did they? Or is it just not their top priority? Affirmative action is one of the most unpopular policies almost ever. It's lost every democratic vote it's ever been put to. And yet, politicians who supported it kept getting elected for decades. Immigration is much the same.

Voters in California voted for Proposition 187 - it was thrown out by low level Federal judges with help from the ACLU. Plenty of other ballot initiatives have met the same fate. How is it the voters fault when they keep getting overruled by unelected judges?

Tell me, when was the last time you and yours got oppressed by the big bad US military? Little Rock? The armed forces are a spectacularly bad tool for stomping on the citizenry. This is, of course, by design.

As for common cause…do you think China gives two shits about the who/whom within America? Do you think the people setting up Harvard admissions are desperate to please the CCCP? Because it’s very hard for me to see any common cause. The closest they get is China cheerfully benefiting from American internal tensions. And that’s just as easily ratcheted by convincing people like you to wail and gnash your teeth about race. If you don’t think you’re a pawn of Chinese interests, perhaps your outgroup would feel the same.

Little Rock?

You mean when the military was deployed against schoolchildren in order to crush their ethnic solidarity and clear the way for ethnic cleansing?

Yep. Good times.

It is obviously an example of the state doing exactly what WhiningCoil is afraid of. It’s also probably older than him. My point is that military intervention in American culture is so rare and awkward that it’s not why the army is “importing foreigners.” There’s a much simpler explanation, which is that the armed forces are desperate for anyone remotely resembling a fit human. Populations of poor young men from agriculture are recruiters’ bread and butter. Assuming it’s a ploy to “oppress the natives” is kind of ridiculous.

Ethnic solidarity is when you bully the shit out of children with a different skin color?

The military and their contractors interfered in the 2020 election, resulting in an illegitimate presidency with policies deliberately hostile to my people.

I’m sure this secretive black-hat conspiracy will make great use of the broke Mexicans they’re importing. How will all these lily-white Brits keep their resumes competitive?

It’s hard to find this exposé any more convincing than the various Russiagate conspiracy theories. The people flogging those surely also thought they could see Putin’s hand in every Facebook post. Why do you find this more credible?

Maybe I just haven’t forgiven Taibbi for posting most of his bombshell investigative reporting on Twitter. I guess this is a step up by comparison.

Tell me, when was the last time you and yours got oppressed by the big bad US military? Little Rock?

Not really supporting this claim, but the army lent some serious hardware to the '93 Waco siege, and one of the more iconic photos includes an M1 that the FBI "borrowed" in front of the burning compound, complete with proudly waving US flag. That is far more recent than Little Rock.

Also Kent State.

I think the only reason the US doesn't do what it needs to do about the border is because doing what it takes to actually solve the border crisis would make America look bad in international affairs. Russia and China would have tons of propaganda pictures and stories about how horrible the US is, and the left wing press in the US would be happy to help. The empire and securing global markets is what is most important to American elites, and illegal migration just isn't a huge issue to people who can afford to live in nice areas and send their kids to good schools. The only way to stop illegal immigration would be to replace the entire US government with people that don't give a shit if securing the border makes them look bad and hurts the US's standing abroad. They'd just tell other government to fuck off if they tried criticizing them about it and jail leftists who try to stir up shit domestically. But we don't live in that world so nothing can reasonably be done about it.

That might be part of the reason, but I think another big part of the reason is that US citizens are not going to go pick berries, work in slaughterhouses, or do yard work for $7/hr. Illegal immigrants in the US are an important part of the economy.

Illegal immigrants in the US are an important part of the economy.

Illegal immigrants are an important mechanism of wage suppression, asset inflation and shifting the outcome of elections, and I think US society would be substantially improved if the hiring of illegal immigrants was made into an offence which explicitly pierced the corporate veil and lead to such extensive asset seizures and punitive prison sentences that every single illegal immigrant was unemployed overnight in fear of said regulations.

I get where you're coming from, but Americans keep voting for politicians who don't do that. They keep voting for politicians who either think that it shouldn't be done or politicians who say it should be done but then don't try very hard to actually do it.

Polls for decades have shown that Americans are very against illegal immigration, but we only have two parties and neither will do anything about it. They finally voted in Trump and they pulled out all the stops. He tries to limit Muslim immigration and some judge in Hawaii shuts it down. He doesn't get his wall either. The fact is there is nothing Americans can do to stop illegal and mass immigration short of a coup. I'm not saying that to fed post, but just using common sense. How else could Americans stop illegal immigration if elected officials, the media, and the deep state prevent anyone from really doing anything about it?

By prioritizing the issue (as @WhiningCoil pointed out in https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166846?context=8#context, while Americans care about these issues they might not tend to prioritize them) and consistently voting for politicians who will act on the issue.

I'm sorry, but that's just straight up not true. The US doesn't have a system where people can vote on issues straight up, but when they have been given the chance, they have voted against illegal immigration. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_187

Within days, the deep state shut it down. Just like Trump's Muslim ban by some judge in Hawaii or his wall. It is literally impossible to stop illegal immigration democratically in the United States. If it was possible, it would have ended by now.

I don't think it's impossible. People would just have to consistently vote for politicians who actually prioritize the matter. But Americans for the most part, even if they want to stop illegal immigration, do not care about the issue enough to make it a dealbreaker when it comes to who they vote for.

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Trump could (and should) have sicced federal law enforcement on the businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Everyone knows who does it, everyone knows where the live, and they have attachable assets. Illegal immigration sceptics on both sides of the political fence know that this would work, and that more security on the border probably wouldn't (not least because ~1/2 of all illegal residents were originally overstayers and not border-jumpers). The vast majority of illegal immigrants come to the US to work illegally, and if people stopped employing them they would stop coming.

He didn't, because businesses which employ illegal immigrants are a key GOPe constituency, and at that point he was still trying to work with the GOPe. And the MAGA base didn't care.

We still see far more people calling for fences and deportations than we do calling for universal e-Verify. I despise people who try to psychoanalyze political opponents, so I am not going to speculate on why this is. But part of the reason why politicians (even Trump) don't actually try to reduce illegal immigration is that the voters who say they want less illegal immigration don't expect them to.

Wouldn't a better idea be to fix the US economy so it doesn't require importing countless poor people to work unpleasant jobs reliant on the fact that they aren't here legally and therefore have no right to a liveable wage?

I think that would be better for US citizens, but the politicians do not care much what I think and Americans keep electing the same kind of politicians over and over again.

That kind of apathy is the biggest issue though. Because it's one step above acceptance - you already present exploitation as a fait accompli, like Americans are physically incapable of picking berries or doing yard work or paying a reasonable rate for those tasks, when the exploitation is why they refuse to do those things. Why would a politician act any differently?

I don't mean that to sound personal, I'm part of the problem too. It's such a massive and ingrained problem at this point that it seems almost impossible to fix.

A better idea from whose perspective? The cheap labor benefits American consumers, and the wage being paid is more than said importee would get in their home nation presumably.

So both sides have reasons not to "fix" it. From a free market perspective its a win win.

Well from my perspective, for starters. Is that your perspective then, a free market perspective? Because that wasn't the impression I got from any of your other posts. Other posts I've read of yours gave me the impression you would oppose the exploitation of people living in poverty so Americans can keep their suvs and dollar cheeseburgers.

Also I recall a different response the last time America got a bunch of cheap laborers and gave them just enough to make them better off than they would have been in their home nation.

I am a neo-liberal with authoritarian leanings i would say.

I think exploitation often depends on whether the people being exploited are happy with it.

Having said that i am also sympathetic to the idea that neo-liberal free markets need to be directed and regulated by the state. I think off shoring manufacturing has caused a lot of hardship for working class Americans in the Rust Belt et al.

So probably my position would be importing cheap labourers is ok as long as they are treated reasonably well and are themselves happy with their wages, which i guess is close to the free market position, or comparative advantage. But that manufacturing should be on-shored for the good of the American populace even though that will also raise prices, because the impact on poor Americans is disproportionate.

