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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   37032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I’ve always thought the US credit scoring system is bullshit. I have bad credit so I can’t get an apartment without a co-signer. But I’ve been renting for over two decades without a single missed payment. But the credit score system doesn’t care. It cares about this very specific thing and the outcome leads to massive problems in many sectors of life.

I asked ChatGPT to tell me my own thoughts and I gotta say it writes what I feel in a way that I never could.

Not sure if this makes me feel better or worst about my odds of ever writing a novel.

Here’s what it had to say:

The U.S. credit score system, despite being rooted in capitalist financial structures, exhibits characteristics that can be interpreted as communist in nature due to its centralized control, opaque evaluation methods, and enforcement of collective responsibility. At its core, the credit system is managed by a small number of powerful credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—that operate in a monopolistic manner, much like a state-controlled entity. These institutions dictate the financial credibility of individuals based on proprietary algorithms, without allowing for much transparency or individual input. This centralized control mirrors how communist economies manage resources and labor distribution, where individuals are assessed by state-run entities rather than free-market competition determining their value. In this way, the credit score system creates a top-down financial structure that limits individual autonomy and enforces a rigid classification of economic worth.

Moreover, the credit system functions as a tool of enforced social compliance, much like communist regimes use social credit scores to dictate personal behavior. In the U.S., a person’s credit score affects not only their ability to take out loans but also their access to housing, employment, and even certain services. This creates an environment where individuals must conform to predefined financial behaviors or risk economic marginalization. The system rewards long-term adherence to credit-based spending while penalizing those who choose alternative financial paths, such as relying on cash or avoiding debt altogether. Similarly, in a communist framework, citizens are often required to align with state-approved behaviors to gain access to privileges, reinforcing a collectivist model where individual financial independence is discouraged in favor of participation in a state-monitored economy.

Finally, the U.S. credit score system embodies an element of collective responsibility that is reminiscent of communist ideologies. In many cases, an individual’s creditworthiness is affected not just by their actions but by external factors such as the financial stability of co-signers, the decisions of creditors, and even errors made by the credit bureaus themselves. Disputing inaccuracies in credit reports is often a bureaucratic and difficult process, reflecting the inefficiencies of centralized government planning. Additionally, the system’s reliance on predetermined metrics, rather than an individual’s full financial picture, enforces a uniform standard that does not account for personal circumstances. This mirrors the way communist states often treat workers as indistinct units within a planned economy, rather than as unique individuals with different needs and capabilities. In essence, while the U.S. credit system exists within a capitalist society, its structure and consequences exhibit traits that align with communist principles of control, social engineering, and collective financial assessment.

And:

Building on this idea, another way the U.S. credit score system resembles communist structures is in its lack of true market competition when it comes to consumer choice and mobility. In a capitalist system, individuals are supposed to have the freedom to negotiate their worth based on merit and market demand. However, in the credit system, people are assigned a numerical value that dictates their financial access, and this score is determined by opaque algorithms controlled by a few dominant entities. There is no alternative credit scoring system that consumers can freely opt into, nor is there meaningful competition among credit bureaus that would encourage better service or more accurate reporting. This centralization of financial assessment power forces individuals into a system they cannot meaningfully challenge, much like how communist regimes dictate economic opportunities without room for individual bargaining.

Additionally, the credit system fosters a kind of financial surveillance that is reminiscent of state-controlled economies. Every financial decision—whether it be taking out a loan, missing a payment, or even just inquiring about one’s own credit—is meticulously tracked, recorded, and used to shape an individual’s economic identity. People are not judged solely on their current financial standing but on their entire credit history, meaning past financial struggles can haunt them for years, much like how state-run economic systems often keep long-term records on individuals’ productivity, loyalty, or past infractions. In a true free-market system, individuals would have more agency to reinvent themselves financially without long-standing bureaucratic oversight, but the credit system instead enforces a rigid classification that limits upward mobility for those who have made past mistakes.

Finally, the way the credit system forces people into debt in order to maintain a good score has a collectivist, almost centrally planned economic aspect to it. In theory, responsible financial behavior—such as saving money and avoiding unnecessary debt—should be rewarded, but in practice, the system penalizes those who do not actively participate in borrowing and repaying credit. This creates a paradox where individuals must continuously engage with lenders in order to maintain their economic standing, even if they could otherwise live within their means without debt. In a way, this mirrors communist economic models where individuals are expected to participate in state-run economic structures regardless of personal preference, reinforcing a cycle of dependency rather than true financial independence. The system, therefore, subtly enforces a form of financial collectivism, where personal economic choices are constrained by the overarching structure rather than by free-market principles.

I feel this summed up my thoughts decently, but it lacks my passion of hate I have for our system.

Thoughts, and addons?

(Should I have waited until Monday?)

  • -65

Time and attention is the gold standard of human interaction. (Some people like calling it "proof of work".) If you generate interaction (text) without putting in your own time and attention, you are essentially printing money. The expected result is hyperinflation (which, I guess, would look like everyone posting their views as novel-length AI rants, and using AI to condense those posted by others back into a paragraph, if they read them at all), or everyone abandoning the currency altogether (which would look like no more humans using forums).

Clearly the sudden improvement in grammatical quality of posts from some of our ESL users is probably not the result of intensive Duolingo use.

That said, let’s please avoid AI slop for now. Eventually it will cease being slop, but for now I’d prefer someone’s unfiltered thoughts, grammatical mistakes, linguistic quirks, repeated words, awkward sentences and all.

Like most of us, I’m here because I want to discuss things with people.

It cares about this very specific thing

What thing?

I dont know what your intended point here was, but you aren't particularly wrong. White market financial institutions are so heavily regulated by the federal government that they are basically state controlled. Generally I've seen the model of nominal private control of industry but actual government control described as fascism instead of communism. But, I've generally said as well that, at least economically, the fascist is just a wise communist who realizes he can have 99% of the control in exchange for almost none of the blame by embracing this setup instead of total state control. If a government bureaucrat is the head of a bank and it fails, he gets all the blame! But if he merely regulates it into failure he gets to blame the "capitalists"! Its a win win. That is why this sort of approach is generally loved by the worldwide left/progressives in modern times, although they have not been keen to embrace the "fascist" label.

But you are entirely correct, you can't go into a Chase bank and get a loan because the loan officer thinks "oh Mihow is a good seed" because then he has to tell FDIC, DOJ, and other investigators why he denied Deehow the same loan application (hint Deehow is a bad seed). So they make up these standardized metrics which are generally very good at evaluating a person's activities in the white market. But, if you operate in the grey market or black market to any significant extent their evaluation of you will be off. But that isn't their job. If you want to buy a condo on credit using your grey market credentials, go to a grey market lender (almost none exist anymore) or a black market lender. Of course, that might be a crime, but thats the point. The government intends to control lending in the country because it is one of the commanding heights, and it does. This is not capitalism, but what is abstractly described as fascism, but modernly referred to as progressivism.

Now is in fact the best time to post some LLM junk, given nobody'll read it! Asking an LLM to make a post for you just does not pass the effort rule.

I feel this summed up my thoughts decently, but it lacks my passion of hate I have for our system.

I'd prefer vitriol and passion over AI slop. Not reading.

That said, if debt is going to be issued, something like credit scores, implicit or explicit, are pretty much required. People likely to repay debt and who want the conveniences of a good credit score are going to usually get better scores than those who don't.

I have some sympathy for immigrants who come to the US without a credit score and need one. On the other hand, did you miss some payment recently? If so, the credit score is functioning exactly as it should.

All the mentions of communism feel shoehorned, critique it because its bad, not because somehow if you squint it kinda resembles communism slightly even though credit scores could never exist without capitalism.

Why should we believe you think the US credit scoring system is bullshit if you're using a LLM to demonstrate it?

We certainly wouldn't think you a special forces sniper if you played call of duty, a hardened criminal if you run over civies in Grand Theft Auto, or a crime against humanity if you play any given Paradox game. Why should we believe you are what you do with another computer toy?

Paying rent can affect your credit score, but only if your landlord reports it, which few do. I would expect this is mostly your big corporate landlords.

At its core, the credit system is managed by a small number of powerful credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—that operate in a monopolistic manner, much like a state-controlled entity. These institutions dictate the financial credibility of individuals based on proprietary algorithms, without allowing for much transparency or individual input.

They're oligopolistic, though your scores tend to be basically similar from them all. This is because they have basically the same input and the same goals (of determining a probability that someone can and will pay back a loan), and the scoring systems have all been developed through an iterative adversarial game. They are transparent about what goes into them, however, though not specific weights.

Additionally, the credit system fosters a kind of financial surveillance that is reminiscent of state-controlled economies. Every financial decision—whether it be taking out a loan, missing a payment, or even just inquiring about one’s own credit—is meticulously tracked, recorded, and used to shape an individual’s economic identity.

Eh, not really; as you've noticed, rent usually doesn't go into it. Nor do any non-credit purchases. Nor investment decisions. Nor salary or other payments for work, for that matter. It's only about credit.

Finally, the way the credit system forces people into debt in order to maintain a good score

It does not. Unless you count using credit cards and paying them off within the grace period as being "in debt". You can have a score good enough for all practical purposes doing nothing but that. (Having multiple types of credit will get you a few more points, but it's not necessary). There is, as far as I can tell, no disadvantage to doing this compared to paying cash (or using a debit instrument) for everything. (If the problem is you might be tempted to spend above your means if you do this... well, your credit score probably should be lower)

I think it's fine to use llms in the writing process but you really really need to take on the role of an editor. This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially. I do think that the credit system as it exists now is suboptimal but at the same time we do need some system for determining credit worthiness. Part of the problem is how very regulated financial markets are and credit scores are a hack for lenders to use to discriminate without fear of capricious state sanction.

