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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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that's dumb strawman-utilitarianism.

As we see with live examples, no it's not. And that's how it works in general. Utilitarians have not noticed the skulls, nobody ever notices the skulls, Putin's Russia is simply fascist, Xi is not a Palladiumpilled Governance Futurist but a two-bit dictator, your enemies simply hate you, there are more malicious conspiracies and frauds than «emergent memetic attractors», the simplest and crudest and cringiest explanation is usually correct.

The reason it's dumb is because you have to take into account second-order effects in doing whatever it is you're doing, and those second-order effects for dishonest and coercive actions are nearly always profoundly negative

It's not dumb, and this is a fig leaf for useful idiots with their prosocial Hajnal brains. Every time EAs try to explain how they are acktchually rationally compliant with conventional morality, it screams «but in less tortured scenarios we can calculate when to defect and get maximum utility» just as strongly as this yield farming aka «Ponzi with extra steps» story does. It's from April as you see; a lot of SBF-glorifying EA-backed content came after that. EAs know they are smart and can trick commoners; they believe themselves to be even smarter than that and able to calculate ripple effects. In fact, calculating ripple effects using raw brainpower is what they do under the rubric of longtermism.

There is a reason why nobody on the EA side is defending Bankman.

The reason is that he has apparently failed them and burned their piggy bank, decreasing the utility they could have produced.

And it's the same reason they did not renounce him before his fraudulent empire crashed. They are not deontologists, after all. They assumed he's a math whiz and got it all figured out.