Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Wrote this right on the SSC reddit:
Couldn't a very similar argument be made in favor of the Catholic Church though? After all they've founded thousands of hospitals and such. They're very big on charitable giving. Are people unfair by judging the Catholic Church mostly on its religious doctrine and political activism instead of its charitable works?
And like the Catholic Church, they have sexual assault scandals
The real draw of EA/utilitarianism is abstracting away the need to make difficult ethical decisions by just throwing money at things and feeling good about it.
For example, to paraphrase the article: “I don’t want to grapple with the structural issues facing the US that lead to gun violence. Instead, if I look at the number of people killed by guns and save the same amount of people from dying from malaria, that’s equivalent and I can stop thinking about it, right?”
This whole article is a tactical blunder. He keeps bringing up the 200000 lives saved from malaria. That’s good! If you proved to me that an organization saved 200k lives, I wouldn’t have any animosity towards them unless you gave me a reason. Cue the rest of the commentary.
The irony in all this is that if they just dropped the utilitarianism and were just honest about feelings guiding their decision making, they could be tolerable. "I'm not terribly versed in the details of the gun violence issue, but I did care about malaria enough to donate to some functional causes." Ok, fine, you're now instantly just a normal person.
But Silicon Valley thinks we’re all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats.
[citation needed]
The start of the post can't be accused of strawmanning if you just include all possible variations of accusations taps forehead Amount of different groups he accuses of hating EA 10, proof 0 (The political compass later looks related, but actually doesn't prove anything Scott just said apart from being a vague handwave (and increasing the accusations count even more). Scotts, a scott never change(s)
Also note that his list of 'this is what we did' doesn't actually compare their costs to the costs of similar charities (nor do I think it mentions the total costs of the whole organization) nor does it include the negative effects of convincing people to work into high paying but bad jobs to tithe their 10%. (also note how he compares yearly deaths in the usa with the overtime malaria thing, which just is weird if you just look past 'numbers are the same'). Anyway Scott you know how much the malaria lives cost per dollar spend, now calculate the lost lives due to the FTX disaster using those same numbers ;) .
Anyway tag yourself im a zealot.
@gerikson What I'm getting from this is "Everybody hates ScottA"
Sometimes when you very carefully triangulate yourself into a center, everyone despises you for being a sniveling wimp with no convictions.
I'm pretty sure Scott is angling for a well-paid sinecure at some network or big remaining newspaper, but he's not been able to break out into that rarefied space of US media. And he's not yet given up and given in to the urges to just go balls-to-the-walls racist to get sweet substack dosh.
I think it is more likely that Scott is a true believer in EA/Rationalism and NRx and wants to combine it all in some weird mass where people who dismiss things by saying 'fuck you arguing for eugenics is crazy' get expelled while the eugenics argument stays up. The sexless beige marketplace of ideas given flesh. [Lovecrafting description of the flesh removed, reached my quota of inflicting people horrible mind images for this month].
He's lately been giving in to the urges more and more:
Expansion of the 'not provably not correct' eugenics thing into a massive TLDR that I ain't reading
here is that HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38457770
It's worth to look at the track record of utilitarianism:
Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the founder of classical utilitarianism, almost 300 years ago, was arguing in favor of women's rights, decriminalization of homosexuality, abolition of slavery, animal welfare, prison reform.
lol (I'm not saying they are not good causes they are, but a bit of history on the effectiveness of this is missing).