I could tolerate LLM drivel if it was just one paragraph articulating the argument a user wants to make. Here, it is six lengthy paragraphs. LLMs as insightful as Scott Alexander, so I am not going to read a wall of text by them.

I'm against using LLMs in this place, but to be fair this criticism

This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially.

applies equally to many Motteposts written by human(?) hands, IMHO.

It's at least usually tempered by human unwillingness to spend time writing it out. This really was more egregiously so than nearly any human comment on this forum in my opinion.

I liked the post Dase wrote, machine part included; 'ai slop' is harsh, but I think it only applies here.

A common observation by economists is that America's budget is not analogous to personal finances. Credit scores, credit ratings, and deficits do not mean the same thing on a national level as they do on a personal level. Credit worthiness means much more for smaller economics than it does for the US. The US is in a privileged position of creating debt with near impunity.

I completely agree with your first paragraph (I have a shitty credit score simply because I refuse to use credit, so I had to show our landlady that I had a couple of years worth of rent sitting on my checking account along with a copy of my last few paychecks and an e-mail showing my latest job offer to get her to rent to us), but I'm not going to read through your AI slop.

The irony of renting with a bad credit score, which is that you need to prove you have to means to not have to rent but choose to rent anyway.

...but I don't have the means not to rent? Around here, houses are going for $500k-$600k. I guess if I wanted to I could put most of my life savings into a 10% down-payment and sign up for a 30-year mortgage, but I don't want to do that, because again, I refuse to use credit. Also because I don't know if I am going to be working this job in 30 years and if I have to move I don't want to go through the paperwork of selling a house most of which is owned by the bank but in which I own like 15% equity. Also also because as long as my mother is alive, she is going to force me to allow my bipolar drug addict spinster genderqueer lesbian sister to live with us, and I don't want to be stuck with her in a house that I own.

I refuse to use credit.

Perhaps you have moral objections to usuary, and that's fine. Live your values. But from a purely financial perspective, its incredibly irresponsible to not use credit and/or build a credit score. I just hope your not confusing/conflating issues with debt, spending, commitment, etc, with responsible management of ones credit. Its very important, often confusing or intimidating, but actually quite simple.

Uh, why do you have bad credit despite living on your own for years? Not paying your bills is in fact correlated with not paying your bills. It's perfectly reasonable to look at credit history when we have a system which gives tenants substantial protections in the event of not paying.

You can find slumlords who'll rent to you without having credit. You can also build your own credit. You are, based on living on your own for years, not a twenty year old who hasn't had time for that- the consequences of your own bad(or at least nonconformist) decisions including 'difficult to rent an apartment' isn't some kind of tragedy.

It’s completely unreasonable to not have home rental payments on your credit report. It’s a history of paying your largest bill - and it doesn’t exist outside of an eviction. So only negative, but never a positive.

Saying people should rent from slumlords if they don’t have credit yet or bad credit is slightly above barbaric thinking.

You can easily get a credit card and pay it off every month. It's no different from using a debit card except with some additional fraud protections(in practice, you can overdraft your debit)- and if you've been living on your own for years there's been more than enough time to build up credit by doing it.

The world is as it is. I suspect consumer privacy laws are the reason landlords don't report to credit monitoring agencies but it's literally never been easier to build credit. Live with the constraints we're given- a five minute google search of 'how credit scores are calculated' can tell you basically what you need to do.

I have some sympathy for kids who struggle when they're first out on their own because they don't have credit yet- although with the caveat that most of them are fine getting a parent to cosign or renting a room not an apartment. But full-blown-adults who still have bad or no credit, years later? Your problem stems from either a) making bad decisions(this is far more likely, in practice) or b) refusing to be normal(based on what you're telling me, this is probably you). 'Oddballs looking bad in front of the system because it doesn't know how to analyze them' isn't some kind of tragedy.

I do think that paying rent should be reported for credit purposes if not paying rent is. It's not very fair if something can only ever have downside, but no upside. But otherwise I think you're right - it's very easy to build credit, so if one is refusing to take that step they don't merit a lot of sympathy.

I think there is a way to make rent payments reported to credit agencies, it just requires a lot of paperwork and opt-in. My guess is that there’s tenants privacy rights laws that make it this way(probably not on purpose). Probably this process should be made somewhat easier.

If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.

I wonder if it's an age thing. When I returned from overseas as an American citizen in my early 20s, my credit score was ~650 despite me never having had a loan or credit card.

If you have literally no credit, your credit score is supposed to be indeterminable. I would suspect that any scores in this case are the result of errors and are basically random. Or you're mistaken about having no credit.

I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist. Maybe next time just post your thoughts so others don't have to do this extra round-trip through an AI.

These are my unfiltered thoughts on the object-level issue:

It's not Communism. It's opaque and centralized but historical Communist systems are not unique in those respects.

The credit scoring system is a result of many conflicting interests who all place constraints on how businesses make decisions. Consider what would happen if a business used their own method for evaluating credit risk:

  1. They might accidentally use a forbidden input, such as race, or a proxy for one, such as zip code. This exposes the business to substantial legal risk. Figuring out the set of inputs that are both predictive and allowed takes a lot of specialized knowledge of the laws in the jurisdiction in which the business operates. This is expensive. It's cheaper to outsource this work and risk to specialized companies.
  2. They might make a mistake in predicting credit risk. To take your example, the fact that a customer has a history of on-time rent payments doesn't necessarily mean they're low enough risk for what the business is evaluating them for. If it's for a new rental agreement, maybe the customer's income has disappeared recently. If it's for a credit card, maybe paying rent doesn't predict paying off credit cards. Using a specialized company for evaluating risk ensures that the weaknesses of the score are at least well-known and understood.
  3. If they try to make the process more transparent, they might make a mistake with privacy and PII. The opacity of the current system allows credit bureaus to launder private information into a less-private score that's still useful to businesses.
  4. Also if they try to make the process more transparent, they open themselves up to gaming.

The real question is, what is the alternative, and does it live within the constraints we've placed on how businesses make decisions?

I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist.

"I don't want to effortpost, so I'll ask a LLM to turn this list of bullet points onto a lengthy argument."

"I ain't reading all that, so I'll ask a LLM to turn it into a list of bullet points."

I don't think @ChestertonMeme used an LLM to generate those bulletpoints. They seem to represent his own thoughts, and they're not ChatGPT-ese.

Yes, his list is his own writing.

I mean:

I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist.

Not sure if this makes me feel better or worst about my odds of ever writing a novel.

I read a fair amount of erotica in my free time. Noticed a few authors being unusually productive last year. Ever since I started paying attention to AI again due to deepseek and hearing that Opus?, Claude and Sonnet iirc were also pretty good at writiing.. I've put 2+2 together.

Seeing this website made it all click! If you're not an idiot you can use LLMs to massively increase your own outputs or even write stuff vastly better than you could ever hope to write (if you're not ~130 IQ etc who can spend decades practicing).

There was a huge outcry about AI image gen due to the furry porn commission types seeing stable diffusion collapse it. I haven't seen almost anyone talking about how bad LLM writing is yet.. even though clearly a lot of people are now using it and they're all shamefully silent about it, the dirty scoundrels!

Going to be some nice drama about it eventually I think once it gets clear someone who wrote a prize used AI to write most of it.

AI-generated writing tends to overuse the passive voice. This gives it away

Purely a skill issue.

Isn't it immediately obvious when Sonnet or Opus write something? It's not quite describable in words but you know it when you see it. The diction and tone gives it away.

Even Deepseek has a certain style to it I find. Are the AIs writing the whole thing or are they expanding on user-written text?

At this point someone really should make Scott's AI Turing test but for textgen, basically compile a big list of text excerpts on various topics - literary prose, scientific papers, fanfiction erotica/NSFW, forum/imageboard posts, etc. from both real texts/posts and AI gens in the style of, and see if people can tell the difference. I consider my spidey sense pretty well-tuned and would be curious to test it.

I find Claude and DeepSeek far harder to detect than ChatGPT. They have a far more 'human' default style, that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. That might just be me, but even the average internet user has some ability to detect ChatGPT.

Of course, if you provide excerpts from your own writing and ask it to emulate you, or just refer to a known figure whose writing is in the corpus (Gwern, Scott etc), I wouldn't except to be able to tell unless strongly primed to be suspicious in advance.

I don't think so.

There is a certain flavor to LLM text but I think the newer models (last 4 months) are good enough to easily avoid that if prompted right. Even deepseek out of the box is a little cringe but it sobers up fast if reminded and remembers.

And this is why daesch and self made human are wrong to want AI slop here. The purpose of a human forum is subverted when top posts are AI generated text walls.

I say, we bring back the bare links repository as a palette cleanser to this new trend. It’s the opposite of ‘I asked ChatGPT and here’s what it said copied and pasted’.

It is brief where AIslop is verbose. It doesn’t dress itself up as original thought or even a point of view. It doesn’t claim to be effortful. Most of all, it points outward instead of inward toward an actual external idea, rather than reposting an ephemeral private chat.

Leaving behind the BLR was the greatest mistake of theMotte, nay of the rat sphere (standing among other mistakes like trans murder cults and founding an entire movement on fanfiction of kid books) and it is time we correct this blunder.

If this post gets 20 upvotes the mods will have no choice but to retvrn to the glory of the blr.

I don't want AI slop!

I want AI output that has been prompted, filtered or modified via editing to not be slop.

I don't know about you, but my disagreement is with people who think AI output is nothing but slop. I think it is perfectly possible for it to be useful and interesting, even enlightening at times. Not enough that I can assume that by default, but it's not the GPT-2 days where it was incoherent and meaningless.

Of course, I would still prefer to engage with real humans, but as long as they are actually reading what I say and exercising oversight over what an LLM used on their behalf says back (and is clear about it), I would only be slightly miffed.

