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 -
I fail to see how supplying basic needs is worse than leaving someone to die.
Is that not the definition of completely ignoring the human?
Because it means that a decade down the line, some Saudi policeman is going to be tempted to drink because his job involves shooting at 'wretched refuse' to prevent it from crossing the border and milling around in Saudi Arabia and asking for handouts. Don't even ask what Europe is going to end up like.
It’s all part of Big Alcohol’s plan to break into the Muslim market.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People are social, people interact, helping a person live might increase the happiness of those around them or end up causing the suffering of those around them, they will probably do both simultaneously in varying amounts. The problem is you are trying to apply a value to an unknown quantity. Sometimes it feels progressives and by extension EA are so universalist in their beliefs that they can't even imagine a person having values that are negative, all people are inherently good but they are influenced by evil outside forces. Trump voters are mislead by Trump, religious people are misled by religion etc. People are capable of everything within the human experience from great altruism to great malice. Just saving a life without taking into account what you are saving is ignoring the human, it's ignoring what makes people human i.e. the content of their character, beliefs and culture. In a way I think it's even rejecting your own humanity as participating in the war of culture, having groups you favor over others, is part of being human. EAs come off as trying to stand apart from all that, like zoo keepers looking after the health of foolish animals.
Are you suggesting that empathy or humanity requires assessing whether the recipient is…worthy? Part of those groups you favor? Because that doesn’t square with any reasonable definition of empathy. Not Christian charity, not secular humanism, whatever.
Another way to put it. Let’s say your neighbor falls ill and you have the money to save him. He’s someone you know well, so you have a good sense of his beliefs and his relationships, even if they don’t always agree with yours. Is it more or less altruistic to save his life?
It requires assessing something. It's up to you whether or not you support people you find worthy or not, but to empathize there has to be something there to empathize with, otherwise you are just creating something fictional.
Saving the neighbor is traditional altruism. You know them you've interacted with them so you can empathize with them.
Saving x from y shouldn't be altruism, you don't know anything about them, you can't empathize with them without projecting, and not just some minimally necessary projection, you're basically inventing them whole cloth.
As to whether it's more or less altruistic, it seems it would be more altruistic to save the neighbor who shared none of your values than it would be to save a neighbor that shared your values and therefore helped to further you / your groups interests. This seems nonsensical to me though and basically just pointless virtue signalling.
edit: Another poster argued basically exactly this that the definition i'm using reduces to virtue maximizing and that actual EA would donate to people that shared their cause (the neighbor they liked) because they are about maximizing positive outcomes. I do feel like it stretches the definition of altruism though. Say some extreme narcissist that took an iq test as a kid and got into mensa or something felt that they were likely to be more capable than anyone else and therefore had the potential to benefit the world more than anyone else. Would they create an organization that aimed to funnel all resources to themselves and call it effective altruism? Maybe EA people believe this? Seems like the economy and wealth agrees with this. Are there EA groups funneling all their resources into ai to create god? Idk, maybe!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine a country where the people have overexploited their environment, and there are now more people living there than the country's ecological base can support. Once they see all the starving children, famous westerners come in and throw big rock concerts to raise funds to ease their pain, and they succeed - the food gets distributed and the people stop starving. They then have children, and the population becomes even more unsustainable, which creates an even more dramatic famine 10 years later.
Is feeding those starving people the correct thing to do when enabling their population to increase more is just going to make the problem worse in the future? You have a choice between a bunch of people starving to death, or twice that many people starving to death a generation from now. Which choice is more humane?
This is a legitimate argument, though my personal beliefs lean closer to @self_made_human’s.
It’s also completely absent from the OP and from his response. He is very clear that acting on an “unknown quantity” is despicable not because one might cause more total suffering, but because it’s “discounting their humanity.” Somehow, providing basic needs for people you don’t know implies less empathy than deciding they don’t deserve your attention, or worse, that they have “values that are negative.” This is fucking incoherent.
More options
Context Copy link
I will consider that thought experiment to be isomorphic to this one:
Imagine you're a doctor who has a patient about to die young before having kids.
Why save them? After all, they're going to die anyway, and more importantly, they'll have kids, who are also going to die, young or old.
So it's a choice between having one person die now, versus two people die in the future.
What I can only hope is obvious is that most people value life, especially a quality life, and consider it worth extending, even if the terminal prognosis for everyone is fatal, even if they're only going to reproduce and have more people who have a bounded lifespan. Let's leave aside that I expect lifespans to become unbounded shortly, it's not relevant when we haven't solved Heat Death.