So I guess, let market forces reign but with a heavy state hand regulating them, for an optimum balance of economic and human thriving.

I would be on board with this if we weren't talking about illegal, undocumented, non-citizens. I would actually be ok with indentured servitude if it was between consenting adults. But the system as it stands seems almost designed to be abused.

Sure, some kind of easy legal immigration for low paid workers would probably be better. But I don't see that being politically feasible currently.

So probably my position would be importing cheap labourers is ok as long as they are treated reasonably well and are themselves happy with their wages, which i guess is close to the free market position, or comparative advantage.

I'd go so far as to say none of that is necessary, if the laborer knows what they're getting into.

I'd hope I count as a skilled worker, but I can also accept "cheap", since my wages in the UK would be a pittance compared to the US, an electrician in the US can easily make triple what a junior doctor does in the former. Further, I'm not remotely happy with said salary as provided by a monopsony employer, and I think calling the conditions NHS doctors labor under as "treated well" to be a farce.

None of that prevents me from leaving, I still consider it a step up, albeit a modest one, from being a doctor in India.

I'm also entirely OK with less skilled workers, such as those in construction or domestic care, who go to places with less than stellar rights and conditions like the Middle East from even less stellar, not even planetary, conditions as found in the Indian subcontinent. Would it be nice if they were paid better and treated better? Sure, but believe me that the silent majority will accept that as a reasonable tradeoff when it means they make 5 to 10 times what they could back home, thus having actual savings while sending remittances back home.

I'd know, I was one of the doctors at a Qatari Visa Center, and there were plenty of people who were eager to resume their posts after their visas expired and they had to come back. I'm sure many of them were mislead by touts about how cushy it was there, but they're not the norm.

In other words, as long as people make the tradeoff with a decent level of insight, and ideally it's a step up from where they began, I can hardly begrudge them their movements.

So I guess, let market forces reign but with a heavy state hand regulating them, for an optimum balance of economic and human thriving.

One of the reasons why I don't call myself an outright Libertarian despite being very sympathetic to that position is that I see clear utility from having states around to do things that the free market doesn't (as well as fuck things up, but my position is that we should find where we can maximize benefits and minimize downsides from having both).

Especially in matters of national security, you need to have a big stick to prevent companies from selling out or doing end-runs, such as Nvidia after the executive order banning export of high-end GPUs to China.

Sadly, while I sometimes wish otherwise, governments are usually good to have around, not that I'd mind less of it in many places.

I actually have sympathy for Libertarians myself. I think their positions are generally logical, consistent and principled. Unfortunately much like with communism, i don't think their ideas will actually work in practice with actual people.

doing what it takes to actually solve [X] would make America look bad...

This seems a correct take, and generalizes to quite a bit of the everyday grumbling we hear about other "unsolvable" problems like homelessness, uninsured drivers, and street crime. Not that the solutions that look bad are always effective, but they are probably moreso than current inaction.

It's not that they would make the US look bad abroad. It's that they'd look bad in the US. There are plenty of people who like the idea of not having to see, e.g., homeless people or immigrants but who aren't going to support actually rounding them up en masse. In many cases weeding them out from the general population would require invasive enforcement policies that would anger voters who support Doing Something. (This is a pervasive element of politics - people like the idea of a problem being fixed or a certain outcome being achieved, but balk at the tradeoffs involved in actually doing it).

It's not that they would make the US look bad abroad. It's that they'd look bad in the US. There are plenty of people who like the idea of not having to see, e.g., homeless people or immigrants but who aren't going to support actually rounding them up en masse.

Why not? Isn't that exactly what happened with the homeless problem when Xi came to visit California?

No, that was more or less a continuation of standard practice, i.e. disperse homeless encampments when they become too noticeable, but don't actually do anything to address homelessness. It nicely illustrates the point: people don't want to see homeless people or have to deal with them, but they're also not willing to support throwing thousands of people in prison for vagrancy or spend money to build sufficient shelters.

Yeah but the rest of the world isn't the leader of the free world. America's narrative is that it is spreading freedom and democracy and human rights. If the border starts looking like the Gaza Strip, homeless people are being carted off to prison etc. you'd see foreign governments take advantage of that. The global elites are more or less in agreement on this issue of immigration too and I think actually truly believe it, so they aren't going to change. They'd be embarrassed among their peers, which I think they care about more than what voters and their fellow countrymen think. The only way to change it would be to replace it with people who are America First i.e. don't care about the U.N. or Western Europe or NGO's opinions. Plus they'd have to tell a bunch of legal organizations to get fucked (foreign and domestic). It would be a massive endeavor.

I do agree that home front is also a problem. Leftists would be agitating and you'd see newspapers like the Guardian crying about it from day one and trying to get sympathy for migrants. You'd either have to have discredited these organizations so much that nobody cares what they think, or straight up jail and beat them into submission. Then you'd also have to have a population that is okay with that as well. Because right now, as soon someone comes into enforce the law, every left wing newspaper in America is going to be talking about kids in cages and people dying at the border with AOC photo ops. It would have to be a whole paradigm shift that is really unreasonable to expect unless something extraordinary happens.

The only way to change it would be to replace it with people who are America First i.e. don't care about the U.N. or Western Europe or NGO's opinions.

American voters, left or right, do not give two shits about what any of those think. What is important is how American voters regard themselves. Your average middle-class suburban conservative doesn't like immigrants, but they also won't like hearing stories about abusive migrant detention centers or, say, migrants killed up by mines as I've seen advocated for here and elsewhere. You have some hardcore anti-immigrant types who fantasize about CBP shooting asylum seekers, but they're a small minority compared to people who just hope a symbolic middle finger to would-be immigrants will overcome the overwhelming economic incentives and aren't prepared to resort to the inhumane measures or extraordinary costs required for effective immigration enforcement.

The global elites are more or less in agreement on this issue of immigration too and I think actually truly believe it, so they aren't going to change.

This is probably true, but not in the way nativists think. Western countries all share a similarity in that they have a highly educated, aging population that demand standards of living, social security, etc... be maintained (and actually increase) despite declining labor force participation, retirees that are living longer than ever, and a workforce with a disproportionate aversion to manual/menial labor.

The only country of note that has bitten the bullet on avoiding immigration despite the factors above is Japan, and they've paid for it with economic stagnation. Political elites have to try to square the circle, and they've calculated (almost certainly correctly) that even if they're nominally anti-immigrant that they can't afford the political and economic costs of actually cutting off immigration. Again, there might be a minority who is happy with that outcome, but your average voter isn't going to be swayed when the politicians tell them this is what they asked for. So instead you get the status quo - capricious, half-assed enforcement which gets more capricious or more half-assed depending on whether the party in power is notionally against or for immigration.

The best explanation of the illegal immigration topic that I've encountered online is probably this paragraph from 2016

Both parties, despite occasional bursts of crocodile tears for American workers and their families, have backed the offshoring of jobs to the hilt. Immigration is a slightly more complex matter; the Democrats claim to be in favor of it, the Republicans now and then claim to oppose it, but what this means in practice is that legal immigration is difficult but illegal immigration is easy. The result was the creation of an immense work force of noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of employers over those of wage-earning employees.

The political/managerial class directly benefits from illegal immigration, they're not going to do anything about it until they're forced to.

The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!) In order for this to make sense, 'the elites' would have to be capturing all of the value of illegals, somehow, despite the competitive marketplace. This is theoretically possible, but I don't see much evidence!

Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.

The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!)

I don't know, man. I used to make these arguments myself, but I don't feel like we're swimming in abundance since we let it rip with the globalism. The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.

Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.

I agree with them in spirit, I'm not convinced about them in practice.

The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.

In my experience and also (i think) the statistics, 'durable consumer goods' have gotten significantly cheaper. Definitely more slowly than in the past.