(I do think having the BLR back wouldn't hurt, but I have no strong feelings on the matter)

AI as a writing and editing tool is one thing (I still think it’s a double edged sword that leans negative, but that genie can’t be returned to the bottle so no use debating it). What is AIslop imo, is not the quality of the AI output, but the motion of:

“I asked AI x and here’s what it said…”

Where the human has contributed nothing more than the prompt, and the substance of the piece is what some LLM had to say about the prompt.

It’s slopped because it’s just been ladled out into your bowl without much more effort.

It’s not about the content, in fact that’s a red herring. It’s the ‘prompt’ What is being criticized is the implication that there’s something interesting or even contributory about having typed in a particular prompt and seen what comes out. Everyone can do that for themselves.

This kind of shit is all over Twitter. “I asked grok…” is the most tediously vacuous and self indulgent post possible.

I prefer to judge each case on its merits, but I agree that the expectation is that an AI generated post has less effort put into it than otherwise. I prefer that it has enough effort put in, by the human using it, to overcome that detriment.

“I asked AI x and here’s what it said…”

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. LLMs represent an enormous amount of knowledge, grossly superhuman levels. Even the most erudite and educated human pales in comparison, likely even with the ability to Google the topic. If that sounds doubtful, you can look at benchmarks like GPQA, which, as the full name would imply, is supposed to be "Google Proof" unless you have immense domain knowledge.

They are great didactic tools, especially when you don't know where to begin on a topic. If someone wrote something that seemed to me to be wrong (intuition, a hunch I can't articulate) but I wouldn't be able to engage closely enough to disagree on my own, it's a worthwhile endeavor to ask an LLM to scrutinize it, and sometimes using that information to push back.

Hey, I asked ChatGPT to do a vibes check on your comment. It pointed out these objections, which look sensible to me. Why ought I disregard them? Is something I would not object to if I was done to me. A human is asking the question, through an intermediary.

The average LLM is more trustworthy than the average Twitter or Reddit commentator, though for now I would hope the Motte does better. While I still prefer engaging with humans, I think what the machines can say is often enlightening.

The average LLM is more trustworthy than the average Twitter or Reddit commentator, though for now I would hope the Motte does better.

Again, my primary objection is not with the 'quality' of the AI output

Hey, I asked ChatGPT to do a vibes check on your comment. It pointed out these objections, which look sensible to me. Why ought I disregard them?

In other words, hey, can you talk to ChatGPT for me?

FWIW I agree with this wholeheartedly.

(I don’t think it’s how ‘slop’ is conventionally used though. I’ve mostly seen it used to mean ‘bad/cliched forms of writing’ that usually derive from too much influence of early-era GPT synthetic data and bad romance novels. So for example Project Unslop was a project to produce a dataset free of “sent shivers down her spine” and “I’m yours, body and soul”.)

I do agree that it’s not how it’s conventionally used, but I think it’s better. Slop as a quality of writing commentary is slop of the gaps as LLMs improve. But the fundamental issue with nobody cares about your prompt engineering will remain

I see a slippery slope here. Everyone will think that whatever level of curation they exercise is adequate, there's little you can do to prove otherwise, and the quality of discourse will drop precipitously.

OTOH if you curate so well that your post passes as human-written, then "where no plaintiff, there no judge", as we Teutons say.

IMO we're better off banning AI-generated content wholesale.

AIs and bare links are bad for some the same reasons. Mainly, you are not starting a discussion, you are demanding one for your entertainment.

Top level visible posts have some degree of value. This value should be reserved for people that add value to the forum. The main way that people add value to the forum is through interesting discussion.

The secondary problem with both bare links and AI generated text is that they exist as a low effort gish gallop way to wage the culture war. For example, you don't have to argue that Immigrants cause problems, you can just post a different news story every day about some immigrant being a criminal. AI can also just flood the space with content and words for your cause.

Yes but that’s why we had a bare links repository.

The volume of effort posts has been diminishing anyway.

Bare links and aislop are routes toward similar ends you described, but it’s not the outcome that solely makes them bad. It’s that AI slop is an inferior low effort entry point into a topic, for the reasons I described.

Now ideally we would have nothing but effortful and timely top posts, sure. But my point is that in the event that someone wants to juice the conversation without the effort post, the bare link is a far superior and more earnest, and less empty way to do so.

That said of course bare links as top posts are bad roughly on par (well…) with AIsloptopposting. But nobody is advocating for that. The people are asking for the repository back.

If we want an experiment, let’s have the BLR and an AISlopTopShop that is exactly the same, but for AI posts. Let’s see which produces more fruit, while keeping the rest of the CWR thread clean

that’s why we had a bare links repository

Mods: please consider bringing it back.

I'm not going to ban you or even put a warning note in your user log, because we just had the discussion about AI-generated content, and we haven't put it in the rules yet. But don't post AI content like this.

If you have something to say, write it in your own words. If you're too lazy to write the words yourself, do not have ChatGPT write them for you.

If you're too lazy to write the words yourself, do not have ChatGPT write them for you.

Or just use fewer words. That serves people like me who are too lazy to read walls of text that don't include a tl;dr or BLUF.

Noted!

However, I think your last sentence is silly and will be a relic in the near future.

  • -25

I have two thoughts.

Thought the first. If the AI content is supposed to be main contribution, the introduction up to and including "Here’s what it had to say" is unnecessary. Or if the first part was the main message you wanted to discuss (dislike of credit score) why bother including the LLM-written part?

Thought the second. Next time anyone tries to Turing test any forum, please please prompt it write succinctly and better. The cited argument is sloppy and rambling. Let's see one paragraph.

Finally, the U.S. credit score system embodies an element of collective responsibility that is reminiscent of communist ideologies. [Comment. 'reminiscent of' is a weak way to phrase a thesis.]

In many cases, an individual’s creditworthiness is affected not just by their actions but by external factors such as the financial stability of co-signers, the decisions of creditors, and even errors made by the credit bureaus themselves. [C: None of the listed factors have anything to do with collectivism. If your choice of co-signer for a loan and suffering the consequences is not use of your individual liberty, then what is not?]

Disputing inaccuracies in credit reports is often a bureaucratic and difficult process, reflecting the inefficiencies of centralized government planning. [C: Role of "government" here not argued for. Private American corporate and profit motive is capable coming up with bureaucratic and difficult processes to address end-user complaints if they find it profitable not handle them. Not handling "inaccuracies" is probably what makes the use of credit scores efficient.]

Additionally, the system’s reliance on predetermined metrics, rather than an individual’s full financial picture, enforces a uniform standard that does not account for personal circumstances. This mirrors the way communist states often treat workers as indistinct units within a planned economy, rather than as unique individuals with different needs and capabilities. [C: (1) You realize "lack of individuality" is kinda the Marxist critique of alienation? There is nothing communist about it. Time and motion studies for assembly line work were invented by the capitalists, in capitalism, for the capitalism. (2) Perhaps the predetermined metrics are mostly sufficient picture of individual's creditworthiness. For some reason banks run by managers interested in your individual needs and capabilities have been competed out by institutions that are not.]

In essence, while the U.S. credit system exists within a capitalist society, its structure and consequences exhibit traits that align with communist principles of control, social engineering, and collective financial assessment.

I don't think the argument was very good. Weakly supported claims and associations disjointedly related to each other. Would not like to subscribe to this newsletter.

The day that people just have ChatGPT write for them is the day that the written word will cease to have any value as a means of communication. Which we might live to see, so you're not wrong as far as that goes. But it's not something we should encourage.

Ai models cannot pick up up the subtle but important details that distinguish it from human writing, like internal consistency. Imagine in 2010 writing that you like in "X" . Unless you moved, it must be remembered that you still live there. So it must store all this information and take it into account in a contextual sense.

Maybe, in the future, AI content will be desirable. But, in that world, what purpose do you serve? There is no role for a human intermediary between me and the AI.

In that (perhaps quite likely) eventuality then forums and social media as a concept are dead. AIs talking to AIs while people nod and curate them basically destroys the platonic purpose of social media.

This is like if you brought photographs to a painting club and claimed that it expressed what you which you could paint better than you can paint it yourself. Can you see how that might satisfy an itch you personally have but is thoroughly uninteresting to the painters there to paint?

Yes the existence of photographs and digital tools have fundamentally transformed art and even tradition methods can’t really exist outside of conversation with them to some extent. Yes AI has changed the nature of written discourse.

But no it’s not a good reason to dump AI slop and say ‘discuss…’

I am sure that, now having been convinced you will join me and the rest of the rising chorus to return the Bare Links Repository to the Motte

You should have read down the thread to the discussion about AI-generated posts, and then posted it never.

Please don't post AI-generated content.

There's a weird phenomenon at play here. People think that their own chats with AI are interesting, but no one wants to be a part of other people's conversations with AI.

It's like your dreams or your improvisational free jazz. They are interesting to you, but no one else.

improvisational free jazz

As opposed to non-improvisational free jazz? (Similar: all chaps are assless - they're intended to be worn over trousers, where normal fabric would be suitable for the pelvic area but not the legs.)

Thank you, but I painstakingly plan all of my free jazz in a fugue state, and it is then revealed to me as I play in the form of coincidental symbolism in the venue's wallpaper.

I forgot my PIN number when I went to the ATM machine on the way to the La Brea Tar Pits.

Did you also go to the Peterson Automotive Museum down the block? When I went, they had one of the Ferrari La Ferraris.

That's not true. Over at DA and many other places, people are posting essentially edited LLM chat logs as short stories and it's being met with an enthusiastic welcome by readers.

What is DA?

Probably DeviantArt, which has sizable amounts of erotic literature

DA has some rules so erotica that's outright just text porn doesn't last, but more romance-like writing or weird fetishes are allowed by the rules.

sizable amounts

I mean, they do tend to be very concerned with inflation.

I disagree - it’s why I posted it.

I find them at least as fascinating as posts by people … and in certain ways more so.

