“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.
FWIW, it made sense to me. And I think it avoids a couple of possible confounders: shows that you're not one of those trying to paint empathy as something bad, and that your problem is only about EA, not about donating.
I'd be curious for your take on this one. I know it is admittedly very weird for a right-wing anti-communist like myself to deploy a Marxist analysis, but that is very much intended for rhetorical effect.
I was watching an interview with the YouTuber Jreg yesterday and was dismayed to hear him mention he was invited out to hang with Yudkowsky and co for a month?!? The evangelism is real.
In response to the above commenters take: Personally I'm very glad you have this niche focus and understanding. I read bundles of researchers and journalists who focus on all the "other villains". You have a unique insider view, and letting us know how you live your life post EA (like donating) helps to paint a picture of how one can take the good and leave the bad.
“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.
My first encounter with EA was through a local ambassador of sorts, who presented the usual spiel that you should “earn to give” to their vetted charities because that was the most impactful way to save lives. Personally helping individuals in your community, they continued, was inefficient and a waste of resources; the only reason people did this was to feel good about themselves, and therefore they were actually being selfish.
I’m glad this person spelled out the logical conclusion of their ethical framework from the beginning, otherwise I might have been fooled.
Thank you for your work and for the inspiring compassion you maintain, even when dealing with some of the most toxic and harmful ideologies of our time.
The book More Everything Forever is an important read for anyone who’s interested in learning more about the EA/longtermism cult, whose members are some of the most wealthy, powerful, and evil people on earth.
The ideology is plainly incoherent and evil to anyone who sees human beings as having inherent worth and dignity.
It justifies ANY evil done today based on made up probabilities like this one:
If a nuclear war destroys 90% of humanity today but there is a 1% chance that it is necessary for such a war to happen in order for trillions of humans to eventually populate the entire universe inside of data centers, then nuclear war is moral because 1% x 1 trillion > number of people who will die from nuclear war.
These kinds of made-up probabilities of future space expansion are used by longtermists to justify actively harming millions or even billions of ACTUAL people who are alive today. All you have to do is speculate about how some evil thing you want to do today will eventually enable trillions of humans to exist in the future and BINGO—it’s okay for you to do it.
So glad to have stumbled upon this stack and see that I am not the only one that thinks it both cultish and BS. I attended an event to learn more and also hoping to make philanthropic contacts.
I ended up sitting next to 2, also EA curious folk. Midway through the opening session he turned to us and said, "Is it me or does this feel like a cult?"...Yes, yes it did!
Will I get $ from OP/CG...probably not. They don't like my math, even though I tried to convert cows, sheep and pigs into shrimp equivalents.
Thanks for reading all this TESCREAL stuff so we don't have to. It looks nauseating.
I chuckled at the idea of EAs embracing "epistemic humility". These are the people who think that "intelligence" is a single-dimension quantity that can obviously be increased beyond any level observed up until now, and the only problem is that we haven't yet built a machine intelligent enough to make new machines that are more intelligent than itself. And that consciousness can be instantiated in digital form, and all that's preventing this is a being with a high enough level of intelligence to figure out how to do it. These intelligence facts are so obvious they doesn't even need justification.
And then they take these beliefs and start doing utilitarian ethics math with them, while failing to make any kind of adjustment for however much uncertainty they have regarding whether the beliefs they're mathing about are true. Or, alternatively, trivializing the uncertainty by inserting arbitrarily large amounts of utility into whatever formula they're using (Bayes' Rule? Yeah, probably Bayes' Rule).
This is such a fantastic demonstration of the dangers in resorting to "logic and reason" to get through all aspects of life. Rationalism turns into Calvinball real quick when freed from the messiness of the human experience and the complexity of the outside world. Logic and reason are abstractions that are often of great practical value, but which (inconveniently) require additional assumptions in 100% of applications. And, sadly, the sorts of people who are allergic to uncertainty tend to also think they can logic and reason their way to answering any question worth asking, so they'll happily and quickly make whatever assumptions are needed to get to the fun rationality part. Cos wouldn't it just suck if you couldn't answer ontological or ethical questions with math? Boo!
“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.
FWIW, it made sense to me. And I think it avoids a couple of possible confounders: shows that you're not one of those trying to paint empathy as something bad, and that your problem is only about EA, not about donating.
It’s very distasteful to brag about how much money one gives away to charity.
