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Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it's easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here's a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka "no-go zones" or "Sensitive Urban Zones").
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn't just about a delta, it's also about the end state: assimilation isn't complete until Muslims adopt Western values.
Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France's Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.
I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.
In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.
Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.
What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?
My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural / community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.
It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.
Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.
Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.
Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.
Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.
If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.
My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty's position "repugnant" and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty's position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.
I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else's. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.
Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if "welcoming" results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it's going too far... I guess it depends on your goals.
Redistributing the world's rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you're suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.
Factually, it's unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like "whores" and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered "rapable." Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won't actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn't keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it's really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.
Even if spreading around the world's rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it's still morally repugnant. I'm trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world's rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:
From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn't seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don't want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don't have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren't on board with your plans?
Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren't. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people's rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don't have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn't have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.
Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say "well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists" but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.
Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don't think it's utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture's B crime problems. If you take the world's biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.
If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it's considered unpopular.
If you are going to say that it's The White Man's Burden to fix other nation's problems, then at least go whole hog.
If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it's possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.
I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I'm interpreting you wrong then please tell me.
I'll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine "deserved" to be attacked. This really doesn't look like assimilation.
But for now, let's pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It's supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It's not enough to say "that's wrong" after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It's also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard. When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as "racist" by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam's infringement of women's rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
- Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?
- Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women's rights?
- Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women's safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women's rights?
- If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?
Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn't encountered. I don't think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn't seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.
It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it's quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.
That's correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it's clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It's clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it's clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here's another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It's not just politicians, it's not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it's obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it's not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
- Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
- Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved
- The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham's council website:
By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so. ...
The issue of race, regardless of ethnic group, should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is known to be a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised abuse in any local community. There was little evidence of such action being taken in Rotherham in the earlier years. Councillors can play an effective role in this, especially those representing the communities in question, but only if they act as facilitators of communication rather than barriers to it. One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers...
In her 2006 report, she stated that 'it is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators'.
She also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry, but was not supported by specific examples.
Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, rather than in individual cases. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators...
Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions_ of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn't "make sense," that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can't be true. I think that's a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.
Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don't like each other; they aren't going to like supporting each other's members through welfare. As another example, imagine that multiple populations in a country have very different economic productivity. The people who are higher in productivity aren't going to enjoy their taxes being siphoned off to support other groups who aren't pulling their weight economically. These situations are a recipe for ethnic conflict.
Icelanders may be happy with their socialized policies now, but imagine if you created a new nation with a combination of Icelanders and Greeks called Icegreekland. The Icelanders would probably be a lot more productive than the Greeks and unhappy about needing to support them through welfare. Icelanders might be more motivated to work and pay taxes if it's creating a social safety net for their own community, but less excited about working to pay taxes to support Greeks. And who can blame them?
There is plenty of valid debate about the likely consequences of socialized policies for populations other than homogenous NW European populations. Whoever told you these issues were a matter of scientific fact was misleading you. This is an excellent example of how the siren's call of politically attractive answers leads people to cut corners during their analysis so it goes in the desired direction, whether they are aware they are doing it or not.
Generalizing what works for one group as appropriate for another is a really common failure mode through history which hurts real people. See the whole "democracy in Iraq" thing as another example.
You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn't mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.
The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it's quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that are still problematic.
As you point out, many interventions to change the world risk going wrong and making things worse, but it would be a shame to completely give on making the world a better place. So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.
To some degree, the idea of a "Friendship and Science Party" has already been tried. The Mugwumps wanted to get scholars, scientists and learned people more involved in politics to improve its corrupt state. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but this is what happened:
So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.
When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this "marketplace," because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.
Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.
...
In particular, when the power loop includes science itself, science itself becomes corrupt. The crown jewel of European civilization is dragged in the gutter for another hundred million in grants, while journalism, our peeking impostor of the scales, averts her open eyes.
Science also expands to cover all areas of government policy, a task for which it is blatantly unfit. There are few controlled experiments in government. Thus, scientistic public policy, from economics ("queen of the social sciences") on down, consists of experiments that would not meet any standard of relevance in a truly scientific field.
Bad science is a device for laundering thoughts of unknown provenance without the conscious complicity of the experimenter.
According to this account, the more contact science has with politics, the more corrupted it becomes.
There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it's important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.
The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution / Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.
These events were all horrible disasters from a humanitarian perspective. Yet I doubt that the original French Revolutionaries planned from the start to execute the aristocracy, and then execute many of their own factions for supposedly being counter-revolutionaries. I don't think Marx ever intended for the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union to have a high death toll. I don't think the original abolitionists ever expected the bloody Civil War followed by 25% of the former slaves dying.
Perhaps, once a movement for egalitarianism and altruism got started, an ideological death spiral caused so much polarization that it was impossible to stop people from going overboard and extending the movement's mandate in a violent direction. Perhaps at first, they tried to persuade their opponents to help them towards the better new world. When persuasion failed, they tried suppression. And when suppression failed, someone proposed violence, and nobody could stop them in such a polarized environment.
Somehow, altruism can turn pathological, and well-intentioned interventions have historically resulted in disastrous side-effects or externalities. That's why some people are cynical about altruistic political attitudes.
I agree that Japan has its own problems. No solutions are particularly good if they can't get their birth rates up. Singapore also has low birth rates. What problems are preventing high-IQ people from reproducing might be something that EAs should look into.
"How much immigration to allow" and "precisely what kind of people should we allow in" can be related, because the more immigration you allow, the less selective you are probably being, unless you have a long line of qualified applicants. Skepticism of open borders doesn't require being against immigration in general.
