These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.
The point about ideologies being a minefield, with Nazis as an example, particularly stands out to me. I pattern match this to the parts of harsher critiques that go something like “look at where your precious ideology leads when taken to an extreme, this place is terrible!” Generally, the substantial mistake these make is just casting EA as ideologically purist and ignoring the centrality of projects like moral uncertainty and worldview diversification, as well as the limited willingness of EAs to bite bullets they in principle endorse much of the background logic of (see Pascal’s Mugging and Ajeya Cotra’s train to crazy town).
By not getting into telling us what terrible things we believe, but implying that we are at risk of believing terrible things, this piece is less unflattering, but is on shakier ground. It involves this same mistake about EA’s ideological purism, but on top of this has to defend this other higher level claim rather than looking at concrete implications.
Was the problem with the Nazis really that they were too ideologically pure? I find it very doubtful. The philosophers of the time attracted to them generally were weird humanistic philosophers with little interest in the types of purism that come from analytic ethics, like Heidegger. Meanwhile most philosophers closer to this type of ideological purity (Russell, Carnap) despised the Nazis from the beginning. The background philosophy itself largely drew from misreadings of people like Nietzsche and Hegel, popular anti-semitic sentiment, and plain old historical conspiracy theories. Even at the time intellectual critiques of Nazis often looked more like “they were mundane and looking for meaning from charismatic, powerful men” (Arendt) or “they aesthetisized politics” (Benjamin) rather than “they took some particular coherent vision of doing good too far”.
The truth is the lesson of history isn’t really “moral atrocity is caused by ideological consistency”. Occasionally atrocities are initiated by ideologically consistent people, but they have also been carried out casually by people who were quite normal for their time, or by crazy ideologues who didn’t have a very clear, coherent vision at all. The problem with the Nazis, quite simply, is that they were very very badly wrong. We can’t avoid making the mistakes they did from the inside by pattern matching aspects of our logic onto them that really aren’t historically vindicated, we have to avoid moral atrocity by finding more reliable ways of not winding up being very wrong.
These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.
I agree there’s such a risk. But I also think that the tone actually matters a lot.
These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.
The point about ideologies being a minefield, with Nazis as an example, particularly stands out to me. I pattern match this to the parts of harsher critiques that go something like “look at where your precious ideology leads when taken to an extreme, this place is terrible!” Generally, the substantial mistake these make is just casting EA as ideologically purist and ignoring the centrality of projects like moral uncertainty and worldview diversification, as well as the limited willingness of EAs to bite bullets they in principle endorse much of the background logic of (see Pascal’s Mugging and Ajeya Cotra’s train to crazy town).
By not getting into telling us what terrible things we believe, but implying that we are at risk of believing terrible things, this piece is less unflattering, but is on shakier ground. It involves this same mistake about EA’s ideological purism, but on top of this has to defend this other higher level claim rather than looking at concrete implications.
Was the problem with the Nazis really that they were too ideologically pure? I find it very doubtful. The philosophers of the time attracted to them generally were weird humanistic philosophers with little interest in the types of purism that come from analytic ethics, like Heidegger. Meanwhile most philosophers closer to this type of ideological purity (Russell, Carnap) despised the Nazis from the beginning. The background philosophy itself largely drew from misreadings of people like Nietzsche and Hegel, popular anti-semitic sentiment, and plain old historical conspiracy theories. Even at the time intellectual critiques of Nazis often looked more like “they were mundane and looking for meaning from charismatic, powerful men” (Arendt) or “they aesthetisized politics” (Benjamin) rather than “they took some particular coherent vision of doing good too far”.
The truth is the lesson of history isn’t really “moral atrocity is caused by ideological consistency”. Occasionally atrocities are initiated by ideologically consistent people, but they have also been carried out casually by people who were quite normal for their time, or by crazy ideologues who didn’t have a very clear, coherent vision at all. The problem with the Nazis, quite simply, is that they were very very badly wrong. We can’t avoid making the mistakes they did from the inside by pattern matching aspects of our logic onto them that really aren’t historically vindicated, we have to avoid moral atrocity by finding more reliable ways of not winding up being very wrong.
I agree there’s such a risk. But I also think that the tone actually matters a lot.
To be clear, I also agree with this.