Presumably, by revealed preferences, these people you discuss consider their lives worth living, and the reason they're about to die is because they have no choice in the matter. Further, so too will their offspring,
More importantly, it buys time for more durable solutions.
Since this line of thinking would have consigned all previously starving populations in history to a shared grave with Malthus, I'm not paying it any heed.
HOLD IT! You've committed a rhetorical sleight of hand here - it isn't the fact that people die at all that's the problem. We're talking about starving to death, which is a humiliating, painful and degrading way to die. "Death" and "Death by starvation" are different things and not really equivalent. But that's just a minor problem - you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the argument being made here, because your isomorphism is false.
Have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? The salient quality of this "thought experiment" (if you're paying attention this isn't a hypothetical but real world history) is that the ability of the environment to support life is part of the equation. You have a choice between supercharging a given population, taking them beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, or letting some portion of the population starve/die. When you pick the first option the commons gets destroyed, and the ecosystems that can support a larger community get damaged (the natural equivalent to the seed corn being eaten). When you actually take the specifics of the scenario into account, you're advocating for the destruction of the environment and mass starvation as opposed to letting a population return to a level that's sustainable in the long term. I don't think that's actually a position that you'd support - though I may be wrong.
I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, or Malthusian population limits.
Neither applies here.
For one, we're not Malthusian, given that there is food to feed them with. If every locale was restricted to having to feed itself, goodbye Singapore I guess?
Secondly, the behavior they're engaging in, namely having more kids or mouths than they can feed, such that they end up being naturally culled, is one that just about every population in history has been guilty of.
When I think "population sustainable in the long term", I'm contemplating Dyson Swarms and the Heat Death of the Universe. It has little relevance to the denizens of Sub-Saharan Africa, no matter how dysfunctional it might be right now.
And I don't even like them, I happen to think that the problems that they suffer from can be fixed, be it immediate calorific concerns, or the poor quality of human capital, be it by genetic engineering or otherwise. Hence why I'd rather they'd not starve to death, at least not when it's random philanthropic movements footing the bill for feeding them.
What exactly do you envision when I propose a doctor "who has a patient about to die young before having kids"?
Do you think the people who die at that age are choosing a particularly dignified way to go? Severe appendicitis? A road traffic accident? Bullet to the gut?
I'll tell you that I'd certainly find shitting my guts out in front of a hundred strangers to be "humiliating" if nothing else.
So I think my isomorphism works just fine, since we're talking a cause of death that can be relatively cheaply mitigated, ensuring a longer life and time to churn out the next generation.
Yes, they very explicitly do! I'm the person who came up with this "hypothetical" and I can very flatly state that it is not taking place in a science-fiction universe with AGI and dyson spheres. Instead, it takes place in the real world - human beings need to eat, and that food has to come from somewhere. You don't get to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Overfarming can damage environments, and if you overfish a lake to the point that the fish can't recover, you've permanently reduced the population your environment can support.
The world has a certain amount of overhead - but not an infinite amount. You're proposing that we spend the entirety of the world's excess on feeding more and more Ethiopians, without any care for the consequences of doing so. Why is it worth making sure that Ethiopia has more Ethiopians than it can comfortably support? Remember that we're pushing their population above the carrying capacity of their local environment - they are going to become a permanent drain on global resources and food, and the problem is going to immediately become much worse (and the total number of Ethiopians lower) the moment that access gets cut off. What happens when there's a crop failure somewhere else in the world, or a different plague/famine/war that leaves other nations reliant on charity as well?
Do you walk into conversations about cars and talk about how discussing fuel economy is useless because we're going to have spaceships soon? If you want to talk about cool sci-fi novels, that's great! I mean, I like talking about them too - but a conversation about the hard ecological limits to human existence in the present isn't the place.
Either they starve to death now, or you have an even larger famine in the future with even more people starving to death, and causing further damage to the environment to boot. "We feed them now, and then when this problem returns in the future I'll just plug in my Mr Fusion and 3d print an infinite supply of burgers for all the starving people" isn't an option that's on the table! You're advocating for more suffering and a lower total population over time due to ecological destruction.
The last time something like this happened in my social circle, it was cancer. If I was going to die at a young age, I would greatly prefer the last moments that they went through as opposed to starving to death with the rest of my family in Africa as I watch them eat the seed corn that could have helped a smaller family survive and thrive.
Well you can see I don't find myself beholden to your strict interpretation of the hypothetical.