As you say, a filtered immigration population could be very valuable. For example, you could have "open borders" for educated professionals from low-crime, low-corruption areas countries with compatible value systems and who are encouraged to assimilate. I'm pretty sure this isn't what most open borders advocates mean by "open borders," though.
The left doesn't "want" a responsible immigration policy either. For their political goals, they want a large and dissatisfied voting block. And for their signaling goals, it's much more holy to invite poor, unskilled people rather than skilled professionals who want to assimilate.
There are other countries with sound institutions, like Singapore and Japan, but I'm not so worried about them as I am about the West, because they have an eye towards self-preservation. For instance, both those countries have declining birth rates, but they protect their own rule of law (unlike the West), and have more cautious immigration policies that help avoid their population from being replaced by a foreign one (unlike the West). The West, unlike sensible Asian countries, is playing a dangerous game by treating its institutions in a cavalier way for ill-thought-out redistributionist projects and importing leftist voting blocs.
EAs should also be more worried about decline in the West, because Westerners (particularly NW Europeans) are more into charity than other populations (e.g. Eastern Europeans are super-low in charity). My previous post documents this. A Chinese- or Russian- dominated future is really, really bad for EA, for existential risk prevention, and for AI safety.
To be clear, when I speak of defending the West, I am mostly thinking of defending the West against self-inflicted problems. Nobody is talking about "beating" the global south / east. If the West declines, then it won't be in a very good position to share anything with anyone.
It's not the preferences of the West that are inherently more valuable, it's the integrity of its institutions, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, etc... If the West declines, then it's going to have negative flow-through effects for the rest of the world.
No need for you to address any particular political point I'm making. For now, it is sufficient for me to suggest that reigning progressive ideas about politics are flawed and holding EAs back, without you committing to any particular alternative view.
I'm glad to hear that EAs are focusing more on movement-building and collaboration. I think there is a lot of value in eigenaltruism: being altruistic only towards other eigenaltruistic people who "pay it forward" (see Scott Aaronson's eigenmorality). Civilizations have been built with reciprocal altruism. The problem with most EA thinking is that is one-way, so the altruism is consumed immediately. This post argues that morality evolved as a system of mutual obligation, and that EAs misunderstand this.
Although there is some political heterogeneity in EA, it is overwhelmed by progressives, and the main public recommendations are all progressive causes. Moral progress is a tricky concept: for example, the French Revolution is often considered moral progress, but the pictures paint another story.
On open borders, economic analyses like Roodman's are just too narrow. They do not take into account all of the externalities, such as crime and changes to cultural institutions. OpenBorders.info addresses many of the objections, sometimes; it does a good job of summarizing some of the anti-open borders arguments, but often fails to refute them, yet this lack of refutation doesn't translate into them updating their general stance on immigration.
If humans are interchangeable homo economicus then open borders would be a economic and perhaps moral imperative. If indeed human groups are significantly different, such as in crime rates, then it throws a substantial wrench into open borders. If the safety of open borders is in question, then it is a risky experiment.
Some of early indicators are scary, like the Rotherham Scandal. There are reports of similar coverups in other areas, and economic analyses do not capture the harms to these thousands of children. High-crime areas where the police have trouble enforcing rule of law are well documented in Europe: they are called "no-go zones" or "sensitive urban zones" ("no-go zone" is controversial because technically you can go there, but would you want to go to this zone, especially if you were Jewish?). Britain literally has Sharia Patrols harassing gay people and women.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening with current levels of immigration. Just imagine what happens with fully open borders. I really don't think its advocates have grappled with this graph, and what it means for Europe under open borders. No matter how generous Europe was, its institutions would never be able to handle the wave of immigrants, and open borders advocates are seriously kidding themselves if they don't see that Europe would turn into South Africa mixed with Syria, and the US would turn into Brazil. And then who would send aid to Africa?
Rule of law is slowly breaking down in the West, and elite Westerners are sitting in their filter bubbles fiddling while Rome burns. I'm not telling you to accept this scenario as likely; you would need to go do your own research at the object-level. But with even a small risk that this scenario is possible, it's very significant for future human welfare.
Do you have ideas for people or professions the movement would benefit from and strategies for drawing them in and making them feel welcome?
I'll think about it. I think some of the sources I've cited start answering that question: finding people who are knowledgeable about the giant space of stuff that the media and academia is sweeping under the carpet for political reasons.
Part of the reason I wrote my critique is that I know that at least some EAs will learn something from it and update their thinking.
VoiceOfRa put very concisely what I think is a median EA view here, but the comment is so deeply nested that I’m afraid it might get buried: “Even if he values human lives terminally, a utilitarian should assign unequal instrumental value to different human lives and make decision based on the combination of both.”
I'll take your word that many EAs also think this way, but I don't really see it effecting the main charitable recommendations. Followed to its logical conclusion, this outlook would result in a lot more concern about the West.
Even if this is not a median EA view, I would argue that most EAs act in accordance with it just out of concern for the cost-effectiveness of their movement-building work. It is not cost-effective to try to convince everyone of the most unintuitive inferences from ones own moral system.
Well, there is a question about what EA is. Is EA about being effectively altruistic within your existing value system? Or is it also about improving your value system to more effectively embody your terminal values? Is it about questioning even your terminal values to make sure they are effective and altruistic?
Regardless of whether you are an antirealist, not all value systems are created equal. Many people's value systems are hopelessly contradictory, or corrupted by politics. For example, some people claim to support gay people, but they also support unselective immigration from countries with anti-gay attitudes, which will inevitably cause negative externalities for gay people. That's a contradiction.
