the_jaded_one

Karma: 108

the_jaded_one 29 Oct 2017 16:57 UTC
18 points
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on: Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA
The idea of introducing social justice into an existing movement has already been tried, and I think it’s worth going over the failures and problems that social justice has caused in the atheist movement before jumping headlong into it in the EA movement. This reddit page about why Atheism+ failed makes for interesting reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/2ygiwh/so_why_did_atheism_plus_fail/

Unfortunately, the people who ended up in charge of the movement cared much more about perpetuating their radical ideologies, their cults of personality, and their easy paycheques than any of these issues. … No matter how noble your cause, someone who practices dishonesty, censorship, intimidation, and harassment in alleged pursuit of that cause is not your friend.

See also this: https://athefist.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/the-atheism-plusftb-problem/

Attempts to interfere with harassment policies and promoting the (unevidenced) idea that atheist meetings are hotbeds of sexual exploitation have slashed female attendance at events like TAM which were practically on ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ parity. Rather than trying to invest in the future of the movement or seek the best and most effective speakers there’s an insistence on the basis of gender rather than expertise. Not that there aren’t good speakers of all genders but when you pass over expert male speakers to include sub-par ones with axes to grind rather than progress to make that’s an issue

it continues:

There’s also something peculiar in claiming to be atheists and skeptics while suspending skepticism when it comes to certain claims – like the highly questionable 1-in-4 rape statistic or broader concepts like patriarchy and rape culture. Skepticism or demands for evidence in these arenas is treated as hostility.

The post by Kelly that I am responding to seems to contain several red flags indicating that EA+SJ is falling into the same traps that Atheism+SJ fell into;
- suspending healthy skepticism of questionable claims,
- advocating identity categories over competence,
- supporting the silencing of dissenting opinions and abandoning free speech
As I said in another comment: don’t say you weren’t warned if this goes badly.

the_jaded_one 29 Oct 2017 16:32 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA
Came to say this as well.

See, for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/2ygiwh/so_why_did_atheism_plus_fail/

The atheists even started to disinvite their intellectual founders, e.g. Richard Dawkins. Will EA eventually go down the same path—will they end up disinviting e.g. Bostrom for not being a sufficiently zealous social justice advocate?

All I’m saying is that there is a precedent here. If SJW-flavored EA ends up going down this path, please don’t say you were not warned.

the_jaded_one 26 Oct 2017 21:04 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Cornelius’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
Thanks for the info on the worm wars, will look into it.

the_jaded_one 26 Oct 2017 21:01 UTC
−14 points
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on: Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA
This smells a lot like a Social Justice Warrior takeover of effective altruism. The idea of restricting free speech is particularly worrying. I would write a full rebuttal, but it might not be worth my time or that of others—the movement might already be unsalvageable (does anyone agree/disagree with that?)

EDIT: Replying to XCCF below: I don’t think there’s much in this post that doesn’t qualify as generic SJW ideology and talking points.

EDIT: Regarding the noncentral fallacy: I think this is a pretty central example of an SJW takeover from a pretty central SJW, but I’m open to new information.

the_jaded_one 30 Jun 2017 6:41 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: jayd’s comment on: Hi, I’m Luke Muehlhauser. AMA about Open Philanthropy’s new report on consciousness and moral patienthood
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap

the_jaded_one 29 Jun 2017 21:07 UTC
0 points
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on: Hi, I’m Luke Muehlhauser. AMA about Open Philanthropy’s new report on consciousness and moral patienthood
I think that functionalism is incorrect and that we are super-confused about this issue.

Specifically, there is merit to the “Explanatory gap” argument. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap

I also sort of think I know what the missing thing is. It’s that the input is connected to the algorithm that constitutes you.

If this is true, there is no objective fact-of-the-matter about which entities are conscious (in the sense of having qualia). From my point of view only I am conscious. From your point of view, only you are. Neither of us are wrong.

the_jaded_one 30 Apr 2017 12:06 UTC
3 points
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on: Physical punishment of children: the neglected $3.6 trillion/year? problem
I do think indeed every physical punishment, however “mild” or “reasonable”, is child abuse

I think this claim is a bit problematic…
- moral claim masquerading as factual via reification of moral categories (there is no objective fact of the matter about whether something is or is not child abuse)
- supporting a deontological claim with consequentialist evidence of harm that (presumably) arises from only a subset the more extreme violations
- never physically punishing children is a much less defensible, less persuasive position than doing so in a limited set of circumstances

the_jaded_one 28 Apr 2017 8:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
If a shanty town opens down the road from me, giving me the option to live like the global poor, I become richer relative to my neighbors, but I don’t become richer in absolute terms. Even if a shanty town opened, I’d buy the same stuff as before, so my quality of life would be exactly the same.

