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Andaro
Karma: −44
Value drift is not necessarily a bad thing.
If it gets people away from cultish movements with morally questionable ideologies, value drift is a good thing.
If you’re a collage kid who drinks the KoolAid and then outgrows it over time, all the more power to that future self.
Grounding your spending in your own wellbeing has high information value; the purchasing power allocated to your own preferences gives tangible feedback inside your own brain—you know what brings you utility and what doesn’t. You know what purchases you like and which ones you dislike.
Compare this with giving money to strangers who merely promise to make the world a better place based on lots of highly questionable empirical assumptions and even more questionable moral axioms. Surely you can see the difference in information value.
Frankly I am shocked that there are people who give 50% of their income away to Effective Altruism; the social dynamics and moral uncertainties surrounding the Effective Altruism movements don’t even remotely justify such a speculative investment.
Yet preventing such cases should not be lexically prior to any other consideration: we should be willing to gamble utopia against extinction at the chance of a single terrible life of 1/TREE(9).
I disagree; it is lexically, deontologically more important not to cause an innocent rape or nc torture victim than to cause any amount of happiness or utopian gain for others; also the number is absurd, terrible lives in the millions are a stochastical inevitability even just on Earth within each generation. Just look at the attempted suicide rates.
Statistical outliers say life, even in the historically propitious circumstances of the affluent west, is not good for them. Their guardian angels shouldn’t actualize them. Yet uncertainty over this, given the low base-rates of this being the case, doesn’t give them right of veto across the innumerable multitudes who could rejoice in an actual future.
I disagree; the right not to be tortured or raped without one’s consent is lexically more morally important than the interest of others to rejoice in a good future. Rape doesn’t become moral even if enough spectators enjoy the rape video; nc torture doesn’t become moral even if enough others rejoice in the knowledge of the torture. Victimizing nc innocents in this way is not morally redeemable by the creation of utopias populated by lucky others. There is no knowledge that our descendants could discover that would change this.
I often read rape and torture scenes in fiction—you could also watch Game of Thrones for the same effect—and while I enjoy the reading, I am often horrified by the thought that equivalents are real. If you want a good example, read this. (content warning: rape and torture, obviously). Now, I love these story as much as the next guy, but they also make me reflect: If I could choose to create a universe where this happens once and also intergalacitc utopias filled with happy life exist, or a universe that is empty, I would choose the universe that is empty. And I think it’s utterly morally absurd to choose otherwise. It’s churched-up evil.
Of course, you don’t have to look for fiction, just remember that actual nc child torture is still legal in the US, the UK, and France, among other countries. Or read the piece about North Korea on this forum. Humanity has no redeeming qualities that could morally justify the physical reality of these systems. It never will.
Similar to the above, myself (and basically everyone else) take our futures to be worth living for on selfish grounds
I don’t. Plus, for those who see it your way, it’s consensual (though not necessarily rational). Those who disagree, are of course victimized by the anti-suicide religionists and their anti-choice laws. It’s not like people have an actual right to exit from this shitshow.
Humanity’s quantitative track record is obviously upward (e.g. life expectancy, child mortality, disease rates, DALY rates, etc.).
This can turn around as per-capita incomes fall, which inevitably happens in a Malthusian scenario. And Malthusian scenarios are not outlier probability scenarios, but expected with high (mainstream) probability, because any fast reproduction technology without global centralized suppression predicts a near-inevitable Malthusian outcome (any fast reproduction tech, not just ems).
Moral progress is not a robust law of nature, but could be contingent on other factors that can turn around, or it could simply be a random walk with reversals to the mean to be expected, combined with distortions of perception (any generation will consider its values superior to prior generations and therefore see moral progress, no matter what directions the values actually took or why).
If it turns out that the only thing that makes things good is happiness, we can tile the universe in computronium and simulate ecstasy (which should give amounts of pleasure to pain over the universe’s history not ’10% higher’, but more like 10^10:1, even with extreme trade-off ratios).
Several problems here. (1) the numbers are absurdly overoptimistic, you assume lots of hedonium with near-zero torture. Hedonium doesn’t carry its own economic weight and the future will likely be dominated by Malthusian replicators who are not optimized for ecstasy, but competitive success in replication,
(2) you assume our descendants will be rational moral beings who implement our idealized moral values (far mode), when in reality they will almost certainly be constrained by intense competitive pressures and implement selfish incentives (near mode); they would use victimization as a means to an end just as likely as current people are to eat factory-farmed meat; indeed value drift makes it even more likely that they won’t share our already-meager humane values, e.g. their altered psychology may have optimized empathy and justice instincts out completely.