I just don't think a lot of EAs have thought their value systems through very thoroughly, and their knowledge of history, politics, and object-level social science is low. I think there are a lot of object-level facts about humanity, and events in history or going on right now which EAs don't know about, and which would cause them to update their approach if they knew about it and thought seriously about it.
Look at the argument that EAs make towards ineffective altruists: they know so little about charity and the world that they are hopelessly unable to achieve significant results in their charity. When EAs talk to non-EAs, they advocate that (a) people reflect on their value system and priorities, and (b) they learn about the likely consequences of charities at an object-level. I'm doing the same thing: encouraging EAs to reflect on their value systems, and attain a broader geopolitical and historical context to evaluate their interventions.
However, among the things that are important to the individual EA, there are likely many that are very uncontroversial in most of society and focusing on those views in one’s “evangelical” EA work is much more cost-effective.
What is or isn't controversial in society is more a function of politics than of ethics. Progressive politics is memetically dominant, potentially religiously-descended, and falsely presents itself as universal. Imagine what an EA would do in Nazi Germany under the influence of propaganda. How about Soviet Effective Altruists, would they actually do good, or would they say "collectivize faster, comrade?" How do we know we aren't also deluded by present-day politics?
It seems like there should be some basic moral requirement that EAs give their value a system a sanity-check instead of just accepting whatever the respectable politics of the time tell them. If indeed politics has a very pervasive influence on people's knowledge and ethics, then giving your value system a sanity-check would require separating out the political component of your worldview. This would require deep knowledge of politics, history, and social science, and I just don't see most EAs or rationalists operating at this level (I'm certainly not: the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know).
The fact that the major EA interventions are so palatable to progressivism suggests that EA is operating with very bounded rationality. If indeed EA is bounded by progressivism, and progressivism is a flawed value system, then there are lots of EA missed opportunities lying around waiting for someone to pick them up.
That would be another example of things which some EAs do, but which don't yet seem to percolate through to the public-facing parts of the movement. For example, valuing other EAs due to flow-though contradicts Singer's view, as far as I understand him:
Effective altruists do not discount suffering because it occurs far away or in another country or afflicts people of a different race or religion. They agree that the suffering of animals counts too and generally agree that we should not give less consideration to suffering just because the victim is not a member of our species.
I do believe that my comment accurately characterizes the large EA organizations like GiveWell and philosophers like Peter Singer. I do realize that EAs are smart people, and many individual EAs have other beliefs and engage in all sorts of research. For example, some EA are concerned about nuclear war with Russia, and today I discovered the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Global Priorities Project, which are outside of my critique. However, for now, Peter Singer, Give Well, Giving What We Can, and similar approaches are the most emblematic of EA, and it is towards this style of EA that my critique is directed, which I indicated in my previous comment when I said I was addressing "typical" or "median" EA. I believe it is fair to judge EA (as it currently exists) by these dominant approaches.
I disagree with you that I am stereotyping, but I think it's good for me to clarify the scope of my critique, so I am adding a note to my previous comment that links to this comment.
That 80,000 Hours post doesn't contradict my argument at all, and in fact reinforces it. My comment never argued that EAs believe that everyone earned to give, only that they are very confident about their moral claims about what people should do with their money. That post still shows that 80,000 Hours believes that at least 10% of people should earn to give, which is still an incredibly strong ethical claim.
A lot of the post seems to confuse complex strategic moves like GiveWell's move to start by focusing on life saved by proven interventions with the belief that life saved by proven interventions is the most important thing.
Obviously GiveWell cannot show that their interventions are the "most important thing." But GiveWell does claim that that its proven interventions are a sufficiently good thing to justify you spending money on them, and this is an immense moral claim. It's not like GiveWell is a purely informational website.
In the context of the larger EA movement, Peter Singer's philosophy and EA pledges argue with incredible confidence that people should be giving. EA is extremely evangelical, and Singer's philosophy is incredibly flawed and emotionally manipulative.
The problem is that none of the most common EA approaches have defeated the "null giving hypothesis" of spending your money on yourself, or saving it in an investment account and then giving the compounded amount to another cause in the future. If someone is already insisting on giving to charity, then GiveWell might redirect their money in a direction that is actually useful, but EA is also trying to get people involved who were not doing charity before, and its moral arguments and understanding of the world are just not strong enough to justify spending money on the most dominant charitable approaches.
"X is the most efficient birdfeeder on the market" is a different type of claim from "the best birdfeeder on the market is worth spending money on," or "feeding birds is a moral imperative," or "we should pledge to feed birds and evangelize other people to do so, too." My impression is that EAs are getting these kinds of claims mixed up.
EAs might believe that, but that would be an example of their lack of knowledge of humanity and adoption of simplistic progressivism. Human traits for either altruism or accomplishment are not distributed evenly: people vary in clannishness, charity, civic-mindness, corruption, and IQ. It is most likely that differences between people explains why some groups have trouble building functional institutions and meeting their own needs.
Whether basic needs are met doesn't explain why some groups within Europe are so different from each other. Southern Europe and parts of Eastern Europe have extremely low concentrations of charitable organizations. Also, good luck explaining the finding in the post I linked in my previous comment finding that vegetarianism in the US is correlated at 0.68 with English ancestry (but only weakly with European ancestry). Even different groups of white people are really, really different from each other, such as differences between Yankees and Southerners in the US, stemming from differences between settlers from different part of England.
Human groups evolved with geographical separation and selection pressures. For example, the clannishness source I linked show how tons of different outcomes are related to whether groups are inside or outside the Hajnal Line of inbreeding. Different rates of inbreeding will result in different strength of kin selection vs. reciprocal altruism. For example, here is the map of corruption with the Hajnal Line superimposed.