I think this is incorrect. Right now I am looking for accommodation. The cheapest option I can find (which doesn’t have a working washing machine and is a single small room with shared facilities) costs €5400 per year. It would be very useful for me to have the option to live in a room of quality and price at the level of the 75th or 80th percentile in India. Eyeballing the graph above, the 80th percentile in India is on $1500 or so. They can’t be paying more than $700 for their accommodation.

I have to go live in this room—the alternatives are even more expensive, or being homeless and losing my job.

I agree that the shanty town wouldn’t help me—I would stink of feces and quickly lose my job on personal hygiene grounds—but the 50th and 75th and 80th percentiles in India do not live in ‘shanty towns’. Or am I completely misinformed here?

The reason the super cheap goods the global poor buy don’t exist in the West is because no-one wants them.

that’s false—they don’t exist because the government bans or taxes them, or because of cost disease. In almost every relevant category (cars, accommodation, food, household goods), the government bans you from buying the cheap options.

E.g.
- Bike helmet made in China for $3 but sells for €40. (Compulsory safety testing to ludicrously high standards, tax, overheads)
- Want to buy a second hand toaster? Nope, banned in many countries because it might be hazardous. Pay for a new one, including all the tax and overheads and then when you’ve finished, throw the old one away.
- Learn to drive in the UK as a new young, male driver)? That’ll be £1500 for lessons, plus £3800 for insurance Why? Do people in India or Brazil need to pay that much? You tell me!
- Want to buy a cheap new car like the Tata Nano? Nope, your government has banned it because it’s 99.999% safe rather than 99.9999% safe.
- Surely a speeding fine will be inconsequential to someone in the top 1% of the global income distribution, because the harm from speeding on a road is a fixed quantity? No, the government wisely decided to make it it scale with your income!
- want to buy/rent a very small house/flat/room? Nope! It has to have a bunch of amenities and features that you don’t need, by law.
- Want to buy a simple product like milk at market price? Nope! The government, media and farming lobby are getting together to make sure that consumers subsidize unprofitable dairy farms.
I think the key here is that once you have some money, the government finds many ways to take that money away from you, and those ways tend to scale as a percentage of your income for people in the range that we are talking about ($1000-$100,000). Being able to afford a place to live has a minimum threshold which depends on the average income in your country.

If you (in the west) fall behind in this race to make enough money so that once the government has thieved from you at both ends you can still afford a room to live, you end up falling into the homelessness trap which is very hard to escape from and is actually worse than the life of a median person in India.

the_jaded_one 26 Apr 2017 17:27 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?

it would indeed be harder to live in the west on $2/day, because the low-quality goods that the global poor use are not available to buy. I think the relevant comparison is more like “if there were lots of people living on $2/day in the west, what quality of living would you get?”. It’s artificial to imagine one person living in extreme poverty without a market and community around them.

OK, so maybe appeals to donate money based on factors of 100 wealth difference should be limited to people who actually have a third-world price/quality market for (food, accommodation, shelter) available to them. Hmmmm OK that would be no-one at all.

Then we come to this:

You could, of course, doubt the existing estimates. My general policy is to go with the expert view when it comes to issues that have been thoroughly researched,

...

The PPP adjustments are meant as a hypothetical “what you could buy on $2 per day if the same goods were sold in stores, or if there were lots of other poor people in the country”.

So they’ve thoroughly researched a question which is completely different than the one I care about, which is what I can actually buy and do.

As an inhabitant of a rich country, you get to consume lots of extra public goods that aren’t fully included in the post-tax income figures in these data-sets e.g. safety, clean air, beautiful buildings, being surrounded by lots of educated people.

But these things are mostly not worth the massive amount of tax money I have to pay. And that’s partly because that tax money is not being spent on me, (I have looked at government spending and the part of the pie that is spent on “things that childless healthy 30 year-olds want” is extremely small.), partly because taxation is progressive so punishes people who earn well, and partly because others in the west have different preferences about how much to spend reducing various risks (such as the risk of a $50,000 car being damaged in a collision with my $1000 old banger).

I would contend that I am not (on $60k) 100 times richer than the average Indian, at least not in the same way that someone on $6M is 100 times richer than me; the way that they really can buy my entire life 90 times over and still be way better off than me.