Maybe what’s really going on here is you’re making a bid for status by accusing others of being status seeking
Hahahaha. I’m at −12 karma because I wrote what I think instead of what people here want to hear. And I knew well in advance that this would happen. If I wanted status, I’d join a group in person and give lip-service to the community dogma. Probably the Catholic church, then I could sing hallelujah all day long and scoff at those filthy atheists while covertly grooming young girls for sexual use. And you know what, I’d probably be happier that way. Problem is, I’m not a good enough liar, and I despise gullible people far too much to play the pretend game.
It is great to see that some people in EA recognize that the greater evils of this world are disproportionately worth damaging. North Korea is one of the greatest evils on Earth, and any political force that will increase the probability of an eliminatory war with North Korea is morally worthy of considerable support.
“Effective Altruism” is continuously overestimating the value of unconditional niceness and underestimating the altruistic value of systematically damaging victimizers.
critique of negative utilitarianism
Except I never argued for Negative Utilitarianism. Misrepresenting the arguments I made as such is a complete strawman.
For example, I don’t believe there’s a moral reason to prevent people who want pain and consent to it, from having pain.
Neither do I believe that there’s a moral reason to prevent suffering for the guilty who have forced it on nonconsenting innocents. You, for example, have actively worked to cause it for a very large number of innocent nc victims, and therefore I do not believe there is a moral reason to prevent your suffering or victimization, even if it is nc.
It appears I was downvoted to −10 karma by people who didn’t even read my posts.
Nice exercise in goalpost-moving, kbog.
Look dude
Errrr, no.
(This is a long comment. Only the first four paragraphs are in direct response to you. The rest is still true and relevant, but more general. I don’t expect a response.)
Childbirth is not an act of self-sacrifice. It never was. There was not even one altruistic childbirth in all of history. It was either involuntary for the female (vast majority) or self-serving (females wanting to have children, to bind a male in commitment, or to get on the good side of the guy who can and will literally burn you alive forever).
I’m not saying there is never any heroism if the hero can harvest the status and material advantages from it. But if they can discreetly omit it and there’s no such external reward, motivation in practice does look slim indeed.
Even if you’re a statistical outlier, consider the possiblity that you’d be saving a large ethical negative, which is a tragic mistake rather than a good thing.
If you personally would be willing to pre-commit, that’s at least some form of consent. In contrast, the actual victimization in the future is largely going to be forced on nonconsenting victims. There’s a moral difference. It’s hard to come up with something even in principle that could justify that.
Not to mention humanity’s quantitative track record is utterly horrible. Some improvements have been made, but it’s still completely irredeemable overall. Politics is a disgusting, vile shitshow, with top leaders like the POTUS openly glorifying torture-blackmail.
Seriously, I have never seen an x-risk reducer paint a realistic vision of the future, outline its positives without handwaving, stay honest and within the realm of probable outcomes, so that a sane person could look at it and say, “Okay, that really is worth torturing quintillions of nc victims in the worst ways possible.”
If they can be bothered to address it at all, you’ll find mostly handwaving, e.g. Derek Parfit in his last publication dismissing the concern with one sentence about how “our successors would be able to prevent most human suffering”. It’s the closest they’ve got to an actual defense. Ignoring, of course, that torture is on purpose and technology just makes that more effective. Ignoring also that even if suffering becomes relatively rarer, it will still happen frequently, and space colonization implies a mind-boggling increase in the total.
Ignoring also the more fundamental question why even one innocent nc victim should be tortured for the sake of… what, exactly? Pleasure? Human biomass? Monuments? They never really say. It’s not like these people are actually rooting for some specific positive thing that they’re willing to put their names on, and then actually optimize that thing.
If Peter Singer came out and said he wants x-risk reduced because he expects 10% more pleasure than pain from it and he’ll bite all the utilitarian bullets to get there, advocating to spread optimized pleasure minds rather than humans as much as possible and prevent as much pain as possible by any means necessary, I would understand. I would disagree, but it would be an actual, consistent goal.
But in practice, this usually doesn’t happen. X-risk reducers use strategic vagueness instead. The reason for that is rather simple: “Yay us” yields social status points in the tribe, and humanity is the current default tribe for most intellectuals of the internet era. So x-risk reduction advocacy is really just intellectualized “yay us” in the internet era. As long as it is not required, bullets will not be bitten and no specific goals will be given. The true optimization function of course is the advocate’s own social status.
