I'm not sure I agree that Nietzsche had a metaphysics, but I'm also not sure I understand what that word actually means. Is physics different from metaphysics? For the will to power is just a further generalization of the concepts: Darwinism, memetics, anti-fragility. He traces human behaviour back to the law of physics, which looks like a "will to power" like darwinism looks like a "will to fitness", but neither are wills or even laws, they're tautologies. It may also be that Nietzsche somehow realized that chaos was as important to life as order, and that this is why he liked chance, accident and the Dionysian. I think modern research on the "edge of chaos" confirm his findings, but it's just an intuition as I don't understand the concept in depth.
I'll also add that Nietzsche wrote (when translated, at least): "In itself, there is nothing sick about the herd animal, it is even invaluable; but, incapable of leading itself". He only wants the herd not to dominate the values of those outside of it, he's not trying to get rid of the mediocre. He even wrote "Hatred for mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher" and "What I fight against: that an exceptional type should make war on the rule - instead of grasping that the continued existence of the rule is the precondition for the value of the exception"
I'm not confident to add anymore right now, and going into depth on Nietzsche is very difficult. He was much more intelligent than people give him credit for. I'm at least 3.5 standard deviations above the norm and Nietzsche is so far above me that I don't dare to correct him on anything
Re: the specific example of fentanyl addicts and petty criminals in SF is that they’re not happy; they’re acting under compulsion (their addiction). Locking them up in an involuntary detox facility certainly won’t make them happy in the short run, but maybe gives them a chance to turn their life around and be happier in the long run.
Scott, you are tiptoeing towards a solid argument for moral realism! Try adding other pairs of “competing” ideologies to the mix and ask the same question: do the converge? And do they, individually, break apart when taken to extremes? What you’re describing looks like nicomachean ethics: that virtue is the mean of two vices.
What does it look like, if, in general, instrumental rationality consists of a series of tradeoffs which, in a sense, are opposites, and yet by themselves taken to extremes lead to self-destruction? That’s what I think moral reality actually is: just long term survival plus thriving which requires the successful union of seemingly opposed philosophies, all of which are approximations of long term survival that work by picking one end of a tradeoff curve.
I think it's possible to, using a bunch of parameters like this (eg how long-term to be, how much to smooth everything out, how deep a veil of ignorance to use) get something like morality. But where this process and morality diverge, I usually vote for morality, plus you need some incentive to do this process at all and to choose the "right" parameters.
I don't think I'm 100% moral realist, but I think a very small amount of subjective/assumed/intuitive morality can go a really really long way.
If the process and morality diverge, how can you tell? Religious persons would just say, “this is evidence that you have a moral conscience and believe it more so than you’d trust the results of any rational process.”
I think most people know this is true: No amount of evidence would convince me to kill and eat my own children, nor would that work for any sane adult. You’d much sooner believe your reasoning process was faulty, because if we are honest with ourselves, sane adults trust their moral intuition OVER their rational faculties. So really this idea of being rational is always going to be subservient to our internal conception of the good. Someone who recoils in horror at, eg homosexuality or Trump isn’t going to consider evidence they are wrong, because, like us, their moral values inhibit rationality and this is a feature, not a bug.
The only question could be, well, what are those moral values and can we be wrong about them? If we were, how would we know?
I think this last part is then the answer to “pretending to try.” I think it’s worth asking: what exactly are you pretending? To advance your own utility function? I tried that experiment and found it uninspiring. I couldn’t keep pretending since I just didn’t care that much. What’s the point?
But what if you tried a different experiment?
What if you tried pretending that being itself has an intrinsically good order, but that by substituting our own flawed conceptions of the good, we make a mess of things, for ourselves and our loved ones? What if you tried pretending that by loving and trusting reality itself, and then acting as if the ground of being were pure love, we could heal the world in a recursive fashion? I’ve found that a much more inspiring game of make believe to play, because I keep accumulating evidence that it _actually works_, which makes it easier to pretend even more so.
Absent that positive feedback loop - where make believe experimental runs of a strategy produce real evidence that the strategy works - my effort never got off the ground.
> Someone who recoils in horror at, eg homosexuality or Trump isn’t going to consider evidence they are wrong, because, like us, their moral values inhibit rationality and this is a feature, not a bug.
Ex fundamentalist Christian here. My moral/emotional perception of homosexuality changed from disgust to neutrality. Also, vegetarian here - my moral/emotional perception of eating meat changed from neutrality to disgust. Clearly, human values can change, and it's hard to see how if not by *some* kind of argument and evidence (be it sound or not).
Yes, I agree completely they can change. They can’t do a 180, though. I think they change through osmosis if the values of the people we spend most of our time around.
I think our brains are computing a solution to an optimization problem: “what’s the best explanation”, where “best” minimizes internal tension between experience and expectations. Going against the people around you adds a ton of tension; people would only do this if there were either a greater source of internal tension opposing your neighbors, or else some internal mechanism that relieved tension.
Interesting! I don't know anyone who has not been raised by atheists, and I tend to see revulsion over homosexuality more as a "masculinist" "real men aren't acting camp" thing than religious thing. I always thought religion is just an excuse for that.
> I don't know anyone who has not been raised by atheists
Fascinating! I mean only one of my parents was religious, but the were free to indoctrinate me, and they did.
Re. real men vs religion: hard to (causally) separate for me. I was definitely explicitly taught that its a disgusting sin (as opposed to some other sins like lying, which implicitly were just sins).
The religion promoted quite strict gender roles, so some "real men don't X" was also part of it. Personally, I felt much more disgust towards gays than lesbians (if I felt disgusted at all), and *perhaps* others did too, but at least some definitely found lesbianism disgusting as well. So the "real men" perspective itself can't fully explain it, I think.
A big example is the Marquess of Queensbury who was an outspoken atheist and a huge devotee of manliness. He was quite famously annoyed at what Oscar Wilde was doing with his son.
My favourite map ever. It is basically about two different ways of being liberal or conservative. Notice that they correlate. But there are outliers.
One outlier is my Ex-Commie Eastern Europe. Secular, but survivalist. So basically don't worry about god or tradition, but on the other hand we are too busy trying to survive to allow caring about self-expression, just do the survivalist tough stuff everybody else is doing. No time for thinking about pronouns, go dig potatoes.
The other outlier is Latin America but also USA. Life is all about self-expression - but limited by traditional/religious norms.
Bubbles are interesting: today 70% of Americans are religious, and twenty years ago (when people on this site may have been in the process of being raised) it was closer to 85%. Even today only 5% of Americans consider themselves atheist, and about 5% more consider themselves agnostic (the remainder believe in some kind of higher power, just not in an organized way).
I'm trying to think if I personally (IRL) know anyone who was raised by atheists. Can't think of any!
Funny enough, in my part of the world, almost everyone is an atheist, or functionally behaves like one. At least the part of the world where I grew up in, (former) East Germany.
Commie countries were officially atheist and a lot of people, while not quite believing the propaganda, were still "apatheists", just not caring, no explicit animus, just simply not interested. On the other hand masculinist norms were strong, because of survivalism and because the state also wanted some tough soldiers and workers.
If we go back to the beginning, Socrates, Plato, the idea is that we have correct moral intuitions, but they fail in some special cases. So the goal of philosophy is to discover the base algorithm behind these intuitions and apply it in those cases.
This was not succesful. After many attempts Plato just gave up and said best thing is we just keep out of other people's business - to each their own. But since our ethical dilemmas are precisely about what is people's own, what is their rightful due, it does not help.
We generally know how not to harm people. It is just a social contract along the Golden Rule. We know how to help people on the small, personal scale, just intuitively. What we do not know is how to help people on the grand scale and this is what Scott and EA and all are trying to figure out. I just given up on helping people on the grand scale. Just helping people on the small scale can turn the world into the Shire and that is good enough.
I'm sure this is a two-way process. People use moral intuition to inform and modify their rational process and they also use rational process to modify their moral intuition to try and build a coherent moral worldview with low number of exceptions.
The philosopher Jonathan Bennett (who died in March this year) has a sort-of Popperian approach to morality, which is easier to defend than moral realism (defined as the idea that verified moral truth exist). Bennett argues that we must stay vigilant when it comes to consider valid arguments against our present morality, i.e. we must always stay open to the possibility that our morality might be "falsified" in the future. Excerpt from his classic discussion of the tension between moral principles and spontaneous human sympathies, in "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn":
"it is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false. Still, although I can’t point to any of my beliefs and say “This is false”, I don’t doubt that some of my beliefs are false; and so I should try to remain open to correction. Similarly, I accept every single item of my morality – that is inevitable – but I am sure that my morality could be improved, which is to say that it could undergo changes which I should be glad of once I had made them. So I must try to keep my morality open to revision, exposing it to whatever valid pressures there are – including pressures from my sympathies.
I don’t give my sympathies a blank cheque in advance. In a conflict between [moral] principle and [human] sympathy, principles ought sometimes to win. ..( )...Still, one’s sympathies should be kept as sharp and sensitive and aware as possible, and not only because they can sometimes affect one’s principles or one’s conduct or both. [The poet Winfred] Owen, at any rate, says that feelings and sympathies are vital even when they can do nothing but bring pain and distress.
In another poem [Insensibility] he speaks of the blessings of being numb in one’s feelings: “Happy are the men who yet before they are killed/Can let their veins run cold” he says. .... He contrasts these “happy” ones, who “lose all imagination”, with himself and others “who with a thought besmirch/ Blood over all our soul”. Yet the poem’s verdict goes against the “happy” ones. Owen does not say that they will act worse than the others. ...He merely says that they are the losers because they have cut themselves off from the human condition:
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
First published in Philosophy 49 (1974), p. 123 - 134.
You ask: How is it useful to maintain an element of doubt as to the validity of your moral worldview (be it a version of utilitarianism of vitalism or whatever)?
A concrete example usually serves better than a thousand abstract words, so let me illustrate with an example, from Bennett’s article: How Heinrich Himmler justified his moral worldview back in 1943. Long quote from Bennett:
… has [Himmler’s interpretation of Nazism] a moral basis at all? And if it has, was there in Himmler’s mind any conflict between [his] morality and [ordinary, spontaneous] human sympathy? Yes there was. Here is a quote [from a speech he held October 4th 1943 for SS top brass]:
“I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter…I mean…the extermination of the Jewish race…Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Himmler saw his policies as being hard to implement while still retaining one’s human sympathies – while still remaining “a decent fellow”. He is saying that only the weak take the easy way out and just squelch their sympathies, and is praising the stronger and more glorious course of retaining one’s sympathies while acting in violation of them [notice the “heroic” overtones in this stance]. In the same spirit, he ordered that when executions were carried out in concentration camps, those responsible “are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude”.
A year later he boasted that the SS had wiped out the Jews “without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and soul. The danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla of their becoming heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure life, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.”
And there really can’t be any doubt that the basis of Himmler’s policies was a set of principles which constituted his morality – a sick, bad, wicked morality. He described himself as caught in “the old tragic [Kantian] conflict between will and obligation”. And when his physician Kersten protested at the intention to destroy the Jews, saying that the suffering involved was “not to be contemplated”, Kersten reports that Himmler replied:
He knew that it would mean much suffering for the Jews…”It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life [notice that this is a very vitalistic justification, with a dash of Great Man/übermensch added]. Yet we must…cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”
This, I submit, is the language of morality.
So in this case, tragically, [Himmler’s] morality won out over [spontaneous, not-derived-from-ideas ordinary human] sympathy.
…so far Bennett (end of quote).
I hope you agree that this example illustrates the rationality (so to speak) of not allowing oneself to be totally swallowed up in any moral worldview, just as it is rational not to be totally swallowed up in any scientific theory of what constitutes “truth”.
PS Bennett also adds:
I am sure that many of Himmler’s killers did extinguish their sympathies, becoming “heartless ruffians” rather than “decent fellows”; but not Himmler himself. Although his policies ran against the human grain to a horrible degree, he did not sandpaper down his emotional surfaces so that there was no grain there, allowing his actions to slide along smoothly and easily. He did, after all, bear his hideous burden, and even paid a price for it. He suffered a variety of nervous and physical disabilities, including nausea and stomach-convulsions, and Kersten was doubtless right in saying that these were “the expression of a physic division which extended over his whole life”.
I feel like there's certainly something to the idea of balancing drives to optimize flourishing and survival... But I think this philosophy falls short. It is a part of the picture, but actually is working in service to some deeper truth.
Consider, for a moment, if I were to create a self-sufficient race of intelligent beings. If this race were based on uplifted octopi, they might come to very different conclusions about 'moral reality' than us uplifted apes.
Similarly, if I were to create a race of intelligent digital beings with substrate independence, I expect such beings would find that the moral philosophies which seemed to extrapolate to being conducive to their long term flourishing were quite different from human philosophies.
And, indeed, were humans to undergo substantial genetic drift over some few million years, I also would expect that their flourishing would be best supported by adherence to a different set of philisophical extrapolations.
Your 'realism' takes some approximate current state of the intelligent beongs you are familiar with as an unspoken assumption. As of recently, technology has undermined the foundations of those assumptions. The set of intelligent beings is no longer fixed to a glacial shift over many human generations. The illusion of moral reality no longer serves as a sufficiently stable guiding star to generate wise plans for the divergent futures of rapidly diversifying intelligent beings.
It is not widely enough understood that moral realism doesn't have to involve universalism. Minimally, MR is the claim that there are mind independent moral truths, and such truths can depend on nomental things such as "what species an I".
For that matter, Moral Relativism also breaks down at extremes, degenerating into "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law" if you take its premises too seriously.
Realist.... relative to what? If by "moral realism" you mean some kind of cosmic moral truth independent of the existence of our species or any species, that more or less brings God into the picture, which is quite the prerequisite.
