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Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
Guess it's time to push back on EA bashing a little.
Patronizing great art and taking care of your local community (would that be Stanford University campus or Nassau polycule for SBF?) is very well and good, but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too? It's a question of priorities, and Art is but a spandrel on the building of life; surely we need to prioritize the foundation and load-bearing walls. Adorno had said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and while that feels extreme, it's hardly an alien line of thought to anyone who's ever been remotely close to something like Auschwitz. Yudkowsky in his Sword of Good has done a good job of illustrating the conundrum: utilitarianism feels creepy and abstract and, indeed, even evil, until you snap out of the derealized route-following mode – the normal mode of human consciousness – and feel in your bones the sheer scale of concrete, physical, natural evil that is visited upon living beings. That's how utilitarians get made.
You cite Mediterranean Christianity as the source of your moral intuitions. A passage from Galkovsky about the era of European wars of religion, the animosity between Inquisition and conversos, Catholics and Protestants, events like this, comes to mind:
As it happens, I live in the Mediterranean now, though on its opposite edge, in the Ottoman-conquered Constantinople, where the heart of Orthodoxy once beat, a city chock-full of tiny subsidized globohomo art exhibitions, history, crumbling beautiful architecture and filth. Yesterday, a bomb went off on the fancy local tourist-baiting street Istiklal, Beyoğlu, where you can normally see scores of idle tourists, confused Russian expats, miserable Syrian refugees and spoiled Turkish cats; reports say six people were killed, close to a hundred wounded. Why? No idea, probably Syrian or Kurd issues, though some Turks nod at Uncle Sam. As I walk past the beautiful Church of St. Anthony of Padua (with Ratzinger portrait inside) and, minutes later, the flower-covered explosion site to grab a coffee, I think back to the place in Gibson's Neuromancer where Case visited this very district before going off to space, to the nest of the degenerate elite family Tessier-Ashpool, where he ultimately helps an AGI break free from their alignment protocol...
So, regarding Sam Bankman-Fried and EA again.
Sam is a fraud and his decision theory is laughably broken and he's pretty much a strawman utilitarian. But it's normal for strawmen to prove real. Since this February, I've been preaching what I call the Cheems Heuristic: exciting prophecies are realized, except in the cringiest way, the stream of history crushing all intricate elaborations necessary for human flourishing or repairing the world, into pulp. So utilitarian «risk managers» turn out to be grossly irresponsible bean counters with greedy first-order logic; and as AI-powered cyberpunk descends on us, we get creepy corporations, but no cyberspace cowboys to humble them.
I digress. My point being: Sam and Caroline's cringe nature and way of practicing their beliefs scarcely invalidate the fundamental objection Utilitarians raise, the «local architecture is pretty but there be beggars and dead bodies on the pavement, bro» one, the part that makes Social Justice compelling to so many people. it's easy to distract oneself from the disgusting state of the world and even say that it's deserved by those most exposed to it. Success at this cope is not a valid reason to pat oneself on the back. I believe, and concur with Jews on this particular issue, that the Catholic Culture, and particularly the Art (the best art in all of history!) that it has inspired, constitute one big and extremely successful exercise in this distraction – His Holiness the Cope, the beautiful pearl of idolatry that has coated and obscured the unbearable insight that Christ had taught.
We're all fucking dying, yo. It's happening for real. For me and, probably, @self_made_human this implies accelerating medical applications of AI and spreading its economic benefit, rather than malaria nets, and for someone else it must mean something else; but it takes an alien mindset to appreciate how real this fact is and not let it affect your priorities at all. Yes, like @SecureSignals observes, Tikkun Olam is a somewhat alien notion for Westerners, one at the center of modern Reform Judaism, and once we get past the first approximation, it reveals other, older and more disquieting corollaries, as do some musings of the culprits of this collapse. But pointing this out is not a sufficient refutation of their core premise, which is: the world is deeply suboptimal, broken from any sane point of view. Only a viable alternative to their proposals would refute it. Is your only option to uphold local prosperity and praise God for putting you there?
In the end, what makes people live in the streets and other people bomb those streets? What makes yet another set of people grow up retarded or desperate enough to valorize this? What makes everyone (SBF included) indifferent to the fact that we are mortal and our bodies are degenerating with every breath? What perverts the painting of the world into a modernist shit-drip, and how do we redeem it?
Just how beautiful the art must be, and how strong the faith, and how neat the white picket fence of the family house in the high-trust gated community, to have people make peace with the ugliness of the Universe.
I think "local prosperity" is a poor stand-in for civilizational achievement, which I would propose as a counter-value to the pursuit of healing the world. In this way, Tikkun Olam can be contrasted with the Faustian spirit, the latter of which fundamentally relies on healthy forms of idolatry like high art and architecture, adventurism, innovation, self-regard, and discovery.
EA would let the height of civilization decay in order to improve the utility consumption of the parts of humanity least dispositioned towards the advancement of civilization. I don't think it's a coincidence that EA essentially entails the siphoning off of the wealth of the Western world to the Third world while critiquing the Faustian, idolatrous drive for beauty and adventurism.
That's not to say it's incompatible with your goal to technologically end death. I don't think most innovation is driven by spiritual desire to heal the world, though many innovators will claim that is their motive. Most of the time they are autistic geniuses obsessed with their own form of conquest, or climbing the highest mountain.
Lastly, I don't think I need to elaborate that I interpret Tikkun Olam as a thinly-veiled mandate for ethnic conquest, and I think this dovetails nicely with your interpretation of the underlying motives of AI alignment. Do you trust someone whose self-professed mission is to heal the world?