From FRED, "all employees, manufacturing" / "all employees" has been flat at 8.5% since 2000 after a fairly linear decline from 38% since 1940ish. I am very confident goods are cheaper now than they were in 1970 and 1940. This probably is just meaningless because these numbers don't mean what i'm guessing they do but durable consumer goods CPI / total CPI has dropped 43% since 2000 and 20% since 2010. So just intuitively by glancing at the graph (and this isn't a strong argument as a result, you'd want a more detailed understanding of what happened) I don't find 'less manufacturing jobs so higher prices' to be correct

Everyone else also benefits from illegal immigration; American meat prices are artificially low because illegal immigrants staff the slaughterhouses for wages Americans won’t take. Houses are nicer than they ‘should’ be because the illegal immigrant laborers take a pay cut compared to natives. Etc, etc.

This isn’t a simple ‘business owners vs heartland workers’ story, the typical American consumer benefits from cheap labor for jobs that spoiled Americans don’t want to do anyways.

You haven't actually done anything to refute the claim that the benefits and drawbacks of illegal immigration aren't evenly distributed. I agree that these people benefit slightly from employers breaking the law and cutting down costs by hiring illegal immigrants, but the idea that those benefits actually match up to what the people in question have lost and are losing is just farcical.

jobs that spoiled Americans don't want to do anyways

Yeah, Americans don't want to work in illegal conditions that violate labour laws - this doesn't make them spoiled!

You haven't actually done anything to refute the claim that the benefits and drawbacks of illegal immigration aren't evenly distributed.

That's not what you said, you said:

The result was the creation of an immense work force of noncitizens who have no economic or political rights they have any hope of enforcing, which could then be used—and has been used, over and over again—to drive down wages, degrade working conditions, and advance the interests of employers over those of wage-earning employees

This implies they drive down wages and advance the interests of employees in general. This is not true. They drive up the value of the wages of most americans, while driving down the wages harming of the interests of workers in the specific sectors immigrants work in. And in such a way that, if there were tax increases and redistribution to specific native workers, everyone would have more 'value'.

And given that, the paragraph doesn't make any sense!

(This is totally separate from IQ, culture, race, etc arguments about immigration, and doesn't disprove them at all)

This implies they drive down wages and advance the interests of employees in general. to drive down wages those of wage-earning employees

No, it implies they drive down wages, as opposed to salaries. There's a clear distinction there and it actually matters for this particular topic - people on salaries BENEFIT from wage suppression, because wages are a component in the costs of services/goods that they consume. I'm more than happy to keep talking about this, but you'd probably be best served by reading the article I was quoting from first - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Do you have a more data-oriented source on the economic claims here? My sense is that if immigration pushes down wages in a few specific sectors, the benefits are diffuse enough that the income for the natives in that sector decreases. But people who work for wages are >50% of the working population, so the harms in terms of lower wages from immigration aren't actually 100x as concentrated as the benefits anymore. And (poorly justified guess) this either washes out or is net beneficial because the immigrants are providing useful services and the population of wage workers isn't, like, doubling.

Also note that if we were taking in as many skilled immigrants as unskilled, this wouldn't be an effect at all - because all skill classes would increase in proportion. And ... I'm not actually sure if that's even false? If you combine illegal and hispanic immigration with the disproportionately skilled immigration from india, asian countries, etc.

This is a theory of international relations where America is bidding against themselves in an auction. The rest of the world largely does not just let illegal immigration happen. But they largely do like free trade. A few countries might say hypocrisy or something but if we just change the rules and say countries don’t need to take refugees then everyone will agree with us. America is constantly hypocritical in international relations.

If we banned illegal immigrants but pushed free trade everyone is just going to follow along.

I think a better theory is that most elites just don’t recognize hbd. They don’t realize many of these immigrants won’t assimilate. They think they will be like the Italians and Irish who just became white Americans. They support immigration because they think it’s a huge utility gain for both sides to have more people following western norms. You average Syrian refugees kids will become Frenchmen who pray at Mosques and your average subsaharan African will have kids who become Harvard educated Doctors is how they think it will play out.

I think a better theory is that most elites just don’t recognize hbd.

Yeah, people come up with all kinds of theories about really complicated political schemes and intrigues but history shows that elites for the most part are not super-human Machiavellian manipulators, even if they would like to be. I think that they certainly are a bit smarter than non-elites on average, but for the most part they are not genius-level political masterminds from a comic book.

The simpler explanation is that to the average left-leaning elite, HBD = racism and racism = bad, end of story. And to the average right-leaning elite, HBD might make a bit of sense but it's not the sort of thing one brings up in polite company and anyway who cares, it's not like my mansion is going to be besieged by mobs of illegal immigrants any time soon.

I would also note that in America, illegal immigrants actually do assimilate pretty well on average. America's chief racial divide has to do with a group of people who have been living here for hundreds of years and whose ancestors got kidnapped and forced to work by America's founders. In Europe, which does not have the guilt that comes with something like that, and which deals with immigrants who assimilate less well on average than Latin American immigrants do in the US, political voices that are in favor of less third-world immigration are actually doing pretty well right now. For example, /r/europe is basically far-right on this topic by Reddit standards.

I share your thoughts. I don’t have a huge problem with illegal immigration in the US for the most part. Hispanics tend to assimilate in the ways they are ok. Generally they haven’t matched IQ testing or educational attainment but second and third generation have reduced criminality to the US white level. But the immigrants Europe gets I am not sure that will be achieved.

Hispanics who have assimilated still vote Democrat at rates far beyond those of average Americans.

Who are assimilated Hispanics, though? Second generation Californians whose ancestors came over in the early 80s, or 15th generation Texan ranchers who still have a vaguely Hispanic last name? White Cubans, or 90% indigenous Mayans? They’re a pretty heterogenous group in a way that ‘pure’ Irish or Swedish Americans aren’t.

They could stop illegal immigration if they wanted to though. This isn't some impossible task. There just isn't political will among the elites. Pakistan deported over a million Afghans: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistans-plan-expel-over-1-million-afghans-living-country-illegally-2023-10-31/

Are you trying to tell me the US couldn't do this if they wanted to? The government just doesn't want to for [insert reason here]. You didn't agree with mine, which is fine, but I hope you don't think the US actually couldn't if there was the political will.

And I mean they kind or are Machiavellian manipulators, considering it's an extremely unpopular thing politically yet they've managed to let mass immigration go on for over 4 decades, completely reshaping the demographics permanently of this country. Trump got elected to finally do something about it, and he was unable to do anything to curb it. Part of that is on Trump's incompetence, but more of it is that very powerful people and institutions resisted and thwarted him every time.

They could stop illegal immigration if they wanted to though. This isn't some impossible task. There just isn't political will among the elites.

One of my favourite trolls is to ask people who claim that this would be an impossible task to just go on the record as saying that it'd be impossible for a government to round up and deport (or otherwise deal with) 6 million people.

"They could, and then we'd Nuremberg them and throw their ideas out of the Overton window" doesn't strike me as a solution to immigration, though. Certainly not a final one.

I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).

This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.

Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.

I appreciate the historical information - thank you for giving me some interesting material to read and learn about. However I have to disagree with a point you've made in your last paragraph. Specifically...

Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people

This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds. The sheer amount of data and processing they have, along with their access to Meta and Google's advertising databases means that they'd be able to organise the deportation and identify the illegals in a single SQL query.

keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.

Those people are correct! That doesn't change anything about it already existing, however.

This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds.

Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.

Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.

How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?

The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.

More comments

I have been upgrading my priors to the effect "more shocking the video, higher likelihood it is AI generated", but this is not shocking enough.

If I were to guess, it is something mundane, and the tables have turned and past stereotypes have become a funhouse mirror: these days it's the Chinese who come from such a well-ordered society that they amaze Westerners with their ability to stand in line waiting for their turn.

it's the Chinese who come from such a well-ordered society that they amaze Westerners with their ability to stand in line waiting for their turn

I've been on multiple lengthy trips to China. Chinese people specifically don't line up in an orderly manner waiting their turn. That, the general dirtiness and the horrific air pollution when it turns cold are my primary complaints about China.