1. I don't see the "brag".
2. As I said, I thought it made sense to make the point very concrete.
BTW, I gave you and your AI Ethics camp some praise in the piece I just published: https://www.godofthedesert.org/p/its-not-a-10-chance-ai-kills-us-all
I'd be curious for your take on this one. I know it is admittedly very weird for a right-wing anti-communist like myself to deploy a Marxist analysis, but that is very much intended for rhetorical effect.
I was watching an interview with the YouTuber Jreg yesterday and was dismayed to hear him mention he was invited out to hang with Yudkowsky and co for a month?!? The evangelism is real.
https://youtu.be/8KfHkqozKTY?is=eHAeSggEJGSNEbS9
In response to the above commenters take: Personally I'm very glad you have this niche focus and understanding. I read bundles of researchers and journalists who focus on all the "other villains". You have a unique insider view, and letting us know how you live your life post EA (like donating) helps to paint a picture of how one can take the good and leave the bad.
Appreciate you just how you are.
“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.
These bastards want us to be quiet. Make noise.
My first encounter with EA was through a local ambassador of sorts, who presented the usual spiel that you should “earn to give” to their vetted charities because that was the most impactful way to save lives. Personally helping individuals in your community, they continued, was inefficient and a waste of resources; the only reason people did this was to feel good about themselves, and therefore they were actually being selfish.
I’m glad this person spelled out the logical conclusion of their ethical framework from the beginning, otherwise I might have been fooled.
Thank you for your work and for the inspiring compassion you maintain, even when dealing with some of the most toxic and harmful ideologies of our time.
The book More Everything Forever is an important read for anyone who’s interested in learning more about the EA/longtermism cult, whose members are some of the most wealthy, powerful, and evil people on earth.
The ideology is plainly incoherent and evil to anyone who sees human beings as having inherent worth and dignity.
It justifies ANY evil done today based on made up probabilities like this one:
If a nuclear war destroys 90% of humanity today but there is a 1% chance that it is necessary for such a war to happen in order for trillions of humans to eventually populate the entire universe inside of data centers, then nuclear war is moral because 1% x 1 trillion > number of people who will die from nuclear war.
These kinds of made-up probabilities of future space expansion are used by longtermists to justify actively harming millions or even billions of ACTUAL people who are alive today. All you have to do is speculate about how some evil thing you want to do today will eventually enable trillions of humans to exist in the future and BINGO—it’s okay for you to do it.
So glad to have stumbled upon this stack and see that I am not the only one that thinks it both cultish and BS. I attended an event to learn more and also hoping to make philanthropic contacts.
I ended up sitting next to 2, also EA curious folk. Midway through the opening session he turned to us and said, "Is it me or does this feel like a cult?"...Yes, yes it did!
Will I get $ from OP/CG...probably not. They don't like my math, even though I tried to convert cows, sheep and pigs into shrimp equivalents.
Thanks for reading all this TESCREAL stuff so we don't have to. It looks nauseating.
I chuckled at the idea of EAs embracing "epistemic humility". These are the people who think that "intelligence" is a single-dimension quantity that can obviously be increased beyond any level observed up until now, and the only problem is that we haven't yet built a machine intelligent enough to make new machines that are more intelligent than itself. And that consciousness can be instantiated in digital form, and all that's preventing this is a being with a high enough level of intelligence to figure out how to do it. These intelligence facts are so obvious they doesn't even need justification.
And then they take these beliefs and start doing utilitarian ethics math with them, while failing to make any kind of adjustment for however much uncertainty they have regarding whether the beliefs they're mathing about are true. Or, alternatively, trivializing the uncertainty by inserting arbitrarily large amounts of utility into whatever formula they're using (Bayes' Rule? Yeah, probably Bayes' Rule).
This is such a fantastic demonstration of the dangers in resorting to "logic and reason" to get through all aspects of life. Rationalism turns into Calvinball real quick when freed from the messiness of the human experience and the complexity of the outside world. Logic and reason are abstractions that are often of great practical value, but which (inconveniently) require additional assumptions in 100% of applications. And, sadly, the sorts of people who are allergic to uncertainty tend to also think they can logic and reason their way to answering any question worth asking, so they'll happily and quickly make whatever assumptions are needed to get to the fun rationality part. Cos wouldn't it just suck if you couldn't answer ontological or ethical questions with math? Boo!
“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.