On the other hand, if it means "relative to our evolved nature", then yeah, you can probably find elements of a sense of "good" that are intrinsically human. Incest for example seems like a near-universal taboo, but also most everyone appreciates thriving and non-suffering by default. The big question is really how far that goes, and how specific it can get before it things get blurred by cultural variability.
That's how I took it. If we look at the human animal, and what is good for it, then that is moral. Probably still breaks down at edges. Like incest, that is a universal Taboo, but not always. With sparse populations, like early settlers, maybe your cousin was the only female around. So incest becomes ok if the species, or group, will die out without procreating's. Same with different foods. Once the group is pushed to survival mode, the 'relative' morality would change again. (of course, even in todays world, we see that groups that think they are threatened, fairly quickly change their morals, say the number of Christians now favoring violence ).
On the other hand, paperclip maximizer doesn't care about well-adjusted children growing up in well-funded schools, thus ending up becoming military-industrialists producing thousands of tanks that can defeat the enemy who's morally in the wrong. It cares about paperclips.
As a matter of fact all humans have near-identical preferences, when compared to the vastness of space of possible preferences. This is because we share an evolutionary history. Probably all or most evolved technologically advanced species have preferences to e.g. playing positive-sum games or for numbers going up because those traits are adaptive, although martians might have an innate aesthetic preference towards the sky being pinkish-red rather than blue.
But I don't think this should be confused for moral realism (you can give clipper infinite compute and empirical data, and it will never construct anything like human morality): rather, it can be used as a case for moral constructivism (with a welcome observation that humans tend to construct similar moral systems, which brings hope to our ability solve practical "metamoral" problems - how to ethically reason in multiagent situations where agents posses different ethical systems), or to simply take the things-that-humans-value-in-person and call them virtues, and ground your ethical theory on that.
It seems like we only know which pairs of vices to choose in such a calculation because we independently know that their mean comes close to maximizing well-being in some sort of modern (=post-Sidgwickian) consequentialist sense. Anorexia and gluttonous obesity are vices with a consequentially good mean, but the mean of anorexia and bulimia is pretty terrible.
>Define altruism as “try to increase happiness and decrease suffering across a society” and vitalism as “try to increase strength and decrease weakness across a society” [...] Most things that do one also do the other: [...]
> Increasing wealth. A rich society is both happier and stronger than a poor society.
Not necessarily, e.g. a democracy that goes from almost everyone being poor with one billionaire, to almost everyone being poor with one trillionaire, will have more wealth, but that wealth can be used for regulatory capture by the trillionaire, transforming the democracy into an oligarchy that ignores the needs of most people in favor of the few wealthy.
> Advancing technology. An advanced society has more ways to make its people happy and to win conflicts than a primitive society.
Not necessarily the case, e.g. autonomous drones, mass surveillance, enhanced torture, misaligned AI...
> Saving lives. This is altruistic by definition. But living people are generally better at achieving their goals than dead people, and a society with more living people is stronger than one where lots of people have died (eg they can field bigger armies). There are some exceptions - it’s not altruistic if the people are suicidal, and it’s not vitalist if the people are useless parasites - but in most cases the goals converge.
Not necessarily, if you save someone but they have a disability, or trauma, or other disadvantage that most people in need of saving will have, the average vitality of society goes down, which the vitalist doesn't like.
>Winning wars. This is vitalist by definition. But if you think your country is in the right, its victory will make the world better and increase utility.
The vitalist will most often try to win the war, but the altruist will most often seek a diplomatic solution to decrease casualties, the two are at odds.
Disagree on the war example, it depends on the conditions. I support Ukraine's continued struggle over a diplomatic solution where they lose territory, for example, because the latter likely provokes more future wars for territory than the former and is therefore net worse even accounting for the continued damage of the current war.
That argument (that negotiated terms "likely provokes more future wars") really looks like you decided on it after you picked the conclusion you wanted (that Russia should continue to be warred against).
I don't see why (and I feel you did not give an argument). The post-WWII period of relative interstate peace is based on large part on a consensus that we shouldn't try to shift borders by force (which is itself based on the reality that doing so usually destroys whatever value you were hoping to capture, and then some). If somebody does expand their bordes by force, it signals that that's back on the table, and every autocrat not held back by popular pressure might start grabbing land. Taiwan is the most obvious next example.
Is Taiwan really the example you want to pick? Because officially (the UN, for example, but also the US) it's part of China, and any principled argument relying on "sovereignty"/"territorial integrity" etc. would lead to backing CHINA against the secessionists/rebels/traitors.
Nobody in power actually BELIEVES any of that, evidenced by their support of Israel. It's all just realpolitik. Now, if you want to war against Russia because you really hate the Russian people, delenda Sovieta, you think a new regime might let you put some military bases there to threaten China, etc., sure, those are sensible goals, just ones I do not share. But expanding a military alliance (even a "purely defensive" one) right up to the borders of your enemy isn't the act of someone who actually wants peace.
Taiwan is the example I want to pick, because the US will back it against China and the war will be devastating for the world. I agree this is a muddy issue on paper and I know most people have officially signed on to the "one China" thing, but have hedged it in various ways to preserve ambiguity (e.g. the US "acknowledges" China's position and the UK "take[s] note" of it).
I agree that you have some points about people crossing this line in various contexts. Israel is an obvious example where the US has sheltered it repeatedly for clear efforts to expand into Palestine and blocked Palestinian recognition, which I think is bad and a mistake. I however disagree that this renders the entire thing completely meaningless to the point where I can't possibly be opposed to Russia taking Ukrainian territory (as indeed I am opposed to Israel asserting sovereignty over Palestinian territory).
"But expanding a military alliance (even a "purely defensive" one) right up to the borders of your enemy isn't the act of someone who actually wants peace."
This I have some disagreements with. It's not like the US or NATO invaded Ukraine to "expand" their territory. Ukraine is a sovereign country and ultimately can choose what diplomatic agreements to enter into. Ukraine joining a treaty does not constitute an aggressive act. If Ukraine HAD joined NATO prior to the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been one. It's kind of absurd to argue that the country that got invaded is the one that doesn't "want peace".
Was Cuba a sovereign country which could decide to host Soviet nukes if it wanted to? Would that have been a not-aggressive act? I don't think that I've ever seen anyone seriously argue for such a position, for good reason. And yet, the converse of this is precisely what NATO has been doing for the last several decades. Of course, the crucial difference is that America actually can enforce a "sphere of influence", and Russia can't, but belatedly decided to LARP as such anyway.
Hypothetically, if Canada had a "Revolution of Dignity"-style change of administration following which the new Prime Minister entered a treaty with China to place, say, nukes in Toronto, is it your assertion that that would NOT be viewed as an aggressive act?
When Cuba did that with the Soviet Union, it was.
And I didn't say Ukraine doesn't want peace, insofar it's an independent agent with wants of any kind. What I said was that US/NATO doesn't want peace: when you're bear-baiting, you don't care if the dog gets mauled.
I want to retract my statement about you deciding on the argument after you came to the conclusion you wanted. That isn't fair, and I ought to have assigned the blame instead to the people who came up with it and presented it to you.
I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, just having adopted positions you haven't thought too deeply about. For example, where do you stand on Azerbaijan conquering Artsakh ("Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?")? Or Ethiopia's agreement with Somaliland? Or Kashmir? Kosovo?
Arguments about "sovereignty" etc. aren't meant to be taken seriously. No meaningful decision is made based on them: those are instead generally about geopolitical self-interest.
The vagueness of Taiwan's status under international law is precisely why we don't want to get rid of the ban on wars of annexation laid out in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Treaty, as Timothy M. explains.
If you take the "One China" argument seriously, then any war over Taiwan would be a civil war between pro- and anti-democracy forces. And western intervention on the behalf of pro-democracy forces in foreign civil wars is pretty standard behaviour and uncontroversial.
I don't see any point of disagreement. I agree that democracy promotion is the likely framing, and I don't doubt that most of the people condemning Russia's invasion of a "sovereign country" ("brutal and unprovoked") would have no qualms about America doing the same. I also agree that the "West" (I mean the US) has regularly done this kind of thing.
I'm not even saying it's a bad thing to do. What I AM saying is that a consistent application of a principle of respecting sovereignty, territorial integrity etc. would forbid it.
> backing CHINA against the secessionists/rebels/traitors
Yes, we'll aid the rightful government of China against the rebels and traitors who've been occupying the mainland provinces of China for the last 80 years or so?
Does this meaningfully differ from Russia supporting the rightful governments of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics against the "Nazis" in Kiev?
Right. The invention of the Haber-Bosch process just before WWI lifted the Malthusian ceiling and the horrors of the Great War led Westerners to agree in 1928 that wars of conquest were now bad and were no longer to be allowed. Abrogating that 96 year old agreement would be a huge step backward.
In the literal sense, sure, but "country starts a war to seize territory from its neighbor" is a different scenario from "country starts a war with its neighbor, loses, neighbor takes territory during the war, country rejects the return of said territory in exchange for a peace agreement as part of a written policy of not negotiating with neighbor".
Israel does not simply holds the GH as a sort of bargaining chip until Syria gives in an accepts a peace agreement, but declared it sovereign Israeli territory with US support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights_Law
"the Golan Heights will remain Israel's forever" - land-for-peace is no longer an offer.
True. This was an explicit principle at founding the UN, that the League of Nations failed to prevent WW2 because it had many goals. The UN has one goal: 1945 borders are sacrosanct, no matter how unjust they are. Secession is acceptable, annexation not. Even the Soviets merely fought for a regime change in Afghanistan, did not annex territory. Of course a regime change implies a pseudo-annexation of the whole, but that is a different story.
Given that e.g. in Africa the borders make no ethnic sense at all, if this was not enforced, the whole continent would blow up.
Taiwan is not a good example because Taiwan accepts the One China doctrine, they see themselves as a legitimate government of the whole. Thus an invasion would be seen as a civil war by both sides - simply the continuation of the old civil war. Much like a Vietnam or Korea case.
Realistically, Russia WILL take some territory. But then the message will be yeah you can annex some relatively small territory are a huge cost (and everything on that territory is blown up and you spend an arm and leg to rebuild it), still not something that looks attractive.
These appear to be quibbles around the edges rather than counter-arguments; is the argument here that the quibbles matter? Because I am not seeing how "oligarchy can happen" negates "rich countries stronger than poor" or how "some tech is bad" negates "advanced societies have more tools to promote happiness and win conflicts".
The other two points seem to be relying on assumptions to do a lot of heavy lift- e.g., "if you save lives this will result in a growing population of less-alive people who outweigh the benefits of saving productive people" or "altruists will sue for peace on terms inferior to what vitalists would accept". Illness is a massive drain on productivity, and death robs us of institutional knowledge and experience. Where do you put the thumb? Having a bellicose neighbor is a net negative for any society, why would the altruist not precision-bomb the leadership and military infrastructure out of existence?
Are there concrete examples or specific real-world scenarios you are concerned about?
> Because I am not seeing how "oligarchy can happen" negates "rich countries stronger than poor" or how "some tech is bad" negates "advanced societies have more tools to promote happiness and win conflicts".
I wasn't focused on the vitalist side, which I'm happy to grant, I was focused on the altruistic side. Yes technology may make a country more able to win conflicts, but not necessarily promote happiness, and yes an oligarchy may be more vitalist (have a stronger leader), but is not more altruistic (happier populace).
Same with your second point, an altruist is perfectly fine with saving less-alive people. As I said, it is the vitalist that doesn't like it when the average vitality goes down (Vitalism could of course be amended to circumvent this, e.g. a "longtemist vitalist" might be fine with temporarily increasing the amount of weak people now, as long as they help create more strong people in the far future, free idea if anyone wants to write it). You're right that an altruist might in some cases choose to precision-bomb the leadership, but they wouldn't like it, they would prefer a solution where no-ones preferences were frustrated. Vitalist on the other hand like to win wars, so they would not seek solutions were no-ones preferences were frustrated, the goals of the vitalist and the altruist are at odds.
> Not necessarily, if you save someone but they have a disability, or trauma, or other disadvantage that most people in need of saving will have, the average vitality of society goes down, which the vitalist doesn't like.
Sure, anyone in need of saving has *some* disadvantage, namely at the very least whatever is currently/will be threatening their life. And sure, the *average* vitality may go down if you don't let them die, because a "negative" persists. But:
1. who says their disadvantage results in their *overall* strength/vitality/whatever being negative? Say I'm in a wheelchair - I'm unlikely to win a race, but I may be physically strong in other regards.
2. Is being mentally strong not very important? Disabled or mentally ill people can certainly be mentally strong.
3. Who says average vitality is to be maximized over e.g. vitality per person (which is a goal, not a metric)? The *relative* strength of the saved people might be even higher than of the average person, since these people may HAVE to struggle and push themselves much more than average. And would not at least some vitalists aim for strong *people* (which these saved individuals could well be) over eg. *average total* muscle mass/mental fortitude?
3.1 If you really were to care about the average, then you can maximize that by culling ALL the weak, which is to say everyone but the most steel-muscled and -minded. I'm not sure that's what anyone is advocating for, so...
There are version of vitalism where the argument doesn't apply, and there are versions where it does apply. I think it does apply in the conventional form of vitalism, but as you've shown, you can construct a form of vitalism where it doesn't apply
These all sound like pretty contrived examples. When evaluating an assertion, you should always add "everything else being equal" mentally to the end of the sentence. Otherwise, of course there are always weird edge cases that one can quibble about. But those edge cases aren't usually the point of the discussion, and so they just distract from figuring out where you actually stand.
I don't think they are contrived examples at all. Regulatory capture exists and is already happening, same with autonomous drones, mass surveillance and enhanced torture (though I'm willing to drop the misaligned AI since that doesn't exist at this moment). Likewise for lingering trauma and disability after adverse life events. And of course there are at this moment several wars going on, as there have been for the past thousands of years.
My personal theory is that "trauma" is caused by psychological unpreparedness. There's a lot of horrible stuff in the world, and we veer from telling people that everything sucks (but it sucks less if you "who whom") to pretending that nothing will go wrong (if you just subscribe to this belief system).