Aren’t the ones in the video literally under arrest? That seems like it should affect behavior a bit.

Yes. So that's why they're standing like that. I just mean to contradict muzzle-cleaned-porg-42's description of Westerners being amazed at Asians politely queuing. Chinese people don't do that, absent border patrol rounding them up.

If they were in line for getting a zoo ticket or a movie theater ticket, it would be a big shoving mass of people. As I have the misfortune of personally experiencing in China.

Most of those Asian dudes in the video look like they are at least 30 years of age, and many look significantly older than 30. It would be strange for China to send a bunch of middle-aged guys over to become US soldiers. Granted, it would make sense for Chinese special agents to be older on average than privates in the US military, because it takes time to train a special agent, but these guys look old enough on average that I have a hard time believing that they would manage to successfully infiltrate the US military no matter how desperate the US military is to recruit. These guys look like dads.

If the Chinese government wants to get people in they can take the much easier route of buying or setting up US companies via proxies that bring people over on work visas, the salary threshold / other H1B is obviously no match for the resources of the CCP.

This is more likely some group of men who have realized that life as an illegal in the US is still vastly better than life in most of the world, including for most Chinese (I doubt these are tier one elites).

Appreciate the sanity check everyone, my apologies for polluting this space

Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?

Almost certainly not. Honestly, a supervillain plan like that seems almost comforting compared to trying to explain US border policy otherwise.

So much of what's going on (for example) just seems so...strange. It'd almost be nice if there was some Bond-esque maneuver behind it.

Seems like a better option for Taiwan than the US. Small area, low population, linguistically and ethnically very close, geographically close to the mainland for backup. Create enough chaos or manufacture some kind of coup, then their Marine Brigades can get an unopposed landing and it's all over.

Any drill sergeants here want to give your opinion on that "parade rest"? Hlynka?

This is quite schizo.

China is definately not sending agents as illegal immigrants to join the military and conquer the US via military coup. That plan is pants-on-head retarded.

I was initially going to say that if they aren't sending agents in as illegal immigrants for general sabotage/espionage work, they aren't trying, but honestly why send them over the border when they can simply immigrate legally through Academia or employment with various major corporations? The illegal route might be a better fit for the more hands-on side of things, I suppose, but the idea of getting enough illegals across the border and into the army to compromise the actual army is a complete non-starter.

but honestly why send them over the border when they can simply immigrate legally through Academia or employment with various major corporations?

Let a hundred flowers bloom.

Chinese people hang out with their hands behind their backs all the time. They walk that way too. It's just a thing.

Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?

No, privates don’t launch coups.

I've seen plenty of Chinese soldiers in China. These guys don't read as Chinese soldiers to me. But I don't know what Chinese intelligence operatives look like.

Parade rest is a specific stance, it is easier than staying at attention but it isn't relaxed like that.

It is more likely that those men have their hands cuffed behind their back after they've shown or failed to show ID.

100% they aren't cuffed. Border Patrol is just waving people through at this point.

So you find it more likely that they are standing at parade rest for funsies?

It's not parade rest.

This was my first intuition as well. The video doesn't really show an angle behind the individuals with their hands behind their backs. Handcuffed seemed like an obvious conclusion.

Plenty of Chinese illegal immigrants already arrive through legal avenues, mainly in the form of criminal organizations getting people tourist visas that they overstay on. That's how most of the girls in "massage parlors" in NYC and LA are trafficked into the country. They don't need to cross the border in the dead of night, they just book a flight and land at JFK or LAX. Why would a state need to resort to this sort of needlessly arduous infiltration when common gangsters have already figured out easier ways?

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:

What are my actual views? I do think that provocative communication styles have a place—but not like this! I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity. This is a huge moral travesty that we should not paper over or downplay. Much of my personal charitable giving over the years has gone to fighting exactly this problem: I’ve given many thousands of pounds to organizations including to the SCI Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission.

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.

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.

I wonder if your wondering is done in good faith 🤔

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

I think extremely few people (maybe even no one) pursue making LLMs liberally biased for EA reasons.

Climate change and veganism are two issues that could well lead to hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions.

Since when has a group representing 3% of the population (vegans) taken enough power to implement "hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions"?

Like with all identity movements, to elevate one group such as animals you end up reducing the position of another group, such as humans

Only for unhealthy minds, I think? Whether freeing slaves "reduced" the position of non-slaves is a question without an objective answer - only psychological interpretations. For instance, many Indians never eat meat and would tell you they don't feel "reduced" by this.

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

That post is just describing regression to the mean, which every informal group encounters. Nothing unique to EA here.

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?

The same could be asked about any group with any large goal: companies, nonprofits, religious organizations. Nothing unique to EA here.

That this action is dishonorable matters

How do we know it is dishonorable?

This means that Sam Altman won't be the first.

won't be the last?

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.

Do you have evidence EAs suffer from "extreme self confidence"?

This... encourages the power hungry to be part of it as well.

Again, this isn't unique to EA. Any group with money/power attracts the power hungry. What's your point?

Only for unhealthy minds, I think? Whether freeing slaves "reduced" the position of non-slaves is a question without an objective answer - only psychological interpretations. For instance, many Indians never eat meat and would tell you they don't feel "reduced" by this.

I'm sorry, are you saying that everyone who isn't Indian is an "unhealthy mind" or are you saying that everyone who eats meat is? This entire bit is confused as hell - quality of life is often psychological, and having meat taken out of my diet for the benefit of animals sure feels like an objective reduction in my quality of life to improve theirs. Status too is objectively changed - if I am not allowed to eat animals then by necessity this indicates an increase in the position of animals and a reduction in my status - from dominion over the beasts of the land to a sad sack of shit who gets less respect than a pig.

And I see no charitable justification for inserting that analogy to slaves, only a cheap appeal to emotions - it didn't improve the clarity of your point, if anything it obfuscated it, since you immediately went straight back to talking about animals.

I think there’s some confusion here over “reducing the position of…humans.”

@KnotGodel was arguing that vegetarianism isn’t inherently low-status, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions who choose it even when meat is available. Therefore advocating for it does not require reducing the status of meat-eaters.

You correctly observed that forcing meat-eaters to stop is obviously reducing their material position and status. Animal rights advocates might well be expected to implement such a reduction.

Frankly, I think the blame here lies with the guy who insisted animal rights was an “identity movement.” Putting it in the same category as woke politics, white nationalism, or civil rights feels like a poor choice.

I'm saying psychologically health people don't see status as zero-sum.

I don't have to feel like I'm losing status if slaves are freed.

I don't have to feel like I'm losing status if I stop eating meat.

Any feeling that I'm losing status is a feature of my brain, not the world.

Any feeling full stop really. Any cognition at all in fact. I'm actually only capable of engaging with reality using my brain, I didn't realise that made me psychologically unhealthy.

Actually I think you need to define psychologically healthy, because you don't seem to be describing it in my eyes. You also don't have to feel like you are losing status if I fuck your wife in front of you, or force you to blow me, but I would suggest not doing so demonstrates a lack of self respect (or a fetish, if they can be separated) not good psychological health.

You also don't have to feel like you are losing status if I fuck your wife in front of you, or force you to blow me, but I would suggest not doing so demonstrates a lack of self respect

IMO, the problem with both of those is not that I'm losing status.

Is that a dodge, or are you actually saying that you wouldn't feel like you lost status if I banged your wife in front of you? Because I wouldn't consider the status loss the biggest problem in either of those scenarios, but I would still consider it a problem.

