What do I meme? Republicans, Democrats, Effective Altruists
The rise of the utilitarian party
This is a pre-emptive post. I’ve got an EA political meme cooking, and I need to develop my thoughts about it. Some of you may know I've been talking about this concept since 2016-17, and for some reason, it's finally getting its time in the limelight with several articles coming out in major publications in the last week. And I feel partly responsible for contributing to the zeitgeist - and so I needed to spit out my immediate thoughts. Apologies for grammar and whatnot… this has a shelf-life.
Here’s the thesis:
Effective Altruism is about to be everywhere - especially in politics - edit: AND while it’s annoying, I’ll play along.
I know this looks like confirmation bias, but honestly, sometimes, I’m just one of those people who has their finger on the pulse of public discourse. About a month ago I finished an EA intensive course where I probed the philosophy on several levels only to find out that EAs really don't know what is effective, and don’t have a great reason to support why they should be altruistic. But that doesn't stop then from calculating and quantifying all the human nature out of us mere mortals. At first, I thought ‘Hey at least we’re headed in the right direction - the direction of evidence!’, but as you know my internal battle with scientism, utilitarianism tends to flare up - especially after interactions with adherents to strict ideologies.
On Twitter, recently I was told that my optimism was a category 1 error.
I kept it light and fun, but the truth is that I don't want to be at parties where everyone is like this. A bunch of nerds sucking the fun out of the room is not my idea of “reducing suffering”. That sounds like hell. I don’t want my errors categorized and measured by others. Maybe - MAYBE, I’ll measure them myself. When I fucking feel like it, but telling me that optimism is an error is absolutely fucked.
Furthermore, I recently re-joined Facebook (ugh I know - it’s like a fucking high school reunion), only to discover that there is a dank EA memes group that I have been missing out on. In this group, not only are the memes fun, but there are occasional interesting critiques of the philosophy. Lately, because of the mainstream attention, the discussion has been about “normies” entering the EA space, and what that will do. The discussion of this meme in particular:
Ok, fine, I get it when we first dive into the philosophy/IDEOLOGY, we might say some ignorant things, but the thread that follows is the troublesome part:
As a scientist obviously I support evidence, and evidence-based policy, but to what extent? This is a question I think we're going to be asking ourselves in the near future. We're going to have to be talking about trolley problems in real life. Because the EA wants to calculate away suffering. I fundamentally disagree with this plight. Of course, I do think this level of activism could make many improvements in society, however, imma say this now, if I get on the bandwagon - there will be a time when I will need to jump off this bandwagon because it will become a runaway train that will annihilate any choice of humanity that exists today and yesterday.
EAs don't care about humans. They care about consciousness, which soon will be deduced to electrochemical impulses between neurons and thus effective altruists will care about that. Vote for a brain in the vat! I think I’ve found my meme.
Honestly, I bet people would vote for that. Probably more people than would vote for Kamala. I predict someone will run on these values in the next election or so. Especially after this comment:
Also, I will likely support this in the short-term, but ultimately vote against it in the long run. I see EA as chemotherapy. We might be able to slow the growth of the most cancerous existential risks, but ultimately it will kill the host. We’ll need better treatments along the way. All of this talk about Salaman Rushdie lately has me thinking more about my values. I think the most important thing someone who calls themselves an altruist can do is push back against the prevailing narrative, and push for short-term change in the meantime.
I'm not really up to date on EA; I've read the wikipedia articles and a few other think pieces but not any of the fundamental books recommended on the website, so I may be way off base. That said, the problem I have is when EA, a social reform movement, becomes a political movement the outcomes can differ wildly based on who's making the decisions. It's not unreasonable to think that people espousing EA as their dominant philosophy lead us into a Brave New World. Again, this is a surface level take, but I don't know that I'm willing to go all the way down the rabbit hole on this one.
As a tiny, tiny side note: dude is using "miho" to be condescending...is he trying to use "mi hija"? 'Cause, if so, that's fucking hilarious.
As a blacc man whose synapses are trapped innaYTvat, I recommend train-hopping, but only Soul Trains, 'cuz the music is better… Also, for those of us with high plateaus, we rarely experience the struggle for (with?) something that has the potential to have real world consequences and, just as often, we can intellectualize ourselves into inaction. Potential unactualized is itself a vat.