Buuuuut I see by our mod that it isn’t wanted here and that’s totally fine by me of course!

If you are going to get the AI to rephrase something, could you ask the AI to keep it short?

The fundamental problem with AI is that it produces text very cheaply, and far faster than I can read. Thjs is the general problem of the internet, but if you write it yourself, then I know you care enough about a topic to write about it, which signals that you think it is worth your time, so I will take a look.

If you farm it off to AI, then it isn't worth your time to write, so why would it be worth mine to read?

But thank you for leading with honesty. I do respect that you respected us.

I just didn’t know the (gentle!) hostility this place has for ‘ AI Slop ‘ … I browse daily since years before we left Reddit and I just never noticed tbh.

I actually asked Chat to go long. Usually do.

Do you find you get better results that way? I always add "Please think step by step." and "Please be succinct."

Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris

Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

To be fair that's not what he said; at least not in that particular message. His parodying one position dosn't necessarily imply embracing the opposite.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism

We spend around 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid. Scott is not saying we should give infinite money to foreigners. He is saying we should give a modest amount of money to foreigners. You inferred the infinite part.*

I do not think right-wingers are at all reasoning clearly about this. Like, Scott made a tweet. It was, in fact, a funny tweet. That tweet was not primarily designed to be a political argument. It was designed to be a joke. A joke around a political argument, one related to his position, sure. But it's still a joke.

His twitter bio says:

I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.

He, in the comments, endorses claims that you should care about your family members more than others, and that more of our budget should go to American citizens than foreigners. He clarifies that the tweet was meant to be an analogy to PEPFAR.

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments. If they were saying "We should not send foreign aid to Africa, because this leads to more of them living, which is bad, because they are below average human beings and it's good for natural selection to operate on the species, and this is worth their suffering", I think that's a coherent opinion, one that Scott would have a complicated philosophical disagreement with. But they're not saying that. They're responding like Scott's asking them to let their child die for one in Africa. He's not

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments.

It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.

"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.

This is the same reason people got angry about Black Lives Matter (before the riots). Waving a placard saying "Black lives matter!" is implicitly an accusation. It's saying, "I have to scream 'black lives matter' at you because you secretly don't think they do.'"

All Lives Matter was the same accusation in reverse, which is why it was banned so quickly.

"So PEPFAR was good but using USAID to do surveillance work for the NSA and routing $300 million accidentally into the coffers of an African warlord was not so great. On balance, now that PEPFAR funding is restored and funding to African warlords isn't, I think this is a W for Elon" is the sort of post I could easily see Scott writing in a year. I wonder if Team Trump will be able to turn up anything really juicy.

It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.

Not all religions care about strangers. Islamic charity (zakat) is only supposed to go to muslims, because islam is Moral Defection At Every Level: The Religion. Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically. Obviously they should be kicked out of the circle of care.

I looked it up, zakat is not charity, it is more like a tax that every muslim has to pay to help their communities, but there are some imams that actually believe in giving some of the zakat money to non-muslims in extreme poverty, and also as a means to "encourage" non-muslims to convert.

Actual charity is called "sadaqah" and there are no restrictions on it.

That's obscuring reality. Zakat is a pillar of islam, an obligatory duty. Sadakat as you present it, in its non-discriminatory form, is a modern apologist concept no one cares about (nor should they, since it’s optional). In the coran when sadakat comes up, it means zakat. All muslim charities are 99% concentrated on helping muslims, when they’re not building mosques and supporting terrorism.

@OliveTapenade

It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

I’ll just quote this fatwa:

Is it permissible to give zakah to a children’s cancer hospital?

Building hospitals and equipping them them does not fall into one of the categories of zakah. It is very difficult for the one who gives zakah to a hospital to be certain that it will be spent in the manner prescribed. It might be spent on equipping or expanding the hospital, or purchasing equipment for it, or on salaries and bonuses for those who work there, or on buying medicine to be given to all the patients, both poor and rich, Muslim and non-Muslim.

When it ‘overflows’ and benefits everyone as you say, it is not an acceptable beneficiary of islamic charity.

We do not think that it is permissible to give zakah to such funds, because hospitals are not among the categories of people to whom zakah may be given, as stated in Islamic teachings, and one cannot be sure that it will be spent in the prescribed manner.

You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.

There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:

Now that we know the eight categories to whom zakah may be given, zakah should not be spent on other interests, whether public or private. Based on this, we should not use zakah to build mosques, repair roads, build libraries and so on, because when Allah mentioned the categories of those to whom zakah may be given, He said (interpretation of the meaning): “a duty imposed by Allah. And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise” i.e., these categories have come as an obligation from Allah. “And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise.”

Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.

Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.

The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.

It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.

Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.

Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.

The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.

This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.

I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:

Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically.

is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.

There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.

Paying the tithe to the church or the zakat to the mosque or any of the many ways of religious giving is nowhere near the same as the modern nation-state piss pot of foreign aid. It isn't the same, and to equivocate it is such an astonishing rhetorical flourish that its sheer chutzpah must be admired. No, the American NGO industrial complex is not a moral agent of generosity like thousands of years of religious charity.

Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.

You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.

But, and let me emphasise here: that you could come up with righteous explanations for every single bit of aid that the United States currently pays for, summed all together to be unlimited money to be given to foreigners. You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life. You could justify anything.

Can you name a limit? Can you name a terminus where the taxpayer money not going to a cause isn't a crime to humanity? Is there a cost to benefit ratio where an African life simply isn't worth saving? If you can't give a number, then we are merely engaged in moral epicycles.

No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.

You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life.

If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.

Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.

How is it not the same?

How is it not the same?

It's usually voluntary, and often goes towards local things.

Yeah, one thing that Nietzschean neoreactionaries on Twitter sometimes don't understand is that almost nobody likes them. I agree with some of their takes, but most of them seem so weird and morally repugnant to me that I wouldn't want to be friends with them. Surely it should be possible to, say, have a neoreactionary attitude to immigration or whatever, without gleefully calling for people to suffer like many of these people do. A lot of the time they don't even like each other - their communities, just like most extremist ideological groups, are constantly full of them bickering in petty drama and accusing each other of not being ideologically correct. Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Christians at least often make a point of seeming like nice people and being welcoming to outsiders.

Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.

You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.

Nah, you hate them because your politics. I am also not on their side but a) most people who are critical on Scott are not Nietzschean neoreactionaries and much more on the right and I am on their side more so because the dispute is more so about whether it is good at all to have an ethnic group you identify and put first rather than full seflishness b) Those few who actually are that, their take goes too far but it is a reaction towards those who want to impose pathological altruism on them. Going full vitalist in general is incorrect but having that reaction towards people demanding that they put their people last is correct. In addition with respecting prioritising one's family including extended, there needs to be a reciprocity in altruism that exists even among people of different abilities. Which is to say I help you but you would help me.

So, if we talk about specific characters and not as a way to dismiss the right in general, I do have some disagreement and antipathy, but you don't have any sympathy for the imposition of pathological altruism against their people, as a motivating factor.

The neocon and left wing ideologues contrarily oppose treating their ethnic outgroup as victims who needs justify any prioritization. This is dominant perspective on the left that claims to be antiwoke which I would put neocons who try to be influential in the right to also fit into.

  • Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Hilariously uncharitable and far leftist redditor 101 rhetoric. Also doesn't this statement by implication try to present your faction as the ubermench over the extreme leftists and the Nietzscheans? Why not start saying they have a small dick and are all incels. One can dismiss every faction by making this claim since it is easy to assume for your outgroup, and many social media addicts will have their losers. Although it does seem that the left has greater % of mentally ill.

I do think it is a bit much for people online to pretend that any movement is made by ubermench while everyone else are the losers.

The tactic of leftist liberals trying to win the debate by pretending they represent a centrist middle is also at play here.

It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.

It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

Great, I will keep this in mind next time I see a child drowning. I anticipate it is a rare occurrence, because skill of swimming is widespread, taught early to children, and most parents in my society don't let children who yet can't swim wander near bodies of water, and most popular swimming places have a lifeguard presence.

I wish someone would come up with an article that would encourage modern academic philosophy and its offshoots to throw "intuition pumps" to rubbish bin. "Saving child drowning in the river" is nearly nothing like what the author actually exhorts the reader to do; all the important pieces of context are abstracted away, so that reader is lead to a particular conclusion, then the author brings up he context again, presuming the conclusion should still apply.

Eh, here in Arizona, the news networks have a common saying: "watch your kids around water." Too many kids have drowned in backyard swimming pools here.

Swimming is an inherently dangerous activity like driving. It also is a basic activity where the issues can and often are mitigated by responsible practices.

The split from something like USAID and PEPFAR is that AIDS is the result of an inherently dangerous activity, that being anal sex and "dry" sex (better know as sex with abrasives placed in the vagina) which are also easily mitigated, but those who are on the side of these charities insist that mitigation is far too burdensome, even though it is much less burdensome than getting your child a proper car seat, not driving drunk, and not letting toddlers swim on their own.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.

Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.

I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.

I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."

are you sure foreign aid helps the US perception in the world? i wonder if it suffers from this copenhagen ethics problem where because you help out you are now blamed for anything that is not perfect. not the best example but the US helped the afghans militarily then when 9/11 happened apparently the US 'deserved' it partly because they helped the Afghans militarily.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

If we are just bribing dictators and/or corrupt bureaucrats to be on our side, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply bribe them, without the pretense of curing AIDS/malaria/whatever?

Dictators have limited tenures. If you covertly support them via foreign aid (as opposed to direct bribery), then you have plausible deniability which enables you to continue working with whoever deposes them.

Eh, just call it the "Congo Development Fund" or something, and wire transfer directly to whoever's top dog at the moment -- several layers of bureaucracy and graft (including on the American side) could be removed by not pretending to care what happens to the money once it leaves the public purse.