I get the impression that you have a warped understanding of psychological strength. Status very often - if not always - is zero sum. To be the most popular or most hated requires that someone else is not occupying that spot - if they are, you have to take it from them (otherwise you are not the most popular/hated). Being psychologically healthy is not ignoring attacks, or being apathetic to them, or writing your pain off as an artifact of your brain, it is (assuming fighting back isn't an option) enduring the suffering without being broken by it. That doesn't mean it doesn't affect you or hurt you. I don't know what the psychologically healthy way to respond to either of those scenarios would be, but I'm sure it's not a thumbs up or yawn or intense rationalisation. Those strike me as closer to denial than anything else.

Is that a dodge, or are you actually saying that you wouldn't feel like you lost status if I banged your wife in front of you?

Could you maybe describe what "status" means to you?

I don't really walk around thinking "I should to X at work to gain status" or "I should make fun of Y to gain status" or "Person Z lowered my status in that meeting - I've got to be sure to get even with them." I don't think that, in order to have more/closer friends, it is important that I become more popular than someone else. I do occasionally feel embarrassed (e.g. I said something wrong in a meeting) or ashamed (e.g. I forgot about a friend's birthday).

I guess I just don't think any of these as "zero-sum".

Even in the "banged your wife" scenario - does that give you status? I don't think it would among my peer group... Would I become less popular? Would people at work think I was less competent? I don't think the effect would be very large...

Do people actually think like that? To me, it doesn't seem like a good way to approach life from either a personal-happiness perspective or a social-welfare perspective. I don't know, I find the amount of emphasis you're placing on its importance confusing. So, I see three options:

  1. There is some disconnect between what you and I mean by "status"
  2. I actually do care immensely about status - I'm just repressing it.
  3. Some people viscerally care a great deal about status. Others don't.

Status is a person's placement in a social hierarchy. Most people don't think in terms of status, they simply feel shame or embarrassment when it is taken from them or pride and confidence when they take it. You don't need to think about becoming more popular by taking it from others - simply by being more popular you do so inevitably. Just because it isn't a concious effort doesn't mean you don't care about status.

Re banging your wife, we can add your peer group to the dynamic - do you think their opinion of you would change at all if I banged your wife in front of them? It might not affect their opinion of your competence, but I bet it affects their respect for you - but status is an element even between the three of us original parties - you me and your wife. If you walked in on that what would you think my opinion of you was? Would it be different from before you entered the room? What about your wife - if you saw that would you immediately assume she loved you as much as she did on your wedding day? If not, you do care about status.

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I wonder if your wondering is done in good faith 🤔

What does that mean? That you don't think it's true? That you think it's true but it's inconvenient for someone to point it out? Please be specific.

Do you have evidence EAs suffer from "extreme self confidence"?

Have you heard of a guy called "Sam Bankman-Fried?" He was in the news a little bit lately.

What does that mean?... Please be specific.

This is exactly what I wanted him to do, but I was being snarky about it. I'd thank you for being kinder, but...

Have you heard of a guy called "Sam Bankman-Fried?" He was in the news a little bit lately.

A single guy in finance being over-confident is pretty minimal evidence that EAs as a group and as a constellation of organizations suffer from "extreme self confidence".

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.

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?

Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.

If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.

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.

I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".

The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.

Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.

If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.

and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?

Of course I wouldn't expect a stranger to help me. I'm arguing that it's not possible after all. In retrospect even people that do know and care about me have had some pretty spectacular failures on that front, though I don't blame them as long as they forgive me my own.

Death is necessary. We live in a world with physical limits, without death the resources eventually run out. Most of life from the realm of the microscopic to the complex workings of human society is just the process of determining what is worthy of those limited resources. When the determination is subjective we call it morality or justice and when it's objective we call it nature.

It seems trivial to me that human lives aren't worth saving per se. It's the content of those lives that matters, and if you don't know the content than you can't prove that you've done anything of value let alone something "effective." I mean if you had the choice between saving 1000 lives of people in a persistent vegetative state, or a dozen lives of people you know to be good and functioning people you choose the functioning people right? It's not the lives that matter it's the person, the content. If you could have more people living by putting everyone in a low energy state in some kind of feeding pod, where they undergo minimal activity to reduce calorie expenditure and just enough calories are provided to keep them alive is that good because more people are living? It seems cartoonishly evil.

and those are just overly simple demonstrations, in reality the world is more complex than that. Value is a human thing and though nature occasionally forces our hand the more advanced we get the more leeway we have to be subjective. There really isn't even a way to maximize value because people have different values and therefore competing interests.

That's the problem I have with EA. The whole, "we're saving more people than anyone" thing. Stopping needless suffering. Why is their suffering needless? Suffering can be important, it teaches us things. It leads to improvement. When you are saving them what are you saving? Do you know any of them? It's so surface level and such a philosophically empty paperclip maximizing type ethos.

I do agree that it hasn't been very effective PR for the tech bros so far. I think it worked better for progressives (though people are growing resistant to it) and EA seems to be a silicon valley version that has made the whole process too efficient and made it's contradictions too apparent. It feels too inhuman for most.

and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?

This is a retarded standard that nobody who has to work with more than a handful of people at a time holds. Do you think doctors look up new arrivals to the ER to ascertain whether they're accidentally treating murderers and rapists?

It's the net impact that matters, and unless you're exclusively attempting to save the denizens of a prison, or maybe Hamas, you will find almost no population where they predominate, such that by saving the entire lot you've done something worse.

I mean if you had the choice between saving 1000 lives of people in a persistent vegetative state, or a dozen lives of people you know to be good and functioning people you choose the functioning people right? It's not the lives that matter it's the person, the content. If you could have more people living by putting everyone in a low energy state in some kind of feeding pod, where they undergo minimal activity to reduce calorie expenditure and just enough calories are provided to keep them alive is that good because more people are living? It seems cartoonishly evil.

Great. An accusation that of all the people in the world, EAs don't know the concept of disability adjusted life years (DALY) and quality adjusted life years (QALY).

That's the problem I have with EA. The whole, "we're saving more people than anyone" thing. Stopping needless suffering. Why is their suffering needless? Suffering can be important, it teaches us things. It leads to improvement. When you are saving them what are you saving? Do you know any of them? It's so surface level and such a philosophically empty paperclip maximizing type ethos.

I will go with the "good things are good, and bad things are bad, actually" over this galaxy-brained advocacy for letting people starve to death or die of malaria.

I'm sure those are all laudable, character building exercises.

I'm not an EA, I just think that of all the people I strongly disagree with, they're doing what they believe to be right thing with the right amount of rigor, as opposed to nothing but vibes.

I will go with the "good things are good, and bad things are bad, actually" over this galaxy-brained advocacy for letting people starve to death or die of malaria.

Which is a lazy dismissive assumption. You have faith that lives are good or that they are in aggregate good and therefore maximizing them is positive, you don't know that. As far as I can tell you can't know that.

I'm not arguing against helping people, just that helping people you actually know is better, especially en masse (what if everyone logged off social media and did that?), than industrial philanthropy or w/e.

You are welcome to demonstrate your conviction that lives are terrible and worth terminating on average, as they must be if the aggregate is, but I suspect you can't, for the same odd reason most antinatalists or misanthropes don't start with themselves.

You have faith that lives are good or that they are in aggregate good and therefore maximizing them is positive, you don't know that. As far as I can tell you can't know that.

Faith? Why? I can clearly see that most people have lives worth living and extending, at least if it comes to the expenditure of funds I can't repurpose for things I personally care about more. To the extent that governments and charities spend their money on that, I'd prefer they save as many lives as cheaply as effectively as possible, and EAs do that. Would be even better if they handed all the cash to me, but since there's no advocacy group for the same, I'll take it.

Go ahead and help whoever you like, if you care to. By the same process where you don't care about most people, I don't particularly care about you and yours, and thus EA beats you in terms of net people I minimally consider worth existing saved. Sure, sucks that a large number of them are Sub-Saharan Africans with low IQs I suppose, but that's hardly all of them, there is a non-zero tradeoff for the same with Westerners or any other kind of human really.

ah yes, "KYS" nice to see the motte's standard of petty insults in as many words as possible is still around.