There is no good reason to believe that humans have equal potential for altruism and accomplishment, though there are benefits to signaling this belief.
Effective Altruism is a well-intentioned but flawed philosophy. This is a critique of typical EA approaches, but it might not apply to all EAs, or to alternative EA approaches.
Edit: In a follow up comment, I clarify that this critique is primarily directed at GiveWell and Peter Singer's styles of EA, which are the dominant EA approaches, but are not universal.
There is no good philosophical reason to hold EA's axiomatic style of utilitarianism. EA seems to value lives equally, but this is implausible from psychology (which values relatives and friends more), and also implausible from non-naive consequentialism, which values people based on their contributions, not just their needs.
Even if you agree with EA's utilitarianism, it is unclear that EA is actually effective at optimizing for it over a longer time horizon. EA focuses on maximizing lives saved in the present, but it has never been shown that this approach is optimal for human welfare over the long-run. The existential risk strand of EA gets this better, but it is too far off.
If EA is true, then moral philosophy is a solved problem. I don't think moral philosophy works that way. Values are much harder than EA gives credit for. Betting on a particular moral philosophy with a percentage of your income shows an immense amount of confidence, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
EA has an opportunity cost, and its confidence is crowding out better ideas. What would those better altruistic interventions be? I don't know, but I feel like we can do better.
EAs have a weak understanding of geopolitics and demographics. The current state of the world is that Western Civilization, the goose that laid the golden egg, is declining. If indeed Western Civilization is in trouble, and we are facing near or medium-term catastrophic risks like social collapse, turning into Brazil, or war with Russia or China, then the highest-value opportunities for altruism will be at home. Unless you think we have a hard-takeoff AI scenario or technological miracles in the near-term, we should be very worried about geopolitics, demographics, and civilization in the medium-term and long-term.
If Western Civilization collapses, or is over-taken by China, then that will not be a good future for human welfare. Averting this possibility is way more high-impact than anything else that EAs are currently doing. If the West is secure and abundant, then maybe EAs have the right idea by redistributing wealth out of the West. But if the West is precarious and fragile, then redistribution makes less sense, and addressing the risks in the West seems more important.
EAs do not understand demographics, or are not taking them seriously if they do. The West is currently faltering in fertility and undergoing population replacement from people from areas with higher crime and corruption. Meanwhile, altruism itself varies between populations based on clannishness and inbreeding. We are heading towards a future that is demographically more clannish and less altruistic.
Some EAs are open borders advocates, but open borders is a ridiculously dangerous experiment for the West. They have not satisfactorily accounted for the crime and corruption that immigrants may bring. Additionally, under democracy, immigrants can vote and change the culture. Open border advocates hope that institutions will survive, but they have provided no good arguments that Western institutions will survive rapid demographic change. Institutions might seem fine and then rapidly collapse in a non-linear way. If Western Civilization collapses into ethnic turmoil or Soviet sclerosis, then humans everywhere will suffer.
Some EAs have a skeptical attitude towards parenthood, because it takes away money from charity, and believe that EAs are easier to convert than create. In some cases, EAs who want to become parents justify parenthood as an unprincipled exception. This whole conversation is ridiculous and exemplifies EAs’ flawed moral philosophy and understanding of humans. Altruistic parents are likely to have altruistic children due to the heritability of behavioral traits. If altruistic people fail to breed, then they will take their altruistic genes to the grave with them, like the Shakers. If altruism itself is a casualty of changing demographics, then human welfare will suffer in the future. (If you doubt this can happen, then check out the earlier two links, and good luck getting Eastern Europeans or Middle-Easterners interested in EA.)
I don’t think EAs do a very good job of distinguishing their moral intuitions from good philosophical arguments; see the interest of many EAs in open borders and animal rights. I do not see a large understanding in EA of what altruism is and how it can become pathological. Pathological altruism is where people become practically addicted to a feeling of doing good which leads them to act sometime with negative consequences. A quote from the book in that review, which shows some of the difficulties disentangling moral psychological from moral philosophy:
Despite the fact that a moral conviction feels like a deliberate rational conclusion to a particular line of reasoning, it is neither a conscious choice nor a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing that we know’ arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. . . .
What feels like a conscious life-affirming moral choice—my life will have meaning if I help others—will be greatly influenced by the strength of an unconscious and involuntary mental sensation that tells me that this decision is “correct.” It will be this same feeling that will tell you the “rightness” of giving food to starving children in Somalia, doing every medical test imaginable on a clearly terminal patient, or bombing an Israeli school bus. It helps to see this feeling of knowing as analogous to other bodily sensations over which we have no direct control.
It seems that some people have strong intuitions towards altruism or animal rights, but it’s another thing entirely to say that those arguments are philosophically strong. It seems that people who are biologically predisposed towards altruism will be motivated to find philosophical arguments that justify what they already want to do. I don’t think EAs have corrected for this bias. If EAs’ arguments are flawed, then their adoption of them must be explained by their moral intuitions or signaling desires. Since EA provides great opportunities to signal altruism, intelligence, and discernment, it seems that there would be a gigantic temptation for some personalities to get into EA and exaggerate the quality of its arguments, or adopt its axioms even though other axioms are possible. Even though EAs employ reason and philosophy unlike typical pathological altruists, moral philosophy is subjective, and choice of particular moral theories seems highly related to personality.