That’s incorrect.
You can’t make a thread saying sexual violence is bad because of suicide, and then not allow people to discuss the consent principle as it pertains to suicide.
If you use “lives saved” numbers that imply involuntary survival is good, then you will get commenters pointing out that this violates the consent principle. You are not immune to criticism.
Don’t want to discuss suicde? Then don’t bring it up.
The other points crossed some inferential distance, but were both relevant and correct. It really is true that most rape currently happens in nonhuman animals, and that the x-risk reduction efforts implies actively causing a future that contains astronomical amounts of additional rape. This is both true and relevant, even if it goes against the usual euphemistic framing and may therefore sound counterintuitive to you.
This may sound rude, but I don’t believe you.
Of course, if you consented, it would be consensual. The actual torture will be nonconsensual.
You can downvote and ignore all you want. However, this does not change the objective fact that these points are both true and relevant and their consequences inevitable.
Just ask yourself the following questions:
Do you think any of the x-risk reduction advocates would voluntarily go through even one minute of personal torture if it were necessary to prevent civilization from collapsing by 2100?
Do you think it is moral to torture a non-consenting innocent individual to give 1.1 times as much pleasure to third parties?
If you are able to cover some inferential distance, you can see what this implies for the x-risk reduction narrative. Ostracizing criticism does not change that one bit.
I am not saying you should walk away from Omelas. Walking away does nothing, and there will not just be one tortured kid in a basement per city in the actual future—it will be plenty more than one.
I am not blaming Robin Hanson or David Denkenberger for wanting grant money, or Toby Ord or Robert Wibling for wanting to be high status “leaders of effective altruism”. Everybody wants money and status, it’s straightforward self-interest.
I am saying it is not altruism to donate financial and political capital to increase this perverted incentive. You can at least omit donating to Shitty Omelas, Astronomy-Sized.
What do you get from causing all these additional nonconsenting victims? What’s your incentive? Because it’s not altruism, no matter how many times it’s called that.
I see downvotes without arguments.
I don’t care about the karma, as it buys me nothing. However, I will point out that this is a sign of epistemic closure and that nothing I wrote was either unkind, untrue or irrelevant from an altruistic point of view.
It is up to you not to cause harm.
I agree with the underlying logic, and I did point out that insofar as these suicide statistics imply additional suffering, hardships, downsides, etc., then they do highlight the importance of preventing rape.
However, framing matters. If you frame suicide in terms of productivity loss, you imply that people owe you existence for the sake of productivity. Even if you don’t intend this message, it’s at least the possibility of an easily avoidable miscommunication.
The same is true for the “lives saved” calculation, which implies that a high invountary survival rate is a good thing because it “saves lives”—ignoring that those may be people might actually prefer to have more reliable suicide options availabe, i.e. have the right to exit.
By the way, if the EA movement is causing harm by overlooking crucial considerations, then more productivity allocated to EA is the exact opposite of making the world a better place. Always a possiblity to take seriously. Even in that case, I don’t blame people in EA to want grant money, sell books and carreer coaches, have high karma etc. - I just don’t think giving them these things for free would then be actual altruism.
To be clear, I don’t think individual antinatalism is much of a solution, because of global replaceability.
However, these crucial considerations are rarely considered by those who openly push for active x-risk reduction.
In comparison, someone who eats meat out of self-interest does not have to donate financial or political capital to factory-farming-maximization efforts. Similary, someone who is individually interested in children—or even in violence, sadism, etc. - does not have to believe that supporting anti-extinction shelters is a moral idea.
There are several dimensions in this. One is a deontological: Do we really want to rationalize increasing the total number and severity of rape and torture victims because other entities will experience pleasure? This is central to the x-risk reduction narrative.
But another one is of course the doubtful question of whether there actually will be enough pleasure/happiness to justify those additional rapes, tortures etc.
Yet another third question would be if x-risk reduction efforts justify the opportunity cost in not doing other things, such as actually maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, or what the OP is trying to accomplish about sexual violence. Have the x-risk reduction people ever considered any optimization of anything other than spamming civilization throughout the reachable universe? It is very rarely even considered as a possibility.
However, hidden among our gropers, there are probably paraphiliacs with biastophilia or pedophilia, the paraphilias that motivate rapists and child molesters.
Be careful about the statistics, however. Consensual sex with individuals under the age of consent is not rape—it’s consensual sex with individuals under the age of consent. Treating them the same reduces the incentive to ask for consent and actually respect when it is not given. It also disincentivizes overall mutually beneficial relations that contain a sexual motivation at least on one side. Both of these effects can make young people worse off.
