“I myself am 100% committed to donating nearly all of my disposable income, and I think EA is complete bullshit.”
Émile, you bragging about this all the time doesn’t make you look like some saint. It comes off as performative, like you want people to admire you and see you as somebody special.
If you really believed this then you wouldn’t feel a need to brag about it so regularly. Loudly talking about how much money you donate to charity just makes you come off as somebody who has something to prove. Most people don’t brag about how much of their money they give away to charity.
“EA is the devil, and the world would have been better without it. Unfortunately, we must now pick up the pieces and try to undo the damage it’s done.”
There are many, many devils in this world. I appreciate you so much for calling out the TESCREAL devils, but please don’t get tunnel vision and see these guys as the only or primary devils in the world. As bad as they are, they’re well-behaved schoolboys compared to Putin and others causing global violence at massive scale.
“This is yet another reason I’ve worried about my personal safety. From the longtermist view, critics like me aren’t just minor annoyances. We are profoundly immoral people, standing in the way of “astronomical” amounts of future value in a cosmic utopia. For utilitarians, murder is morally right if it leads to overall better outcomes. Hence, if they come to believe that murdering me would increase the probability of utopia being realized — even by a teeny-tiny amount — then they have a moral obligation to murder me. Utilitarianism is scary, and as Steven Pinker (ugh) points out, utopianism contains within it a particularly insidious kind of utilitarian reasoning:”
Nobody is going to murder you for this stuff, Émile. You’re not so important that anyone would risk going to jail to shut you up. I’ve been writing and researching Islamist terrorists for 17 years now. I don’t live in fear of terrorists coming to kill me even though many of the people I’ve worked with have received death threats. Just writing about terrorists and killers and evil people doesn’t mean they’re going to come and actually harm you.
This sort of EA cult behavior isn’t anything special. This is just normal for how intellectual cults like this operate whether they are left, right or some other ideology.
“In contrast, my commitment to donating is based on a genuine concern for people as ends in themselves. It’s because people are ends that I want to help them, not because helping them maximizes some abstract thing called “value,” which no one can even define.”
I think it’s more out of concern for yourself and you wanting to feel better about yourself. That’s why most leftists do what they do, so that they can feel like they are a good person and imagine they are actually making the world better when really all they are doing is making themselves feel better.
“I myself am 100% committed to donating nearly all of my disposable income, and I think EA is complete bullshit.”
Émile, you bragging about this all the time doesn’t make you look like some saint. It comes off as performative, like you want people to admire you and see you as somebody special.
If you really believed this then you wouldn’t feel a need to brag about it so regularly. Loudly talking about how much money you donate to charity just makes you come off as somebody who has something to prove. Most people don’t brag about how much of their money they give away to charity.
But mentioning that is relevant to my point: I donate, yet hate EA. No?
No, it isn’t relevant. You mention it all the time and it always distracts from whatever you’re arguing.
“EA is the devil, and the world would have been better without it. Unfortunately, we must now pick up the pieces and try to undo the damage it’s done.”
There are many, many devils in this world. I appreciate you so much for calling out the TESCREAL devils, but please don’t get tunnel vision and see these guys as the only or primary devils in the world. As bad as they are, they’re well-behaved schoolboys compared to Putin and others causing global violence at massive scale.
“This is yet another reason I’ve worried about my personal safety. From the longtermist view, critics like me aren’t just minor annoyances. We are profoundly immoral people, standing in the way of “astronomical” amounts of future value in a cosmic utopia. For utilitarians, murder is morally right if it leads to overall better outcomes. Hence, if they come to believe that murdering me would increase the probability of utopia being realized — even by a teeny-tiny amount — then they have a moral obligation to murder me. Utilitarianism is scary, and as Steven Pinker (ugh) points out, utopianism contains within it a particularly insidious kind of utilitarian reasoning:”
Nobody is going to murder you for this stuff, Émile. You’re not so important that anyone would risk going to jail to shut you up. I’ve been writing and researching Islamist terrorists for 17 years now. I don’t live in fear of terrorists coming to kill me even though many of the people I’ve worked with have received death threats. Just writing about terrorists and killers and evil people doesn’t mean they’re going to come and actually harm you.
This sort of EA cult behavior isn’t anything special. This is just normal for how intellectual cults like this operate whether they are left, right or some other ideology.
“In contrast, my commitment to donating is based on a genuine concern for people as ends in themselves. It’s because people are ends that I want to help them, not because helping them maximizes some abstract thing called “value,” which no one can even define.”
I think it’s more out of concern for yourself and you wanting to feel better about yourself. That’s why most leftists do what they do, so that they can feel like they are a good person and imagine they are actually making the world better when really all they are doing is making themselves feel better.