The other psychological bias of EAs is due to them getting nerd-sniped by narrowly defining problems, or picking problems that are easier to solve or charities that are possible to evaluate. They seem to operate from the notion that giving away some of their money to charity is taken for granted, so they just need to find the best charity out of those that are possible to evaluate. In an inconvenient world for an altruist, the high-value opportunities are unknown or unknowable, throwing your money at what seems best might result in a negligible or negative effect, and keeping your money in your piggy bank until more obvious opportunities emerge might make the most sense.
EA isn’t all bad. It’s probably better than typical ineffective charities, so if you absolute must give to a charity, then effective charities are probably better. EAs have the right idea by trying to evaluate charities. Many EA arguments are strong within the bounds of utilitarianism, or the confines of a particular problem. But EAs have a hard road towards justification because their philosophy advocates spending money on strong moral claims, and being wrong about important things about the world will totally throw off their results.
My criticisms here don't apply to all EAs or all possible EA approaches, just the median EA arguments and interventions I've seen. It is conceivable that in the future EA will become more persuasive to a larger group of people once it has greater knowledge about the world and incorporates that knowledge into its philosophy. An alternative approach to EA would focus on preserving Western Civilization and avoiding medium-term political/demographic catastrophies. But nobody is sufficiently knowledgeable at this point to know how we could spend money towards this goal.
I think your “mental muscle” analogy is interesting: you are suggesting that exercising mental grievance or ressentiment is unhealthy for relationships, and is part of why men red pill men have an “uphill battle.” You argue that love is incompatible with resentment. You also argue that certain terms “demonstrate” particular unhealthy and resentful mindsets, or lead to “objectification” which is tantamount to not viewing others as people.
I share your concern that some red pill men have toxic attitudes towards women which hamper their relationships. I disagree that language like “sexual access” is sufficient to demonstrate resentment of women, and I explained other reasoning behind that language in my previous comment where I discussed operational sex ratio, polygyny, and other impersonal forces.
My other argument is that views of relationships operate at different levels of explanation. There are least 3 levels: the macro level of society, the local level of your peers and dating pool, and the dyadic level of your interpersonal relationships. Why can’t someone believe that dating is a brutal, unfair, dog-eat-dog competition at the macro or local level, but once they succeed in getting into a relationship, they fall in love and belief in sacrifice, like you want? It’s also possible to have a grievance towards a group of people, like bankers, but still respect your personal banker as a human being.
A metaphor that is useful for understanding the mating market at the societal or local level can be emotionally toxic if you apply it at the dyadic level. If you believe that the current mating market results in some men lacking sexual access at the macro level, that’s a totally correct and neutral description of what happens under a skewed operational sex ratio and polygyny. If you tell your partner “honey, you’ve been denying me sexual access for the past week,” then you’re being an asshole.
In the past, men and women of the past held beliefs about gender roles and sex differences that would be considered scandalously sexist today. It seems implausible that our ancestors didn’t love each other. People are good at compartmentalizing and believing that their partner is special.
Your theory about concepts leading to resentment and resentment being a barrier to relationships could be true, but I think it’s much more likely that you have the causal relationship backwards: it’s mostly loneliness that causes resentment, not the other way around. For instance, in the case of a skewed operational sex ratio, some people are just going to end up single no matter how zen their attitudes are.
Even if there is a risk of alienation from understanding sex differences, and sexual economics, I still think it’s better to try to build an epistemically accurate view of relationships, and then later make peace with any resentment that is a by-product of this understanding.
It seems like the only alternative is to try to mentally avoid any economic, anthropological, or gender-political insight into dating that might cause you to feel resentment: blinkering your epistemic rationality for the instrumentally rational goal of harmonious relationships.
There’s also a genuinely open question of how big sex differences are: if sex differences are smaller than I think, then I’m probably harming my relationships by being too cynical, but if they are larger than I think, then I’m naive and risk finding out the hard way. I really doubt that relationships are the one place where Litany of Tarski doesn't apply.
It sounds like your current relationship attitudes are bringing you success in your relationship and that terms like “objectification” are more helpful to you than “sexual access.” That’s totally fine, but other people have different challenges and are coming from a different place, so I recommend suspending judgment about what concepts their mindsets entail and why they are single. If you believe that toxic attitudes towards women are correlated with their concepts, then that’s plausible, though it’s a different argument.
To go a bit more meta, I would argue that a lot of the resistance towards men developing inconvenient conclusions about sex ratio, polygyny, sex differences, etc… is not because these ideas are necessarily harmful to male-female relationships, but because they are harmful to feminist narratives about male privilege. It is morally reprehensible how feminists use their own grievance-based concepts of “objectification” to reject any macro-level analysis of male-female dynamics that might be unflattering towards women. It’s just far too convenient how sociological, economic, and anthropological arguments that would be acceptable in any other circumstance are dismissed as denying women’s humanity or personhood. I think you should be just as skeptical towards feminist grievance concepts as you are towards red pill grievance concepts.
I liked your description of certain unconventional schools of thought as "tough-minded" and "creative." Tough-minded, creative thought processes will often involve concepts and metaphors that make people uncomfortable, including the people who think them up.
Sometimes, understanding the behavior of large groups of people involves concepts or metaphors that would be unhealthy to apply at the individual level. For instance, you can learn a lot about human behavior by thinking about game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma. This does not mean that you need to think about other people as "prisoners," or think about your interactions with them as a "game" or as a "dilemma."
I think you probably do have a lot of differences in values from people who are “red-pillers, manosphericals, conservatives, reactionaries, libertarians,” but I think this case is really just about inferential distance on the object-level. Although “sexual access” has potential problematic connotations, it actually accurately describes situations where some people’s dating challenges are so great that they are effectively excluded. I apologize for the length this post will be, but I want to drop down to the object-level for a while to give you sufficient evidence to chew on:
Demographics: sex ratio and operational sex ratio have a gigantic influence on society. Exhibit A: China has a surplus of men. Exhibit B: The shortage of black men due to imprisonment turns dating upside-down in the black community and causes black women to compete fiercely for black men. Exhibit C: In virtually all US cities (not just the West Coast), there are more single men than women below age 35 (scroll down for the age breakdown or use the sliders). Young men face a level of competition than young women do not.