Quite - I think ordo amoris by itself fails as an argument against foreign aid, partly because it's not at all clear that the small amount of foreign aid the US provides is not in fact net beneficial to the US, and partly because ordo amoris in no way says that you should have zero care for people far away from you. It says that your moral duties to care for others scale with distance, such that American moral obligation to non-Americans is less, but less is not zero.

It is worth noting that Aquinas actually talks for a while about almsgiving as an act of charity, and appears to be wholly in favour of doing corporal works of mercy for others simply because they are in need. He follows the ordo amoris (article 9) in asserting that it is better, all other things being equal, to give to those "more closely united to us", but immediately qualifies that with the note that all other things are usually not equal. Aquinas:

I answer that, As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28), "it falls to us by lot, as it were, to have to look to the welfare of those who are more closely united to us." Nevertheless in this matter we must employ discretion, according to the various degrees of connection, holiness and utility. For we ought to give alms to one who is much holier and in greater want, and to one who is more useful to the common weal, rather than to one who is more closely united to us, especially if the latter be not very closely united, and has no special claim on our care then and there, and who is not in very urgent need.

Per Aquinas, it is better to give to a more righteous cause, or to one who is in more desperate need, over one who may be closer to us in other terms. He endorses the kind of charitable triage that I mentioned here. The ordo amoris requires a kind of discernment around need, righteousness, justice, and so on.

One must also remember that Aquinas lived in a totally different world. His concerns were local by default because nothing else was possible.

Giving alms to your neighbour’s friend whose house burnt down instead of your neighbour who stubbed his toe is one thing. Being on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world is a very different thing.

Aquinas was familiar with international charity. Thomas Aquinas lived in the mid 13th century. By his day, international projects like the Crusades were a century and a half old, and among the justifications for the Crusades had been charity - that it is an act of gracious generosity to one's fellow-believers who are in need, even though they may be on the other side of a continent.

The idea of giving charitable aid to people a long way away from you geographically goes back as far as the New Testament itself - for instance, in 1 Corinthians 16:25-28, Paul talks about his plan to bring donations from churches in Achaia and Macedonia all the way to Jerusalem. Aquinas was surely familiar with such cases.

So I don't think we can assume that Aquinas' model of charity assumes only local charity. He understood and approved of the idea of a Christian making great sacrifices in order to aid Christians in another country entirely.

Now, sure, this doesn't necessarily equate to "on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world" - that's an exaggeration or caricature. What I'm saying is that Aquinas' interpretation of the ordo amoris plainly allows for charity to people with whom the giver is not personally familiar. For Aquinas, proximity is one among several factors influencing who it is appropriate to give charity to, alongside need, holiness, and the common good more generally. These are criteria that allow for international projects in some circumstances.

Aquinas does think that having something in common with the needy is important. This comes up further in the next section of the Summa:

On the contrary, Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28): "Since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us."

I answer that, Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (Coel. Hier. vii). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.

Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.

You will notice that, having established the principle that one owes more to people with whom one has a commonality, Aquinas then goes on to explain two things. Firstly, that 'closeness' has several measures, including natural, civic, and spiritual matters. Thus he might argue that, for instance, a fellow Christian in another country is spiritually close and has a stronger claim on a Christian's aid than a non-believer. Secondly, this does vary contextually, such that, as he says, a stranger in desperate need may have a higher claim on charity than one's own family.

This does not add up to "you have a direct moral responsibility for the entire planet", but it does legitimate kinds of international charity. If those with whom I have a natural bond (e.g. a family relation), or a civic bond (e.g. if we are members of the same nation), or a spiritual bond (e.g. we are both Christians) reside far away geographically, I may still possess duties of charity towards them.

The case for extending this even to non-believers in certain circumstances seems fairly straightforward to me (cf. Matthew 5:47), in a way that does not create an infinite obligation, but does suggest that doing good even for those to whom one shares no connection is supererogatorily good. Aquinas appears to agree that need is sufficient to create a kind of moral claim, which must be judged carefully alongside the claims created by connection or proximity:

For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.

That's fair, and I appreciate the detailed rebuttal. I still don't think it's quite the same. At the time of the crusades, the Arab nations were roughly on a par with the Europeans. By contrast, today we are called upon to feel responsibility (in the sense of duty not blame) for huge masses of people who are civilisationally/economically far below our level and may always be. There are not some people in the third world who need charity, as there were Christians in Islamic nations who needed assistance, but instead the entire third world needs assistance, billions on billions of them, maybe forever.

That would seem to be an anticipated problem for a religious tradition whose most sacred text says plainly, "The poor you will always have with you." (Mark 14:7, Matthew 26:11) The number of people in need of charity is functionally unlimited - that was the case in Jesus' day, in Aquinas' day, and also in our day.

I take the ordo amoris to be suggesting some structure to our moral duties such that we are not crushed entirely flat by the weight. This much seems right and just. But within that structure, it can hardly be bad to seek to do more than the barest minimum.

FWIW, if the problem is cultural rather than HBD, it may be fixable - provided that those millions of people don't migrate all over the world and extinguish all the more functional cultures in favor of their dysfunctional ones.

I hope so, with the proviso you mention.

All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.

Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.

Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.

There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

There is also the Hayekian local knowledge problem / skin in the game that Ordo amoris solves.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

Point of order- isn't Vance using it to suggest that deporting foreigners to their home countries is fine, even if it's bad for those foreigners personally?

I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.

At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:

Aquinas applies the notion of ordo amoris to our love of other people. There is no question that all persons are equally worthy of our love. We are created in the image and likeness of God. But each of us is cast into a world of already existing relationships. These relationships bring with them duties and responsibilities.

This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.

Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.

Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.

Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman.

The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.

The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.

Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.

To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.

I hate the argument “it’s a small number.” Because many things are a small number. Add up ten “small numbers” and maybe it’s meaningful. Four years of eliminating foreign aid taking into account interest is probably at least 300b of debt we don’t incur.

It's not even a small number! An analyst at a company with a budget in the billions (nevermind an order of magnitude more -- not too many companies like that!) who found a (legible) way to .2% would be in line for a promotion and a big bonus -- it is a lot of money; companies understand that.

I don't think that either Scott or the average utilitarian would claim that, for the sake of utilitarianism, the flow of money to foreigners should have no limits whatsoever. I'm not a utilitarian myself, but I think that this is a mischaracterization of utilitarian thought.

You're right that they do put limits, but they have no theoretical basis to do so. It's just an unprincipled hack that they tack on at the end to prevent their moral philosophy from ruining their life. Eventually someone is going to write "Famine, Affluecne, and Morality II" in which a good effective altruist is walking to work after just finishing their annual 10% donation for the year and sees a drowning child. Obviously you wouldn't let the child die just because you already donated 10% for the year right?

True. Funny thing is, there is a theoretical basis that utililtarians could use if they wanted to. One could argue that, since Americans are more innovative than people in most other countries, it is overall better for humanity in a utilitarian sense to help Americans instead of non-Americans. But probably most utilitarians would not wish to pursue this line of thought.

I strongly prefer helping my own country, town, and family before helping foreigners. But I still support foreign aid to Africa because it's ridiculously effective at saving people. So even though I value the life of random strangers less, it's still a better use of money than letting the military blow it on F-35s or whatever.

I will note that if F-35s can deter Xi Jinping from starting WWIII (or even help cut down the amount of ICBMs that get off the ground when it goes nuclear), they're actually pretty good value for money. Assuming that something won't be needed always sets its value to 0, but most things have nonzero value because that assumption is usually wrong.

This is a vile sentiment, and that you've received upvotes I suppose indicates at least a few here agree with it. Do you have any experience firsthand in any part of Africa? Do you know anyone either living there or from there? Does your statement cover all the population of the continent? Or just those with darker skin? Or is "African" code for black here? When I read this shit I really feel like discussion is pointless --getting to a point where you're willing to shrug your shoulders and consign an entire continent to the flames is just beyond my ability to empathize with. I align myself against you, that's about as polite as I can put it.

Or is "African" code for black here?

I mean, no, it's not, because "black" is itself ambiguous; there are three major human populations with dark skin (sub-Saharan Africans, some South Asians and the Austronesians of Australia/Oceania/parts of SEA) and they're not closely related to each other. But yes, most people here talking about "Africans" are talking about sub-Saharan Africans, as North Africans are more closely related to Europeans and Asians.

(TBC, I am opposed to genocide unless the alternative is the end of the world - if someone made a human gene-drive and it couldn't be fixed in live patients, for instance. The arguments I've seen for such a dichotomy in the case of sub-Saharan Africans are risible.)

I don't dismiss your points here, but I'm asking specifically about the idiomatic usage of the term by the guy I was responding to.

Oh. I thought by "here" you meant "on theMotte".

Please expand on the reasons you believe Africans cause issues for humanity. What do you consider the three most solid pieces of evidence for your view that Africans are a net negative for humanity?

Africans leave Africa and cause problems with crime and low IQ any place they go.

This is not a problem if you have sensible immigration policies. If Europeans are so dumb that the only way to save them from themselves is to hope that every African drops dead before they can be invited in, then they are already doomed.

They also make living in Africa impossible because it's full of Africans.

We haven't exactly run out of space in the rest of the world yet. If that ever becomes an issue it will be easy enough for other nations to re-colonize Africa and clear the land.

Lots of money is spent helping Africa that could be spent elsewhere.

This depends on your definition of "lots of money." Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US federal budget, and PEPFAR even less than that.

Every African is net negative value.

They're net negative on average, but not always on the individual level. Same is true for Arabs in European countries, although there's more of them who are beneficial, on the whole they're a net negative.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00148-017-0636-1

No, Scott is dumb, and I've only realized it in the past few years: you can always find reasons to wring out more blood and treasure saving African lives, but left unsaid: are the lives of the modal African worth saving? In particular, the kind of African that grits his penis to tear bloody cuts into a woman's vagina?