This is what I was saying all along, I think. The trouble with Vulgar Nietzscheans is that they see strength as the ONLY moral value. The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape, which generates the VN backlash.
Strength should be part of the moral landscape because
1) it is good to make people strong, not only happy, so they can get less dependent on others and take care of their own utility, or can give forward. Teach a man to fish and all that.
2) if we are pledged to do good, it is better if we become stronger, perhaps, for the perfect utilitarian even a moral duty
Why do we often leave it out of the moral landscape?
La Rochefoucauld had put it this way: "No one should be praised for his goodness if he has not strength enough to be wicked. All other goodness is but too often an idleness or powerlessness of will." (This quote makes the Nice Guy cry. I know. I am one. I hate it. But I probably need it.)
Weak people are often... safer. They don't do bad stuff, they cannot, or do not dare to. So they can turn it into a moral claim of sainthood. The problem is, they don't do good stuff either.
If I am roomies with young Mike Tyson, every day he rolls a D20 and does something nice like buying me dinner on 1 to 19, and on 20, beats me up, I think I would prefer the passive gamer roomie.
The world is not symmetric. Bad is stronger than good in the sense of easier to break a vase than to put it back together, because entropy. Bad is downhill, good is uphill. So easy to burn a town down, so hard to rebuild it. I wonder sometimes how we are still here.
We see so much evil in the world, that people who do neither bad nor good seem like an improvement. This is why it gets left out. And well they are an improvement. If Vladimir Putin spent his entire life playing videogames, the world would be better for it. So I guess this is why.
After all, if someone does get strong - how do we know they will keep their pledge to do good?
Still the goal we should optimize for is not safe do-nothing-at-all people. We need to accept some risk. Goodness is still more important than strength, but strength is still important.
(This could be an explanation for the women don't want Nice Guys phenomenon. They don't want the specific kind of Nice Guy who does not do bad things, but also does not do good things, and generally just does not really do anything. I know. I managed to screw up a whole marriage by doing nothing bad, but not enough of the good things either. Perhaps there is a ratio. You can get away with doing one bad thing for every ten good thing you do in a relationship. Such a person is not a saint. But more useful and more interesting than someone who does nothing.)
Because Earth isn't a closed system in regards to entropy. In a sense, natural selection is all about finding ways to burn negentropy more efficiently, simply burning towns has stopped being good enough a long time ago.
Are Vulgar Nietzscheans real or are they a strawman?
"Strength is the only moral value" sounds like a combination of words that someone might say for the purposes of annoying others, but doesn't sound like an actual moral position that anyone could actually hold after some thought. Nietzsche certainly didn't. I don't think Walt Bismarck does either. Maybe some of his less-sophisticated teenage commenters might believe it on some level?
"Strength is the only moral value." Perhaps not. But without strength, there can be no other moral value, since you need strength to preserve any value. Therefore strength is the most foundational moral value.
> The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape
I don't think this is true, consequentialists don't leave it out of their moral landscape for the sort of reasons you gave, it is part of the instrumental convergence.
But it is different to value it instrumentally, than to value it for itself, and particularly to value it as strongly for itself than the Nietzscheans
«The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape, which generates the VN backlash.»
Those that leave strength out of their moral landscape have nothing worthwhile to say about morality, whatsoever.
«Weak people are often... safer. They don't do bad stuff, they cannot, or do not dare to. So they can turn it into a moral claim of sainthood. The problem is, they don't do good stuff either.»
Weak people impose massive negative externalities upon others! A strong person alone cannot resist Leviathan. But Leviathan could not possibly exist, if at least the majority was strong! Because of the weak, everybody must pay income tax, send their kids to horribly mismanaged schools (which of course perpetuate weakness!), tell a central authority where they live, be burdened with massive debts and be forced to support and suffer under all kinds of idiotic schemes. A strong person that goes wrong may spill some blood, but can be fought and kept in check, by other strong people. But the sins of the weak created a monster, that will be the death of all of us!
> Weak people impose massive negative externalities upon others!
You know the saying about the willow tree bending, but the oak breaking?
I've thought for a while that a forest of oaks provides shelter for an entire ecosystem. The difference is whether an individual oak has capable allies.
>but minimizing suffering directly and monomaniacally to infinity will take you someplace weird. That’s not a problem with altruism, it’s a problem with infinity.
I am not sure I buy this. I think a lot of smart people are extremists, because they value logical consistency over practicality, and thus I want ideas that are safe to take to the extreme.
The idea that you shouldn't trust any idea beyond its known and demonstrated range of applicability. That's one of my key heuristics, so I basically agree with Scott on this.
Morality, whether religious or secular, is a model of empirical data (situations vs. a sense of rightness or wrongness). Models lose trustworthiness insofar as we use them to extrapolate outside the range of the observed data.
There's really no need to go to Extremistan. History is littered with examples of altruism and vitalism being at odds.
To start with, adopting agriculture is also known as "the greatest mistake" because it almost certainly decreased the average health and happiness. It's a mistake from an altruistic point of view, that is. From a vitalist point of view, the agricultural societies won out because they had more population which could win wars.
The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party. This is a cliché of course, but there's a reason it exists.
> The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party.
I don't think the facts back up this reading, unless you define "decadent" as "prioritizing winning internal conflict at the expense of weakening society as a whole," which is certainly not the same as "altruism maximizing."
Yes, I'm aware that most historical civilisation collapse was not really caused by their altruism or hedonism. That's why I called it a cliché. The following is trying to be its comprehensive rebuttal, by a historian:
My point is, even if the cliché is wrong in majority of cases, it's still at least partially true for some of them. Mongols were not anybody's idea of altruism.
You seem to have a model where the problem of "decadence" is smaller than people imagine, but real and directionally accurate, and therefore we should accord it less weight than our naive intuitions would give it, but still some weight.
I think acoup argues pretty persuasively that it's not even directionally accurate. Built-up civilizations with specialization and luxury and strong laws are MORE stable than those with the opposite traits. They're not invincible, they do sometimes collapse, but it's not how you'd bet. Therefore this "decadence" cliché should have zero or even negative weight, rather than small-but-positive weight as you argue.
Also, you seem to think that calling it a "cliché" is an admission that it is mostly-false, or at least greatly exaggerated. I do not normally assume that something is mostly-false just because it is a cliché and I would be pretty surprised if the median reader interpreted your comment that way.
cliché: a phrase, remark, or opinion that has very often been said or expressed before
Being often said is not a guarantee of truth, just of a perceived wisdom that seems worth repeating. My position is, that this particular cliché is overstated and even false in its strong form. The reason I brought it up is simply because it serves to refute Scott's claim that you have to go to Extremistan to find examples of altruism and vitalism in opposition.
If you're claiming no, it wouldn't serve because it's completely and utterly false, a "decadent" civilization never happened, well have some concrete examples:
* After Rome won the Punic Wars, they went on a conquering spree: Macedonia, Greece, the Middle East. Livy describes it all very much like a vigorous, vital state conquering decadent states.
* The simple explanation for the fall of Soviet Union is their standard of living feel too obviously behind the West, because their productivity was behind the West. The reason for that was because they were trying to build an equitable socialist paradise, and in that system there's no reason to be more productive than the next guy. Whereas the wage slaves in the West had every reason to improve their productivity. Altruism/decadence versus vitality.
* Same thing seems to be happening now between EU and USA. Europeans enjoy their long vacations and secure jobs, Americans keep toiling. More generally, if a state's citizens choose and vote for more leisure and equality, that will hurt their long-term productivity and lead to a relative economic decline.
The stagnation of the USSR wasn’t due to military spending. Exporting military goods was one of the few areas where Soviet industry was competitive and profitable. Nor did the 80s see the soviets attempt to keep up with Reagan’s military ramp up.
The Soviet economy, such as it was, stagnated because they tried to use a system (socialism) under which societies can not function, not because they had 'excess military spending'
You are arguing against ridiculous caricatures of what I said.
Being a cliché does not automatically make something true, but it doesn't automatically make it false, either. I never said clichés are true. I said they are not automatically false.
"Look, a brown dog."
"That's not a dog, that's a cat."
"Obviously I know it's not a dog, I said it was BROWN. Being brown is not a guarantee of truth!"
I never said that no civilization has ever been decadent or that decadent civilizations can't fail. I said that luxury is not a predictor of failure. Civilizations generally have a lot of luxuries because they are successful. If I picked two random civilizations from two random moments in time, and asked you to predict which one is going to fail first, and the only thing you know is that one of them consumes more luxuries than the other, then you should bet on the failure of the non-luxurious civilization because it probably can't afford luxuries. You should NOT bet on the luxurious civilization failing "because it is decadent and weak".
Every strong and stable civilization with luxuries that has ever existed has seen declines in its ability to project power and generate wealth over a long enough timescale. Acoup doesn’t offer a good reason for why this happens, and this decline seems to correlate with hedonism.
I think the loop is fairly clear. We get wealthy, we become comfortable, our only real enemies are each other, we devote more and more time to political infighting, we burn the commons of social cohesion for temporary political advantage, and when an existential threat shows up, we lack the practice and ability and civilizational resources to handle it.
>The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party
He is very consistently against the Tough (Posturing) Dude Theory of History. Sparta, Fascism, Fremen and other nomads etc. But I am not sure why, what is the core reason, if any.
My best guess is this. Not the toughest wins, but things like numbers and resources, but some baseline toughness is needed. I know I am the type who would run away. But many civilized people were capable of this baselines toughness. But Late Romans were clearly not - they did not want to become soldiers.
This is why I fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture. That is the idea that men may not show vulnerability and may not show emotion except anger. Isn't that the ideal mindset of the soldier in battle? Without it, why not show vulnerability by running away?
> This is why I fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture.
Surely there are some pathologies that could be weeded out, while keeping a healthy appreciation of strength and resilience? But it depends on who defines "toxic", and how. Too many people have an agenda.
I think the reason why toughness is not very critical is because 1) you can train people to become tougher in a matter of weeks or months, but it takes generations to build a functioning economy and state apparatus. Maybe this requires some "baseline level of toughness" but 2) no society, not even the present day US, has ever been so prosperous as to hopelessly spoil literally all of its members. Elites can become spoiled and maybe the middle class, but you always have enough people in lower classes who do not leave a life of abundance and are more willing to become soldiers.
> Late Romans were clearly not - they did not want to become soldiers
Was this really a significant problem for them?
> fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture
Meh, I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the key things considered toxic about toxic masculinity is the idea that close intimate friendship between men is gay or something (jokes about bromance and all). But close friendship between men is what maintains troops cohesion and prevents soldiers from running (according to the Pedant, but also approximately every author who went to war and cared to write about the experience). So maybe the idea of toxic masculinity isn't as bad per se, as long as you oppose it with healthy masculinity, not with absence of masculinity.
I've never understood this agriculture claim. Surely any population, whether agricultural or not, will increase its numbers to the point where it hits the Malthusian limits and begins to suffer from hunger and disease?
Agricultural societies have more consistent food production, so their average standard of living can be lower before they get massive die-offs in bad years. They are also apt to develop nobles, gentry, or "big men" who take a lot of the agricultural surplus in good years; this further lowers the peasant standard of living at a given population point in most years, but also creates some slack that can be used to mitigate famines and crop failures.
In either model, the bad years are where the die-offs happen, so that's a lot of what determines Malthusian carrying capacity. The bad years are just as bad in both society types (perhaps a bit worse in hunter-gatherers), but the good years are a lot worse for they typical peasant than the good years are for hunter-gatherers.
Because the agricultural society winds up with more people faster than it produces more food.
It also depends how you define "standard of living". In Malthusian terms, where standard of living is measured in terms of the effects of material conditions on fertility and population growth, agricultural societies have a higher standard of living at a given population density for the reasons you intuit. But comparing equilibrium states where the population has reached carrying capacity then agricultural societies have the same standard of living as hunter gatherers, albeit at a much higher population density.
In terms of quantity and quality of food in a given year, hunter-gatherers and peasants will (at Malthusian equilibrium) have about the same standard of living in bad years, but hunter gatherers will have better standards of living in good years. This is reflected in the archeological record, where skeletons of people from early agricultural society generally show signs of stunted growth from chronic poor nutrition, much more so than non-agricultural societies.
But that doesn't reflect any of the other benefits that denser societies exhibit in terms of greater specialisation and varieties of consumption, not to mention potential selection biases in the archaeological record.
If you decrease average health and happiness, but also increase population, then it's not *obvious* that's a mistake from an altruist perspective. If I offered someone the option to murder the least-happy 10% of the world population while magically not affecting the happiness of the surviving 90%, most people wouldn't take it, even though it would increase average happiness.
Population ethics is hard. Most people don't want to bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion, but if you criticize that without providing a similarly-concrete alternative that you believe instead, then that's just another way of cheating by hand-waving your own philosophy while criticizing the concrete operationalizations of others, like Scott is complaining about in the post.
Your reasoning assumes that you will be born, regardless of how many or how few people are born in total. But if more total people are born, then *some* person's probability of being born has to be going up. Unless there's something special about you that makes you more likely to be born than other people, you need to consider scenarios where you don't exist, not just the scenarios where you do.
If you make that correction and then apply the most obvious variation of your earlier reasoning, you'll end up at maximizing total happiness instead of average. (With nonexistence being the "zero point", and anything worse than nonexistence being negative.)
(You could hypothetically take the position that you only care about maximizing your happiness-conditional-on-existence, and don't care about your probability of existence. But that isn't what you said. Also if that was your position then you should probably be playing a whole lot of Russian Roulette, or otherwise taking risks that have a chance of terminating your existence but positive expected-payout if they don't.)
I don't think it's unreasonable to consider murdering people as being different from preventing births. But BlaMario claimed that agriculture was a mistake (from an altruistic perspective), and the only reason they gave was that it reduced average health & happiness, so the murder example suffices to show the claim is, at best, missing some caveats.