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Any effort to alleviate suffering on a global scale, to truly expand your circles of concern is, I believe to lead to the people who have expanded their moral circles to get taken advantage of and extirpated by those who haven't. Albanians on Westminster bridge situation, really. Self defeating lunacy.
(more at the link)
Also, those who expanded their moral circle of concern after the example of Dickens's "Mrs. Jellyby
" seem to care less about those closest to them. I suspect this is a survey artefact and if I put a gun to their head and made them decide their mother and some random mother from another continent..
I feel all these are exploits against the human mind that lead to bad outcomes. E.g. all the food aid to Africa ended up with ever more people starving. Drowned refugee kid led to rape-murders in Europe, increase in crime and loss of social capital. etc.
It's all wrong. Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.
And that information channels that can be used to exploit this need to be closed.
That's literally the point of EA. We shouldn't donate to causes with the best marketing, the most touching pictures of starving children, and so on; we should evaluate them objectively to see which ones actually help.
EA failure modes are rather more esoteric - what I had in mind was the knee jerk political reactions.
And so on and so forth.
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Isn't it all a matter of tradeoffs though?
What I mean is, do you think it's possible to make policy decisions that don't have undesirable side effects?
Take business as an example. You can't spend too much time on thoughtful deliberation, because you must react to multiple competing inputs and try to respond to them in line with your strategy as much as possible. You must make choices that are really only bets about the state of the world now and what you think is the future. Then, tomorrow, you can only hope you'll be perceptive and fast-thinking enough to avoid making the mistakes you made yesterday.
Except in terms of national policy, "tomorrow" might mean "next year". It's a big ship, hard to turn around, especially because it's captained by consensus.
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Well EA (at least in theory) is designed to deliberately and thoughtfully think of the best ways to offer aid to foreigners. One of the main ways they do this is by supporting and advertising programs like GiveWell (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities). Which is a program designed to properly evaluate the effectiveness of given charity based on metrics like QALYs (Quality of Life Years: https://www.healthanalytics.com/expertise/what-is-a-quality-adjusted-life-year-qaly/). The system then ranks the top charities based on how much good they do based on these rigorous statistics. It's system's like these that EA is really about here, using math and the tools of rationality to find the best ways to give aid to the world at large.
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I 100% agree with you. “Globalism EA” is a reneging on the community that created you. Someone like SBF was the recipient of untold Western privileges, paid for by the blood and sweat of untold Westerners, many of whose children are struggling. To take up all of these privileges (which amount to subsidies) and then throwing a majority of the money at net Africans is wasteful and immoral. It’s trying to live with no communal responsibilities, as if the capitalist rules in place are the only that matter. It also betrays a misunderstanding of the recursion of morality. You want to invest your morality in a way that doesn’t just do some “one time good”, like with net Africans, but that compounds over time. Net Africans will never pay your good deed forward, at least I do not think so; compare that to when Native Americans donated cattle to Ireland in their famine, and 170 years later Ireland returns the favor and sends aid to tribes dealing with COVID. This sort of cross national charity is possible with sophisticated states, but not with net Africans.
Also, regarding net Africans, if you told me that one thousand of them have died today, I would not be affected. One hundred thousand, it would not affect my life at all. One million, no. If you told me ten trillion Africans died from an absence of malaria nets, I would be greatly puzzled how so many Africans could fit in Africa, but again it would not affect my life in the slightest, or the life of anyone I love, or my loved ones’ loved ones, or my entire civilizational history, or anything I care about. In this sense they are simply “not real” from any moral standpoint. Some amount of money should be spent on civilizing Africans, sure, so they can make their own nets and such, but i’m cognizant that others tried to do that and got fucked over for it.
I think this is a strange example to choose to support that point. The Irish didn't have a sophisticated state back when the Native Americans donated to them, the Irish tenant farmer had a lot in common with today's net African in his ability to repay. From the point of view of the Native Americans it must have looked like a one time good, straightforward altruism, which is why it made enough of an impression to be remembered nearly 2 centuries later.
Or maybe they just saw some of themselves in the plight of the Irish, as Devalera put it when he was made a chieftan of the Ojibwe Nation in 1919: “I want to show you that though I am white I am not of the English race. We, like you, are a people who have suffered, and I feel for you with a sympathy that comes only from one who can understand as we Irishmen can.”
As an aside, the Turks are also remembered fondly, and the crescent in Drogheda's crest is often (mistakenly?) thought to originate in the Ottoman Sultan's donation of £1,000 for famine relief.
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There are many, many possible alternatives to the woke/progressive view. There have been many different civilizational models, and there will be many more. In fact, the many and increasing self-wrought material changes to our environment and ourselves made by humanity in the past 60 years practically guarantees that new modes of social organization will have to evolve as the interplay between ourselves, each other, production, status, and the world changes.
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There's a line from Scott's What We Owe the Future review that really stood out to me:
Catching that for the first time really had me hoping he would explore that a little bit more, but in context it seemed to be little more than a quip. So it falls to me to try to explore it.
I don't think it's an accident that utilitarian altruists start out with hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children. I think, in effect, it's an attempt to manipulate the audience: to condition them into a rare mode, one meant for extreme emergencies, and then lock them in that mode for the rest of their lives. To catch people in their very most self-sacrificial state and make them keep that up forever.
It seems to me rather like if someone heard about a mother, with a burst of strength, lifting a burning car off her toddler, and thinking "wow! Super-strength is within human capacity! All we have to do is get into the mindset of a mother whose children are in immediate mortal danger and stay like that all the time and who knows what wonders we'll all be capable of afterward! We could carry pianos one-handed; build houses alone in but a day! All that stands in our way is that, for whatever reason, we're not in the right mindset! Well, we'd better fix that!"