It's odd that those who would condemn a man to the eternal pits of progressive damnation for the slightest of errors would support such a practice. You could say that they don't intend that, but that's the practical outcome of their efforts. The F-35 may be a boondoggle but it doesn't have the moral catastrophe of spreading AIDS.

The life a neighbor 15 miles away probably isn't even worth saving. That's not the point.

However, the money I have represents enough power to affect an African. It is not enough power to affect a fellow American. When I donate to VLCOL-based charities I am buying an effigy of influence.

Feeling powerful feels good. That is enough.

That is not relevant to the post you are responding to. They are saying you should feel powerful...but also should feel evil.

From Scott further down in the thread:

I think the non-zero-sumness is that if everyone tries to save everyone else's child, then everyone is better off. That is, if your child is drowning in China, and the Chinese person by the riverbank thinks "it's not my child, forget it", and a Chinese child is drowning in America, and you think "it's not my child, forget it", then both of you are worse off than if you both saved each other's children.

I think this hypothetical, as stated, is obviously correct. There is a pretty big assumption though, the assumption that this is a reciprocal arrangement. You can get into galaxy-brained decision theory stuff to argue that because of acausal trade, there is an unnegotiated policy that intelligent agents would automatically know they should follow where agents help each other. Its a bit hard to see how impovershed African children have any way to help Americans even if they wanted to, to say nothing of their intuitive understanding of functional decision theory. Still, I have to concede that it is at least conceivably possible.

Where this logic does not hold at all is in animal welfare. No one can seriously argue that animals would collectively decide to treat humanity better if only we would reduce the suffering associated with factory farms.

I was just going to post this, lol. Why the hell is Scott posting fallacies on Twitter now? I know he's a clear thinker in general, so why is he being obviously stupid here? (I'll explain the fallacy below).

Here's his tweet:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

This might take a bit of context for the unordained to understand. Let me explain. This tweet references three things.

  1. The philosophy of Peter Singer. In "The Life You Can Save", he writes about a thought experiment. If you saw a child drowning, you would jump in and save him, even if you ruined your $1000 suit. So why don't you give $1000 to charity and save a life in Africa? (Pretend, for the sake of argument this is actually possible).

  2. The meme that white progressives care more about people in other countries than their own people. They have pro-outgroup bias. This is opposed to the 99% of people who show concentric lines of caring. They care about family, then friends, then neighbors, then countrymen, then foreigners. Presumably, this makes white progressives bad allies since they will betray their own to help others. It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

  3. Trump canceling all grants to NGOs. Amongst the sea of graft and Marxism, there were some actual effective programs too. The one everyone is getting excited about is PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving millions of African lives by providing cheap AIDS medications. (Note: It is generally impossible for AIDS to become widespread in a heterosexual population. It spreads in Africa because of the cultural practice of "dry sex".)

The fallacy here is that Scott is comparing canceling PEPFAR to letting the child drown.

But why is it a fallacy?

Because, in the child drowning scenario, only YOU can save the child. If you take no action, the child will drown. But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

Scott knows this of course. Does he just not care, or is it TDS? I think maybe he is willing to lie and manipulate to achieve an otherwise worthy goal. But, if so, why should I listen to him at all if he's just trying to manipulate me?

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap

Where did you get this idea from? I don't see any strong reason to assume this will fully happen within the next decade, or that the funding for the PEPFAR replacement will be as large as PEPFAR currently is. It might happen, but it also might not happen. And in the meantime, a lot of medical treatment won't be provided.

don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

Because he was making a political joke on twitter. Please read his twitter bio: "I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns." He's made plenty of complicated arguments about EA on his blog. People are holding this tweet to a much higher standard than they would any other tweet because they really want to own the libs, but it's a fine tweet.

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

If you are making this argument for PEPFAR, I think it is self defeating.

All these sorts of arguments are inherently utilitarian at least in part. The problem with this is that there is no evidence that PEPFAR or related programs will solve the problem and end. Any utilitarian argument for a form of welfare must chart a path to its own termination, and frankly, that is the opposite of basically every African aid program. To be frank, there is no end in sight. Africans aren't on the path to manufacture their own mosquito nets, let alone antivirals. You are keeping people alive for the purpose of the next generation of Americans to pay to keep the next generation of them alive. Repeat until the AI destroys us all or decides to dedicate its purposes to keeping them alive, despite their best efforts.

Its not like the PEPFAR enthusiasts are human slavers of any sort and have a plan to take a bunch of Africans and make them carry raw materials to build a space elevator, but without that sort of plan the program does appear to lack much justification.

It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

Am I missing some context? Presumably it's that anyone who scores... some way on some metric that results in that chart isn't worth listening to?

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones, the assumption that literally everyone cares about their family more than about strangers, about human strangers more than animals and so on was just baked into the study.

So if anyone says that study proves democrats care more about animals than people, they are wrong.

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

Knowyourmeme was wrong about that, though to be fair they're better than regular journalists.

From the original article (link should bring you directly to Methods, Study 3a, procedure):

All participants completed a moral allocation task, in which participants allocated 100 “moral units” among the following 16 categories...

[...]

We also explained to participants that these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family).

created the heatmap shown. Afterwards:

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4).

and supplementary note 4 is shown in the knowyourmeme post.

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Yes thanks for the sources, I didn't know that allocating points was part of the study, but apparently that part was irrelevant to the heatmap.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-12227-0/MediaObjects/41467_2019_12227_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Please click on a number that depicts the extent of your moral circle. Note that in this scale, the number you select includes the numbers below it as well. So, if you select 10 (all mammals), you are also including numbers 1-9 (up to 'all people on all continents') in your moral circle.

That data was not used to generate the heatmap.

>Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4). This measure allowed us to create heatmaps to visualize the relative sizes of liberals’ and conservatives’ moral circles.

Does this not say that heatmaps were made out of what they used in supplementary note 4?

I had to dig into their data source to be sure, but it seems you're right. The "allocation" in the caption is talking about the "extent" in the main body, not the "allocation" there. The raw data of the heatmaps is x/y coordinates where they clicked.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones

Why? Iirc it was simply a matter of assigning 100 points to different categories.

No, as far as I remember it was not about assigning points, it was about choosing the size of the moral circle, if you look at the graph each circle has the previous smaller circle included within, that imagery is intentional, that is how the participants were meant to interpret it, when they choose animals (big circle) the humans (small circle) is included within.

Yes, you're right.

Finally, we assessed the heatmaps generated by participants’ clicks on the rung they felt best represented the extent of their moral circle.

The size of the moral circle was examined in that study, but was not used to generate the heatmap:

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Well they explicitly say heatmaps were made from the size of the moral circle, and I don't see any other heatmap besides that one.

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

Sounds vague enough that I don't think i have to change my interpretation, even if the wording kinda sound like they're talking about the points allocation.

Every liberal I know would in fact not choose a tree over their family, even if they care about the environment, if your interpretation is right that goes against what you can just see with the naked eye.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

Sounds vague enough that...

I came down on the other side of that vagueness, but their raw data source is the pixel people clicked on, which is undeniable evidence for your interpretation of that.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

I have, and that's why I found it plausible. Humans as equal to everything else in the universe is not at all outlandish of a statement. (As to whether they would actually follow that through to its conclusion? Nah, I doubt it. It's all talk.)

Going from memory, it's the amount of empathy the study population (left wingers in that picture) have to a series of groups, starting from "family" in the middle and proceeding through neighbors/countrymen/foreigners/mammals/other animals/bacteria at the edges.

EDIT: found it. The most common highest choice outer limit among liberals looks like "all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms" while it's "all of your friends (including distant ones)" for conservatives.

White progressives have a pro-outgroup bias. That means they like black people more than other white people, foreigners more than countrymen, etc... They are the only group known to have these biases.

I think the image is trying to say something like this: Why should I listen to you when you hate yourself? You think white people are bad. Shouldn't I just go listen to a black person instead?

For example, recently Michael Moore (a fat, stupid, white male) complained that the problem with America is that there are too many fat, stupid, white men in charge. This seems like the perfect time to reply with the jpg.

The other problem with that hypo (which is the original problem with the Singer hypo) is that it is very rare to encounter a drowning child (ie the problem is discrete and solvable) whereas the poor will always be with us (ie the problem is unbounded). Applying the logic of the first to the second is wrong headed.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

This is precisely what the US should do.

Trump should simply declare that PEPFAR etc are worthy initiatives but US national interests are at the moment constrained but that billionaires and ordinary citizens who have prospered handsomely from business in the free world and can bear it should contribute to such initiatives instead of funding left-wing activism or people gluing themselves to roads.

Is Scott implying that if his child were depressed, he wouldn’t spend more time helping his child than a stranger’s child? Or if his own child needed tutoring, he wouldn’t tutor him more than another child? Or is he saying that saving a life is the ultimate criterion of value, thus it dwarfs everything? It’s not actually clear. The example further doesn’t make sense because (1) his scenario implies the child is a community member, falling squarely into the ordo amoris worldview; (2) what we witness first hand compels our moral instinct in ways that data does not, and rather than meaning we have a mismatch between intuition and logic, it means that the pain of not helping the child is more severe and the absence of moral response is more damning when it occurs in front of us — this is part of our design, it’s not a bug. It’s like, if you see a crying puppy in front of you, and you just bought a steak, there’s a big chance you give the crying puppy the steak, because your body is designed to experience distress when not helping someone whose distress you witness. This does not imply that you must now buy steaks and distribute them to hungry puppies worldwide. In fact it doesn’t even imply that you ought to give the puppy the steak if you were somewhere else and someone merely informed you “a 6 month old canine would like your steak”.

He's saying that hypothetically saving a drowning child has no negative impact on his ability to care for his family.