And leaving aside futuristic things like Dyson Spheres, we're thankfully living in the !science fiction setting where we had the Green Revolution and have industrialized agriculture. There is no shortage of cheap calories on a global level.
Sure. All well and good. But there are plenty of billions on the table yet, even trillions or quadrillions just on Earth if it was truly optimized as an ecumenopolis. Fuck the environment as far as I'm concerned. If it has to give so we can have more humans around, all the worse for it.
Once again, I stress that humans have existed in Malthusian conditions for most of history, and only recently broken out of it, even if that is "temporary" compared to the limits of exponential population growth. I see no reason to think that hypothetical carrying capacity will be breached before it keeps getting raised, as has been the case for about a century or so, and for a good while to go.
Does maybe a few hundred million extra Africans in a century change much? A billion or two? Not really, and I don't expect the conditions that make them be non-self-sufficient in the same manner as most other nations to cease before they balloon and outnumber all of us.
What on Earth gave you that impression?
I never advocated for the largesse of the globe heading to them. At most, to the extent that Effective Utilitarians are choosing to help feed them, I don't object to them using their funds in that manner.
They get shafted, and I don't care. At that point the EAs may well decide that they're not the cheapest population to prioritize, and everyone else gets a handout. Or more likely, the EAs don't have money to spare at all.
Fuel economy concerns matter a great deal less when we can reasonably expect energy to get much cheaper. I support it to the extent it pays for itself, and pricing in externalities.
As for the "ecological limits", they're likely in the tens of billions with minimal change to the condition of the average human and not much in the way of major change in terms of agricultural technologies. Given that I think those are inevitable, trillions or billions.
We can worry about it when we get there, or improvements stall before population growth does.
Why not? I invite you to show me we're near nominal capacity with even current agriculture. We are clearly not optimizing for calories over all else, as we would if we had reason to.
I have seen a great more youthful deaths from cancer than you have. As would be expected, I work in an Oncology ward.
Let me tell you that the modal passage is not something I'd call dignified.
In other words, you're arguing with a position I don't hold, and I think you utterly underestimate the nominal carrying capacity of this globe without even going into non-existent technologies.
Are you familiar with the way this conversation started? This is an unsustainable practice and is only possible because we are drawing down on the accumulated energy savings of millions of years. We are inflating a population bubble that will cause immense damage to the environment and its ability to support human life when it bursts. The same industrialised agriculture you're talking about, with its incredibly lopsided EROEI compared to previous farming methods, is a big part of the problem.
This, on the other hand, is just immensely stupid. Where does the food required to sustain you come from? Where does the oxygen you need to breathe come from? Where does the water you need to live come from? If you're working in medicine then I'm sure you know how many compounds and discoveries are either sourced from or inspired by nature. A human being is utterly inseparable from the environment, and maintaining a healthy environment is a requirement to actually be healthy yourself.
If the environment has to give, you don't get any more humans! Humans need the environment to survive and cannot be removed from it without killing them. "Fuck this dude's body. If it has to give so I can have more tumour mass, all the worse for it." - given where you work, I'm sure you know what happens when some part of a greater system decides to grow out of control and stop giving a shit about the environment that supports it.
You're not advocating for transhumanism, you're arguing for human extinction. A human being removed from his environment is a corpse.
We have already most likely breached it - current population levels are only really sustainable while burning fossil fuels, which we have a limited supply of. Even assuming alternative energy sources come online in time to save us, the soil degradation and erosion caused by petroleum-based agriculture combined with shifting weather patterns are going to be a big problem for the future. We're actually tracking the World3 Business-as-Usual model alarmingly well, and that's predicting a peak in global population in the not-so-distant future.
The point where you entered the discussion.
I don't think we can reasonably expect that. Based on historical trends we can expect the price of energy to get more expensive to the point that it causes demand destruction, which then drives prices back down again.
If there's no major change in agricultural technologies caloric availability falls off a cliff as petroleum gets substantially more expensive and climate change shifts weather patterns in ways that are inconvenient for current farming/river systems, rendering our current farming techniques unviable.
Congratulations! You can start worrying about it now.
I suppose it might be different in , but for me the biggest contributor to whether or not I'd consider my death "dignified" would be what I leave behind for others. Dying in agony of cancer would be more dignified to me than dying peacefully in my sleep if the latter meant that I'd caused irreparable harm to the world that my descendants would have to live in.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your posts. But, sadly, I don't think your position here holds water regardless.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link