Not sure why you'd expect the number of possible people to be infinite, unless you think an individual person can be infinitely big. The number of possible human-sized arrangements of physical matter is finite. Our universe is both finite and quantized, as far as we can tell.
Even if the number were infinite, deciding that you don't care about something just because you can't figure out the math to measure it seems like a pretty weird policy to me. Didn't you care about things before you learned math?
The idea that you don't care about how likely you are to come into existence, but you care a lot about how likely you are to continue existing once you exist, sounds to me like a rationalization. In order for it to even be coherent, you'd need to draw a distinction between "I continue to exist, but change over time" and "the exact person I am now ceases to exist, but an extremely similar person comes into existence the next moment", and I'm doubtful you can give any rigorous account of how those are different.
Don't vitalists usually rate the barbarian lifestyle of raiding and hunting as higher than the coddled life of mediocre suffering that agriculture brings?
It's a mistake from a local altruistic view, but you shouldn't be choosing only locally, you should be looking at what this affects in the future. It allowed more people which allowed flourishing and happiness far far beyond anything a hunter gatherer society could provide.
(Though, of course, your altruist back then has no clue what is possible)
Yea, this whole take is really bizarre. An altruist standing at the cusp of agriculture would clearly look at it and go "this will reduce food insecurity and make the world a better place". What exactly is the argument here? If you went back and time to that altruist and went "hey, you shouldn't do this, it's a total mistake and will allow the strong to exploit the weak and everyone will be miserable", if the altruist then asks you "so you are are living in an agricultural hellscape and wish to prevent the future?", and you respond "well, no, our society is glorious and full of technological marvels which would appear as magic to you, where even the poor own wealth enough to make a ruler of your time jealous beyond measure, where death and disease have been mitigated to let people live long prosperous lives. All of this is built on the bedrock of the agricultural revolution and wouldn't be possible without it. But if you squint at it the right way, things might get worse for a little bit before our glorious future happens, so from your perspective it's definitely a mistake and you should stop it or you aren't a good altruist." Don't you think the altruist is going to think you are insane?
Perhaps agriculture was a mistake from the vitalist perspective instead, after all, it let people become decadent! Wouldn't it be much more vitalist for everyone to struggle against the adversity of the natural world, where the weak perish and only the strong survive to reproduce? And if it leads to a future where everyone is a fat person on a heroine drip being taken care of by a robot, a vitalist might even consider it "the greatest mistake"!
i think the problem here is that a lot of these "vitalists" are not universalists. they're not trying to maximally increase the experience of power and life-energy across the entire population (if they we're, i imagine they'd end up with some kind of wildean socialism); they very explicitly prefer a society of a few conquering aristocrats who get to experience beauty and struggle, presiding over a mass of slaves whose lives will be spent in utter drudgery.
Agree, probably in large extent because they imagine that they would _surely_ be among those aristocrats due to their qualities (the imagined qualities regular society don't appreciate, for some strange reason).
Yes, thank you! I was confused not to see a bit of jujutsu acknowledging that if vitalism is trying "to increase strength and decrease weakness across a society," that's a pretty altruistic definition of vitalism from the get-go. Do Supermen care if they're helping everyone become strong and heroic as well, or are they just trying to make their own strength and heroism as big as possible, for its own sake? Honestly asking.
Notice that this example seems symmetrical, but isn't.
The mistake theorist is trying to cooperate with the conflict theorist, which the conflict theorist mistakenly interprets as an attack. This means the conflict theorist's understanding of what's happening is INACCURATE, which means the mistake theorist is CORRECT when they think the conflict theorist is making a mistake. The mistake theorist is right and the conflict theorist is wrong.
(Unless one or more parties are lying about their own positions, of course. But if the mistake theorist is doing that, then they never *actually* thought the other side was making a mistake, and if the conflict theorist is doing that, then the conflict only exists because they deliberately *started* a conflict by defecting from the cooperative equilibrium.)
The conflict theorist agrees with the mistake theorist on all matters of fact, but the opposing mistake theorist believes the conflict to be the result of a mistake. This means the mistake theorist's understanding of what's happening is INACCURATE, which means the conflict theorist is CORRECT when he thinks the mistake theorist is the enemy in his conflict. The conflict theorist is right and the mistake theorist is wrong.
You're constructing your hypothetical opening with "the mistake theorist is trying to cooperate with the conflict theorist," so of course BY CONSTRUCTION the conflict theorist is wrong. But one can just as easily construct the hypothetical the other way.
As I said in my last paragraph, it's possible someone is a wicked backstabbing liar. But if the mistake theorist is a wicked backstabbing liar, then they never *actually* thought the conflict theorist was making a mistake, which contradicts how YOU set up the scenario.
If both parties claim that their goal is X but disagree about the best strategy for accomplishing X, and neither of them is lying, then the conflict theorist is wrong and a mistake has been made. The mistake theorist might be wrong about the *nature* of the mistake--there are many possible ways to be wrong--but the conflict theorist *can't* be correct unless someone is a liar.
My hypothetical involves neither backstabbing nor lying. Conflict theorists do not assume these any more than mistake theorists assume bad faith and willful ignorance.
If both parties claim that their goal is X, but disagree on whether strategies χ or υ achieve it, as in your hypothetical, the mistake theorist is correct that there is a mistake, not a conflict.
However, if both parties agree that strategy χ achieves goal X, and the conflict theorist wants to implement strategy υ because he prefers goal Y instead, as in mine, this is a conflict and there is no mistake. This continues to be true even if the mistake theorist genuinely believes goal X to be better for everyone.
This seems wrong. If the conflict theorist has irreconcilably different goals, then he may correctly recognize that there is no avenue for cooperation. So in this situation it's the mistake theorist who is making a mistake, except the conflict theorist has no interest in correcting it.
Yep, that Oscar Wilde. See "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". London at that time was chock-full of Anglo-Irish on the make in literary circles, so of course Wilde and Shaw knew each other, and socialism was sort of fashionable amongst a certain set of the middle to upper middle classes - see the Fabians.
""The Soul of Man Under Socialism" is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde in which he expounds a libertarian socialist worldview and a critique of charity. The writing of "The Soul of Man" followed Wilde's conversion to anarchist philosophy, following his reading of the works of Peter Kropotkin."
"The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism."
Wilde was more interested in socialism as an impetus for aesthetic theory, I feel he would have been just fine with a robot making a billion extremely beautiful marble statues.
Huh, I don't like it. There is something very off with this vibe. But it is real. In the 1970's you could hitch-hike all over Europe, except Sweden, drivers would not stop there. The vibe was "I am paying enough taxes, if you can't afford a train ticket, talk with the government". I think this is not a good thing. Charity is good not only because it helps people but also because it connects people.
So pretty much Scrooge's "My taxes help support the public institutions which I’ve mentioned and they cost enough. Those who are badly off must go there"?
Unfortunately, Wilde was writing before socialism actually got implemented. Socialist countries were less scientifically productive than capitalist ones. But I think even in his own time it was false to claim that the majority of people squandered their potential on altruism.
"Scientifically productive" as in "productive, measured scientifically" or as in "produced the most science?" Because the USSR is famous for the amount of science (especially math and physics, not to mention art, music, culture) that it produced.
I think that that is truer of _technological_ progress, and not all of it either. In terms of scientific progress, the USSR _did_ have some very good people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laureates . They had an awful system, but let us give the devil his due.
I won't comment on engineering progress, since I don't know as much about it. But as far as math and physics go, it would be quite difficult for them to make progress via espionage, because much of the work of the USSR was original and undiscovered in the west until the scientific barrier between the two fell.
I think they would argue instead that Socialism, in practice, resulted in worse outcomes for the individuals involved. The promise of Socialism wasn't Real - meaning it couldn't withstand real life and the friction of dealing with people.
I think that many, maybe most, vitalists would prefer a world of strength (life-energy across the entire population) to a world without it, but would contend that the option isn't on the table. The options are instead "local population of strength, while the rest of the world struggles" against "everyone struggles."
I think people make a lot of mistakes by thinking qualitatively that could be easily avoided by thinking quantitatively.
The choice between "local population of strength, while the rest of the world struggles" and "everyone struggles" sounds like the second option is just straight worse than the first, but that hides an assumption that all "struggling" is equal. It evades the practical question of how to trade off centralized strength vs distributed strength by "rounding" the benefits of distributed strength to zero (before multiplying them by the huge number of affected people). Which is psychologically satisfying, because you get to pretend that your preferred policy has literally no downside, but for virtually all real-life policies that's nonsense.
(Alternately, maybe it's just strawmanning by pretending that Soviet-style socialism is the only possible form of altruism, I'm not sure.)
Yes! This essay is treating vitalism as a real, worthy of respect philosophy, when in practice it is typically an extremely thin justification for facism. I agree with the essay in the sense that its conclusions are right if you think everyone is reasoning from good and honest intentions. But “incorrect” applications of vitalism aren’t a mistake or an error in how people think about vitalism, they are the point. Maybe Scott is trying to get at this very tactfully but it deserves greater emphasis.
>This essay is treating vitalism as a real, worthy of respect philosophy, when in practice it is typically an extremely thin justification for facism.
You're looking at it backwards. Fascists don't claim falsely to be vitalists in order to promote fascism; they are fascists *because they are vitalists*. Fascism was literally invented by vitalists trying to work out how to max out a society's warmaking capabilities no matter the cost, and it is quite good at that (there's one really-huge pitfall which is that it tends to lead to institutional overconfidence, but not *every* fascist state has blown itself up that way). Vitalism is the original and still essentially only reason that people become de-novo fascists - if you do not value vitalist principles, fascism looks insane - and as such it doesn't make sense to accuse it of being a bad-faith excuse for fascism.
The accusation of preferring a civilisation of aristocrats comes out of an interpretation of history that it's the inevitable norm, true even today in obscured form, not an arbitrary preference. Essentially the idea is if there's going to be a ruling class either let us in or we're gonna cause problems. There are natural peasants in this dichotomy of human history, whose ideal life is more humble and earthly.
I don't personally share this view, though I vaguely identify with vitalism. To my observation the type that would've been understood as aristocratic or noble in olden times is now a much larger proportion of the population. We now live in an era where no small cadre in proportion to the population is notably superior, and there's no longer the material necessity of hierarchical obedience to local rulers in a kingdom or empire to maintain order.
The reality that has followed, in my view, is that while legitimate rule under necessity has disappeared the older type suited to it has not moved into the new sphere of power, but directed their energies into new avenues. All the while a different and less noble type has seized the reigns, reconstituted absolute power in managerialism, and it is this that the new reactionism is fighting.
I agree with Scott's argument as far as it goes, but I believe the tension between the altruist and vitalist camps is that the former are trying to adjust the system to operate more effectively, while the latter are assembled to fight the system as an enemy. I don't think that's a very fatalistic view, there's not too many steps involved towards an understanding, but both sides need to acknowledge the others held ideals.
Aristocrats and slaves is the default state of any human society with sufficient numbers. No attempted solution has rectified it. The vulgar vitalists are concerned that current aristocrats lack beauty and struggle.
I think when we just sit and think about an ideal society, all truly terminal goals are aesthetic. We are a story-telling species and all our goals are deep down about what would look cool on the movie screen. "Why did you climb the Mount Everest?" "Because it was there." How do you interpret this? My interpretation "because I knww it makes a cool story". Why build Dyson spheres? Because (one day) we can, and they are awesome.
The problem is, people occasionally do the cool story heroic thing alone, and some governments sometimes do it as a side-effect (like sending people to the Moon to warn the Soviets that they could drop a rocket on Moscow), but most of the time human societies don't do this. I dunno. Maybe it is democracy. Pharaohs could build pyramids, but as an election programme, it would never be voted for. People vote for those who build boring useful things. The Swedish government built one million homes in nine years. But they look exactly like how you would expect them to look if you ever been to IKEA. Functional, but entirely uninspiring.
Maybe I am wrong. Perhaps one day we get sufficiently high on the Maslow pyramid that we start electing Entertainers In Chief. "I will build one billion marble statues! On Vega! And upload a 3D documentary about it with epic music."
Anyhow, the spergy Calculator Maximus who takes utilitarianism too literally ends up with wireheading. But those who get (allistic) human nature enough to understand we run on stories, not math, ends up with an utopia that is mostly about cool stories.
Ronald Reagan was a movie star. Clinton played the sax. FDR did his fireside chats. Nixon wasn't very charismatic, nor was LBJ, but we've been flirting with the idea of Entertainer in Chief since at least the 60s, with some notable examples long before that.
Shit man, do you think Kings put on ermine robes and parade before the commoners in golden coaches purely for their own satisfaction? Entertainment has been part of the job description of power since forever.
I honestly think that kings got personal enjoyment and satisfaction out of feeling like they were a better person than the commoners due to their wealth and power, and liked to show it off.
That they added flair and fanfare and made it a spectacle is also true, and likely was a part of entertainment. Even the Romans figured out that you can distract the people through bread and circuses, so the social technology was definitely there for, say, European kings.
It was enough of a thing by 1980 that Douglas Adams's plotline of Zaphod being made President of the Galaxy in order to distract attention away from real power worked as satire.
Reagan may have been the first straight-up professional actor to play the role of President. But who was calling the shots?
Our latest selection of would-be leaders appear to be not just be screen actors, but reality TV actors. It takes a specific kind of skill to play the role of a leader without actually leading. They have to say realistic things and sound convincing, while often actually doing the exact opposite. I mean, after all it's just reality TV -- which can be programmed and delivered on cue. Which again begs the question, Who's calling the shots?
It would still be helpful if candidates listed their closest dozen or so advisors. -- that is, If one wants transparency.
>Maybe it is democracy. Pharaohs could build pyramids, but as an election programme, it would never be voted for.
