I don’t think foreign aid is at risk of being viewed as woke. Even the conservative criticisms of USAID tend to focus on things that look very ideological and very not like traditional foreign aid.
This just isn’t true. Yes, exaggerated claims of “wastefulness” are one of the reasons they are against it, but there are many more who are ideologically opposed to foreign aid altogether.
I can link you to this exchange I had with a conservative, where they explictly stated that saving the lives of a billion foreigners would not be worth increasing the national deficit by 4%, because they are ideologically opposed to american taxpayer money saving foreign lives, no matter how efficiently they do it. Or see the insanely aggressive responses to this seemingly innocuous scott alexander tweet. Or here is a popular right wing meme specifically mocking liberals for having large moral circles.
I suspect that you are in a bubble, where the conservatives you know are fine with foreign aid, so you extend that to the rest of conservatives. But in a broader context, 73% of republicans want to cut foreign aid, while only 33% of democrats do.
I could have been more clear. “Woke” at this point is a slogan, and its connection to any sort of actual social phenomenon is increasingly tenuous. The original definition according to critics on the right might be something along the lines of “the divisive impulse to reduce problems to issues of race and racism and nothing else, at the expense of true racial progress and civic unity.” But we’re now at the point where anything that touches on race and race relations, and even just anything Trumpians don’t like, is being labelled woke. My use of the term here was more a gesture at that latter usage of the term. Regardless, it’s not especially relevant—opposition to foreign aid and animal advocacy, etc., will likely be quite strong among conservatives, whether or not the “woke” label is (mis)applied.
You missed my point. I agree that foreign aid is charged along partisian lines. My point was that most things that are charged along partisian lines are not charged along woke/anti-woke lines. Foreign aid is not an exception to that rule, USAID is..
This again seems like another “bubble” thing. The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general. And I would guess they do associate foreign aid with “woke”, because “woke” is a word that is usually assigned based on vibes alone, for the things perceived as taking away from the average american to give to some other minority. Foreign aid involves spending american money to help foreigners, it’s absolutely perceieved as “woke”.
Look, I wish we lived in a world where people were rational and actually defined their terms and made their decisions accordingly, but that’s not the world we live in.
EA is an offshoot of the rationalist movement! The whole point of EA’s existence is to try to have better conversations, not to accept that most conversations suck and speak in vibes!
I also don’t think it’s true that conservatives don’t draw the distinction between foreign aid and USAID. Spend five minutes listening to any conservative talk about the decision to shut down USAID. They’re not talking about foreign aid being bad in general. They are talking about things USAID has done that do not look like what people expect foreign aid to look like. They seem to enjoy harking on the claim that USAID was buying condoms for Gaza. Now, whether or not that claim is true, and whether or not you think it is good to give Gazans condoms, you have to admit that condoms are not what anybody thinks of when they think of foreign aid.
Unfair: he/she did not propose speaking in vibes ourselves he/she merely argued that this is how many other people will process things.
Condoms are a classic public health measure because they prevent STDs, apart from the benefits of giving people control over their fertility.
Obviously rationalists have contributed a lot to EA, and of the early adopters probably started with views closest to where the big orgs are now (i.e. AI risk as the number one problem). But there have always been non-rationalist EAs. When I first took the GWWC pledge in 2012, I was only vaguely aware that rationalism/LW existed. As far as I can tell none of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky or Elie Hassenfeld identified as rationalists when EA was first being set up, and they seem the best candidates for “founders of EA”, especially Toby (since he was working on GWWC before he met Will if I recall what I’ve read about the history correctly.) Not that there weren’t strong connections to the rationalist community right from the beginning-Bostrom was always a big influence and he had known Eliezer Yudkowksy for years before even the embyronic period of EA. But it’s definitely wrong in my view to see EA as just an offshoot of rationalism. (I am a bit biased about this I admit, because I am an Oxford philosophy PhD, and although I wasn’t involved, I was in grad school when a lot of the EA stuff was starting up.)
“The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general.” Not sure I’d go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don’t really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad (“dysgenic”), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.