It's an odd choice of example because quite a few people are killed annually trying to rescue children from bodies of water. It's not risk-free.

The original hypothetical from Peter Singer is a child drowning in a shallow pond, where you could just walk over and pull them out. It is designed to be a zero risk situation.

I say the kid (or his parents) owes the rescuer a new suit, which short circuits the whole thing.

And at the end of the day, this is the problem -- I haven't spent enough time reading literature responding to it, so hopefully this critique is already well documented -- this is an un-trolley problem. It's designed so that there's absolutely no opportunity cost. But then used to imply therefore, the opportunity cost of other scenarios are handwavable.

If I'm walking by a pond where there's a drowing child; in all likelihood, rescuing that child is the most valuable thing I can do in that moment, and the ruin of a 1k suit, that I'm already wearing is a sunk cost.

But this doesn't extend to prove that some future fungible time and money, there's a best thing to do and thus it is a moral imperative to have it done.

As soon as we add any actual opportunity cost to saving that child or ruining the suit, the parsimony of the aesop falls apart. Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem, with a little bit of forecasting mixed in, and there's nothing really to gleam from it.

If alternatively we take the most superficial lesson from the problem: We should help others when we are able, at a cost to ourselves, even when we aren't physically near them. Then sure! It's a great reminder. And it has just about nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

To me, Singer's hypothetical points out that there are people you or I can easily help/save at a financial cost that we normally don't blink an eye at (the cost of a phone, a suit, a plane ride...), at no real danger to ourselves. This isn't a philosophical imperative, it is an observation. The observation becomes obvious when the person is next to you, but it still exists when the person in trouble is on another continent. Of course, most people are viscerally affected by someone in danger next to them, and generally have no reason to think of anyone on another continent. Singer's hypothetical attempts to address that disconnect.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem

I ised to have a lot of beef with the trolley problem because it is almost tautological in its obviousness. But reading some variations on it by the original author, and knowing she was a virtue ethicist, the major point I took away was that real-world moral decision-making is hard! The trolley problem is easy, but recognizing when you are faced with a "trolley problem" in real life, and figuring out which track is which, is difficult. Humans are concerned with ethics, but we have to practice to be discerning and virtuous. Ethics are not (just) a math problem.

nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

I don't know if that follows from what you said. I can see why foreign aid isn't a consideration in a vacuum. But I would think that if helping people who are far away at a low cost to ourselves is considered a good thing, it is a consideration that a society and its government can make on a grand scale.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

Yes I know, my point was in agreement with yours. That's why I said the original is an 'un'trolley problem. My point in describing some additional opportunity cost was exectly to illustrate that opportunity cost ruins the thought experiment.

And that's why it has very little to say about foreign aid or most other real world charitable activities that are abstracted from time and place. Because outside of immediate and present opportunities (like saving a drowning child right in front of you), opportunity cost does have to be considered.

And as you've agreed, it becomes different than the thought experiment, thus the thought experiment is no longer relevant.

or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.

Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.

(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)

I want less Africans, not more.

https://www.condoms.com.au/donate-to-africa/

Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

Yeah, it's subsidizing the proliferation of one of the most low human capital and negative value-add populations of the world.

If money is to be spent by the West in Sub-Saharan Africa, it should be on cash in exchange for tubal ligation for teenage girls and women under 35 or so. We can free SSA girls and women from the oppression of pregnancy and child-rearing, and we can better empower them to focus on their education and careers. If there's cash left over that, the West can pay for and provide stipends for children of all ages getting much-needed gender affirming hormone therapies and surgeries. And then if there's money left over that, to be Inclusive and all, the West can do cash in exchange for vasectomies for the men.

The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.

If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.

Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).

the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless

“Essentially” is doing quite a lot of work there. The existence of a massive cost doesn’t negate the existence of a far smaller but still very large cost.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

I will consider this if he working as hard as he can, living an ascetic life, giving it all away. One gets zero moral points taking the fruits of another person's labor.

I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality.

Where did Jesus say one should advocate Caesar take money from others and redistribute it according to one's will?

Is that true? On my phone right now but I’m pretty sure the absolute number of Native Americans in the US is higher than any time in the pre-Columbian era. And were they really better off back then when murder and torture were commonplace ? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely debatable.

In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.

In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.

2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).

Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.

Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.

Tangential, but I was expecting a lot more culture war fallout from Reich's pre-columbian population estimates paper. I guess even in 2020 that fell under "easier to just ignore than attack," especially after Saini's "the return of race science" failed to take him down.

Do you have a link for said paper, or a pointer to it?

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time. Would Scott support this? If the notion of subsidiarity supersedes the interest to invade, then we can just as easily argue that the notion of subsidiarity supersedes our interest to help.

some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality

This is really just the Parable of the Good Samaritan being abused by bad exegetes imo

I don't know if Scott would support invading Africa and imposing more humane governments on the continent, but having read much of his writing, I feel that he would at least give the idea an honest evaluation rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Wrong- we can try to invade Africa and redistribute the resources of their warlords into helping ordinary people. Perhaps a long term occupational state- say, a garrison of cleruchs- can make the lot of African peasants very slightly better. The USA is constitutionally incapable of doing this. What would actually happen if we invaded, say, the DRC is that, first off, things would get way worse because of collateral damage. Then Kinshasa would be rebuilt, until it broke into another civil war, the transitional government stole all the development money, and we wound up back at square one.

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time.

Uh, we tried that in Afghanistan and let's just say it wasn't exactly a profit center for the government (not to even touch on the other points).

If you think we tried to colonize or patronize Afghanistan you are greatly mistaken. We gave them free money

That's not even remotely what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.

A couple of things do that.

First the facial feature proportions of house cats are close to human babies. This activates nurturing instincts in women. More so than other small animals.

If you pay attention you can really see how that affects how men and women interact with cats. Men tend to see their cats akin to jobless friends crashing at their place. Some women become deeply concerned for their cats socialization and emotional life.

They match up better to yin and yang traits, cats being yin.

Most people these days have met enough loud outing women that yin traits don't strongly code feminine to modern eyes.

Some languages need to classify everything as masculine or feminine and from what I've seen there's a lot of randomness. In French cheese is masculine but apples are feminine.

I'll try to tie this together for a closing. Their wariness towards new people is seen as traditionally feminine coded. As is their quietness compared to a puppy. Dogs interests match up better to traditional masculine tasks -- patrol the boundaries of territory, go on hunting expeditions. Cats keep an eye on the homestead.

In modern life the feminine coding comes more from women who get them because of unmet baby desires. Also men are expected to at least pretend that they regularly trek through the wilderness.

As an aside, see this r/askhistorians comment about a Song dynasty literati who got domesticated by his cat.

In the modern USA, it seems like medium and large dogs are male coded, other free ranging pets(except maybe ferrets, but normal people don't have those) are female coded- small dogs, cats, guinea pigs, etc.

I think the difference is cuteness value outweighing other value- exercise, playtime, trainability, etc. I would think it rather suspicious for a man to own a yorkie, rather more so than a cat.

Hmm, would lions, tigers, jaguars, panthers, etc. be male or female coded?

Individual ownership of big cats or bears or apes or whatever would come off as weirdo coded more than gendered.

Big cats are a massive money sink. A world leader having a private zoo big cats is basically proof that they are crooked and impoverishing their people.

Lions, as the traditional king of the animals, are not only male-coded, but outright symbolic of deity. Which makes sense, since they're fucking huge (even without the mane), imposing, loud, and live/hunt in a pack like dogs do.

The other big cats are more "large housecat" than anything else; they're still solitary ambush predators, and are as such still female-coded. (Exhibit A: if Disney has adopted a story, and it contains a big cat that is not a lion, then it tends to engage conflict in a female manner, subterfuge, etc.)

One exception to that is the cheetah, who aren't quite as solitary/territorial as the others and aren't ambush predators, but most people don't know that since they're more famous for the other reason.

Cheetah's become more feminine coded once you find out that they meow.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0tmCIsSpvC8

Cats are small, quiet, subtle, sleek, and graceful. Dogs are big, loud, straightforward, rough, and boisterous. This maps pretty well onto stereotypical gender differences.

I love cats and grew up with them hanging around the barn, raising stray kittens and giving them away. My only solution to mice is getting a cat. I don't think having a cat is inherently feminine.

But working breed dogs and ones relationship with them are inherently and classically masculine.

Occams razor imo: Cats are higher pitched and smaller than almost all dog breeds, and the smaller toy breeds of dog are feminine coded.

Some of this may have to do with experience with prior generations of dogs and cats that were much more rarely neutered if male or spayed if female. Male dogs are notorious for humping furniture, people's legs, attempting to mate with many things that aren't really hump-able. Historical phrases have left me with notions of what a bitch-in-heat is like, with remarkable aggression (especially to other female dogs) but googling they can also be very clingy.

In German, "der Hund" is masculine while "die Katze" is feminine, in French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is (Edit: correction thanks to @pigeonburger ) either masculine but can be used for both ("chatte" for a female cat). In Old English apparently a dog is a "hund" (plural hundas), while "catt" is used for male cats and "catte" is used for female cats.

Someone smarter than me could expound on the terms "bitch"(animal, pejorative(maybe pejoratives, since it seems to mean "very obnoxious" for women exclusively, but can also mean "dishonorable/cowardly" for men) and "pussy"(animal, vulgar term for anatomy, pejorative). Someone probably has, and it's probably buried in some Sociology or Women's/Gender Studies journal.

In German, "der Hund" is masculine while "die Katze" is feminine, in French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is...

Whenever you are tempted to interpret grammatical gender as meaningful remember that in spanish pussy (coño) is male and cock (polla) is female.

in spanish pussy (coño) is male and cock (polla) is female.

On the other hand, penis is male while vagina female.

Note that in both french "chatte" and german "Muschi", a word for cat is used to refer to female genitalia, like "pussy". Pussy and muschi obviously have the same root, but that still leaves at least two language inventors who looked at a cat and were erotically inspired by its femininity.