If something like 120 men are competing for 100 women, in the system if monogamous, then 20 of those men are going to be excluded from marriage. Yes, in some sense, all 120 have an "opportunity," but we know that under monogamy, 20 of them will be left out in the cold. And under a poly system, the results will be even worse, because humans are more polygynous than polyandrous. When low-status men are guaranteed to lose out in dating and marriage due to an unfavorable sex ratio, then that starts looking like a lack of "access."
Let's talk about polygyny a bit more. A recent article defended gay marriage from the charge of opening up the door to polygamy:
Here's the problem with it: when a high-status man takes two wives (and one man taking many wives, or polygyny, is almost invariably the real-world pattern), a lower-status man gets no wife. If the high-status man takes three wives, two lower-status men get no wives. And so on.
This competitive, zero-sum dynamic sets off a competition among high-status men to hoard marriage opportunities, which leaves lower-status men out in the cold. Those men, denied access to life's most stabilizing and civilizing institution, are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence. The situation is not good for women, either, because it places them in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man.
I'm not just making this up. There's an extensive literature on polygamy.
And there's that word again: "access." The notion of men being shut out of dating under polygyny mating appears in an entirely mainstream and liberal source. There are also concepts like “high-status” and “low-status” males, which feminists would often object to in other contexts.
Cultural forces: the quality of information about dating for introverted men is so poor that it is actively damaging and has the effect of excluding them from dating. There is also a decline in socialization and institutions around dating. For evidence, it is sufficient to look at the existence of the PUA community. Look at hookup culture on college campuses. In a healthy society, with healthy socialization and a monogamous mating system, we wouldn't even be having this conversation because many of the same men in the manosphere or PUA community would be too busy hanging out with their girlfriends or wives to be complaining on the internet.
Legal and economic forces: In some Asian countries, women’s minimum expectations for husbands involves buying a house with multiple bedrooms, and only some men can economically afford that; the rest lack access to marriage because they lack the economic prerequisites. In many Western countries, if men get divorced, they can face such punishing child support and alimony burden that they must move to a small apartment (or even end up in debtor’s prison if they can’t pay). These men face steep challenges in attracting future girlfriends and wives due to their economic dispossession.
As I’ve shown at the object level, there are large cultural, demographic, economic, and legal forces that influence how challenging dating is and how people behave. These problems are much larger than asshole men blaming women for not putting out. Lack of “sexual access” is an entirely reasonable way to describe what happens to men under a skewed operational sex ratio or polygyny, though I would be totally fine to try other terms instead. I realize the term isn’t perfect, and that some people who use it might have objectionable beliefs, but if we give into crimestop and guilt-by-association, then we would know a lot less about the world.
On one side, I see people who are high-status, intellectual, and look really nice and empathic and compassionate. Of course my instincts like that. On the other side, I see people who look brave, tough, critical-minded and creative, plus they seem to be far more historically literate, so basically NRx and libertarians and similar folks give me that kind of "inventor" vibe, which incidentally is also something my instincts like.
So, basically, there are two groups of people with grievances. The ingroup is very good at impression management and public relations. The outgroup is bad at impression management, but your gut is telling you that they might be on to something. Yet you are suspicious of some of the outgroup’s arguments, because the ingroup says that the outgroup is just a bunch of “smart assholes,” and because the outgroup’s claims have problematic connotations in the outgroup’s moral framework.
I don’t think your reaction is unreasonable given your vantage point and level of inferential distance from the outgroup. But note that there is a strong incentive for the ingroup to set an incredibly high bar for the moral acceptability of the outgroup’s grievances, so it’s necessary to apply a healthy degree of skepticism to the ingroup’s moral arguments unless you have confirmed them independently.
In some cases, we will have to go to the object-level to discover which group is the “smart assholes” who are confabulating. Of course both groups will try to tar the others’ motives and reputations, but the seeming victor of that conflict will be the group with the best public relations skills, not necessarily the group with the more accurate views.
If your gut is telling you that there is potential truth in the outgroup’s arguments, then don’t let the ingroup’s moral framework shut down your investigation, especially when that investigation has implications for whether the ingroup’s moral framework is any good in the first place. Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in an closed loop of belief. I think the same argument applies to one’s own moral framework, also.
While both the left and the right have their own forms of ideological conformity, the term "political correctness" is associated with left ideological conformity. There is a reason that ideological purges and struggle sessions throughout history are associated with the left. I realize that "political correctness" is a loaded term, but I agree with its connotations and I'm not interested in feigning neutrality.
As for Scott, I cannot comment on that particular case, but him as a leader of NRx wouldn't make sense anyway because he isn't right-leaning enough.
That's Foucault's theory, but Rictor Norton's book I linked to convincingly debunks Foucault as ideological and ahistorical. Quoting an excerpt, here are historical cases of unmarried men going for each other instead of marriage and children:
In between these two extremes of lust and idealism we find a sense of identity based upon ordinary and unremarkable same-sex love. The records of the Inquisition in Spain, Portugal and Brazil; the police archives of early eighteenth-century Paris; the records of the Officers of the Night of sixteenth-century Venice – all clearly document a preponderance of men who were bachelors and who preferred their own sex. Statistical analysis of the particularly full and detailed Florentine records ‘of the marital status of the men incriminated for sodomy from 1478 to 1483 reveals that fully three-fourths of all such men aged nineteen to seventy were unmarried.