Amusingly, I once heard an argument that the pyramids were basically the ancient equivalent of a jobs program - something that people could work on in exchange for food during the yearly flood season when the farmers couldn't work in the fields.
(Probably there's some sort of lesson there about how people create the best art when they have the free time to do other things besides keep themselves alive.)
>Define altruism as “try to increase happiness and decrease suffering across a society”
No, I won't do that, because that's not what it means -- not in common parlance, and certainly not in EA terminology. If that were what EAs meant by the term, then wild animal suffering wouldn't be an EA cause, since they're not participants in society.
Well, the post was obviously focusing on humans here. After all, the vitalist perspective on animals (whatever that may look like) was not discussed here, either. But even if it consisted in the subjugation of animals to show our strength or whatever, and thus altruism and vitalist would disagree there, this wouldn't touch the human case, where they may well still be allies.
Vitalists would increase the size of herds so we can eat more, and expand. If we filled up the planet, we would use the excess resources to go to the stars or whatever.
I think that's the cycle we're on: technology is driven by consumerism, and consumerism by technology. When you leave the house, you don't need a wallet; you need a phone, and the service will cost a monthly fee.
But getting us to waste money on gadgets we don't need and delivering nonstop propaganda are just by-products. We're happy to pay marketers to besiege us with advertising and nonsense because we've been conditioned to believe OCD is 'multi-tasking.' Technology and nonsense create their own markets.
Animals may not be participants in society, but people who feel bad for them certainly are. Like everybody else, they promote their interests, so animal rights would still be on the agenda.
"People who feel bad for animals" is not an EA cause area. If they considered stopping humans from feeling bad to be the only morally relevant benefit of helping wild animals, then the cost/benefit wouldn't be anywhere near favourable enough to qualify as "effective".
I think I agree with the signalling part. I remember when 10-12 years ago the very same people who are now vitalists were talking about self-improvement through deadlifting and reading classics like Marcus Aurelius. There was also talk of cold showers. These things are probably good, but the problem is they do not signal hard enough that you are the toughest mofo in the entire universe. So things started escalating, until we arrived to BAPs "be like bronze age pirates". But no one is actually going to do that, it becomes LARP. I wonder whether they still keep deadlifting? It's hard, injuries almost unavoidable, every pro power lifter can tell you that, none of them never had injuries, and telling AI to generate pirate art is easier.
I agree with your overall point, but do want to challenge your "injury" assumption. I've been deadlifting 4+ plates (more than 405 pounds) for a decade and a half, including 5 years actually competing as a powerlifter, and injuries are pretty rare.
Even at the top of the field, the injury rate for elite powerlifters is 1-2 per 1k training hours, versus 3 for Oly lifts, and for Olympic hopefuls, 5.5 for gymnastics, 4 for track and field, 6 for boxing, 10 for skiing, 8 for basketball, 7 for soccer, and even 5 for volleyball.
So deadlifting heavy is probably one of the safer occupations one could get up to while feeling bronzely perverted or whatever. It beats besieging Troy (or joining Blackwater / Xe / Academi / Constellis or whatever they're called today).
Honestly it sort of surprises me that the risk ratio between powerlifting and Olympic lifting is that small, but I think that's a vibes thing about how kinetic the Olympic lifts look to me. My intuition would be that with perfect form deadlift would individually be safest - do you know if that's borne out in data?
Yeah, I agree - I'd have thought Oly would be higher risk than Track and Field, for example. But I think when you consider the range of movement and forces, the ranges for both powerlifting and Oly are pretty narrow and prescribed versus the much greater torsions and sheer forces a basketball player or gymnast can put their muscles through.
I don't know of any actual data / publications on this front, but anecdotally in my own experience and observation, bench is most dangerous (takes out a lot of shoulders / rotator cuffs / sometimes muscle tears in pecs or biceps / triceps), followed by squat (killer of knees), with deadlift the safest.
I think a couple of things make deadlifting safest - the main risk from deadlift is lower back injury. Failing a deadlift typically means it doesn't even get up off the floor, and failing even after it starts going up is simply dropping it, so the easiest and safest failing mode (versus failing with squat or bench, you usually try to get it back on the rack, adding movement and sheer stress to the load). Further, since rounding of the upper and lower back is fairly easy to spot or feel while training, I think it's easier to stay in safe bounds on the deadlift.
Probably moving high-human-capital people to high-productivity societies would be the most impactful. E.g. you might turn a $10k/year programmer into a $100k/year programmer by moving him from Ukraine to the US.
As someone with non-hypothetical experience in that area... the more likely outcome would be turning a $10k/year programmer into an unemployed programmer. Companies outsource development work to places like Ukraine and India because they can get away with paying the lower wage, then assign them to "grunt work" tasks while the expensive American developers work on the more difficult parts. This invariably backfires when they hit cases where the "grunt work" turns out to contain hidden complexities that low-wage-low-skill code monkeys can't produce a satisfactory solution to, so now they have to pay the expensive American developers to go through and fix what the outsourcing team broke. (The most memorable example of this, to me, is when the Ukrainian team produced a grid view in the UI that was running a database query for every single cell in the grid, in a callback that ran inside the loop to draw the grid on-screen. On a database that was *not* located locally on the user's computer. And they never seemed to grasp just how completely wrong that approach was!)
A Ukrainian with the skill level to be a $100k programmer would most likely not be making $10k as an outsourcing code monkey in the first place. The ones that lack that skill level, moving them to America won't magically give them the training and experience they need in order to get hired as a high-skill American developer.
To clarify, my hypothesis is that a mediocre Ukrainian developer making $10k/year working for a local firm there could become a mediocre US developer making $100k/year working for a local firm there. ̦It's quite possible that I'm mistaken about how much mediocre US developers make or about how much mediocre Ukrainian developers make, but I don't think I'm mistaken enough to change the conclusion that the potential gains are on the scale of tens of thousands of USD per year per such person who migrates (and on the order of millions per career). This to me seems like a much bigger impact on economic growth than the hypothetical gains from an increase in the population of Subsaharan Africa.
I understand what you're trying to say; I'm saying that there's a skill gap there, such that a mediocre Ukrainian developer would have a lot of difficulty being hired as a mediocre US developer in the first place.
I think a lot of it is due to the phenomenon Richard Feynman talks about in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", where he recounts his utter dismay at working with students from other countries and seeing how they are taught to memorize facts — and they become incredibly proficient at doing so — but not how to analyze them and draw conclusions from them. That's a skill that you need to be educated in, and moving to another country where such education is normal just puts you further behind, rather than helping you to get ahead.
OK, but thats not speeding up economic growth, though.
This is essentially just "juicing the stats" to make it appear there has been economic growth (as we measure that in part on wages paid as a proxy).
If a 10k Ukrainian developer produces X output in Ukraine due to the limits of his skill level, then he will still produce X in the US even if he's paid $100k.
The amount of actual economic output hasn't increased. Even if you get marginal improvements by being in a better knowledge culture etc etc its certainly not the 10x growth in actual output the wages proxy would seem to indicate. Probably more like 1.1x or 1.2x.
To actually increase economic growth you must "make more stuff" be it atoms (TV's, Washing Machines) or bits (computer programmes, databases, algorithms).
As a result this is probably NOT a genuinely overpowered way to increase actual growth (unless he genuinely produced programmes that were 10x better, or produced 10x more programs etc etc). Its just taking advantage of the use of a proxy to juice the figures via manipulating the proxy.
I disagree. We know that the programmer is producing some marginal value X>$10k to his current employer, and we know that he'll produce some marginal value Y>$100k to his new employer. Assuming that X>$100k or that X=Y (or close) seems unreasonable to me.
Yes, but the value he is producing that is >10k may be 101k, and the employer is capturing the surplus.... that programmer can be employed at 100k profitably in the US, but that is still no increase in economic output just redistrubution of the output that was already there between employer/employee.
If he is only producing 20k of output, then he is profitable to hire in UA but not US. In *that* example your scheme to make migration easier in order to increase economic growth will not do so, as the US employer will decline to hire him at 100k even if the migration is frictionless.
In both cases, you aren't getting any increase in economic output (although in one you are getting a 10x boost of the proxy measure and redistribution of who the surplus is captured by).
To produce a 10x increase in economic growth, you have to be able to point to the actual source of the additional economic output. For a washing machine factory worker this may be all the high-capital automated equipment he gets to work with, the great transportation system for goods in that country, the efficient retail ecosystem that can sell those goods at lower costs..... maybe that means he really can produce 10x as much with the same amount of identically skilled labour as all that capital multiplies his labour output.
But you can't point to that for the digital worker. He has access to all that capital already, its at the other end of the wire coming out of the back of his PC. Whether it leads to the server farm in the basement (US) or the server farm in thee basement on the other side of the world (UA). He has access to all the capital equipment, the tools, the knowledge. The goods are transported instantly to market at light speed in both places. The retail distribution is the same .com site whether the software is coded in US or UA.
There is just nothing to presuppose that simply moving a human being from being seated in front of a PC in UA to being seated in front of a PC in US makes them 10x as actually economically productive. There is no mechanism to force that outcome. He's the same guy, with the same skills, and the same equipment. Maybe you can find a way to drive out a 10% improvement or 20% because of social effects of being "face-to-face in an office" rather than "remote" but not a 1000% improvement in output.
If the "proxy" is telling you there is a 1000% improvement thats the result of an imperfect proxy. By manipulating that proxy only, you're essentially stats juking, and not causing actual creation of 10x as many computer programs, or computer programs that are 10x as efficient.
If I increase the price of all Van Gogh paintings by 10x I am not increasing economic output by 10x, it may look so in the stats...as that economy just went from selling 100m of paintings in 2024 to selling 1bn worth of paintings in 2025. Now selling 100mn worth of Van Gogh's brings in 900m more $s, when they're sold GDP will jump 900m.
But the world will still ONLY have the same paintings we started with. Not a single one more. The quality of the paintings hasn't improved either. They're just as good (or not) as they ever were. No economic output has been added. You just juiced the GDP proxy.
You may as well propose massively increasing economic output by EA's bidding up the price of Van Gogh paintings if you are going to insist an increase in the proxy is ipso-facto identical to an increase in the output. To increase output you really do have to increase output. The programmer needs to produce 10x as much work, you have to paint 10x as many Van Gogh paintings!
That seems backwards. It would be far better for global economic growth to take the $200K/year programmers from the US and force them to work in Ukraine (or a less war-torn version thereof) for $10K/year.
How so? That would seem to (1) directly reduce global GDP by $190k/year/person and (2) go directly against the basic economic knowledge that wealth is generally created by (a) moving stuff from where people are less willing to pay for it to where people are more willing to pay for it & (b) letting people do what they want.
Not the original poster but.... Because you'd get the same economic output at a lower cost!
Lets imagine he's producing washing machines to make this easier.
If he produces 100 a year in the UK at 200k a year .... and would still produce 100 year in UA at 10k a year..... you're getting cheaper washing machines if he's in UA. You can hire 20 times as many guys if you want and for the same 200k you are spending in wages get 20x more washing machines (i.e. 20 times the actual economic output).
This doesn't change when you move back to bits from atoms.
The guy moved to Ukraine would have to reduce his output to <5 washing machines for the move to be an economic negative, maybe lack of local capital infrastructure etc may reduce his output but in the case of our computer programmer that seems unlikely as digital workers have (by definition) access to almost all the capital infrastructure on a global level. Its all at the other end of a light-speed wire.
Although we use wage as a proxy to measure GDP easily it is JUST a proxy, attempting to get at the "real" value (actual output) is much harder, but we have to be aware of the inconsistencies/distortion this approach creates and not build recommendations directly atop that distortion.
I don't think you'd get the same economic output. If that were the case, the US company could just hire workers already in Ukraine instead. The wage differential shows that this is not happening.
Which they do, all the time, for any job they outsource.
If there are 200 jobs, 100 that have to be done in the US@100k and 100 that can be done in UA.@10k.... they'll outsource 100 to UA to get the lower costs.
If you remove the barrier to movement.... that doesn't suddenly mean all 200 jobs will be done in the US@100k and output will go up 5x (in this example) as a result. They're the same people, with the same skills, the same capital infrastructure, the same output.
If hiring 100 more people in the US would increase output 5x, they'd do it today at 100k and not bother with the UA outsourcing.
Wage paid (in aggregate) is a reasonable proxy for output. BUt you can;t go from there to "...and so with this one weird trick we can multiply this guys output 10x by simply seating him at a desk 5,000 miles away from his current desk and changing literally nothing else about his skills or how he does his work. Ta Da"
As he notes, "it’s one of the few interventions which has been well-studied". Anything that is in fact more effective as a way of speeding economic growth hasn't been studied well enough yet to make us confident that it is more effective.
I dont know of any 'vitalist' who says that war is the terminal goal of human civilization.
Effective altruists, on the other hand, do typically take it as a given that everyone's life is equally valuable. This is a terminal goal in the sense that it is supposed to be a blueprint for the ideal society.
Unlike EAs, I don't try to derive all my behavior from a single set of moral axioms. I believe that the conception of morality promoted by EAs gives too little weight to other things I find valuable, particularly the preservation of the most intelligent and capable people and the most functional societies, and criticize it on that basis.
You're criticizing EA for not preserving the most intelligent and capable people, or helping society, but what are you doing, that you wouldn't do otherwise, that would embody this virtue?
Insofar as EA is appealing to me personally, it's because it can be operationalized to something like "earn to give" or "direct work", instead of talking abstractly about how x ideal is great and how y ideals suck.
So what does your criticism buy you? Other live players doing things for you? It would be terrific if someone who said the same things as you can say like "here's bills a b c which implements education reforms x y z that I think works well for these not-philosophically derived reasons" rather than "raaaaah me! Boo EA!"
> I think a lot of people think of this in terms of “Africans’ lives are [worth] less than nothing and I want to get rid of them”.
