Radical Empath Ismam

Karma: 375

Radical Empath Ismam Mar 12, 2025, 1:21 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: Capitalism and the Very Long Term
That is insane that you can embed a OWID chart into a forum reply 😂

Radical Empath Ismam Sep 9, 2024, 7:55 AM
7 points
5 ∶ 6
on: Alice Crary’s Bad Criticisms Of Effective Altruism
Now, maybe the worry is that while longtermists are doing good stuff now, they might eventually do terrible things for the sake of the long-term future
Longtermists have (past-tense) done bad things. The worry is now evidenced by a track record. It’s not some theoretical worry about the future. Are we still not able to admit this as a movement?
Things done under the guise of longtermism:
- Political lobbying for crypto done in the name of “pandemic prevention”
- The PELTIV scandal
- Gabe Bankman-Fried’s plans to purchase the island nation of Nauru
- The Longtermism castle
- Connections to various far-right projects
  - SBF’s funding of Praxis Society
  - FLI’s grant offer to a pro-nazi group
  - Far right personalities connecting their ideologies to longtermism
I can’t even begin to estimate the harm done by SBF’s political interference, succesfully electing his crypto-friendly candidates to the world’s most powerful institution of democracy, the US House. Permanently altering the course of world history, ending the careers of some very promising principled candidates who refused to take big money.

Radical Empath Ismam Aug 4, 2024, 9:25 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA should unequivocally condemn race science
Race science is well-established pseudoscience recognised by the scientific community. This why I roll my eyes when EAs think of themselves as elite or smarter than average. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, anti-intellectual currents within this movement, and race science isn’t the only pseudoscientific inclination in my opinion, and in the opinion of a few others in this movement I have learned.

Unlike you however I actually am grateful for EAs anti-science streak to be so nakedly visible, because it is actually valuable information for outsiders and insiders to know. Knowledge of the EAs embracing race science should inform the public how seriously to take this movement, and can only help weed out the good parts of EA from the bad.

We shouldn’t mask up the shortcomings of EA to make it look like a better movement than it actually is.

Radical Empath Ismam Jul 21, 2024, 1:42 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
on: New 80k problem profile: Nuclear weapons
I also want to say I’ve been really impressed by the work of the Quincy Institute (https://quincyinst.org/). They advocate for an anti-war & anti-interventionist foreign policy, which is very neglected amongst think tanks in this area due to the high levels of funding by weapons-makers and the military-industrial complex. They’re work on the Iran nuclear deal was highly lauded.

Nuclear weapons are of course a specific area they focus on, but their more holistic Anti-war & Anti-interventionist advocacy has noticeably improved the foreign policy debate and challenged hawkish perspectives that dominate this space and I suspect is a very effective way to reduce X-Risk.

Would love to see EAs engaged in Anti-war & Anti-interventionist spaces as they seem very neglected and a chance to make an outsized impact.

The nobel-winning ICANW also does really excellent work and spoke at EAGx Australia.

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 25, 2024, 11:34 PM
2 points
6 ∶ 9
on: Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest
Can I add one more fear—mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the “race realist/ HBD” position than there actually is.
In actual fact, the opposite is true.
Response by evolutionary biologists responded to Nicholas Wade’s book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-troublesome-inheritance.html the
American Society of Human Genetics statement https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(18)30363-X.pdf and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists statement https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Further papers on Race & IQ https://r.jordan.im/download/racism/bird2021.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.202100204?

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 25, 2024, 10:38 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 17
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Distancing EA from rationality is foolish
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).

From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.

I don’t recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 25, 2024, 9:57 PM
−5 points
4 ∶ 34
on: Distancing EA from rationality is foolish
I’m in favour of distancing “Rationality” from EA.

As I’ve said elsewhere, Less-Wrong “rationality” isn’t foundational to EA and it’s not even the accepted school of critical thinking.

For example, I personally come from the “scientific skepticism” tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for critical thinking in the EA movement than LW.

I’ve been in the EA movement for a long time and I can attest Rationality did not play any part in the EA movement in the early days.

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 21, 2024, 10:59 PM
23 points
5 ∶ 1
on: Why I’m leaving
I feel exactly the same way. I love the idea of “lowercase” effective altruism. I’ve also dabbled with term “evidence-based altruism”, where “evidence-based” I hope signals to people that I am not interested in hypothetical/rationalist/extremely philosophical issues.