I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.

and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?

Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question? "Some people in a group might become rapists, or might even be rapists, and thus most of the people in that group should get malaria and maybe die of it" is the sort of position a children's cartoon villain would hold. If that's your sincere considered position based on the things you have seen online, I suggest touching grass.

I think it worked better for progressives

Most EAs are sympathetic to progressives, but most progressives are vehemently opposed to EA ideas like "you can put a dollar value on life" and "first world injustice doesn't matter much compared to [third world disease / global extinction risk / animal suffering, depending on exactly which EA you ask]".

It feels too inhuman for most.

I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.

Still fits with my theory. EA like the progressive model but are a bit robotic and misunderstand it. Progressive recognize that EA is pulling a lot from their PR scheme but doing it poorly and spoiling the effect.

I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.

There's more of a trade off than that though. That money and effort could be spent elsewhere, making family or people you know about happier. I mean if they don't have anyone like that they could at least look towards their local communities? From what I've seen of the bay area it could use it.

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?

I fail to see how supplying basic needs is worse than leaving someone to die.

Because it means that a decade down the line, some Saudi policeman is going to be tempted to drink because his job involves shooting at 'wretched refuse' to prevent it from crossing the border and milling around in Saudi Arabia and asking for handouts. Don't even ask what Europe is going to end up like.

It’s all part of Big Alcohol’s plan to break into the Muslim market.

People are social, people interact, helping a person live might increase the happiness of those around them or end up causing the suffering of those around them, they will probably do both simultaneously in varying amounts. The problem is you are trying to apply a value to an unknown quantity. Sometimes it feels progressives and by extension EA are so universalist in their beliefs that they can't even imagine a person having values that are negative, all people are inherently good but they are influenced by evil outside forces. Trump voters are mislead by Trump, religious people are misled by religion etc. People are capable of everything within the human experience from great altruism to great malice. Just saving a life without taking into account what you are saving is ignoring the human, it's ignoring what makes people human i.e. the content of their character, beliefs and culture. In a way I think it's even rejecting your own humanity as participating in the war of culture, having groups you favor over others, is part of being human. EAs come off as trying to stand apart from all that, like zoo keepers looking after the health of foolish animals.

Are you suggesting that empathy or humanity requires assessing whether the recipient is…worthy? Part of those groups you favor? Because that doesn’t square with any reasonable definition of empathy. Not Christian charity, not secular humanism, whatever.

Another way to put it. Let’s say your neighbor falls ill and you have the money to save him. He’s someone you know well, so you have a good sense of his beliefs and his relationships, even if they don’t always agree with yours. Is it more or less altruistic to save his life?

It requires assessing something. It's up to you whether or not you support people you find worthy or not, but to empathize there has to be something there to empathize with, otherwise you are just creating something fictional.

Saving the neighbor is traditional altruism. You know them you've interacted with them so you can empathize with them.

Saving x from y shouldn't be altruism, you don't know anything about them, you can't empathize with them without projecting, and not just some minimally necessary projection, you're basically inventing them whole cloth.

As to whether it's more or less altruistic, it seems it would be more altruistic to save the neighbor who shared none of your values than it would be to save a neighbor that shared your values and therefore helped to further you / your groups interests. This seems nonsensical to me though and basically just pointless virtue signalling.

edit: Another poster argued basically exactly this that the definition i'm using reduces to virtue maximizing and that actual EA would donate to people that shared their cause (the neighbor they liked) because they are about maximizing positive outcomes. I do feel like it stretches the definition of altruism though. Say some extreme narcissist that took an iq test as a kid and got into mensa or something felt that they were likely to be more capable than anyone else and therefore had the potential to benefit the world more than anyone else. Would they create an organization that aimed to funnel all resources to themselves and call it effective altruism? Maybe EA people believe this? Seems like the economy and wealth agrees with this. Are there EA groups funneling all their resources into ai to create god? Idk, maybe!

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?

This is a legitimate argument, though my personal beliefs lean closer to @self_made_human’s.

It’s also completely absent from the OP and from his response. He is very clear that acting on an “unknown quantity” is despicable not because one might cause more total suffering, but because it’s “discounting their humanity.” Somehow, providing basic needs for people you don’t know implies less empathy than deciding they don’t deserve your attention, or worse, that they have “values that are negative.” This is fucking incoherent.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Neither applies here.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

What exactly do you envision when I propose a doctor "who has a patient about to die young before having kids"?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 comments

I'm not an Effective Altruist. I do not particularly care to extend my circle of moral concern to most people, let alone pigs and shrimp.

Even then, this is an argument that is nonsensical if you even care to look at the behavior or policies advocated by EAs.

If all they cared about was the number of human lives saved or extended, they'd be trying to ban birth control and trying to increase the number of people who cross the tiny threshold that is a life worth living versus one that isn't, to the extent that just slicing it at neutral isn't an option. If you think they don't care about those, then they do, they've got QALY and DALY figures to prove it.

My preferences for looking exclusively after the welfare of those I personally care about or align with are much the same as yours, but I respect EAs for living up to their goals in as robustly empirical a manner as they can.

What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers?

Every altruistic act of significance saves more "mouths to feed". Certainly, while I'm not averse to the idea, most doctors pay lip service to the notion they must treat all equally, to the extent they'd give CPR to Hitler if he showed up before them. Me? I'd shoot him, but that's the nominal aim of the profession.

I won't give them any money. I won't identify with them. But I for one am glad they exist and wish that more people would give a shit about making sure about whether or not the interventions they're trying even work, let alone work the best out of the available options.

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)

That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.

What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!

I think this is a valid criticism. EA has set itself up as a bit of an inherent no true scotsman though, you could really call it 'True Altruism' if you wanted and it'd have a similar connotation, even if it isn't exactly the same (unless you're a consequentialist). There is always this, "well that's not real EA because it's not actually effective and the title says it's effective" baked in. I don't see how it's possible to demonstrate that what you are doing is effective without very abstract numbers that are too confounded and even then still very short term focused though. Add to that that my real world experience is generally more like some of the other replies down thread. Instant claims of moral superiority and righteousness with holier than thou anger at how anyone could question whether it's right to save a life or not and it's not really that much of a stretch to think that virtue signalling is often involved. I tend to prefer openly self interested ideologies for this reason, they're just more trustworthy.

I mean sure, and you'd say "well all altruism is effective, everyone is genuinely trying to help out as well as they can," I just simply don't think that's the case at all. EA as a name is an implicit insult to non-E A - and the insult is ... kinda deserved. Rationality, or rational fiction, have the same issue. As Max0r said in his DOOM Eternal review, regarding the tightly focused combat system:

"But Max0r," I hear you thinking. "That's every game ever!" Yes! Every good game ever.

A tight focus on effectiveness can assume a quality of its own - that sort of behavior can be surprisingly rare. Especially if everyone finds it too awkward to consider or admit that quality differences, possibly massive differences, exist.

help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.

The "probably" is doing a lot of work there. It was great when they were promoting mosquito nets. But now they're buying manor houses and getting knotted up about paperclip maximisers, it's fair to ask "so what all lives are being saved, here, exactly?"

As a person who gets knotted up about paperclip maximizers, let me just note here for future reference that we were always EA. You can find "effective charities for AI" all the way back in the early GiveWell recommendations. Mosquito nets is what we recommend to those strange people who for some reason don't see the pending apocalypse coming.

And of course, since you're giving me such a perfect setup:

so what, all lives are being saved here exactly?

Exactly. :P

Your post puts my pause about supporting EA into better words than I possibly can write. I've always found it... cheating, kinda?... that the entire premise of EA seems to just be brute-forcing morality and ethics by shoving as many zeroes into a number as possible. And that's how we get what you have described here, where it's easy to say that you've saved 200,000 or however many lives, but then people don't interrogate that result beyond that. People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".