Anyway, thanks for responding to me, best regards, Jaded.

the_jaded_one 26 Apr 2017 15:57 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
I think that on £1.53/day you could easily die, depending on your location (esp. cold locations). No food in the bins for a while, police evict you from your tent or destroy your shelter, you get drenched with water and then really cold, you get an injury or infection.

Are these kind of things (dying from exposure or hunger, police bulldoze your house) actually happening all the time to the median person in India at $700? I don’t think so. I don’t imagine it’s easy to be the median average Indian, but I expect that you would have a shack, and food, and not freeze to death.

Also, there is a larger issue here. Being “100 times richer” than someone hides a lot of important assumptions. Let me grant the point that I could survive as a barely-alive hobo for £1.53/day. Well, that existence is not compatible with having a job in the west. There are amounts of money that I have to spend whether I like it or not, if I am to continue to earn any money at all, let alone my current salary. Others have argued that that restriction is irrelevant since it isn’t binding, but actually I would quite like the option to live in a really small room in sharing facilities with 4 people if it was 4x cheaper. The option just isn’t on the market. I am looking for accommodation right now, and plenty of people want to sell me 50m^2 for $1000/month with a 3 month penalty clause ($3000!) if I want to leave in less than 3 years, but no-one is selling 12m^2 for $250/month. In fact, the government in my country (western Europe) has passed laws that prevent me from living in a student house (closer to what I want to pay), because I am not a student; they have deliberately split the housing market into two and made people with jobs ineligible for the cheaper half. I would like to pay insurance that only paid out to a maximum of $1000 because that is all my car is worth, but other people on the roads drive $50000 cars and that impacts my premium. Then there’s the social aspect of wealth. If I lived with the same quality of stuff that an Indian person at the 75th percentile of wealth in India lived on, and took a girl back to my shack, she would urgently have something else to do; whereas I can imagine a female from the 50th percentile in pretty much any place being impressed by a male from the 75th percentile.

With all these things in mind, I would say that I am not 100 times richer than a guy in India earning $700. If I were earning $70,000 IN INDIA, I would say it would be closer to the truth (though some of the same problems would apply, especially having to spend money to hold down a white collar job). For starters, I could easily afford a servant or three on that kind of money in India, which paints a picture that is more intuitively commensurate with the factor of 100 that the numbers imply.

Anyway, thanks for responding, I realize your time is valuable!

the_jaded_one 26 Apr 2017 15:37 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?

I didn’t bring up the $70k figure or the $200k figure

that may be true, but they are figures that have been brought up

FWIW I doubt this is actually true.

Maybe. But the promotional materials certainly seem to frame it that way.

the_jaded_one 9 Apr 2017 11:41 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
If minimum standards rise to $90,000 and I’m earning $100,000, I would argue they do probably affect me substantially and my original premise of ‘minimum standards that basically don’t affect me’ no longer holds.

And I think the reality of the situation facing many people in the intended audience of the original graph is at least somewhat like that.

As this debate has progressed, the amount of income corresponding the targeted person has gradually moved upwards from $70k gross in an expensive area of The West (Bay Area, Oxford UK, NYC, London) to $200k net in an average-cost-area (Ohio). I feel like there is something of a motte-and-bailey defence going on here:
- the “motte” is the position that the superstar lawyer earning $200k after tax who inexplicably lives in Cleveland, Ohio could pretty reasonably be said to be roughly 200 times richer than the person in the developing world on $1000. Not quite true (because it still fails the division test), but close. Problem with the “motte”: If you literally told young EA recruitment targets that they all earned $200k post tax and lived in Cleveland, Ohio where living costs are average, they would unanimously object that that’s nowhere near their situation in life.
- the “bailey” is position that young potential EA recruits earning $70k net in an expensive area are literally 100 times richer than an average Indian earning $700. Advantage of the “bailey”: makes people feel extremely guilty and more likely to donate money or sign the pledge. Disdvantage of the “bailey”: as always, it’s not actually a defensible position. We can see this by the fact that as I push on it, a retreat is happening.

the_jaded_one 8 Apr 2017 0:38 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?

why do increases in minimum standards that basically don’t affect me (I was already buying higher-than-minimum-quality things) and don’t at all affect the median Indian make me much poorer relative to the median Indian?

Well, this itself may prove too much.

Suppose that the minimum to survive in the west is raised to $90,000, and if you have less than that you are thrown out onto the streets and made homeless.