(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I’m under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1⁄5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)
*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.
This just isn’t true. Yes, exaggerated claims of “wastefulness” are one of the reasons they are against it, but there are many more who are ideologically opposed to foreign aid altogether.
I can link you to this exchange I had with a conservative, where they explictly stated that saving the lives of a billion foreigners would not be worth increasing the national deficit by 4%, because they are ideologically opposed to american taxpayer money saving foreign lives, no matter how efficiently they do it. Or see the insanely aggressive responses to this seemingly innocuous scott alexander tweet. Or here is a popular right wing meme specifically mocking liberals for having large moral circles.
I suspect that you are in a bubble, where the conservatives you know are fine with foreign aid, so you extend that to the rest of conservatives. But in a broader context, 73% of republicans want to cut foreign aid, while only 33% of democrats do.
I could have been more clear. “Woke” at this point is a slogan, and its connection to any sort of actual social phenomenon is increasingly tenuous. The original definition according to critics on the right might be something along the lines of “the divisive impulse to reduce problems to issues of race and racism and nothing else, at the expense of true racial progress and civic unity.” But we’re now at the point where anything that touches on race and race relations, and even just anything Trumpians don’t like, is being labelled woke. My use of the term here was more a gesture at that latter usage of the term. Regardless, it’s not especially relevant—opposition to foreign aid and animal advocacy, etc., will likely be quite strong among conservatives, whether or not the “woke” label is (mis)applied.
You missed my point. I agree that foreign aid is charged along partisian lines. My point was that most things that are charged along partisian lines are not charged along woke/anti-woke lines. Foreign aid is not an exception to that rule, USAID is..
This again seems like another “bubble” thing. The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general. And I would guess they do associate foreign aid with “woke”, because “woke” is a word that is usually assigned based on vibes alone, for the things perceived as taking away from the average american to give to some other minority. Foreign aid involves spending american money to help foreigners, it’s absolutely perceieved as “woke”.
Look, I wish we lived in a world where people were rational and actually defined their terms and made their decisions accordingly, but that’s not the world we live in.
EA is an offshoot of the rationalist movement! The whole point of EA’s existence is to try to have better conversations, not to accept that most conversations suck and speak in vibes!
I also don’t think it’s true that conservatives don’t draw the distinction between foreign aid and USAID. Spend five minutes listening to any conservative talk about the decision to shut down USAID. They’re not talking about foreign aid being bad in general. They are talking about things USAID has done that do not look like what people expect foreign aid to look like. They seem to enjoy harking on the claim that USAID was buying condoms for Gaza. Now, whether or not that claim is true, and whether or not you think it is good to give Gazans condoms, you have to admit that condoms are not what anybody thinks of when they think of foreign aid.
Unfair: he/she did not propose speaking in vibes ourselves he/she merely argued that this is how many other people will process things.
Condoms are a classic public health measure because they prevent STDs, apart from the benefits of giving people control over their fertility.
Obviously rationalists have contributed a lot to EA, and of the early adopters probably started with views closest to where the big orgs are now (i.e. AI risk as the number one problem). But there have always been non-rationalist EAs. When I first took the GWWC pledge in 2012, I was only vaguely aware that rationalism/LW existed. As far as I can tell none of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky or Elie Hassenfeld identified as rationalists when EA was first being set up, and they seem the best candidates for “founders of EA”, especially Toby (since he was working on GWWC before he met Will if I recall what I’ve read about the history correctly.) Not that there weren’t strong connections to the rationalist community right from the beginning-Bostrom was always a big influence and he had known Eliezer Yudkowksy for years before even the embyronic period of EA. But it’s definitely wrong in my view to see EA as just an offshoot of rationalism. (I am a bit biased about this I admit, because I am an Oxford philosophy PhD, and although I wasn’t involved, I was in grad school when a lot of the EA stuff was starting up.)
“The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general.” Not sure I’d go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don’t really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad (“dysgenic”), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.
(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I’m under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1⁄5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)
*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.