Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion

Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by circular_lights on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:23AM (#33622498)

Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.

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Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by Joeboy on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:35AM (#33622635)

Deracinated nerd here, but I find your perspective at least a lot more understandable than the people who at appalled by the idea of using rich people's money to save poor people's lives, from a robustly anti-capitalist standpoint.

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Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by circular_lights on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @05:13PM (#33631590)

Totally - instincts are powerful and attempting to collapse their multidimensional information space into words and rationality forces people into absurdities (and the nerds get immense joy at seeing their betters squirm at their toy games). I side with the "appalled", but that's because I know they are soft and polite people clumsily trying to catch up to the high-IQ* nerds.

I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world".

* EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds

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Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by naasking on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @09:57AM (#33624050)

> Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct

Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?

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Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by circular_lights on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @05:22PM (#33631711)

Absolutely not. Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.

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Re:Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the ... by naasking on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @06:03PM (#33632220)

> Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.

You mean the kind of instincts that justified slavery, that oppresses women, that justifies spousal abuse and racial or ethnic hatred? Yeah sorry, "instincts" have orders of magnitude more failure modes than reason and language.

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