Actually, I went out of my way to steelman what you wrote. So it is no wonder that it is a misrepresentation. The original criticisms are broadly sillier.
I don’t think you’re using the term “white supremacy” the same way as Phil, who’s referring to the systemic issue of power dynamics between whites and non-whites, not the people who claim to be white nationalists or are deliberately racist, say, or their racist beliefs.
I didn’t see any case to be made that the views being attacked here meaningfully cause such bad systemic power dynamics in the real world. Of course “power dynamics” can be defined pretty broadly, but then you run into the noncentral fallacy.
They might cause bad systemic power dynamics by omission (by not actively addressing) them or by worsening them, e.g. by further concentrating resources into the hands of white people relative to non-white people or increasing apathy towards the issue among white people (e.g. global poverty, which disproportionately affects non-white people, as a “rounding error”).
Of course, we are talking about issues competing for our attention and resources, which you’ve pointed out. Focus on global poverty comes at the cost of focus on x-risks.
Refraining from actively redistributing to nonwhite countries is the norm even for most on the progressive left, and Torres himself seems to favor x-risk work over reducing global poverty, so this is not a credible definition of white supremacy. And favoring x-risk reduction over poverty reduction is pretty orthogonal to the object of contention here (which is: whether we should assign different conceptual priority to saving lives in advanced vs developing nations).
You don’t even have the common courtesy of citing the original post so that people can decide for themselves whether you’ve accurately represented my arguments (you haven’t). This is very typical “authoritarian” (or controlling) EA behavior in my experience: rather than given critics an actual fair hearing, which would be the intellectually honest thing, you try to monopolize and control the narrative by not citing the original source, and then reformulating all the arguments while at the same time describing these reformulations as “steelmanned” versions (which some folks who give EA the benefit of the doubt might just accept), despite the fact that the original author (me) thinks you’ve done a truly abysmal job at accurately presenting the critique. As mentioned, this will definitely get cited in a forthcoming article; it really does embody much of what’s epistemically wrong with this community.
Your “steelmanning” is abysmal, in my opinion. It really doesn’t represent the substance of my criticisms. I will definitely be citing this post in a forthcoming journal paper on the issue.
Actually, I went out of my way to steelman what you wrote. So it is no wonder that it is a misrepresentation. The original criticisms are broadly sillier.
I don’t think you’re using the term “white supremacy” the same way as Phil, who’s referring to the systemic issue of power dynamics between whites and non-whites, not the people who claim to be white nationalists or are deliberately racist, say, or their racist beliefs.
I didn’t see any case to be made that the views being attacked here meaningfully cause such bad systemic power dynamics in the real world. Of course “power dynamics” can be defined pretty broadly, but then you run into the noncentral fallacy.
They might cause bad systemic power dynamics by omission (by not actively addressing) them or by worsening them, e.g. by further concentrating resources into the hands of white people relative to non-white people or increasing apathy towards the issue among white people (e.g. global poverty, which disproportionately affects non-white people, as a “rounding error”).
Of course, we are talking about issues competing for our attention and resources, which you’ve pointed out. Focus on global poverty comes at the cost of focus on x-risks.
Refraining from actively redistributing to nonwhite countries is the norm even for most on the progressive left, and Torres himself seems to favor x-risk work over reducing global poverty, so this is not a credible definition of white supremacy. And favoring x-risk reduction over poverty reduction is pretty orthogonal to the object of contention here (which is: whether we should assign different conceptual priority to saving lives in advanced vs developing nations).
Slight downvote for being unnecessarily rude. (You can say the same thing in a nicer way and it would probably make you more persuasive as well.)
You don’t even have the common courtesy of citing the original post so that people can decide for themselves whether you’ve accurately represented my arguments (you haven’t). This is very typical “authoritarian” (or controlling) EA behavior in my experience: rather than given critics an actual fair hearing, which would be the intellectually honest thing, you try to monopolize and control the narrative by not citing the original source, and then reformulating all the arguments while at the same time describing these reformulations as “steelmanned” versions (which some folks who give EA the benefit of the doubt might just accept), despite the fact that the original author (me) thinks you’ve done a truly abysmal job at accurately presenting the critique. As mentioned, this will definitely get cited in a forthcoming article; it really does embody much of what’s epistemically wrong with this community.
Your “steelmanning” is abysmal, in my opinion. It really doesn’t represent the substance of my criticisms. I will definitely be citing this post in a forthcoming journal paper on the issue.