This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".
The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.
and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?
Of course I wouldn't expect a stranger to help me. I'm arguing that it's not possible after all. In retrospect even people that do know and care about me have had some pretty spectacular failures on that front, though I don't blame them as long as they forgive me my own.
Death is necessary. We live in a world with physical limits, without death the resources eventually run out. Most of life from the realm of the microscopic to the complex workings of human society is just the process of determining what is worthy of those limited resources. When the determination is subjective we call it morality or justice and when it's objective we call it nature.
It seems trivial to me that human lives aren't worth saving per se. It's the content of those lives that matters, and if you don't know the content than you can't prove that you've done anything of value let alone something "effective." I mean if you had the choice between saving 1000 lives of people in a persistent vegetative state, or a dozen lives of people you know to be good and functioning people you choose the functioning people right? It's not the lives that matter it's the person, the content. If you could have more people living by putting everyone in a low energy state in some kind of feeding pod, where they undergo minimal activity to reduce calorie expenditure and just enough calories are provided to keep them alive is that good because more people are living? It seems cartoonishly evil.
and those are just overly simple demonstrations, in reality the world is more complex than that. Value is a human thing and though nature occasionally forces our hand the more advanced we get the more leeway we have to be subjective. There really isn't even a way to maximize value because people have different values and therefore competing interests.
That's the problem I have with EA. The whole, "we're saving more people than anyone" thing. Stopping needless suffering. Why is their suffering needless? Suffering can be important, it teaches us things. It leads to improvement. When you are saving them what are you saving? Do you know any of them? It's so surface level and such a philosophically empty paperclip maximizing type ethos.
I do agree that it hasn't been very effective PR for the tech bros so far. I think it worked better for progressives (though people are growing resistant to it) and EA seems to be a silicon valley version that has made the whole process too efficient and made it's contradictions too apparent. It feels too inhuman for most.
This is a retarded standard that nobody who has to work with more than a handful of people at a time holds. Do you think doctors look up new arrivals to the ER to ascertain whether they're accidentally treating murderers and rapists?
It's the net impact that matters, and unless you're exclusively attempting to save the denizens of a prison, or maybe Hamas, you will find almost no population where they predominate, such that by saving the entire lot you've done something worse.
Great. An accusation that of all the people in the world, EAs don't know the concept of disability adjusted life years (DALY) and quality adjusted life years (QALY).
I will go with the "good things are good, and bad things are bad, actually" over this galaxy-brained advocacy for letting people starve to death or die of malaria.
I'm sure those are all laudable, character building exercises.
I'm not an EA, I just think that of all the people I strongly disagree with, they're doing what they believe to be right thing with the right amount of rigor, as opposed to nothing but vibes.
Which is a lazy dismissive assumption. You have faith that lives are good or that they are in aggregate good and therefore maximizing them is positive, you don't know that. As far as I can tell you can't know that.
I'm not arguing against helping people, just that helping people you actually know is better, especially en masse (what if everyone logged off social media and did that?), than industrial philanthropy or w/e.
You are welcome to demonstrate your conviction that lives are terrible and worth terminating on average, as they must be if the aggregate is, but I suspect you can't, for the same odd reason most antinatalists or misanthropes don't start with themselves.
Faith? Why? I can clearly see that most people have lives worth living and extending, at least if it comes to the expenditure of funds I can't repurpose for things I personally care about more. To the extent that governments and charities spend their money on that, I'd prefer they save as many lives as cheaply as effectively as possible, and EAs do that. Would be even better if they handed all the cash to me, but since there's no advocacy group for the same, I'll take it.
Go ahead and help whoever you like, if you care to. By the same process where you don't care about most people, I don't particularly care about you and yours, and thus EA beats you in terms of net people I minimally consider worth existing saved. Sure, sucks that a large number of them are Sub-Saharan Africans with low IQs I suppose, but that's hardly all of them, there is a non-zero tradeoff for the same with Westerners or any other kind of human really.
ah yes, "KYS" nice to see the motte's standard of petty insults in as many words as possible is still around.
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question? "Some people in a group might become rapists, or might even be rapists, and thus most of the people in that group should get malaria and maybe die of it" is the sort of position a children's cartoon villain would hold. If that's your sincere considered position based on the things you have seen online, I suggest touching grass.
Most EAs are sympathetic to progressives, but most progressives are vehemently opposed to EA ideas like "you can put a dollar value on life" and "first world injustice doesn't matter much compared to [third world disease / global extinction risk / animal suffering, depending on exactly which EA you ask]".
I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.
Still fits with my theory. EA like the progressive model but are a bit robotic and misunderstand it. Progressive recognize that EA is pulling a lot from their PR scheme but doing it poorly and spoiling the effect.
There's more of a trade off than that though. That money and effort could be spent elsewhere, making family or people you know about happier. I mean if they don't have anyone like that they could at least look towards their local communities? From what I've seen of the bay area it could use it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link