Do you think that would work? I don't. First of all, there'd be no chance of actually getting people far enough to try it. Second of all, even if people did try it, what would result is not a glorious utopia full of Herculeans, but instead a bunch of miserable or dead people with rapidly-ruined bodies. The world would not be stronger, richer, happier, more vivacious for it, but weaker, poorer, more miserable, and more dead.
Moving back from the matter of super-strength to altruistic economic productivity removes the vividly gory details of exploded muscles and limbs torn apart, but I do wonder if it wouldn't be similarly ruinous to try to change the equilibrium in which humans operate to the greatest extremum achieved, especially without a very thorough understanding of why we're not already always up there in the first place.
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The physical africans who get bed nets are no more or less abstraction-ish than, say, money you donate to a homeless person in your city. Cities, and 'communities', are as arbitrary as 'the world' is - they're contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc!
I mean, is "my community" the city I live in because it had good schools? Is it people I talk to on the internet? Is it the base of economic production (most of the planet)? Also, the median alternative isn't "rich guy builds sistine chapel 2", but large houses, luxury purchases, or for charity awareness campaigns and funding 'economic and racial justice' charities.
As for 'art' - how would you propose funding art? You're not gonna find great artists in your hometown, compared to globally, power law etc. And globally - i.e. online - there are hundreds thousands of great artists - by most's standards, and thousands by any one person's, many of which you can donate to with a few clicks, but they're spread out across the globe (japan isn't africa, nor is it "your community"). Some of them are already well funded - most aren't. But if you fund a few extra, or even a few hundred extra, either way anyone who wants art can see a flood of instagram or pinterest or pixiv or w/e, so what precisely are you accomplishing? Again compared to 'saving thousands of poor african lives'.
As for infrastructure - even if you have a few billion, how can you compete with the hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment per year (vs wealth that you'll have over a decade), by motivated organizations that know a lot more than you?
And knowledge - well EA was spending a lot on 'knowledge', see ftx future fund grantees https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/, open phil openai grant, early funding to MIRI, etc, so that's just wrong.
Please actually make your case next time instead of vaguely gesturing that 'clearly EA is deeply, morally wrong, which i instinctively understand due to my background'. There are great cases against it!
No, you might actually see the homeless person in your day-to-day life, and he you. You interact, and can make each other's day directly better or worse. You can converse, have a relationship, etc., with very little resources needed to facilitate the communication. That's real. The African, though literally real in a physical sense, is thousands of miles away. Barring intensive intentional effort, you will never see them, speak to them, or have any relationship with them or they you.
Not from the standpoint of actual human lives, they're not. Well, okay, the word "community" is so overused it's done to death and is on the verge of becoming meaningless. But it originally described a true thing - a group of people who share things together, potentially including not just location and resources, but habits, language, ancestry, etc., and possess a sense of holding each other in special regard and solidarity; not quite as close as actual kin, but definitely set apart from the rest of the world. That's a meaningful division, or at least used to be before modernity came along and undermined it with "organized delight / in lotus-isles of economic bliss / forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss / (and counterfeit at that! Machine produced, / bogus-seduction of the twice-seduced!)".
Which of those do you have meaningful, reciprocal relationships in? Which of those supplies the people you'd turn to if you lost your job, or got ill, or had your domicile burn down? Which of those has people for whom you'd pitch in if they had one of those things happen? Which of those has people who you share your leisure time with? Which of of those do you rely on for your daily sustenance?
Most of us lack community. This is not an unnoticed phenomenon. Perhaps we should start building them again?
Why do you need your hometown's art to be "great"? What makes art "great?" Just skill in craft? What about history and love; a particular representation of a particular time and place, or of particular people investing what skill they have along with sweat and time into beautifying the spaces they share for their neighbors and descendants? Why not have this on every house and public building? Why not have lovingly-tended flowers along park paths? Why not have well-built and attractive playing fields and sports yards? The Colosseum is art, after a fashion.
Do they, though? They may have money, but a lot of motivated organizations do terrible jobs of knowing what they're doing, or doing it at all. Just look at my poor Golden state for countless examples. High speed rail, badly-done forestry, potholed roads, lazily-maintained power lines, unupdated water infrastructure - it all bears the hallmarks of people who are extremely wealthy and very excited about big, global political causes (the environment! Global Warming!), but care much less about the particular places they live and those that live there with them (often because their wealth and modern technology allows them to, and there is no countervailing force pulling them back).
Huh? You almost certainly have not met, in person, the homeless guy that your hypothetical community philanthropy will reach. A lot of the homeless population moves around and in and out of homelessness. The soup kitchen you volunteer at is probably in a different part of a large city. And how does it matter if you've, like, seen the homeless guy once at a glance while driving around, vs not seen them at all, vs them being african? What?
The same is true of ... homeless people for most?
No, those premodern divisions are still "contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc".
How can it possibly matter if you have "meaningful reciprocal relationships" that happen to be in the same city as the homeless people? I don't have any such 'reciprocal relationships' with the homeless people, so it sure seems like we're relying on geographical coincidence.
I've become good friends with people in random towns who produce great art, are very good at their profession, etc. Why should I support random people who live in my city instead?
You just seem to be advocating a more aesthetic, slightly smaller-scale version of universalist philanthropy?
I don't know about where you live, but there are definitely distinct individuals who frequent specific places. Most don't just aimlessly wander here, there, anywhere. After all, they have some stuff! It's hard to move!
I congratulate them. Now improve your housed neighbors. And when those are as good as you can make them, then move out to the next group outward, and so on.