If the minimum to not be homeless is $90,000 and you earn $100,000, are you REALLY 100 times richer than someone on $1000 who has a shack to live in and food to eat?

and the now-much-richer countries have a safety net that enables everyone to reach this.

that’s a nice fantasy but in reality the way the west works is if you are a single young male and you have less than enough money to afford rent, there is no safety net in many places, especially the USA and the UK. You are thrown into the homelessness trap.

the_jaded_one 6 Apr 2017 17:37 UTC
2 points
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on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?

these bottom lines remain in every estimate of the global income distribution I’ve seen so far… Many people in the world live in serious absolute poverty, surviving on as little as one hundredth the income of the upper-middle class in the US.

But is this bottom line really approximately true?

A salary of $70,000 could be considered upper-middle-class. 1/100th of $70,000 is $700.

According to the chart, that is slightly greater than the income of the median Indian, adjusted for PPP.

Since these figures have been adjusted, that should mean that $700 in Western Europe or the US will afford you the same quality of life as the median Indian person, without you getting any additional resources such as extra meals from sympathetic passers-by or free accommodation in a shelter (because otherwise, to be 100 times richer you would have to have 100 units per day of these additional resources—i.e. $70,000 plus 100 meals/day plus owning low-quality accommodation for 100 people).

However, $700/year (= $1.91/day, =€1.80/day, =£1.53 /day) (without gifts or handouts) is not a sufficient amount of money to be alive in the west. You would be homeless. You would starve to death. In many places, you would die of exposure in the winter without shelter. Clearly, the median person in India is better off than a dead person.

A realistic minimum amount of money to not die in the west is probably $2000-$5000/year, again without gifts or handouts, implying that to be 100 times richer than the average Indian, you have to be earning at least $200,000-$500,000 net of tax (or at least net of that portion of tax which isn’t spent on things that benefit you—which at that level is almost all of it, unless you are somehow getting huge amounts of government money spent on you in particular).

The reality is that a PPP conversion factor is trying to represent a nonlinear mapping with a single straight line, and it fails badly at the extremes. But the extremes are exactly where one is getting this (misleading) factor of 100 from.

the_jaded_one 16 Mar 2017 17:32 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Austen_Forrester’s comment on: Introducing CEA’s Guiding Principles

Gets almost no upvotes

Actually you got 7 upvotes and 6 downvotes, I can tell from hovering over the ‘1 point’.

the_jaded_one 14 Mar 2017 19:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: itaibn’s comment on: Peter Singer no-platformed by pro-disability protestors at Canadian university

you are effectively “bundling” a high-quality post with additional content, which grants this extra content with undue attention.

A post which simply quotes a news source could be criticized as not containing anything original and therefore not worth posting. Someone has already complained that this post is superfluous since a discussion already exists on Facebook.

Actually if I had to criticize my own post I would say its weakness is that it lacks in-depth analysis and research. Unfortunately, in-depth analysis takes a lot of time…

the_jaded_one 11 Mar 2017 15:24 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Austen_Forrester’s comment on: Introducing CEA’s Guiding Principles
Also, I am somewhat concerned that this comment has been downvoted so much. It’s the only really substantive criticism of the article (admittedly it isn’t great), and it is at −3, right at the bottom.

Near the top are several comments at +5 or something that are effectively just applause.

the_jaded_one 11 Mar 2017 15:21 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Austen_Forrester’s comment on: Introducing CEA’s Guiding Principles

dangerous ideas of mass-termination of human and non-human life,

Specifically?

the_jaded_one 8 Mar 2017 21:39 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: AlasdairGives’s comment on: Peter Singer no-platformed by pro-disability protestors at Canadian university
Facebook requires that you give your real name to post an opinion, be part of the group etc. That is certainly a serious limitation to open discussion, and this topic in particular exacerbates that problem.

Not everyone will necessarily want to comment on this issue under their real name.

Also, I presume this forum exists because someone decided that something other than Facebook is required. Are we questioning this logic in general? Or are we making a special case of this issue? Why?

But if you would be so kind as to post anything you see as particularly relevant, I would appreciate it.

Peter Singer no-platformed by pro-disability protestors at Canadian university

the_jaded_one8 Mar 2017 17:53 UTC

3 points

10 comments2 min readEA link

the_jaded_one

Peter Singer no-plat­formed by pro-dis­abil­ity protestors at Cana­dian university

Peter Singer no-platformed by pro-disability protestors at Canadian university