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 21, 2024, 10:03 AM
0 points
2 ∶ 3
on: Radical Empath Ismam’s Quick takes
Manifest 2025 https://youtu.be/FVvg1CKBE20

Radical Empath Ismam’s Quick takes

Radical Empath IsmamJun 21, 2024, 10:03 AM

4 points

2 comments1 min readEA link

Radical Empath Ismam Jun 21, 2024, 12:40 AM
9 points
3 ∶ 8
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
EA to “decouple” from LW/rationality
I mean, why not? Less-wrong “rationality” isn’t foundational to EA, it’s not even the accepted school of criticial thinking.
For example, I personally come from the “scientific skepticism” tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for criticial thinking in the EA movement than LW.

Radical Empath Ismam May 5, 2024, 1:48 AM
23 points
5 ∶ 2
in reply to: David Thorstad’s comment on: Émile P. Torres’s history of dishonesty and harassment
You should absolutely do it, and I would agree that you probably would not receive material backlash.

But I would be careful to assume that your success means that any plain old person can critique EA and receive a warm reception.

You’ve spent a long time building amicable relationships with EAs (I suspect by walking on eggshells, self-censoring—hope I am not being presumptuous here David).

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 22, 2024, 3:53 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow’s comment on: “Capitalism”: talking past each other
It is confusing I agree, but the confusion isn’t helped by coming up with further conflicting definitions.

I’ve studied & work in finance, and as I understand things, the term capital markets really just refers to the market of longer-term debt/equity instruments (e.g. bonds, shares etc). That term sits in contrast to money markets which refers to short-term instruments (e.g. repos, bills which are just bonds that mature ⇐ 90 days).

There’s nothing particular about capital markets that are particularly more objectionable to socialists than say the money market, so your emphasis on capital markets is misplaced in my opinion.

RE participatory socialism, I was not familiar with this idea, but from a quick read it does seem to advocate for the majority of the economy to operate under public or worker ownership of the means of production. So I think this would generally be considered socialism under the official definition of socialism. Happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood Piketty’s system.

Social democracy, whilst it may involve some elements of socialism (welfare state, unions, large public sector, state ownership of some companies), and may be embraced by socialists as a transitory economic system towards socialism, is generally considered a form of capitalism. Historically it gets more complicated, where the terms social democracy and democratic socialism were interchangeable (e.g. the precursor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party). But with history, they’ve come to mean different things.

So in summary, I think you are wrong to point to Participatory socialism and social democracy as not involving public ownership of the means of production, or being socialism respectivel. And I think you are furthering the confusion of these ideas by emphasizing the importance of capital markets in this discussion.

I do applaud you looking into this and the ideas of Piketty & the nordic model. But be careful about theorising too much on your own when there is a wealth of existing work produced by more informed/ dedicated people (including academics, commentators) you could leverage. For example, jacobin, the socialist magazine, has a few articles on what AI means for socialists: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/workers-labor-artificial-intelligence-technology An article like that could have been a good starting point for you to support/ critique in the forum post.

Keep looking into this stuff—glad to see it being posted on the progress forum also. These discussions are needed more for sure.

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 20, 2024, 2:04 PM
14 points
5 ∶ 0
on: “Capitalism”: talking past each other
I’m surprised you didn’t bring up the most commonly cited defintions of capitalism and socialism.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production.
Whilst there’s a great deal of variation in how people envision their form of captialism/ socialism, the above are the generally agreed upon dictionary definitions of the two economic systems.

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 20, 2024, 5:50 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Should we Maximize the Geometric Expectation?
A utility between 0 and 1 effectively plays the same role as “negative utilities” do under regular arithmetic expected value. So a geometric perspective can work if you map what you would ordinarily consider to be negative utilities to the interval 0 to 1, and restrict utility to $R^{+}$ .
But why would you? It doesn’t offer any benefit over regular artihmetic expected value calculations.