These guys sound like they are exclusive, obligate homosexuals.
As for identity, just because the historical labels for queer people were negative, it does not mean that those terms were just externally-imposed slurs, and that homosexual identities did not exist:
In Foucault’s famous statement: ‘Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of superior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ He ludicrously dates this shift to 1870. But the men discussed in the preceding paragraph had a sense of themselves that transcended both ‘the practice of sodomy’ and ‘temporary aberration’. In fact Dutch sodomites in 1734 were described by contemporaries as ‘hermaphrodites in their minds’ (Boon 1989) – an exact match for Foucault’s ‘hermaphroditism of the soul’. The concepts of masculine homosexual women and effeminate homosexual men dominated the premodern world. The homosexual was considered an androgynous species in Aristophanes, in Juvenal, in all the ancient literature about the transgendered priests of Cybele in the ancient and classical world. It was not a modern construct.
The truth is that a homosexual category existed many centuries prior to the nineteenth century. There are literally scores of fifteenth-century Italian authors who portray homosexual characters rather than homosexual incidents (G. Dall’Orto, ‘Italian Renaissance’, EH), and it is a nonsense to label such sodomites ‘temporary aberrations’ rather than members of a species. In real life there is the famous example of self-labelling, the painter Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549) who was proud of his nickname ‘Il Sodoma’. According to his contemporary Vasari ‘he did not take [it] with annoyance or disdain, but rather gloried in it, making jingles and verses on the subject, which he pleasantly sang to the accompaniment of the lute’.
Rictor Norton is a widely published queer historian, his research goes back centuries, and seems very solid. I think we should go with his account and toss Foucault's social constructionism.
Gay historian Rictor Norton vehemently disagrees with the notion that gay identities are recent. Here is his basic position:
- Gay identities have existing for a long time, not just recognition of gay behaviors
- Recent conceptions of homosexuality are politicized, but this does not mean that concepts of homosexuality are new
- The politicization of modern gay politics, combined with poor record-keeping and past suppression, erases the history of gay identities and cultures.
He takes a position against social constructionism:
It is very easy for historians to establish that most of the sexual categories which are supposed to have arisen under modern capitalism in fact existed much earlier. ...
One of the reasons why many contemporary lesbian and gay theorists fail to appreciate that homosexuals existed before 1869 is the politically correct view that terms such as ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ and ‘queen’ are not nice, and especially since the late 1960s people have endeavoured to use the phrase ‘gay and lesbian’ wherever possible. There are some men who lived before 1869 whom I would feel uneasy at calling ‘gay’ or ‘homophile’, but I would not hesitate to call them queer or even silly old queens. Many of the mollies of the early eighteenth century were undoubtedly queens, whose interests and behaviour are virtually indistinguishable from queens I have known in the early 1960s (and later). ...
‘Queer’ was the word of preference for homosexuals as well as homophobes for the first half of the twentieth century, and of course is being reclaimed today in defiant rather than defensive postures. In English during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century the words of preference were ‘molly’ and ‘sapphist’, for which good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’. During the seventeenth century and earlier the commonest terms were ‘Sodomite’ and ‘tribade’, for which, again, good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’. In ancient and indigenous and premodern cultures there were many terms for which good modern equivalents are ‘queer’ and ‘tomboy’. And the nearest modern equivalent for the nineteenth-century term ‘homosexual’ is: queer. ...
I add my voice to the widespread dissatisfaction with social constructionist thought, that seems to have been based on nothing and to have lead nowhere in the past twenty years. Its initial premises have been constantly reinforced by restatement and incestuous quotation amongst constructionist colleagues rather than supported by scholarly research.
To see more, check out these excerpts from The Myth of the Modern Homosexual.
I think many people would have loved to see a response by Moldbug, and found his response disappointing. My guess is that Moldbug felt that his writings already answered a lot of Scott's objections, or that Scott's approach wasn't fair. And Moldbug isn't the same thing as neoreaction; there were other responses by neoreactionaries to Scott's FAQ.
The FAQ nails neoreaction on a lot of object-related issues, and it has some good philosophical objections. But it doesn't do a good job of showing the object-related issues that neoreaction got right, and it doesn't quite do justice to some ideas, like The Cathedral and demotism. And the North Korea stuff has really easy to anticipate objections from neoreactionaries (like the fact that it was lead by communists).
The FAQ answers the question "what are a bunch of objections to neoreaction?", but it doesn't answer the question "how good a philosophy is neoreaction?" because it only makes a small dent. If you consider the FAQ in conjunction with Neoreactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-sized Nutshell, then you would get a better sense of the big picture of neoreaction, but he doesn't really integrate his arguments across the two essays, which causes an unfortunately misleading impression.
The FAQ put me off getting into neoreaction for a while, but when I did, I was much more impressed than I expected. The only way to get a good sense of what it actually is would be spending a lot of time with it.
Another piece of the rationalist diaspora is neoreaction. They left LW because it wasn't a good place for talking about anything politically incorrect, an ever expanding set. LW's "politics is the mindkiller" attitude was good for social cohesion, but bad for epistemic rationality, because so many of our priors are corrupted by politics and yesterday's equivalent of social justice warriors.
Neoreaction is free of political correctness and progressive moral signaling, and it takes into account history and historical beliefs when forming priors about the world. This approach allows all sorts of uncomfortable and repulsive ideas, but it also results in intellectual progress along novel lines of thought.