I think they were looking at something else and erotically inspired by its looking like cat fur.

French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is either.

That would be news to me, a native French speaker. Chat is a masculine word (and is used to denote a specifically male cat, or a cat of a non-specified gender).

Good to know, will markout in edit.

And, to note, the 'proper' term for a male dog is... dog. The term 'dog fox' or 'dog coyote' refers to a male, while a female is a 'vixen' or 'coyote bitch'.

Cats were domesticated (or self domesticated) through their interactions with granaries. They hunted rats, which was useful in and of itself. But their independent streak didn't lend itself to many other economically productive activities, so they were creatures that were mostly for domestic purposes, and so they ended up feminine coded.

Wolves were more amendable to selecting for a broader range of economically useful activities: hunting, herding, guarding. All of these activities are masculine coded, and so dogs eventually gained the masculine coding.

I wonder how universal this coding is, though. Egyptian Bastet and Norse Freyja were both female and associated with cats, and I don't know of any male gods associated with them.

I don't know of any male gods associated with them

If you don't mind the size of the cat...

(Highlights: "The patron deity of the month of Pax has jaguar paws above his ears, a removed lower jaw, and vomits blood" is just how I like my gods to be, "A specific and as yet unexplained transformation into a jaguar involves a male child with jaguar ears and a jaguar tail" Mayans 🤝 weeaboos.)

"A specific and as yet unexplained transformation into a jaguar involves a male child with jaguar ears and a jaguar tail"

The citizens of Duval County have managed to uncover the secrets of this dark and ancient ritual.

/images/17385239015731804.webp

I think your sentiment is mostly sourced from cats being less popular than dogs in the US. Thus with less common interaction small parts of cat owners(like already mentioned "cat ladies") have more influence on your perception of them as group. In Russia where cats are much more popular, nobody thinks that they are somehow feminine. People here written about feminine traits of the cats and masculine ones of the dogs, but you can easily do it vice versa. Like this for example: Dogs are clingy, always asking for your attention, while cats are independent, have their own hustle(if you let them go outdoors) and capable of caring for themselves(washing, going on toilet).

Is there any legitimate reason cats are considered feminine coded?

Are they? I see many more cat posts than dog posts from dudes in Russia. But that might be because owning a lapdog is much more female-coded than owning a cat, and we've thankfully stopped raising large dogs in apartments.

In addition to what’s been said, cats make decent baby substitutes. Babies, especially newborns, sleep a lot, preferably on you. Good cats love sleeping on you, too. Carrying a cat also fulfills some of that feeling of holding a baby up on your shoulder or against your chest. And there’s some of that “unconditional love” feeling when your cat has deigned you worthy of all this and starts purring. On the negative side, cats can be fickle like babies. You may not be playing the “why won’t you stop crying game,” but you are playing the, “why won’t you come here and let me pet you,” game.

I don’t know if these traits are part of that feminine coding for sure, but I do know that I intend to use cats for my baby fix once I’m done having the actual thing.

You halfway described stereotypical male versus female relationship dynamics.

Dogs, like men, are simple, direct, and consistent. It's not that they can't have changes of mood, or are always friendly, but there are strong, direct, and dominant dynamics that are less likely to chance on power dynamics. If your dog suddenly grew to the size of a car, it would certainly be bigger and more prone to dangerous accidents, but if you called it would still come.

If your cat suddenly dwarfed you, however, your relationship would likely substantially change. Cat relationships- precisely because they are fickle and thus often conditional love- are highly contextual, playing to its moods and the power dynamics involved. It can go from signaling contentment to displeasure far quicker, which totally has no gender stereotype equivalent.

Of course, and just like with men and women, stereotypes are not always truths, and there are a lot of overlaps, including the capacity for sincere and committed relationships.

But stereotypes do exist for reasons, or at least often enough for a reputation to be formed and sustained.

I'm a huge dog guy, but it sounds like you got lucky with good cats. Cherish it, the best of them are super cool.

As to the gender coding of pets, consider that dogs are physically bigger and can be used for masculine pursuits. A dude wearing camo out with his Irish Setter or Retriever is one image, a Pitbull straining at a chain link fence to rip out your throat, or a shepherd wearing NVG.... There's no equivalent to a house cat.

Everyone else has mentioned compelling other reasons. I very recently have thought about the doggification of the internet as a symbol of it being September as @WhateverHappenedToNorman points out. I find cats to be temperamentally unpredictable while moving with a delicate sensuousness - obviously female-coded. It all adds up!

Edit: Car typo fixed >:(

I find cars to be tempermantally unpredictable while moving with a delicate sensuousness - obviously female coded

Tell me you like to drive italian cars, without telling me you like to drive italian cars.

Works for cats too.

I find cars to be tempermantally unpredictable while moving with a delicate sensuousness - obviously female coded.

I'm not sure if this is a typo, or the next front in the culture wars.

Why not both? ;-)

https://www.google.com/search?q=anthro+car

/r/aeromorph

Cats are independent douchebags that demand your care while giving somewhat random attention if any in return. They are barely cooperative, difficult to train, and aloof in nature. Cats will drop and break your stuff for fun without any regret.

Dogs are easily trained companions that follow your commands and give you almost unconditional affection and protection in some cases. They react well to order, and their behavior is mostly predictable even if they can be goofballs.

There is a parallel to stereotypical gendered differences in romantic preferences. Lack of cooperation and aloofness are not usually considered attractive traits in women by men. And while most women do value things like commitment and security (and plenty own dogs), it's a well known trope that women do easily develop an attraction towards "assholes" — independent, aloof, and selectively attentive men. Though not particularly applauded, it's perhaps more acceptable for a woman to date someone independent and aloof than it is for a man. And similarly an appreciation for cats is more acceptable for the feminine than the masculine. A cat is someone you submit to, while a dog is more of a companion or underling.

That said, apparently men are more likely to own cats than women in the US, so these stereotypes might not paint a particularly accurate picture even if they explain why cats are more femininely coded. My hypothesis is that surprisingly many men will find cat-like traits attractive in the same way some women do. The aloof and independent manic pixie girl perhaps being one more acceptable example of this.

That said, apparently men are more likely to own cats than women in the US

Damn that 13th Amendment!

Conspicuous social media-tised pet ownership in general is a feminine coded thing because they're usually considered child substitutes.

All of the "furbaby" and "heckin pupperino" type people are either female, or nu-males emulating women to try and relate to them.

But that's all I can really think of. Though, and it's not really what you're asking here, I have noticed that among my gay friends, the twinks tend to have cats and the bears tend to have dogs. It's not an ironclad rule and I know exceptions. But if you were to guess my friends' pets based on that criteria you'd be right about 80% of the time.

cats are feminine or owning cats is feminine? Cats devote a lot of time for hygiene (F) which dogs will eat any crap easily (M). Cat mood is complex and mystery. They accept petting and then unexpectedly bite you. (F) Cats eyes are relatively bigger.

Dogs are almost always affectionate, cats vary. Some are as affectionate as a lapdog (like a king charles spaniel) or dogs bred to love being pet and pulled and touched (like goldens) but many aren’t, and it’s often pretty arbitrary, like @Lizzardspawn said.

I'm not sure this is as strong a connotation as you make it out to be.

All I can really think of are cat ladies. Those are more about replacing human connections with a menagerie than the type of animal. A fair number of "cat ladies" are actually self styled "dog moms".

And the other is the cat's connection to witches and generally the feminine side of magic, which I think is more derived from it generally being more of a mystical animal than any gendered association.

And the other is the cat's connection to witches and generally the feminine side of magic, which I think is more derived from it generally being more of a mystical animal than any gendered association.

Witches are also associated with bats and spiders, and being into bats is more a 'weird' thing than something gendered while spiders are more gendered male.

There is a saying in my country that roughly translates to "Dog and husband - it's how you train them, cat and wife - it's luck of the draw". Just a datapoint. So far my observations are that men do change their personalities more while in a healthy relationships.

Can you share the original, if you're comfortable revealing your country?

Deepseek tells me it's a traditional Japanese saying (while Claude scolds me for asking questions about misogynistic sayings).

Мъж и куче-както ги научиш. Жена и котка-както ги уцелиш.

Is the original. Also how is saying that women are temperament misogyny?

Unrelated question: why is this (Bulgarian?) word for dog so different from the Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian (собака/сабака)?

I don't know. We gave them the alphabet and the language, from there they were on their own.

According to a more literal translation (obtained via Google Translate), the original version could be interpreted as promoting violence against women:

Man and dog—how you teach them. Woman and cat—how you hit them.

Maybe Claude had the original version in its databanks and recognized the translated version as matching it, or something.

According to Chatgpt the literal translation is

A man and a dog – as you train them. A woman and a cat – as you catch them.

But yeah idioms rarely translate well since the word for hit in my language also means to succeed /to score/to be lucky. But yeah Google translate ia done with way too naive implementation to translation

Don't ask me; that was Claude's take. Mostly just kvetching here about Western LLMs.

I think it's literally just the shape of their heads and relative size.

I think it comes from the old (and IMO correct) notion that dogs are family animals: They need some level of attention throughout the day, they need space to run and play, etc.

Cats, then, filled the niche of providing companionship to lonely spinsters: you can leave to work every day, and mostly expect the cat to be there without major trauma and still sort of like you.

There is also the additional stereotype that cats are the preferred pet for reclusive people, because they don't require you to walk them every day. There's a reason the internet used to be full of lolcats, and gradually turned into good doggos as it became more filled with normies.

Nowadays, with the advent of WFH and the popularity of small dogs, there's a lot of Dog Moms, so the stereotypes might evolve further.

The Norse believed cats had magic powers, warded way spirits etc., carved them on things, sailed and went viking with them (and dogs).


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