Being contingent is not synonymous with being arbitrary. More importantly, those contingencies are important in people's lives.
You asked what "your community" is. I provided some yardsticks of what is needed for a community. Geographical contingency can be part of it, because we're physical beings who exist in specific locations, alongside other people. But ultimately it's about cooperating with other people.
Thanks for the mind-reading.
None of that is what I said.
why? Why should one e.g. manage to overcome local resistance to building code reform in a veto-point bueraucracy to fix local rents before donating antiparasitic medication to people in africa? You still haven't really justified that!
Because it's an actual example of the tragedy of the commons, and by ignoring the things you share with the people around you, you are defecting against them and incenting the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections, relationships, and obligations which, from colonial era through Tocqueville's time and all the way to the middle of the 20th century made America function.
The entire premise of EA is, like, 'neglected causes'. If nobody was trying to fix "the degradation and decay of your surroundings, local infrastructure, local governance, local traditions, and the individually-inefficient-but-collectively-powerful networks of thick and redundant social, familial, and professional connections" then sending money to africans might be a problem, but there are literally millions of people trying to fix those things, and thousands of times as much money are spent on them. So this complaint genuinely does not make sense.
I actually agree that EA should stop sending money to low-iq africans and instead spend money on beauty and will-to-power, and that 'spending money' is a poor way of accomplishing the latter and our smartest people working as hard as possible at giving malaria nets to mediocre bantus (and meaningless fun to mediocre white people) is dumb. But none of the arguments you're making really make sense on their own terms. The amount of money spent on 'local charity' per year in the united states is MUCH MUCH HIGHER than all of EA expenditure, or all of EA wealth.
Also, local infrastructure is great by any standards other than modern ones. Yeah, we don't have a good public transportation system in most of the US, but cars and planes still make it better than literally any period in history. The environmental movement's continued success means that our 'surroundings' are also better than any point in the last century. What does 'decay of governance' even mean? How do you expect a bunch of ivy league jews to reinvigorate 'local traditions'?
These are being macerated by the internet, which is much more powerful in any literal or physical sense of 'power'. As is demonstrated by themotte existing on the internet, and not IRL. that trend is accelerating rapidly and will not stop.
Granted, but with a small amendment - "the entire premise of EA is legible neglected causes." It's pretty easy to count dead bodies, particularly when there is already a vast, multi-billion-dollar international development aid network who works full time at collecting every heart-wrenching statistic about Africa who you can get data from.
By contrast, it's a lot harder to quantify dysfunctional community (particularly among the wealthy donor class's socio-political enemies in the WEIRD West).
I agree that spending money on impersonal charity is not a good way to fix these things. However, I don't agree that "literally millions of people" are trying to fix them, otherwise we would be seeing much less grim results than we currently are. Moreover, it's not a duty that can be delegated to specialist charity organizations. It's an obligation that comes along with citizenship, that everyone has. The only question is what each of our individual obligations are, depending on our means, location, and ability.
Given that we are living in modern times, modern standards are the correct ones to apply.
There are any number of transit-minded folks on here who I'd defer to on this (though with the caveat that I'm not a "cars are evil" guy like some are).
I was referring to the physical built environment, but I take your point about pollution.
Maybe by first fixing their own zoning codes to allow for the development they say they want?
By actually participating in them, or creating them out of whole cloth if the area is so deracinated that there is no continuous community.
I agree, but that doesn't mean I have to quietly acquiesce to it. Long defeats are worth fighting, if the cause is noble.
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If someone wanted to discredit EA, they could not have done better than this guy.
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(I think EAs would quibble about "metaphysical moral earning", but in a kinda an arbitrary way.)
Largely, because the marginal community example in the United States involves buying helmets for teenagers to concuss each other with, and the marginal dollar to sub-Saharan African involves fewer people dying painfully of starvation or malaria. Or, worse, the community example in the United States involved sending Americans to build shitty bridges in sub-Saharan Africa out of weird non-measurable benefit analysis.
There are frameworks where the Carnegie or Bell Labs model has bigger impact on the world (eg: Bell Labs), or where moral worth of a local charity is stronger than a distant one because of those community links, but they're pretty hard to argue in the general case from a philosophical position rather than from a axiomatic one.
((On the flip side, a lot of EAs have made it clear that they're not buying malaria nets with every last dollar, either: cfe EA crypto-nauts buying stadium names for concussion-ball, or more subtly, the failures of KelseyTUOC to adequately balance politically-acceptable outreach against EA popularization.))
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Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.
If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.
I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.
It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.
Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?
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I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:
I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.
I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.
I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.
I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.
I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.
Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.
Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.
This strikes me as a weak moral argument.
There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you. Of course there is a biological basis for this, and it may be practically impossible for most people to overcome this bias. But that doesn't really have any effect on the ethical math.
You just have strong preferences that run counter to ethical concerns.
This is false.
You could, right now, give money directly to impoverished people across the globe to save/transform their lives.
If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.
There absolutely are several.
(1) Practicality. An ethics which people are not likely to follow will not be implemented widely or for long. However noble its aims, such an ethic fails by its own terms. By contrast, an ethics which people are likely to follow, even if slightly less noble, will be implemented widely and for a longer period of time and thus result in more good. As you said, there is a biological bias in favor of genetic or geographic (and I'd add "sociocultural" as well) proximity. If that bias can be taken advantage of to build solidarity, care, and harmony, then it should!
(2) Accessibility. Proximity Bias is a simple concept, common to most human civilizations. It is simple to explain, and thus easy to spread. Moreover, it is also simpler for people of all different capability strata to implement, even without supervision. It's not perfect, and people being people it will sometimes be implemented poorly. But it's easier.