Neoreactionary thought varies in quality and rigor, but the current leadership contains rationalists now, and they have recognized the need to provide more rigorous arguments. I predict that more and more rationalists will explore neoreaction once they get over their absurdity heuristic and realize what it actually is.
I think most of this discussion just boils down into a difference of values. You suggest that donating to the world's poorest people seems like to way to increase net utility, but this depends on a utility function and moral framework that I am questioning. I have alluded to at least two objections, which is that this outlook seems too near-mode, and it assumes that people should be weighted the same. I agree with you that getting into a deeper discussion of values would not be fruitful.
Your model is interesting, but it still looks like it weights utility of different people the same, and it doesn't take into account resulting incentives and externalities.
It's possible to imagine a value system and geopolitical picture where saving lives in the third world has zero utility, weakly positive utility, or weakly negative utility. If so, then investing in people who are productive at least does something with your money.
Or my suspicions could be wrong, and there could be flow-through effects that I would find compelling. If I had a comprehensive and strong alternative EA approach and clearly superior value system, then I could be more explicit.
I do want to clarify that I don't consider investing in the stock market to be EA, at least, not very strong EA. I see the stock market more as a way to grow money so that you can do EA later.
My intuition is that if you want to see more good stuff happen, then maybe we should be giving some resources to the kinds of people who have made good stuff happen historically, and make sure we are getting a return on investment. I do not think all these people are located in the Bay Area, and my previous post does suggest trying to find poor people who are likely to be highly productive.
What sort of thing would you consider "good moral arguments"? What makes something "politicized"?
All moral arguments are either politicized or have the potential to be.
My impression is that EA assumes a utilitarian framework which weights people the same and operates mostly in near-mode. EA towards the third world has never been shown to be morally superior to advancing science, medicine, technology, X-risk reduction, or investing the money until better opportunities emerge.
Better moral arguments would involve taking a broader look at the future of humanity, and the current geopolitical and civilizational state of the world. EA does pay some attention to existential risks, but there is insufficient attention to risks that are short of existential risks. Think of all the risks an individual or society faces over a decade. Even if you take a bunch of low probability risks, the probability of at least one bad event happening is going to be higher.
My comment about Bay Area parties is suggesting that if EA's conclusions are all politically palatable, then this could be due to hidden political assumptions, or thinking in a bounded way.
It's certainly plausible that people are biased in favor of keeping their money in their pockets. But perhaps their pockets should be the default place to keep their money until compelling reasons appear to part with it.
Finally someone else who is thinking like an investor. See my longer comment below for more along this line of thought.
The other advantage of investing is that you have a degree of self-insurance against adverse events. This will help you and your family avoid falling on social safety nets (which could be seen as "negative EA"). Typically EA starts by thinking about foreign countries, but perhaps EA should start at home and move outward.
Additionally, investing and waiting helps deal with the problem of values. Right now, EA suffers from a lack of good moral arguments for what to do with money. The current dominant approaches depend on very narrow and politicized moral assumptions. Waiting will allow more time for better arguments to emerge and to see which direction the world is going.
This post has some faults, but it correctly points out the narrowness of currently EA thinking.
The problem with effective altruism is that it depends on values, and values are hard. Values are also notoriously gameable by politics. Currently, EA is Afrocentric and only effective for a very narrow value system.
EA is focused on saving the max number of lives in the present, or giving directly to the poorest areas. This approach is beneficial for those people, but it's not clear that this approach has a large impact on the future of humanity. It also seems very near-mode.
GiveWell claims that there are flow-through effects of charity, such as greater economic development, but these are underspecified.
Science, technology, medicine, and economic development has had a large positive impact on humanity. The style of EA that appeals to me would focus on promoting those things. Existential risk reduction also has appeal. Current EA claims to benefit economic development, but it's not clear that it's the best way to do that. And current EA seems weak for promoting science, technology, and medicine.
Most scientific, medical, and technological advances have come from the West (and Asia). If we want to see more of those advances, then shouldn't we be investing capital in the places with a historical track record of accomplishment?
If you are approaching EA with the attitude of an investor in the future of humanity, then you must also consider national differences in IQ and the correlation of intelligence with per capita income. An investor with a blank slate attitude will be sorely disappointed, because many areas will likely hit a wall in accomplishment.
The current EA approach seems to focus on aid over investment. From a redistributive standpoint, helping the most needy makes sense. Yet from an investment standpoint, helping the most productive makes more sense, even if the bang for your buck is less. Since the most productive people are typically less needy, these two approaches come to diametrically opposite conclusions. There is also a potential conflict between X-risk reduction and technological progress. This underscores how values are hard, and the tensions between different potential value systems in EA.
Yet perhaps there is a way to reconcile the aid and investment approaches: find a place in the world that has poverty or other problems but is high in human capital, and invest there. Is there really no such place in the world like this?
EA's current research seems focus on need-based, accomplishment-blind aid, but this only satisfies a narrow range of the values that EA could represent. It is curious that all major recommended EA interventions seem politically appealing, and there have been no major EA interventions proposed (to my knowledge) that are politically incorrect. Yes, EA has recommend avoiding certain popular interventions, but only in order to get better results within the same progressive value system.
We live in a very convenient world if helping humanity involves doing things that just happen to make people look good in Bay Area parties and the media in 2015. I am concerned that there is a file drawer effect for potential EA approaches that are politically awkward.
Btw, "you" was "general you", not you personally, and mine was trying to piggyback. Post edited to clarify.
Note to all rationalists:
Politics has already slashed your tires.
Politics has already pwned your brain.
Politics has already smashed the Overton Window.
Politics has already kicked over your Schelling fence.
Politics has already planted weeds in your garden.
What are you going to do about it?