Do I understand correctly that "get rid of them" = "kill/let die"? If so:
This perspective is one of the most abhorrent and viscerally disgusting I have ever heard. It obviously has extremely Holocaust-y vibes.
Sadly, Scott may well be correct about many people thinking this. I honestly feel at a loss how to argue with people who genuinely (subconsciously?) subscribe to cartoonesque villainy like this.
> Even if this is where you’re coming from, you’re not getting rid of one billion people, sorry.
This is what I'm talking about. What if they *could* get rid of them? How does one interact with people who, given a big red button saying "Nuke Africa (no side-effects!)", actually consider pressing it? Or have to practice some restraint not to press it, perhaps because murder isn't virtuous or whatever? Or convince themselves that it's not worth it via elaborate 2nd order effects or something?
It genuinely hurts me to think these people exist. I would love if we as a society could get rid of them - by succeeding in changing their mind and preventing new people from getting hooked on such hateful othering.
Edit: This may not be the most constructive contribution to the discussion, but I felt strongly compelled to express my emotions after reading the post.
I pretty much agree with Scott's solutions (help build them up economically), but everyone agrees that Africa has problems.
A less evil version of the vitalist approach would be to stop sending aid to Africa, because it's making things worse. The argument I've heard is that sending food aid crashes the food prices in neighboring countries and causes farmers to quit, which makes the next famine more likely and worse. Or even a more agreeable version - stop selling weapons to Africans.
I think the strongest argument in that direction is that Europe didn't develop thanks to charity, nor did Meiji Japan, and if Africa is to reach a similar destination it will be via similar route. Africans must manufacture their own weapons to do statemaking via warmaking!
The interesting thing about Japan is that it pretty much stagnated for hundreds of years, then rapidly progressed when faced with outside threats. It's pretty much the poster child for vitalism. In 40 years it went from Feudalism similar to 13th century Europe to fully catching up with Europe. That's insane. It's interesting to think about how long it would have continued to stagnate, absent that outside pressure.
It didn't take actual war, just the threat of losing sovereignty in a country that cared a lot about it.
This sounds like an argument for not-quite-successful renewed colonialism in Africa. I'm not saying it wouldn't work (I have no idea whether it would), but it would at least be one of the _oddest_ development tactics...
It wouldn't work, because ultimately it wouldn't be real. Nobody would take it seriously that some foreign power was going to really conquer an African country, because there are too many powers that could easily do it. They either would or they wouldn't. If they didn't, or didn't succeed, it would have little to do with the African country, and a lot to do with international norms (and likely US military strength).
Japan was in a sweet spot where no one had the interest or ability to conquer Japan in say, 1870, but the Japanese foresaw the possibility that it could happen in a few decades. Enough time to take steps to counter it, but not so long that the Japanese felt like they could ignore it.
There is in fact a gallery of such people who come out in the comments section, loudly proclaiming how psychologically normal they are for preferring another family/country to die to protect their family.
At some point you have to accept that people will say and think anything to avoid doing prosocial things.
It's not normal to proclaim that you want specifically others to die, when no one else has mentioned this tradeoff. If you love and prefer your family, you build them up and tell it to them, not tell random internet strangers what you'd do with them in thought experiments you yourself are inventing. That's weird.
It's in fact 100% normal to prefer your family, it's not fine to use your family as a prop to heatedly win internet arguments.
So you're saying that a fact that you agree is 100% a fact should not be discussed in internet arguments? Why? Wouldn't we all be better off if discussions were more fact based rather than less?
Fact based questions like "do you think it's normal to let children die"?
Yes, I agree arguments would be much more fact based and less emotionally driven if everything were reframed with respect to whether or not you want to murder your family. (FACT if you disagree with me you are MUCH MORE pro family murdering! It's true I read it in a blog comment. source: me)
No, the fact that practically everybody would rather have other people's children die than their own. Why choose to elide this if you agree it's true? It has many important implications for understanding and predicting social behaviour.
Yes, Scott in channeling the Nazi version of vitalism here.
Nazi vitalism is a moral theory of sorts, as illustrated by Jonathan Bennett (a New Zealand philosopher that died in March this year) in his analysis of Heinrich Himmler's justification for the Holocaust. Quote from Bennet's analysis in his article "The conscience of Huckleberry Finn":
… has [Himmler’s interpretation of Nazism] a moral basis at all? And if it has, was there in Himmler’s mind any conflict between [his] morality and [ordinary, spontaneous] human sympathy? Yes there was. Here is a quote [from a speech he held in 1944 for SS top brass]:
“I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter…I mean…the extermination of the Jewish race…Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Himmler saw his policies as being hard to implement while still retaining one’s human sympathies – while still remaining “a decent fellow”. He is saying that only the weak take the easy way out and just squelch their sympathies, and is praising the stronger and more glorious course of retaining one’s sympathies while acting in violation of them [notice the “heroic”, vitalistic overtones in this stance]. In the same spirit, he ordered that when executions were carried out in concentration camps, those responsible “are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude”.
A year later he boasted that the SS had wiped out the Jews “without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and soul. The danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla of their becoming heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure life, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.”
And there really can’t be any doubt that the basis of Himmler’s policies was a set of principles which constituted his morality – a sick, bad, wicked morality. He described himself as caught in “the old tragic [Kantian] conflict between will and obligation”. And when his physician Kersten protested at the intention to destroy the Jews, saying that the suffering involved was “not to be contemplated”, Kersten reports that Himmler replied:
He knew that it would mean much suffering for the Jews…”It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life [notice that this is a very vitalistic justification, with a dash of Great Man /übermensch added]. Yet we must…cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”
This, I submit, is the language of morality.
...so far Bennett's analysis of Nazi-version vitalism. It can illustrate how vitalism as a moral theory has the potential to end up in very dark places. (But mind you, so may utilitarianism.)
I think that "Kill" and "Let die" are very different here.
"Let die" is to let something end when it cannot support itself, simply by doing nothing. Killing something is to aid it in its destruction.
I'm not for killing anything, but if something cannot sustain itself, then that's reality itself saying "no". You can bail out banks, you can bail out failed companies, you can compliment art that you don't really like, you can give participation trophies to losers, you can let students pass exams even when their performance is lacking, you can tell people who annoy you that of course you like them and there's nothing they should change. In the end, all your compassion is doing, is preventing adaptation either by masking its need or by temporarily providing support (not by teaching a man to fish, but by providing him fish - the strength is not his own). It's a kind of reverse eugenics.
I think we should leave Africa to itself, but I certainly do not think so out of hatred.
I also don't think Africans are "undermen" by any means. They're not doing very well, but their rate of depression might be lower than that of the western world, and that would make them superior in their attitude towards life. Nietzsche meant "power" very broadly. A species which can thrive in poverty and war is in many ways stronger than one which can be hurt by saying mean words to it, even if the latter is more intelligent (which is yet another form of power)
I think both vitalism and altruism are helpful perspectives but the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws. An altruist post-singularity existence would truly relegate humanity to the heroin drips. A vitalist post-singularity existence might look something like an eternal series of epic cage matches between increasingly ultra-powered humans who feel nothing but blind rage.
The important question is to ask what it really means to be human and what a meaningful humanity actually looks like post-singularity. A number of different aspects will stand out, but one important one is that of agency. We want humans to be able to make meaningful decisions about the world, not just choosing between the red and blue drip or betting on which ultra-human wins the next round. This might look like (for instance) a superintelligent AI carving out a space for humans to exert meaningful control and govern themselves without its direct interference.
This also helps us to see the limitations of both vitalism and altruism in the present. Sometimes people just want to be right for the sake of being right, they want to win every battle and prove that they're on the right side. Other times, people want simple enjoyment for its own sake and fall into the kinds of so-called 'dopamine traps' which are not conducive to living a meaningful life when pursued in excess. Finding ways to increase meaningful agency over one's life is important and sacrificing immediate happiness and 'winning' pointless battles can be worthwhile endeavours in pursuit of improving self-control and reducing impulsiveness.
> the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws.
An ideal moral framework might allow for that. But I am unaware of any existing, fleshed out moral framework that does. Try to think of undesirable ways to maximize "agency over one's life" or whatever your preferred metric/system is and see how well it fares.
- Agency = Ability of humans to make meaningful decisions about the world
- Meaningful decision = decision affecting some macroscopic part of the world
==> Maximize Agency == maximize influence humans have over the world.
Solutions:
- colonize the universe, establishing a flourishing society on maximally many celestial bodies, space stations etc.. Attach some nukes to each human habitat and give everyone a bid red button that blows up their own habitat when pressed. Currently, few people on Earth have that much potential influence on their environment. At every moment, the decision to not press the button has the gigantic effect of "saving lives" (one might argue, which is exactly the point).
- Similar vibe: Give everyone in the world a car full of guns and ammo, abolish the rule of law (think the Purge). Everyone now has much more influence on the life and death of their neighbors than before.
- Advance tech enough such that we can simulate consciousness. Give everyone a button that generate 10^10 consciousnesses experiencing 10^10 subjective years of pure suffering. If you don't think that's possible in principle, just breed humans or animals for that specific purpose and make that a torture button.
You can definitely patch this by modifying or clarifying the definition. But in the end, it's an arms race about finding and fixing loopholes in a definition. You've gotta be pretty brave to think that at some point, you will be done (and can safely maximize), as opposed to having a loophole lurking noone has found yet. See the field of AI alignment for more.
Oh, for sure we're talking about AI alignment. There's a problem there, and it's a complex one. I believe agency is a part of the answer, but it's not the entirety of it, which we haven't figured out yet. Interesting scenarios you've proposed.
Cheers. And I agree, factoring in agency in some way - directly or not - avoids the "passive humans consuming goodness-juice X ad infinitum" failure mode.
Isaac Asimov wrote about a (debatably) dystopian society on a planet called Solaria in his Foundation series. To maximize agency and have near absolute freedom, the planet was divided into a few thousand huge estates, each with a single inhabitant. Work was done by robots. They mostly avoided interacting with other people and could rule over their estate as they liked in solitude.
Another answer is that maximized agency taken to the extreme leads to the same wireheading as maximized happiness. If you can do nearly anything, that should include the ability to stimulate your pleasure centers. There's a contradiction in trying to maximise agency by taking away that choice.
Another answer is that "meaningful" choices are only possible when there are problems. As more problems get solved with technology and progress, fewer meaningful choices are possible. A life-or-death choice is meaningful. Deciding between strawberry and blueberry ice cream is not. If everyone already has everything they can want, and there is no conflict or disease, how can a choice be meaningful? E.g. if everyone in the US thought everything was great and there were no problems to fix, what platform could the political parties have?
But if meaningful choices means you need problems, then to maximize it, someone needs to go around creating problems. You need someone evil to start wars or create poverty so that others can make meaningful choices to fix it. And taking it to the extreme, you want a lot of evil so that there are a lot of meaningful choices.
Really interesting, thanks. This reminds me of something the science fiction author Cordwainer Smith wrestles with in his works - the question of how to create meaning and novelty in a world where all problems are solved and everything is under control. In his fictional distant future, you have human overlords overseeing everything and they do eventually decide to introduce randomness and variability back into interplanetary civilisation, sensing that things have become stale.
I wrote a much more detailed response about this to Jacob Buckman below, but I think maximizing autonomy is the best way to balance the extremes of pleasure vs struggle. I imagine this would look like individualism on a societal scale, but structured around a value system that encourages personal growth instead of static hedonism.
No, of course not. But a superintelligent AI trying to optimise for happiness could easily find a way to hack your brain and make you *want* to go on the drip.
But likewise an altruistic person wouldn't change your terminal preferences if you don't want him to. A lousy AI might, but that's an AI alignment problem, not a problem with altruism.
>I think both vitalism and altruism are helpful perspectives but the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws.
I think I'm inclined to say the opposite.
Any system that is optimised to produce no "strange" results out at the extremes of infinity is not optimised for providing the best results in the very middle of the "normal" range of operation.
Given actual physical limits, as well as psychologicval and social ones, confine us very strongly in that middle range.... we should desire systems are optimised for that range, even if that produces strange results out on the ultra-extremes we know we can't reach.
Think of a car optimised to drive at 1000 m/ph and be safe and reliable at that speed. Thats not a car optimised for using in a world with a 70 mph de-jure speed limit and a 100 mph (or so) de-facto speed limit.
It may be that you can get extremely lucky and find a perfect system that is optimal in all ranges all the time.... but you shouldn't expect that to naturally always be the case, and certainly not to reject solutions based on them not being that lucky one in a million shot.
I'm more comfortable with systems that appear to be optimised for (very wide) ranges of normal human activity.... and when I see those systems break down at infinity-and-beyond that makes me more, not less, confident that they are correctly optimised for those ranges and not for the extremes. Its really hard to optimise for the furthest extreme without de-optimising for the normal!
> Isn’t there some sense where conflict (which is bloody and full of suffering) produces progress and strength? And doesn’t that mean that altruists should oppose conflict, but vitalists should promote it?
>
> I’m skeptical of this argument. America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket. During that time, Iraq has had approximately eight major wars and didn’t even get a cuckoo clock out of it.
There's war, and then there's *war,* and this skeptical position only makes sense if you carefully construct a definition of war that excludes the Cold War. And that kind of makes sense in some contexts — we certainly weren't shooting and nuking each other, which is strictly better than the alternative! — but not when talking about technological progress, because the whole period was basically one big long preparation for a war that never broke out. And it didn't "change our national experience" so much as utterly define it, and then utterly redefine it when it ended, to our detriment in some ways.
But let's look over the list. The computing revolution developed out of looking for better ways to wage war. Whether calculating artillery trajectories, breaking cryptography, or decentralizing knowledge to make it impossible for a single nuclear bomb to wipe out your important military data, everything from Turing's foundational research to the Internet was developed specifically for warfare. The Human Genome Project, AI, advanced medicine, advanced laser technologies, and a whole lot of your list are all downstream from computing.