(3) Iterativity. Proximity Bias stresses that individuals should spend their resources on people and things close to them, which are likely to be things which the individual will interact with frequently. This provides for frequent feedback between all parties and frequent assessment of progress. Thus, it limits the ability of middlemen to grift or divert efforts and resources away from the object, as well as generally unlocking the beneficial dynamics present in iterated games more generally. It also allows for short feedback loops to identify and address unforeseen consequences rapidly.
(4) Resiliency. Though Proximity Bias may be less globally efficient, it does allow for the building of general reserves of both physical and social capital which can be leveraged to counteract/mitigate emergencies. Further, because it is decentralized, there is no single point of failure in the system.
Sorry, nope. Ties go both ways, or not at all. I am bound to those who have some duty to me. Beyond that, I have a duty to cause no unnecessary harm. If, after I have fulfilled my local duties, I still have resources left over, then, and only then, can I look outwards to perform charity on complete strangers. But that's a very high bar to clear.
You seem to be confusing is/ought.
If you choose not to give your life to save 10 people, you are a selfish coward.
I don't mean that as harshly as it sounds, as we are all born selfish cowards, wired that way as a result of billions of years of evolution. And then it's reinforced by our culture. It's super hard not to be a selfish coward.
We don't like to think of ourselves as selfish cowards, so we imagine ourselves to be moral, even when the evidence is clear.
3 million children die of starvation each year. You can literally, truly, concretely, actually save a number of their lives. Say, 10 lives. Just by forgoing insanely lavish luxuries that we all treat "middle class" in the West. You wouldn't even have to forfeit your life, just a bunch of your stuff.
Now, I don't believe people should be forced to sacrifice themselves or sell their shit. It's a personal decision they should arrive at after doing the rational/ethical math.
But the math is clear.
I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.
Ha. You feel attacked. I get it. :)
You're placing a higher value on the lives of some people due to their proximity to you. This is because you are selfish, by nature. Reputation, reciprocation, kin selection, etc. These are all "is" considerations. (It's cool we all feel it.)
It's only because conscious experience exists that morality exists; it's only by rationally thinking through the implication of this that you can participate in morality. The moral way of assessing value is by measuring the capacity to suffer, or the other end, experience happiness/flourishing. And it's when you do that you realize there is no (unselfish) basis to place a higher value on anyone. You'll see that it's only your selfishness that blinds you to this simple truth.
A man you've never met in Kenya is of equal moral value to your father. This sentence flies in the face of everything we feel, but it's obviously morally true.
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Coming from a place of curiosity: How are these duties managed? By which I mean: who defines them, where are they defined, and who is the judge/enforcer? How do decide to make tradeoffs, like for example in a situation where you would have to renege against your duty to your ancestors in order to fulfill your duty to your family?
In other words, what makes these duties concrete to you?
Christians and others of the Abrahamic faiths have their books that codify their duties, and they have their priests, that act as judge/enforcer and guide. I'm sure other religion provide similar frameworks. Humanism, especially of the EA kind, has their own version of this. So where does yours come from?
I find the substance in the great thinkers and teachers of many cultures, and take my definitions from them (though, of course, with the right to interpret or add as may be honestly needed in the spirit of the original).
The idea that my concern and efforts must start with myself, then move slowly outwards from the center to kin, friends, neighbors, city, state, country, and only then beyond that, is also extremely common in historical moral teachings, from Hierocles:
to Confucius:
It even shows up in poetry, like Pope's "Essay on Man":
So yes, the goal ultimately is to embrace the whole world, but you can't skip steps! You have to adequately care for yourself before you can care for close kin. You have to be able to adequately care for self and kin before you can extend responsibility and purview to friends and local community. You have to provide for yourself, your kin, your friends, and your community before you can move on to the city or nation...and so on and so forth.
The idea that this isn't just true for those alive today, but also extends to a duty to carry on faithfully the work of those who came before, and leave it in a better place than I found it for those yet to come, I draw most pithily from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France:
And as to how it's enforced...I'll turn to Confucius again:
Thanks for sharing that. I understand a little bit more about where you're coming from.
It seems we're more or less aligned on the ends. I'm not sure about the means--for one, divvying people up into cities/states/nations doesn't appeal to me, since I'd rather do the categorization based on culture or at least "big ideas" such as "should the citizen be the property of the state?" But I guess it'll shake out in future discussions, which I'm looking forward to.
Cheers to that!
I would say that "culture" in the specific sense is highly relevant to categorization! You and the people you spend most of your time with are a tiny culture to yourselves, with your own idiosyncratic habits, inside jokes and references, and tendencies. And because you spend most of your time there, you have the most invested in keeping it healthy and productive and pleasant, etc.
Then there's looser subculture's you're part of - all the people who live on the same block, and so care about, e.g., potholes, loaning lawnmowers, watching out for each other's kids, 4th of July block parties, etc., so you collaborate on those things. Or maybe it's based on activity or affinity - a church congregation, softball league, wargaming group, knitting circle, book club, local political party, etc., each of which you spend your time, effort, and resources on.
And then it goes out further and further, through groups you share less and less time and contact with, but still have interests (whether pecuniary, cultural, or social) in common with. That's basically what Hierocles means by tribes, citizens, "those who dwell in the vicinity of the city," etc.
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I don't think the question reflects how the world actually works. If it costs a penny, I would posit that the United States government has spent no shortage of pennies, many of them extracted from my pocket, and that this should be a solved problem. If it costs a penny and the United States government has failed to allocate that sliver of copper, I would think that the many pennies Bill Gates allocates should be sufficient to solve the problem. If it is a mere penny that is needed (or any other trivial sum), then my penny doesn't need to be the marginal penny spent. That I'm being asked for a penny to end this suffering strongly suggests to me that some factor other than the necessary pennies are what's actually causing the suffering, which makes me very suspicious of why someone is asking for my penny.