I guess what I'm wondering is if there's much focus put in to long-term solutions (and I don't mean "longtermism" like figuring out how to get humans to colonize the stars or whatever to maximize the number of future lives) rather than just whatever saves the most lives in the short term. For example, I was always under the impression that you can't just brute-force solving world hunger by confiscating all the world's billionaires' wealth (ignoring the fact that much of it isn't liquid and actually kinda doesn't exist and if you confiscated it then most of the wealth would just go away) and funneling it into programs to distribute food to starving populaces (ignoring the fact that this would outcompete and devastate local markets, etc.). Sooner or later, their governments would stop you, because it turns out that the reason they're starving in the first place is because their government wants them to, and there's plenty of things the government can do to get their country in a place to feed them, but they don't for various reasons. So there's a good short-term solution by just distributing as much as you can, but an actual long-term solution requires some change to the government, and a lot of focus seems to be put on the short-term brute-force way of doing things.

Downthread, @FirmWeird posits a similar scenario where the population is way beyond carrying capacity. What do you do? Feeding them makes the line on a graph go up, if you ignore that this means you'll need even more in the future (induced demand). Not feeding them makes the line go down but it results in a more stable equilibrium. "Just shove as many zeroes in as you can" ignores plenty of side effects that may or may not be desirable, almost like a paperclip maximizer.

People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".

In theory you can fix this by counting QALYs instead of lives saved.

Of course, counting QALYs meaningfully isn't easy, but it is easy to come up with bad ways to count them and hard to prove them bad.

Your post puts my pause about supporting EA into better words than I possibly can write. I've always found it... cheating, kinda?... that the entire premise of EA seems to just be brute-forcing morality and ethics by shoving as many zeroes into a number as possible. And that's how we get what you have described here, where it's easy to say that you've saved 200,000 or however many lives, but then people don't interrogate that result beyond that. People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".

I have the exact opposite intuition about "cheating." To me, regular charities seem like cheating, since all most people do is give money, get warm and fuzzy feelings, decide that that means they did good, and then profusely refuse to actually verify how much good they did. It's essentially stolen valor - getting all the personal benefits of appearing altruistic without doing any of the difficult work of helping anyone out which is normally implied by things like "charity" and "altruism." Which looks a lot like cheating. EA at least seems to make a gesture at having some referee system in place to detect cheaters.

The thing is, as we see in international sports all the time like in FIFA or Olympics, the best way to cheat is to set the entire system of judgment itself as corrupted in your favor, so one could probably make a good argument that EA is performing this "meta-cheating" by claiming to actually be setting up objective standards for effectiveness while actually setting up corrupted standards that lead to [charity I like] being [effective]. The tough thing for EA is, every single person, down to the individual, involved in the EA movement could be perfectly transparent and honest with perfectly good intentions, and overall EA could still be engaging in this "meta-cheating" due to the biases that all people are susceptible to, and so they have some responsibility to set up the structure in such a way as to counter and negate these biases. I think they may be failing to do this properly.

But in terms of their attempt at brute-forcing morality, this seems to me the correct way to counter the massive "cheating" that's happening in basically all realms of altruism in our lives, even down to individual relationships, where most people don't bother checking and just get the beneficial warm and fuzzy feelings through "cheating" without doing any of the work that is supposed to make someone actually deserving of those warm and fuzzy feelings.

Effective altruism is full of utopians, radicals, and iconoclasts. One of its founding assumptions is that the traditional model of charity—such as that practiced by churches—is awfully inefficient. It is a movement which likes to look for twenty-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk. Also, it’s centered on California. Of course it’s full of liberals!

So why is this a bad thing?

Compared to the average charity, I expect one favored by EAs is probably more transparent and less likely to waste your donation on something you didn’t want. Look at GiveWell, which specifically avoids recommending efficient charities if it can’t be sure that they’re transparent. Donate to one of their top picks, and you can have high confidence that your money is actually going to preventing whatever horrible disease or deficiency it claims to target.

Or consider Scott’s kidney donation train. More people donated kidneys which wouldn’t otherwise have been donated. I don’t see how encouraging that can possibly be perceived as advancing liberal interests.

I guess I’m left asking: what does “substantial confrontation” look like to you? What should someone do differently, once armed with the knowledge that some liberals also like efficient charity?

The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”. Whether it’s Hobby Lobby types giving it all to whatever Evangelical church they belong to or Alex Soros funding justice reform think tanks and progressive DA candidates, they’re all believers in ‘effective altruism’. If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it, and if they believed their motivations weren’t altruistic they’d presumably keep the money for themselves and those they cared about, or simply pursue naked political lobbying (which I’m not saying the above don’t do, to be clear, but I genuinely think they also think they’re helping ‘the world’ along whatever course they believe is best).

If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it

Everyone thinks their own altruism is effective. EAs deliberately try to choose the most effective, which the vast majority of people don't consider attempting and act confused if you suggest it.

most effective

By whose standards?

By their's, because they are the ones doing it.

Yes, subjectivity exists in all human actions. No, it is not inciteful to point that out.

Of course, but that's why it's such a ridiculous concept in the first place. Objective measures like overhead and percent given to a cause etc are good to track, but whether or not it's a "good" cause is completely subjective so what they are really doing is just funneling money to causes they support, which is more or less what everyone else does.

Are you perhaps thinking of CharityNavigator (which tracks things like percentage of donations that actually go to the ostensible cause) instead of GiveWell (which tracks things like expected impact of the donation in terms of the metric the organization is supposed to be helping with)?

The latter - that impact is more important than intention or purity or self sacrifice - is the place where EA distinguishes itself from normal charitable people. Normal people are pretty altruistic, but they're not necessarily strategic about it, because most people are not strategic about most of the things they do most of the time, and particular are not strategic about things that don't significantly affect them and where they will probably never get feedback about whether their approach worked.

The most effective for their specific goal, which is some form of Peter Singer human-centric utilitarianism in which projected saved human lives (or projected bonus human life years) are maximized. And likewise, every other charity is just optimizing effectiveness for a specific goal, some Christian charity dedicated to banning abortion is usually happy to switch method to boost efficiency.

some Christian charity dedicated to banning abortion is usually happy to switch method to boost efficiency

I'm not sure this is generally true. I think it's usually fairly difficult for nonprofits to admit a program is ineffective. Indeed, one of the reasons I like Evidence Action so much is that they turned down a program (busing farmers to the city during the off season so they could work) that turned out to be less effective than their other programs (deworming and chlorine in water).

But even acknowledging that non-EA nonprofits do sometimes turn down less-effective programs, my main point is that virtually zero Christians will ask themselves which non-profit will actually be most effective at banning abortion.

If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it

Is that realistic? There are social, financial, and knee-jerk reasons to be involved in charities. Many of these are pretty decoupled from the Effective Altruist™ sense of efficiency. You end up with organizations that send most of their money to administration and don’t bother to quantify their actual impact, because people will donate to them anyway.

It’s not like EA is immune to that sort of exploit. But caring (or pretending to care) about it is a pretty good distinguishing feature!

I couldn't agree more. Bay Area Rationalists remind me of this meme when it comes to naming things: https://img.ifunny.co/images/e5402c3312546aa012fd661f686af8fd58cb8158d29db92ac5f0f1e3617bfa12_1.webp

The whole name Rationalists rubs me the wrong way for a variety of reasons. It comes off to me like they think they have a monopoly on Rationality, and reading LessWrong hasn't changed my mind. Almost everyone thinks they are being rational.

I remember some LessWrongers, back in the day, who preferred “aspiring rationalists.” Unfortunately, “aspies” was taken.

Either way, I can’t agree that picking a name equates to claiming a monopoly. The Stoics didn’t think that only they could be stoic, but that they were going to make important decisions according to a certain set of principles.