The moon landing likewise arose out of the Cold War, a side project JFK came up with to show off American superiority over the Soviets in a way that would appeal to the people more than the research into ICBMs that laid the groundwork for all of it.
The microwave came about because a military radar operator happened to notice that the emissions from a radar unit heated up some food he was carrying around, and he thought up a civilian application for it.
The cell phone likewise has roots in military technology for battlefield communications, and what is a smartphone but the merger of a cell phone and a computer?
As for Iraq, the constant fighting doesn't seem to have yielded much of a peace dividend, but I seem to recall analysts saying they'd made some pretty significant advances in the development of the chemical weapons that they "officially" never had, despite using them more than once in various conflicts.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and sadly, nothing says "NECESSITY!!!" quite like an existential threat.
Computing: Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing all made their creations/breakthroughs during peacetime and with no military funding or applications in mind, and then WWII came along and *hampered* computing progress by ensuring all the most promising minds worked exclusively at Bletchley and the NPL (and later GCHQ, eg. Clifford Cocks, James Henry Ellis, et. al.), and all their best ideas were classified Top Secret (and were then gradually all rediscovered and commercialised by the US over the next 30 years or so of peace..)
Moon landing: Okay, I have to give you this one. But - it was probably considerably *less* militaristic than whatever else the US Govt. would have done with its £200bn if the moon wasn't there.
Microwave: I'd call this a draw. The magnetron was largely a wartime invention, but the idea of using one to make an oven was emphatically peacetime and for peaceful purposes.
Smartphone: very much a peacetime non-military invention. Saying that smartphones are a millitary invention because they descend from mobile phones which in turn descend from handheld VHF radios which got used by soldiers is very much a "six degrees of separation" trick. Why stop there specifically? Smartphones use copper which the phalanxes of Alexander the Great used to make their armour.
Laser: Theoretical work done by Einstein with no millitary funding or intentions; practical refinement during the 1960s at Bell Labs, again during peacetime and with peaceable applications (eg. scientific instrument-making) in mind.
Human Genome Project: (Perhaps my strongest disagreement with you) This was a worldwide academic project whereby two dozen academic insitutions around the world collaborated and shared their results - and famously published their outputs openly for the benefit of any researchers that wanted them. I can scarcely imagine a less warlike way of carrying out a project!
Regarding "necessity..." I think the general principle is that, sure, in wartime you *want* lots of new inventions - but you also have much less spare capacity for the sorts of R&D that *actually lead to* new inventions: partly because the latest generation of potential scientists, engineers, etc. is for the most part off in another country wearing tin hats and being shot at, and partly because most of the available R&D capacity gets eaten-up by programmes that are much easier to sell to military budget-holders, aimed at making bullets 0.1% deadlier or whatever (the example you give about Iraq using its available R&D capacity to formulate chemical weapons and not much else seems especially pertinent..)
> then WWII came along and *hampered* computing progress by ensuring all the most promising minds worked exclusively at Bletchley and the NPL
Putting the most brilliant minds together where they can bounce ideas off of each other and focusing them under pressure on a goal... hampers their creativity and progress?
Yes, classifying their work might have held back the broader applications a little, but let's be honest: *the computer revolution* didn't start with computing; it started with the transistor and the integrated circuit, which made miniaturization possible, which made commoditization possible. Before that point, computers were just ridiculously expensive, ultra-high-end devices that no one outside of the military and the top-echelon corporate world (which were so intertwined that Eisenhower famously referred to them as a single entity, the "military-industrial complex,") had any use for, and even there their uses were sharply limited by a physical bottleneck referred to as "the tyranny of numbers." There's a reason IBM's Thomas Watson said "I think there's a world market for maybe five computers."
The transistor arose out of Bell Labs research, tied to military contracts during the Cold War. The integrated circuit likewise came to us from Fairchild Semiconductor, staffed with former Bell Labs personnel and working on military contracts.
> The magnetron was largely a wartime invention, but the idea of using one to make an oven was emphatically peacetime and for peaceful purposes.
Yeah. Someone took a wartime invention and found a new use for it, just like the computer.
> Smartphone: very much a peacetime non-military invention.
Created by combining two wartime inventions. This isn't six degrees of separation; at most it's two.
> Human Genome Project: ... I can scarcely imagine a less warlike way of carrying out a project!
I can scarcely imagine the project being possible without computers, which is the point I was making.
> Regarding "necessity..." I think the general principle is that, sure, in wartime you *want* lots of new inventions - but you also have much less spare capacity for the sorts of R&D that *actually lead to* new inventions ... (the example you give about Iraq using its available R&D capacity to formulate chemical weapons and not much else seems especially pertinent..)
The Manhattan Project led directly to the atomic bomb... and also to nuclear power generation, the solution to all our energy needs for the foreseeable future if we could ever get out of our own way on the subject. The Cold War space race gave us ICBMs and also the moon landing, which are both pretty useless to you and me as civilians... and also the GPS system (developed for military and particularly rocketry purposes) which civilians put to good, peaceful, productive use every day.
It's a little-appreciated fact that in order to beat your swords into plowshares, *you must first have a sword!* As near as I can tell — and this is by no means a firm conclusion that I've put a lot of deep thought into, so it may be badly off the mark, but it feels more correct than wrong — the trick is to have a balance of enough conflict to generate ideas and enough peace to rotate the people getting those ideas into civilian work to come up with interesting things to do with those ideas.
Thanks for your interesting and detailed reply. (Going to number the points because I find it more streamlined than the quotation style - hope that's okay!)
1) I don't say that putting the best minds together to collaborate is what hampered progress, I say that classifying their entire output is what hjampered progress. In fact, the early history* of computing is famous for this! Not just taking all the practical applications for Turing's 1930s theoretical work (which, of course, was entirely peaceable non-military academic study) and classifying them, but much of public key cryptography (Diffie-Helman key exchange, RSA, etc.) was all invented at secret British military labs and then immediately classified, opening the way for the non-military world to re-invent it, publish, and actually make a difference. To say that classifying their work "held things back a little" is very much an understatement!
(* That is, if you don't count the also-peacetime Babbage, Ludgate, Lovelace, et. al.)
Yes, I'll concede the computing revolution came after all of this and that it was made possible by MOSFETs and CMOS circuitry - but I don't think you're correct to say that the Bell Labs and Fairchild research was military: my limited understanding (shored-up by a super-quick bit of Wikipedia-browsing) is that the researchers were predominantly academic physicist types working mostly on open-eneded research contracts not funded by the military and focused either on purely academic discoveries or else on telecommunications research. (Not looked too closely, though - if you've got a citation to contradict this, of course I'll concede the point!)
2) If we can say the microwave oven is just a wartime magnetron which somebody found a new use for, couldn't we also say that a magnetron is just a peacetime cavity resonator (used for academic physics research during the start of the 20th Century) which somebody found a new use for? (And presumably so on and so on all the way back to Archimedes..)
3) The inventions that were "combined" to create the smartphone:
Telephone: Peacetime
Radio: Peacetime
Computer: (still under heavy negotiation here..)
4) It doesn't seem fair to say that computers get the credit for the human genome project just because it couldn't have been achieved without them. The human genome project also couldn't have been achieved without writing systems, fire, or the wheel. The tech-tree is enormous and interconnected and impossibly tangled: for every single military invention ever I'm sure you can find at least one essential precursor invention that's peaceable, and vice-versa. (And this objection is entirely separate to debating whether the computer was a military invention or not!)
5) I very much suspect the Manhattan project (or, more generally, nuclear warfare) hampered the adoption of nuclear power even more than military classification hampered computing research. Sure, it created breakthroughs - although the opinion of most Manhattan project scientists was that all the prerequisites were there and nuclear fission would be developed fairly soon even absent anything like the Manhattan project - after all, Fermi had already successfully created an atomic pile in peacetime without military funding and shared his results with colleagues all over the world - but (I suspect) decades of living in abject terror of a nuclear apocalypse was probably a contributing factor to the poisoning of public opinion against nuclear energy.
6) GPS (well, GNSS): Okay, I'll give you that one. I suspect that even if the military GPS system (if you'll pardon my RAS syndrome..) had never existed we'd nevertheless have civilian GNSS by today owing to the rate of advancement of satellite tech (during peacetime) - but we can't know for sure, so I'll concede that GNSS, a pivotal modern invention, is a military one.
7) I admit that you must make swords before you can beat them into ploughshares. I just don't think that "iron ore" -> "sword" -> "ploughshare" is more efficient than "iron ore" -> "ploughshare".
8) I'm deeply suspicious of any argument - or anybody - that suggests the correct amount of war in the world is non-zero! Couldn't we at least *try* not having any wars? Just for a generation or two, as a sort of control group to the whole of the rest of human history? If we do that and suddenly all worldwide innovation stops, I promise I will enlist in your navy and you can send me off to invade whomever you like..
> The tech-tree is enormous and interconnected and impossibly tangled: for every single military invention ever I'm sure you can find at least one essential precursor invention that's peaceable, and vice-versa.
I think we're in violent agreement on this fact; we just disagree over what it means.
> Couldn't we at least *try* not having any wars? Just for a generation or two
It's been tried. People called WWI "the war to end all wars," thinking that the horrors of mechanized and chemical warfare were so severe that no one would ever want to do that again. That didn't really last particularly long, and I'm not even talking about Nazi Germany. Google "wars between WWI and WWII" and you'll get quite the list.
After WWII, we set up the United Nations to try to keep a lid on things. Their record on the subject has been, well... less than stellar, at least if your criteria is "world peace." On the other hand, if your criteria is the more attainable "diminution of warfare," the 20th century paradoxically is both the bloodiest and also the most peaceful, largely because WWII did what WWI failed to accomplish: inventing a weapon that terrified people so badly that they *really* didn't want to get into another war where it would get used.
I agree with you that the ideal level of war in the world is zero. But I also recognize that we do not live in an ideal world. These ideals can be approached, but never reached, and trying to force mankind to reach them "one way or another" historically tends to result in further strife and bloodshed.
"I think we're in violent agreement on this fact; we just disagree over what it means" - well put! I think it means that you can make any invention appear either military or peacable by cherry-picking the right precursors from an unbelievably huge stock of them, thus making a case for disregarding all precursor invention arguments when asking "shall we count this as a military or a peacable invention?"; I presume you think it means that without those military inventions we wouldn't have gotten the non-military ones? (Or perhaps still would have gotten them, but on some orders-of-magnitude slower timescale?)
I meant "try" as in "experiment with" ("I usually have chocolate ice-cream so this time I'll try vanilla") rather than as in "attempt to". I agree we keep attempting to and it keeps on not working, and I admit that asking the world to conduct my no-war experiment isn't exactly a realistic request.
I agree that there will be war for the forseeable future, but I harbour a hope that eventually humanity's descendants might (er, for lack of a better term!) "outgrow" it. I suspect that probably any of our descendants who actually manage this will of necessity have to think and act so differently from us that we couldn't consider them really human, though!
> I presume you think it means that without those military inventions we wouldn't have gotten the non-military ones? (Or perhaps still would have gotten them, but on some orders-of-magnitude slower timescale?)
Yes. With anything related to rocketry as the uber-example. Jules Verne wrote "From Earth To The Moon" almost exactly a century before we actually got there. We've known for a long time that it was theoretically possible. But there's a reason that the term "rocket science" has become an idiom in our lexicon for "extremely difficult problem to work on." Without the Cold War directing enormous resources from world-class superpowers into relevant R&D, I'm skeptical that we would have ever actually made it happen.
> I admit that asking the world to conduct my no-war experiment isn't exactly a realistic request.
To me, it basically comes down to a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma: the best outcome overall is if both sides decide "no war," but as long as you have one dishonorable person willing to betray the "no war" consensus, they can attain a serious advantage relatively easily by doing so. Hitler took a big gamble launching WWII, and he ended up losing, but he could have won, and that would have led to some significant prosperity for the Nazi Party, and probably a fair amount for Germans in general. As long as there are people who see that and think it's worth trying — as long as human nature remains human nature — we're unlikely to get rid of war entirely.
> I suspect that probably any of our descendants who actually manage this will of necessity have to think and act so differently from us that we couldn't consider them really human, though!
Coming from a Christian background, I kind of agree with this, but probably not the way you're thinking of it...
Very true. I'd argue that *specifically for that reason* ENIAC contributed more to the computing state-of-the-art than Colossus did!
(Were all of ENIAC's *outputs* classified? On the one hand I'd suppose gunnery computation tables might reveal stuff about the guns themselves and therefore be a good candidate for classification, but on the other hand (or so I infer from Spike Milligan's autobiography) if you have to entrust a book of them to some random bombardier somewhere, probably you can't maintain entirely ideal information security...)
I don't think either Colossus or ENIAC really marks the very dawn of computing, though: even though I'm a c̶o̶l̶o̶s̶s̶a̶l big fan of Tommy Flowers, my loyalties must lie with Babbage and Lovelace - the fact that between them they'd worked-out the logic for a Turing-complete machine *and written programs for it* a century before it was technologically feasible to build such a thing just makes it all the more impressive, to me!
I would not count Babbage and Lovelace as pioneers of modern-day computing, simply because there is no causal chain there.
> The consensus of computer historians is that while Babbage was clearly the first to conceive of the flexible machine that foreshadowed the modern computer, his work was forgotten and was then conceptually recreated by Turing a century later.
> ...
> “The pioneers of electronic computing reinvented the fundamental principles largely in ignorance of the details of Babbage’s work,” said Dr. Swade, the former museum curator. “They knew of him, there was a continuity of influence, but his drawings were not the DNA of modern computing.”
> He argues that Turing was a “bridging” figure between Babbage and Lovelace and the modern world of electronic computers.
> A Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, doubts that his subject had seen the Lovelace notes when he wrote “On Computable Numbers.”
> “It’s most unlikely that Babbage/Lovelace had any influence on Turing in 1936,” Dr. Hodges, an Oxford mathematician, wrote in an e-mail. “Motivation, means, language, results were all completely different.”