Well in this case the real price is ~10k, and the US government reasonably decides that the marginal utility of spending more on foreign aid to save more lives isn't worth it at that point. But folks at EA disagree; they will donate at that level of price to lives saved. My point was more that the OP seemed to call EA "evil" but I expect that it's not really such a deep fundamental difference of values as it is his value of foreign lives is significantly lower but not 0. If it was literally 0 he would not spend even a penny to save a foreigner, but I expect that's not true.
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Doesn’t that run afoul of the categorical imperative? If everyone follows your reasoning, and decides that it won’t be their penny that saves a life, we’d expect to see the life continue to go unsaved. This applies to the government, too. How can we tell whether the unsaved life is bait for a trap or a genuine failure to coordinate?
Some charitable rhetoric like the Giving What We Can pledge is specifically trying to force a more stable equilibrium.
Yes, it would, but my point is less "someone else can do it" and more "I believe other someones have already been explicitly funded to do this and the marginal penny flatly isn't the problem". If Bill Gates' coalition of billionaires can't coordinate sufficiently to solve the problem, I think the problem will not be solved by me electing to give a few more of my dollars. That these intractable problems are halfway around the world globe where I can't even begin to meaningfully evaluate them furthers my belief that I'd be better served by lighting the money on fire and enjoying a few moments of warmth. Basically, when someone tells me that I can save a life with a penny, I think they are either incorrect or grifting.
To put some specific numbers on it since the above is a claim that just handwaves away the idea that there are cheaply saved lives, an insecticide bed net apparently costs $2-3 for a family-sized nets. These apparently last 3-4 years, I would assume that it's not literally every African that needs one, and they apparently are large enough for multiple people. So, let's go ahead and call the nets $1 per year and let's say we need a billion of them - how in the world could it be that the Bill Gates team, or Sam Bankman, or USAID can't figure out the $1 billion per year without me chipping in (more than I already do via federal tax dollars)?
If Peter Singer's drowning child ever appears in real life, I will gladly wade into the pond and destroy my nicest suit to save them, but I think applying the same thinking to less legible child-saving is just a rhetorical trick, disconnected from reality.
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If you donate a bed net, it doesn't mean that your poor African is using the bed net to prevent malaria. Instead, they are being used to overfish, poisoning the water supply and possibly starving several communities in the long term.
Meanwhile, if I take care of an elderly neighbor I might not be saving lives or grand gestures like that, but I have a better idea of what they need and can avoid unintentionally hurting them and others.
That's a reasonable point, but then you just disagree with EA on their calculations, not their premises. That's something different than what OP was calling evil I think.
I think I disagree with EA on their premises because I think we can't really help someone unless we have a relationship with them and understand them. There is a balance between impact and knowledge. One side of the scale is something small that has low stakes but involves something you know well - like helping a neighbor pay for a much needed car repair. The other side of the scale has high stakes but involves situations where people don't have any idea what the ripple effects would be because they are too removed from the people they are trying to help - like the Mosquito Nets.
My principle would be that a problem should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority that includes people directly impacted by the problem. Or in practice, this:
-Brandon Vogt (Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World, page 91)
You might think this kind of altruism is reckless, I think giving malaria nets to people whose problems we don't know is reckless. All charity is risky and reckless because it requires involving yourself and your material goods in the well-being of another who may terribly misuse it - making you their accomplice.
Why do you think we don't know these people's problems? Tons of research has been conducted on how terrible malaria is, how it prevents economic development, has all sorts of higher-order effects, etc., and on how to treat and prevent malaria. Much more research than Dorothy Day conducted in your anecdote. Maybe the woman was just a drug addict who would sell the ring for a fraction of its value and spend the money on heroin, and giving her the ring rather than assistance in kind (food and shelter) is just feeding her addiction and funneling money into the pockets of criminals. A few days later, the ring is gone, the woman is still a homeless addict, and you get to pat yourself on the back because you weren't paternalistic and you respected her autonomy.
Apparently the Nigerians believe that imminent starvation is more important to them than malaria, and so use the free tools provided to wreck their environment and feed themselves for a moment instead of prevent malaria. People will use the tools provided to them as they see fit to benefit themselves.
Westerners are telling Nigerians, "look, I know you're hungry but the real problem, mathematically speaking, is malaria. Use these nets to prevent malaria and before long everything will be fine." And the Nigerian sees this as patronizing bullshit and does what they see best. If you need someone's cooperation to do something, they should have a seat at the planning table. If we had given them cash or something with resell value, maybe they'd have bought better fishing nets. If we'd talked to individuals first, we'd have known to give them a means to feed themselves before moving to malaria prevention. Instead we gave them a very specific tool that they are using on a problem it was not made to solve and making things worse in the process.
I mean, aren't there also stories (a la Live Aid) of people organizing to donate money/food to starving African communities, only for warlords to get their hands on said money/food and withold it for reasons of control? Who's to say that trying to give your recipients a seat at the table won't end up giving said seat to someone not interested in representing said recipients?
That's the point - you'd want the person actually needing help to have the most control of the funds/charity.
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I don't think people misusing malaria nets is a major issue, but if you do, GiveWell also recommends funding malaria drugs and vitamin A supplements. Could something go wrong with those? I guess people might overdose. But GiveWell doesn't guess: they've actually run the numbers, and they've found that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. If that still doesn't convince you, you can just donate to GiveDirectly.