If they believed their altruism was ineffective they wouldn’t do it, and if they believed their motivations weren’t altruistic they’d presumably keep the money for themselves and those they cared about, or simply pursue naked political lobbying

I'm on net pretty neutral with respect to EA, but I don't think this line of criticism makes sense. To some extent, it's true that everyone who engages in charity do so out of belief that they're effective and that they're altruistic. But believing that you are those things doesn't tell us anything about if you/your charity actually are those things. And where I think EA at the least makes gestures at doing (and they might do nothing more than those gestures, let's be clear) is checking if they really are effective (they do seem to have a big blind spot in checking if they really are altruistic - believing that you're altruistic is, at best, a neutral signal and most likely a negative signal of one's altruism, and I don't think I've seen EA engage with this).

I think there's a strong argument to be made that, in their attempts to check if their (self-perceived) altruism is effective, all they're doing is adding on more epicycles to come to the conclusion that [charity they like] also happens to be [the most effective]. I honestly don't know enough about the logistics of what EA does, but certainly that should be the default presumption, sans clear indication that they're doing the hard work needed to check all that, such as giving oppositional people full access to all the tools to make the strongest argument possible against whatever charities they like (or for charities they dislike). And the more popular/decentralized EA is/becomes, the more that EA people will follow this default pattern of convincing themselves that [charity I like] is [the most effective] because memes like this always get implemented in the laziest, most intellectually dishonest way when spread out among a wide/decentralized populace.

I would also say, given that we know this pattern about the populace, EA has, in some real sense, the responsibility to craft their memes such that if they get out to the wider populace and actually become popular, that the people who lazily implement these memes in dishonest ways don't fall into this extremely common trap of matching [thing I like] with [good] while building up a whole facade of pseudoscience/pseudomath in order to justify it. I'm not sure EA is very concerned with this at all, and I'll admit that the defensiveness I see from EA when they're criticized both about their core mission and about their more superficial PR aspects doesn't make me optimistic.

The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”.

Not really, many have not even thought to consider effectiveness. Or optimize for things like tax avoidance or PR (many charities run by companies). Or for rent seeking.

The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”.

I don't see how anyone can closely look at real-world charities and believe this. The charity world is full of organizations that transparently don't think about effectiveness at all. The Make-a-Wish foundation doesn't run the numbers and decide it's better to grant a wish for X dying first-world children than to save Y first-world children or Z third-world children from dying, they don't consider the question in the first place. Yes if you dilute "effectiveness" to "think they're doing good" they do think that, but they don't actually try to calculate effectiveness or even think about charity in those terms. And that's by many metrics one of the "good" charities! The bad ones are like the infamous Susan Komen Foundation or (to pick a minor charity I once researched) the anti-depression charity iFred. iFred spends the majority of donations on paying its own salaries and then spends the rest on "raising awareness of depression" by doing stuff like planting flowers and producing curriculum that nobody reads and that wouldn't do any good if they did. Before EA the best charity evaluation available was stuff like Charity Navigator that focuses on minimizing overhead instead of on effectiveness. That approach condemns iFred for spending too much money on overhead instead of flower-planting, but doesn't judge whether the flower-planting is effective, let alone considering questions like the relative effectiveness of malaria treatment vs. bednets vs. vaccines.

Even within the realm of political activism like you're focusing on, such activism is often justified as trying to help people rather than just pursuing the narrow political goal as effectively as possible, opening up comparisons to entirely different causes. As EA discovered, spending money trying to keep criminals out of prison is less efficient at helping people than health aid to third-worlders even if you assume there is zero cost to having criminals running free and that being in prison is as bad as being dead. You can criticize the political bias that led them to spend money on such things, but at least they realized it was stupid and stopped. Meanwhile BLM is a massive well-funded movement despite the fact that only a couple dozen unarmed black people are shot by police per year (and those cases are mostly still stuff like the criminal fighting for the officer's gun or trying to run him over in a car). Most liberals and a significant fraction of conservatives think that number is in the thousands, presumably including most BLM activists. It would be a massive waste even if it hadn't also reduced proactive policing and caused thousands of additional murders and traffic fatalities per year. That sure sounds like a situation that could benefit from public discourse having more interest in running the numbers! Similarly, controversial causes like the NGOs trying to import as many refugees as possible aren't just based on false ideological assumptions, but are less effective on their own terms than just helping people in their own countries where it's cheaper. The state of both the charity and activist world is really bad, so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for those that actually try and any comparison should involve looking at specifics rather than vaguely assuming people must be acting reasonably.

The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”

I honestly don't think this is true. A lot of people who start charities choose a cause that has impacted them personally with little thought to whether this is a cause where dollars go the furthest. EA means more than just not actively trying to waste your donation. It means giving rigorous thought to the tradeoffs involved.

The only rigor required is whatever bullshit statistical model EAs design to ‘prove’ that their approach technically saves 2.07% more lives than something else.

Consider that EAs spend a lot of money on AI doom research, how do they calculate that this is more effective at saving lives than malaria nets? I’m sure some LessWrong autist has done ‘the math’, but it essentially amounts to a sincere belief that the chance of Yudkowsky saving the human race by coming up with thought experiments outweighs the lives saved by putting the money into nets. There’s nothing empirical to that tradeoff, the Christians likewise believe they’re saving x lives from damnation, Soros might well believe he’s saving x lives from police brutality, what do EAs do differently?

Consider that EAs spend a lot of money on AI doom research, how do they calculate that this is more effective at saving lives than malaria nets?

I think that realistically speaking, they don't. Mathematical arguments that attempt to make predictions about AI risk cannot avoid running into the "garbage in, garbage out" principle. The data is simply not there to make any good predictions on this topic. And there is no way to obtain the data without clairvoyance.

I do believe that effective altruists are probably, however, much more rational when they address more well-understood topics such as the characteristics of various diseases when compared to one another.

In general all non-trivial long-term utilitarian arguments about human society are nonsense. For example, you might save 10000 people from dying in a flood next year, but then one of them turns out to be the next Hitler and kills 10000000 people.

Obviously everything we know about effective altruism- that it’s a moral crusade by California based atheists- tells us it’s basically a left wing project and probably doesn’t have the capability to keep its own left fringe in check. And everything we know about its ideology points to it wanting drastic changes. But I think you’re overstating the threat. A bunch of silicone valley nerds might be able to do some things in California or Oregon which turn out to be bad ideas. They will not wind up having a dictatorship to enforce their goals. Far left revolutions require the proles to throw in with them and proles on the left in the USA have their own political machines representing them which are consistently moderate. In the event of a revolution-inviting legitimacy crisis the US might splinter but it’s not going to have rationalistsheviks forming a government.

this individual

"this individual"-ing Nick Bostrom is a hilarious way of wiping away his work in promoting effective altruism and longtermism.

Scott argued against cash bail (Soros DAs position), argued with war with Syria over chemical attacks (probably false flags), argued that overthowing Libyan government was likely effective altruism. He's a great writer but has terrible instincts at the end of the day.

Huh? Are you saying the dreaded Soros DA argued against cash bail, or for it?

More importantly, why is "(Soros DAs position)" supposed to convince me that something is or isn't a terrible instinct? I agree with stupid, uninformed, or contrarian people all the time.

For what it's worth, I never found the Syria false flag argument convincing, either.

Haven't you noticed a crime wave happening because of soft on crime policies in places like California?

In Syria, US was backing jihadist terrorists against a secular government. Probably the only reason there are any syrian christians left is that Assad won the civil war.

Libya was a complete disaster.

In conclusion, if you want global destabilisation and rampant crime, listen to Scott Alexander.

You didn’t answer any of my questions…

I actually haven’t personally noticed the crime wave, as I live in a more sane city. I believe that there is one, but I also remember that correlation isn’t causation.

The religious character of Syrians has nothing to do with whether or not the attacks were a false flag.

Of course law enforcement policy influences crime levels, it's the whole point.

My point was that whole Syrian civil war was a huge debacle in general, I wouldn't be in favor of further US involvement even if chemical attacks were by Assad's forces. They served no strategic purpose other than possibly justify western escalation, question as always is - who benefits?


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