It’s important to rember that antisexual violence is also violence. This includes bans on consensual sex that are enforced through police force or vigilantism. Nonviolent individuals who never violated the consent principle can still find themselves being raped and beaten up for victimless crimes, often in prison under state supervision, which society condones. This also applies to bans of consensual prostitution and other victimless crimes.
Distinguishing between consensual and nonconsensual conduct is certainly not easy, especially to satisfy a high standard of evidence. However, throwing out the consent principle altogether is not a solution either. It’s also worth noting that consensual sex is a substitute for rape.
Suicide attempts are not always fatal: 25 people attempt suicide for every death.
This is a problem in its own right, as it indicates that a large number of people are alive against their will at each time. This is a consequence of nonconsensual bans on good suicide methods. These bans are a violation of the consent principle even worse than rape, as the associated violation is even more existential.
Some will argue that saving lives is good even if it violates the consent principle, e.g. because life contains pleasure or can have positive externalities on others. However, the same can be said about sex, and yet you clearly don’t treat nonconsensual sex as a good thing. So why should nonconsensual life be a good thing? If society does not even recognize the consent principle when my very life is concerned, why should I care about it in the sexual domain if I’m a sexually self-interested individual?
For every 208 people protected from rape, a rough estimate of 1 life will be saved due to the related suicide risk. (See also: the “sexual violence reduction as a life saver” section.) One lifetime includes up to ~80,000 hours of work.
I think it’s absurd to classify suicide as a risk of productivity loss. After all, suicide is a choice. It’s like quitting a job or moving out of a country. That’s not a risk, it’s a personal decision. Pretending that people owe you the omission of such choices so that you can harvest more productivity from them—to what end, by the way? - is a cynical attack on the consent principle itself. That said, to the degree to which these altered suicide statistics reflect additional suffering caused by rape, they are still a good argument for efforts to prevent rape. But we already knew rape was harmful, so no novel insight added.
By the way, there are counterintuitive ways to prevent far more rape still. For example, nonhuman animals in nature also rape each other frequently. In fact, if you think human children cannot consent to sex because of their lack of cognitive ability, then all sex between nonhuman animals must be rape. After all, even the smartest chimp is significantly stupider still than even a 5-year-old low-IQ human. So destroying nature and wiping out wildlife is one of the top priorities if you actually want to prevent the most rape. Not joking by the way. The logic is sound.
But by far the most efficient way to prevent the most rape is to increase x-risk.
By far the biggest determinant in how much rape (and other nonconsensual violence) there will be in the future is whether space colonization happens or not. If humanity spreads throughout the galaxy and perhaps beyond, the total amount of sexual violence will increase by many orders of magnitude.
In contrast, if human civilization fails or collapses permanently to a lower level of sophistication without spreading into space, the phenomena of rape and nc torture will be limited to the surface of just one planet, for just one billion years or so. Not so bad in comparison!
Now some have said that increasing x-risk is a form of violence, and we should always avoid violence. But in reality, the exact opposite is true: Decreasing x-risk causes orders of magnitude more violence, as the entire universe except Earth is nonviolent by nature, and x-risk reducers actively plan to change that. After all, spreading human specifics throughout the universe is the whole point of x-risk reduction. And what is more central to the human spirit than violence, sadism and sex (often in combination)? These are human constants.
Again, not a joke. I take this seriously and think the EA movement is causing serious harm by increasing the total amount of violence in the future indirectly through x-risk reduction.
There is also the reality that all reproduction is nonconsensual from the perspective of the child. Babies do not consent to be born, but they are all violated in various ways, including from the suffering of birth and infancy, not to mention their utter lack of control what happens to their body. From this perspective, life itself is a form of rape. Again, no joke. The antinatalists are right about this, which constitutes another argument against x-risk reduction.
I would beware the political backlash and retaliation costs from #2. What you are classifying as “ethical flaws” is actually about agenda.
In a representative democracy, government spending is supposed to be allocated according to the best interests of tax payers, voters, and citizens. Of course those are human beings living in the relatively present time with citizenship in the respective country. Trying to game the system so that it starts allocating those resources differently is not fixing an ethical flaw, it’s a shift in agenda that does not match the principle of representation.
You may not care about that, but you should care about the political and social backlash EA will deservedly get if it undermines our best interests as voters, taxpayers and citizens of the countries you are trying to coopt.