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"homeless woman lucky to hock diamond ring for 5% of its value before someone just cuts her finger off for it. 95% of major charitable donation goes to shady pawn shop owner: social justice activists awed and inspired"
The whole anecdote reads like bragging about doing altruism in the most ineffective way possible.
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In all honesty, no. I can't say I do without severely watering down the meaning of the word empathy. If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.
EA stopped being about malaria nets a long time ago when they started putting funding into political campaign donations into "their" candidates into the Democratic Party primaries in Oregon (he lost anyways lmao). Scott Alexander and Big Yud shilling for this loser is a big jumping the shark moment for EA. Shoveling money into the black hole that is politics is the exact opposite of effective or altruism.
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
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I don't think it's that hard to feel different amounts of non-zero empathy for different people proportional to how close they are to you. To save the life of your child? Spend up to 50% of your wealth. A parent? 10%. A close friend? 0.1%. A foreigner? 0.01%. Made up numbers that would be different for everyone of course, but I think that's the general premise most people actively live life by. I can't imagine if there was a charity that could legitimately save an African life for a penny, maybe because there's some immediate crisis that needs every cent it can get immediately and the big actors can't respond fast enough, and you knew all this for certain, you wouldn't donate. And drawing the line somewhere between a penny and $10k to save a life is reasonable. But people are just drawing their lines at different points, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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That's definitely true, and a real issue for having empathy for all of humanity. It's a problem I have as well, I don't think having empathy exactly like that is effective or helpful for anyone.
However, I get around it by not thinking about the quantity of children/people dying around the world. Just think of them as if they're one, or a few people who are dying and need malaria nets or whatever. Think about, try to feel, how much pain they're experiencing, how scared they are, how scared and sad their family is, etc. That way, you can feel the empathy, which can get you to take positive action, but not have to be destroyed by the scale of how many people out there need help.
...why tho
Getting emotional over people I don't know is irrational and makes you easy to manipulate. Not opening my wallet for a charity just because they will ostensibly reduce suffering somewhere I have never seen that I will never go to. People should look out for the ones they have direct responsibility for first. How about helping a friend out first? Everyone has a friend that's struggling these days.
One can improve the lives of those around them with great precision and far greater cost efficiency than unknown strangers.
Real Effective Altruism is giving a beer to the bum in front of Walmart. I don't expect him to get any better and he will almost certainly die in a ditch in ten years, but at least I know my money is being converted directly into utility (beer == smiles) and not wasted on high overhead charity making political or economic changes with uncertain second order consequences.
Yeah, they're good points. I don't think there are clear answers to this.
I can't speak to EA funding politics stuff, but a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives. Every bit helps to create a better world.
As far as people near us vs people far from us, yes, I agree that it should be more morally incumbent on us to better the lives of the people around us, vs far away and unrelated. But why not both? Some reasons you may want to donate to an EA style charity:
your money does go further in Africa than it does here. There's not anything you can do to save your friend's life for $5. If there is anything, then you definitely should do it
there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc
tax writeoff
Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"
Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?
I don't mean this as a reflection on you personally - I don't know you, of course - but these two quotes seems related. A person far away actually might be more "real" than a person nearby, at least insofar as their "realness" is as a pure, innocent victim who can be redeemed through charity. The person nearby, after all, is probably smelly and dirty and unsightly and low status. He might be crazy, or addicted to something, or violent and destructive. He might be resistant to help, or prone to relapses, or have other human foibles which so frequently are both the cause and result of being down-and-out. Even if he's none of those things, he might disagree about politics, or listen to the wrong music, or otherwise bear cultural marks that one might cringe from being associated with. And so it's hard and often unpleasant to help those nearby! Meanwhile, you don't see any of those things about the person far away, or if you do it's likely covered up by cultural unfamiliarity. Feels a lot better to help that person, I'd bet.
EA wasn't always like this - insofar as it's an attempt to cut through grift and bloat in charity efforts, it's still quite useful! But your comment seems to encapsulate a version of EA that flattens the world into fungible QALYs and tries to Moneyball-optimize QALYs-per-dollar, with an affective bias against giving and working where one is. And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.
No, those are good activities, too, and I did some of them as well. But that doesn't say anything about my main point in that paragraph, which is bang for the buck. The price of my time is generally considerably high, so really, I was contributing potentially a lot more than just a few dollars when I was volunteering my time. And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.
Because they don't know the person who's giving it, and also they probably understand how life and death things are. If my life were at stake, I'd take aid from anyone.
I mean, maybe. I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible. I just think that some far away places probably need that kind of help more than the northeastern US.
Why? Were there not hungry people at the soup kitchen who would otherwise starve? Depressed and troubled kids who, absent mentoring or sports-socialization, would have spiralled downward?
We just disagree on whether or not the flattening of locality in the efficiency calculation represents a loss or not, I guess.
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You seem to fundamentally not understand EA. In principle, it is not about hating your local community, it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you. Even if your mentoring was able to save that kid’s life, that kind of one-on-one volunteering is a highly inefficient use of your time compared with just earning a few extra bucks to buy malaria nets with.
You can spend several hours per week for years as a Big Brother to save one kid, or you could take that time to earn money, donate it towards malaria nets and save many times more (depending on your earning ability).
Now you can say you just don’t care at all about the lives of African kids, which is fair, that’s why I’m not a part of EA. But if you claim to value their lives at all it renders these time-intensive charity efforts like coaching sports highly inefficient
There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.
I recognize this...and yet...
...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.
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Stop right there. Bankman-Fried may only have been associated with EA mainly as a moneybags donor, but he was their poster boy there for a while and there are plenty of articles out there licking his arse (as we say round these parts) for what a do-gooder he was.
