Clojurians Log v2

"We are doing bad things in the pursuit of good" has been their MO from the get go. I ignore and avoid any and all talks about EA and justifications/"optimizations". It's just an exercise in wishful thinking and self-persuasion, from my perspective.

I mentioned this in another thread, and I want to make a distinction between the incestuous clique of californian wastrels and people who actually care about maximising their impact for good, but EA as an organisation/community basically exists to allow psychopaths to justify why trashing the environment to immanentise the eschaton of a hypothetical galaxy spanning swarm of sapient paperclip maximisers has more moral weight than a single extant human in the third world or scamming people out of their money is a moral good, actually. Throw in a bunch of sexual predators stalking around for impressionable 20 somethings, and the occassional witch hunt against anyone who dares call them out for their vapidity and hypocrisy, and this article basically captures the frivolous, insipid, and morally bankrupt culture that is the EA community as popularised in California. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party

I've also always found it's a very capitalist American viewpoint, where social services are not offered democratically, but instead at the good will of the rich who might feel altruistic and decide to give back under their own terms.

@didibus Noblesse Oblige is a feudal european meme, actually. Capitalists, being, well, capitalists, simply had more money to throw around on charitable endeavours. Moreover, associating the social safety net and services with democratic institutions is a bit ahistorical in that it was the Prussians who first instituted state run welfare.

But I didn't mean state run welfare, I meant democratically determined reallocation of wealth.

And in today's context, where most of the west has social democracies with a more natural inclination that wealth redistribution where capital allocation doesn't produce good outcomes on its own should be determined democratically. I feel EA has an American twist, where generally in America they resist social democracies in favor of more individualism, which EA seems to extend as an idea.

Where capitalism doesn't produce the ideal outcome, Americans tend to say, too bad, and each individual can do as they please with their money, such as choosing to redistribute it if they want with whatever criteria they like. Where I feel other western countries are more likely to think democratically agreed upon schemes should be put in place to manage those shortcomings instead.

Timely: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/lake