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 20, 2024, 4:58 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Should we Maximize the Geometric Expectation?
A natural use case for geometric expected value is in situations where “compounding” occurs. In finance we deal phenomenon like comound interest. Hence the average rate of return is calculated using the geometric mean.
I think compunding occurs in lots of phenomon (population, economy). It may even applicable for modelling utility in some circumstances—perhaps the happiness of a community is boosted by the happiness of all the individuals.
Whether geometric expected utility itself should be maximised is subjective/ philosophical in my opinion. In our culture our concept of “total” is the addition. The total cost of a shopping list is the sum of the prices of all it’s individual items. And hence our concept of “total utility” is similarly the addition of the utility of each actor. However, I wonder if on an alien planet, their concept of “total” is multiplicative. As far as I can reason, there is no reason to think one concept of “total” is more natural than the other.
Aside from arithmetic (addditive) and geometric mean, there are other means like the harmonic mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_means. Maybe we can also ask if we should maximise harmonic expected value too? Or even more exotic kinds of “means”:
I can’t see a good reason why any one of them is a more natural choice over any other. I genuinely think that our usage of the ordinary arithmetic expected value is purely cultural. And this forms part of my critique of leaning so heavily on expected value in the first place.

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 20, 2024, 4:42 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Should we Maximize the Geometric Expectation?
In terms of money: a geometric expectation maximizer will never accept the tiniest risk of absolute bankruptcy, even if it comes with an arbitrarily large probability of an arbitrarily large payoff.
Gee this sure would have been handy in a certain recent scandal involving cryptocurrency.
Matt Levine at Bloomberg pointed out that SBF should have been using Kelly criterion: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-04/sbf-was-reckless-from-the-start

Radical Empath Ismam Apr 14, 2024, 12:44 PM
27 points
5 ∶ 2
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: To what extent & how did EA indirectly contribute to financial crime—and what can be done now? One attempt at a review
If this is the case that MacAskill cannot be forthcoming for valid reasons (opening himself up to legal vulnerability), as a community it would still make sense for us to err on the side of caution and have other leaders for this community as Chris argues for.

Radical Empath Ismam Feb 22, 2024, 12:21 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Is there an online group that gathers people interested in the intersection of EA and left-wing or progressive thought?
There used to be discord group with a lot of left wing EAs but it has since fizzled. https://discord.com/invite/vbXEkDwa

Let me know if you get a new group up and running.

Radical Empath Ismam Jan 2, 2024, 2:03 PM
−1 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Freddie DeBoer Is Wrong About Effective Altruism
I don’t fully agree with DeBoer but am much more sympathetic to his views than yourself. Some respectful pushpack on some of your points:
But if you look at what EAs actually recommend, they very much do not recommend defrauding lots of people
It’s true EA does not reccommend fraud but I think we underappreciate EAs role in having encouraged SBF (and the other EAs assosciated with him) to walk down that path. By all accounts, SBF was a very moral person who cared strongly about animals and was set on a career in animal welfare before he was persuaded by William MacAskill to work in crypto on EA grounds. MacAskill made that encouragement and stuck by him even though
- Many cryptocurrencies have high carbon emissions
- cryptocurrency having questionable utility to society
- FTX advertising complex financial products to unsophisticated retail investors in an unethical way (super bowl ads with celebrities)
If everyone supports effective charities, why does the Against Malaria Foundation get such a small percentage of charitable funding?
I don’t disagree with the gist of your point about people being ineffective, but I think this specific example doesn’t work because by definition the most effective charities have to be receiving a small percentage of funding, otherwise they would no longer be neglected.
Is it really plausible that huge numbers of people have looked into it and concluded that the GiveWell top charities are ineffective?
Many people just don’t know GiveWell exists. Or in fact, they think they are using something as good as GiveWell (e.g. Charity Navigator).
DeBoer’s final point involves questioning why one should align oneself with the movement. Why not just like do charitable things effectively? This is, I think, less important than most of his critique. If you don’t call yourself an effective altruist but give 10% of your income to effective charities, take a high-impact career, are vegan, and give away your kidney, I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. In fact, I’d consider you to be basically an EA in spirit, even if not in name.
I disagree that this is not an important part of DeBoer’s critique. DeBoer is stressing that by disassosciating yourself from “Effective Altruism”, you can continue doing the good parts of effective altruism, without the baggage of the bad parts. The bad parts DeBoer describes as things like longtermism, hypotheticals, book promotions, the castle. If you are someone like DeBoer who sees those things as the bad parts of EA, then there probably is value in distancing yourself from EA, as it lets you continue your good deeds without inadvertently supporting the parts of EA you think are misguided.

Radical Empath Ismam

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Radical Empath Ismam’s Quick takes