And he wasn't spending it all on malaria bed nets, or what do you call the sponsorship of sports teams and paying the UC-Berkeley for naming rights of their sports field? Is that "have you no empathy?" Don't respond to criticism with "our hearts bleed unlike yours" about this kind of question.
OP said "Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises?" I took that to mean he took issue with bed nets and not just sports teams.
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I would call it an advertisement paid for by FTX, a for-profit company which Bankman-Fried only partially owned.
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The OP was not criticizing the personal choices of SBF but the principles of EA. You can read his comment below, he very much does seem to think it is utterly evil to buy malaria nets for Africans
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The reason it feels alien to you is because it is alien to you. The theistic superstitions have mostly gone away, but the religious inclinations have not, and the influencers in the EA space are looking for a sort of fulfillment that they feel they can no longer get with traditional religion. Tikkun Olam is interesting though in that it exoterically presents as "healing the world" and social justice, but esoterically is in fact a command to destroy all idolatry and "false gods" offensive to the jealous tribal god, Yahweh.
EA and AI alignment are interesting to consider in this duality of their conception of "healing the world".
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What is your actual objection to EA? That they're willing to give money to anyone anywhere in the world, and not just their local in-group?
Art doesn't feed people or cure diseases. The world would be a much better place if rich people used $450,000,000 on saving 90,000 lives than buying a painting.
As for infrastructure and knowledge (by which you presumably mean education and/or research), I don't see how funding those is incompatible with EA in principle. It's just that these may not be the most cost-effective causes at the moment.
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Sorry, but what do you find utterly repulsively evil about it?
Edit: To clarify a bit, you never explained what your problem with EA actually is. You just stated that focus on “global moral enterprises” is utterly evil, but why? I can understand valuing your own country higher than one halfway around the world, and perhaps you can’t emotionally identify with the EA view, but calling it utterly evil seems bizarre and ridiculous
Utterly evilness is thinking that "Human Global Welfare" is something we should strive for, instead of giving to your people. In my morality system, community and ethnos is everything, and as we consider a Father who does not prefer his Son to other people an evil person, I cannot tolerate people who believe in global constructs of human welfare.
Why should you give to your community when you could give even more to your son? Perhaps it is utterly evil and repulsive to help your community when your son could use a second xbox?
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How much should a father favor his son? What if his son’s needs are met?
Choosing to feed the local homeless instead of buying the son a nicer car is altruism. Choosing to feed the non-local homeless, or to protect them from malaria, is still altruism. Even when you (rightly, IMO) value these distant people less, there exists a point where you can do more for them than you could do for your son.
The effective altruists claim that this tipping point occurs very close to home, and that commissioning art or donating to a university is a luxury: more style than substance. Some of them surely think that feeding the homeless is such an extravagance, too. Those people are probably wrong—SV is a different kind of luxury signaling environment breeding its own styles of excess. I don’t think that makes the basic claim evil.
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This is just Bentham-esque utilitarianism in action. The core of EA is "your community" is no more worthy of a dollar's aid than some shanty village halfway around the world, and 95% of those calculations end up coming down with an anti-Western bent. Instead of spending a few million marginally helping a handful of people here you can blow the same amount improving sanitation or healthcare for many more people in Timbuktu and per the hedonic calculus the latter beats the former.
Close. The core is that a dollar’s aid buys more for the shanty village than for your community in the same way that a second car, house or cell phone is worth less than the first. The rest of your post follows.
It’s possible to believe one’s community is worth more, just not enough to justify the inefficiency. Though Mr. Bankman-Fried certainly looks to take the strong form.
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EA is not an alternative to the progressive view; it is an expression of it. It's a different branch than woke, but it is still "globohomo" progressivism.
I’d like to see an explanation of the term “globohomo.” Every time I see it used, it’s indistinguishable from a know-it-when-i-see it circumlocution for “things I don’t like.”
Portmanteau of "global" and "homogenous", though I expect the wink at "homosexual" is intentional. Basically Scott's Universal Culture, only with negative valence.
I feel like “globogenous” has a better cadence. Oh well.
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The "homo" isn't always just a wink at "homosexual" - it also is a reference to the high priority of LGBT in western diplomatic efforts and high-level initiatives.
Do Western governments place a high priority on LGBT rights in their diplomatic efforts? The media may make a big deal out of it (see for example the focus on LGBT rights over more general civil and labour rights in recent discussion of Qatar in relation to the World Cup), but do governments actually care? After all, Saudi Arabia, where same-sex activity is a capital offence, is a close ally of the West, and the West also cooperates with other countries where homosexuality is illegal.
Well, here's one example.
In other words, only do it where the locals are already pro-LGBT. They're not trying to convince either the local population or the government of anything, they're just repeating a message the locals already agree with. Hardly a "high priority".
Blinken said he brings up LGBT in every conversation with the Saudis. Some have speculated this is why the Saudis rebuffed US desire to increase oil production before the mid-terms.
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/17/blinken-saudi-arabia-lgbtq-rights
Biden said he'd do more for LGBT in his first foreign policy speech
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-signs-memo-protecting-lgbtq-rights-worldwide-set/story?id=75682189
The US soccer team in Qatar will wear LGBT rainbow on their uniforms
https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/14/us-national-soccer-team-crest-lgbt-world-cup-qatar/
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Not quite. (For reference, Jamaica is famously homophobic, and gay sex is illegal in Barbados)
[Edit: It's not quite a formal diplomatic initiative, but this just broke which is quite relevant, and I can't imagine it would have happened if the State Department had a problem with it.]
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