Fully agree with all of that. I just personally feel that if there was some sort of, I dunno, trophy or something for inventing the Turing-complete computer, Charlie B should still get it, that's all.
(And for computer programming, probably Babbage and Lovelace would share my postulated posthumous trophy..)
Out of curiosity, have you ever read The Way of Kings? I ask simply because this discussion of a hypothetical trophy reminds me of Hoid's "what do men value most?" soliloquy in the epilogue...
Heh...I actually keep meaning to do stuff like this, especially contacting my internet company every year or so to take advantage of whatever new deal they have to reduce/keep reduced my bill.
Not a card-carrying vitalist myself, but a possibly adjacent concept comes to mind: the bard, interested most in a future that stories can (continue to) be made of. To the interestingness-maximizer (or, mathematically, the Kolmogorov-complexity-maximizer), aggregation is anathema: it's the "effective" part of "effective altruism" that it diverges from.
(Well, over-aggregation, really: you can't have exceptions to the rule without a rule)
You conflated "Curing disease" and "Treating conditions".
Vitalist would probably be fine with one and done treatments but not required meds or treatment for life.
The "alone in a cabin with food" test if someone can survive on their own in a cabin even if provided free food (excludes conditions that require meds they can't produce on their own).
And "alone in a cabin with crops/animals & training" test if able to feeds themselves if provided starting animals and crops and training (could exclude mentally ill).
>The "alone in a cabin with food" test if someone can survive on their own in a cabin even if provided free food (excludes conditions that require meds they can't produce on their own).
Anyone can propose any test that they want, of course.
But this strikes me as anachronistic. We've had division of labor to varying degrees for thousands of years. Given that, e.g. we _can_ produce insulin, why is posing a test that excludes it sensible?
The future is, as always, uncertain. But what it _won't_ be is a return to the past. Choosing a test where e.g. surviving without a common medication _is_ crucial but e.g. ability to operate common, crucial machinery is _not_, seems very artificial. Also, what counts as "meds"? How about vitamin C? A lot of crew members in previous centuries died of scurvy - and they had no idea that their diet was inadequate.
> Humans genuinely do what some sort of predictive algorithm figures will send the most dopamine to a certain part of their mesolimbic system; everything else is some kind of complicated willpower-exertion game where, if you contort yourself in exactly the right direction, the reward of feeling responsible and virtuous sends enough dopamine to your mesolimbic system to be worth it. Altruism is a willpower-exertion-contortion game like this, but so are selfishness and everything else.
Wow, the materialist perspective is *incredibly* bleak and depressing! I just wish the task of persuading people that there's more to life than just this was easier. Doing so would alleviate a massive amount of needless suffering and harm.
My non sarcastic answer is that we don't feel like we lead bleak and depressing lives. We feel like we lead meaningful lives where we get to help children not die of malaria (or *insert whatever vitalists love here?*)
My sarcastic answer is: Pretend to try really hard to explain why a non materialist view improves the world. I actually want to know what you think.
You don't actually "feel" at all - *you* don't exist as anymore than an illusion generated by chemicals in your brain. That your brain creates the illusion of meaning via helping other complicated pathways not succumb to a competing chemical pathway rather than anything else is really just an arbitrary outcome.
Basically, if you believe in total materialism, that you are not a nihilist is A) wrong objectively, and B) a total accident. If your brain's meaning circuits made this connection you're fucked.
I mean, if the arbitrary brain state combined with input the to it didn't make your brain believe in nihilism, you won't be one. You'd still be philosophically confused though (not that what is essentially a fancy wind-up toy can be confused but...)
I don't think that brain activity is arbitrary in general, it follows certain patterns which are necessary for the organism in which this brain is situated to survive, for one thing. Of course, some people still end up crazy, and some have random bricks fall on their heads, but I don't see what this has to do with anything? You can be not a nihilist while accepting that the universe doesn't care about you.
On the topic on being philosophically confused, I think that's a trivial statement, because everybody is.
Utter garbage. I'd call this a strawman version of materialism, but really it doesn't rise even to that level. It's begging the question (the logical fallacy, not the common usage).
Considering your only retort is yelling "strawman! strawman!" I'm filing this under "materialist coping and seething" until evidence to the contrary is proffered
Your argument here has "derministic => arbitrary".
But the actual meaning of determinism is "the philosophical view that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable", whereas the meaning of arbitrary is "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". (Definitions derived from wikipedia if it matters.)
So it seems like "deterministic" does not imply "arbitrary" -- it implies the opposite. Are you using some alternative definitions that you haven't bothered to spell out?
A non materialist view improves the world because it treats humans as agents with free will that can make better or worse choices, for one. Our whole society is built on this idea; our justice system, or education system, our religions both civic and supernatural, most of our philosophies, the whole idea of human rights, the idea of ethics in general (that we *should* do this and that, which is entirely based in the idea that we have a will and a choice of what we do, so that we *should* do this thing but *could* do something else), etc. All these things seem to work really well and have improved the world significantly. How does a materialist view improve the world?
Materialists use words and phrases like "free will" and "choices" in ways that are coherent to a dualist. This should make it fairly obvious that (most) materialists believe in some version of these concepts that are functionally identical to that of dualists even if they are extensionally distinct.
The question of how a non-materialist view improves the world was a response to an assertion that the materialist view of the world is "*incredibly* bleak and depressing!" No one claimed that a materialist view improves the world in the first place.
>Materialists use words and phrases like "free will" and "choices" in ways that are coherent to a dualist. This should make it fairly obvious that (most) materialists believe in some version of these concepts that are functionally identical to that of dualists even if they are extensionally distinct.
I agree, though in my experience that's because most materialists have an incoherent view on free will. The dualist (or panpsychist, or other non-materialist) concept of free will and choices are not compatible with materialism. That materialists use concepts that are incompatible with materialism is evidence of the incredible divergence between our direct experience of free will and the implications of materialism.
In my view, the dualist concept of free will is internally incoherent and the compatibilist view of free will is the only one that makes sense of our experience.
I agree: I just disagree that materialism and compatibilism are compatible. I'm a non-materialist compatibilist myself, because compatibilism only makes sense of free will if you believe it was possible to make a different choice (that is to say, it wasn't logically impossible to choose differently) and materialism does not allow that.
The first thing that comes to mind is the recent book review of the guy who became paralyzed, and the discussion of how people who were born paralyzed, in a very real sense, do not know what they're missing. Their brains just aren't wired properly to be able to comprehend what it's like to have full use of their bodies, and so they think that they're living full, fulfilling lives, and to them they are, but the rest of us can look at them from outside of that paradigm and say "they're missing so much and they don't even realize it."
This is how someone with experience with the spiritual sees people who lack such experience. I hope this doesn't sound like a cop-out to you — it's not intended as one! — but it really is difficult to explain in ways that are easy to understand by people who lack the necessary frame of reference. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." (1 Corinthians 2: 9)
But, foolish though it may be, I'm going to try to give some explanation. The biggest benefits, to me at least, are stability, guidance, and comfort.
Stability: The Bible refers to the hope that flows from the Gospel as "an anchor of the soul," and elsewhere repeatedly uses similar metaphors of a ship lost at sea, driven mercilessly by the whims of forces beyond its control, to describe those who lack such an anchor. And what better description can we have of the modern age? How many times in the last few decades have you seen some new idea pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, with adherents demanding that you conform to it, promising a better world if everyone would just fall in line, and then it's not long before the whole thing falls apart... only for the next Next Big Thing to pop up and try to buffet you in a different direction? But if you're well-anchored to a solid rock of things that are already known to be true, you can compare the new theories against them and say "this is nonsense, I won't waste time and energy pursuing it," and save yourself a lot of hassle and occasionally a lot of very real grief.
Guidance: here's where things get really interesting. And I'm going to start off with a big bold claim that you're just going to have to accept at face value: this is not a belief, but rather something I know from personal experience. The evidence is overwhelming, undeniable, and completely worthless to you because it is *personal* rather than empirical. Which doesn't make it any less real or true.
People who are in tune with the Lord are not left to wander alone in this world, to try to figure everything out on their own. I've received ideas that do not come from inside my own head, things that do not follow from what I was thinking at the moment or even from knowledge that I had any way to possess, that turned out to be correct. Things that have helped me in my professional life, in my relationships with family and friends, and in my personal life.
- I was once distinctly told "don't say that; stay quiet," in a conversation that, because I let the other guy just keep talking, ended up going in a completely different (and far more rewarding) direction than I had ever expected.
- I have a friend, a construction contractor by trade, who was told "after this meeting, leave here and go to the Goodwill store at such-and-such location." He had no particular reason to buy anything there, but he listened. Right as he was walking in, he saw someone in the checkout line about to purchase some panels of what he was able to recognize as asbestos ceiling tiles, and he was able to warn them off. Neither the customer nor the people at the store realized what they were dealing with there, but he did.
- Several years ago, I had two job offers open to me. One of them sounded like a better deal — it paid better and the work was more aligned with my experience — but I prayed about it and was directed to take the other one. A few weeks after I moved to take the new job, I met the woman who is now my wife. The other one was located in a part of Texas that was soon thereafter devastated by a hurricane.
Comfort: We've all lost people we were close to. Along with its dreaded companion, Taxes, death is said to be the universal constant to which everyone is inescapably subject. As a little child, when my beloved grandmother died, I was devastated, completely inconsolable for weeks. As an adult, though, losing other people close to me, the pain is far less severe. Pain, loss, and grief are still real, but they aren't crushing, not when you understand that you will see them again.
Perhaps the starkest example of this comes from a friend from church, who had a family member that was in one of the towers on 9/11. She recounted once that the relevant officials brought her and her husband into a waiting area with a bunch of other people in the same situation, while rescue efforts were ongoing and no one knew who was alive and who was dead yet. She said "we were the only ones in that room who were not completely losing it, because we understood that even if they were dead, they were not gone."
You ask why a non-materialist view improves the world. This isn't exactly the right question to ask, because it's framed from an inherently materialist premise, that "the world" is all there is and therefore we'd better make the best of what we've got. Understanding that that is not the case improves you, personally. Improvements to the world are downstream from that.
It's wonderful that you get so much out of your religious beliefs! Now watch carefully as I don't poo-poo your worldview just because I happen to disagree with it.
"Aren’t cathedrals good insofar as they fill us with awe of God, who commands us to love thy neighbor as thyself?"
My understanding was that altruists thought cathedrals were bad, because they encourage people to waste their energy, time and money on non-existent entities like gods and building cathedrals to glorify them, instead of spending their time, energy and money on shrimp suffering.
"post-progress infinite wealth far future (ie 2045)."
Reading the news over the past couple of days, this comes only after the 2024 global recession sparked by stock markets panicking like headless chickens over a USA recession because Intel and Nvidia's stock prices fell after less good than anticipated earnings. The chip manufacturers are crashing, ahhhhh!!!!! so the market is now bear, ahhhhh!!!! Sell sell sell!!!!!
"Don’t feel good about having made vague gestures in favor of altruism - only feel good in proportion to the people you’ve actually helped."
> My understanding was that altruists thought cathedrals were bad, because they encourage people to waste their energy, time and money on non-existent entities like gods and building cathedrals to glorify them, instead of spending their time, energy and money on shrimp suffering.
That's a very specific 21st century brand of altruist. A 12th century Christian altruist would likely have supported building cathedrals, using the argument that God's plan for society is the most beneficial possible plan, and the more people are impressed by God's institutions the more they will follow God's will.
This was actually quite a contentious debate in the twelfth century!
For some Christians, the cathedral was a portal to a holier place that heightens spiritual experience and deepens the worshipper's relationship with God.
Abbott Suger wrote in the 12th century:
> Thus sometimes when, because of my delight in the beauty of the house of God, the multicolor loveliness of the gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation, transporting me from material to immaterial things, has persuaded me to examine the diversity of holy virtues, then I seem to see myself existing on some level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of earth nor completely in the purity of heaven.
In contrast, some Christians saw cathedrals as a waste of resources. In 1125, St. Bernard of Clairvaux criticized the church for building tall, extravagant, jewel-speckled buildings while the poor suffered.
> On vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The church is resplendent in her walls and wanting in her poor. She dresses her stones in gold and lets her sons go naked. The eyes of the rich are fed at the expense of the indigent. The curious find something to amuse them and the needy find nothing to sustain them.
I've heard that building a cathedral was often viewed as a kind of investment - building one would attract skilled craftsmen and other people to the local area by providing jobs, and once it was completed the local area would benefit from tourism and the fame and prestige that came from having such a monument.
Local governments today do "wasteful" things like hosting the Olympics or subsidizing the construction of stadiums for professional sports teams for similar reasons.
I really liked the last post, but this one feels to me like it missed the mark. This is vitalism as reinterpreted by an EA -- the two philosophies come out looking similar only because you have contorted the former through the lens of the latter.
> What’s the equivalent for vitalism? Suppose we took a hyperspecific definition of vitalism (“building as many tanks as possible”). Soon we’re bulldozing the cathedrals to build more tank factories, breaking up happy families to send kids to the iron mines, and ripping scientists from their blackboards to work as tank gunners.
> (if your objection is that vitalism is more about overcoming challenges than about military strength per se, you can replace this with those same WALL-E robots, only now you’re on a testosterone drip and they’re whipping you twenty hours a day to force you to try to lift a weight 0.01 kg heavier than your previous personal best.)
> (if your objection is that vitalism is more about aesthetics/beauty than strength, you can replace this with a robot churning out one billion extremely beautiful marble statues per second somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, with humankind long since extinct.)
These strawman visions of "vitalism-at-infinity" are not broken because they are hyperspecific (in contrast to the rest of vitalism which is handwavy), they are broken because they are doing the EA thing of measuring some global property of the state of the universe and maximizing it. Here's what a vitalist utopia would look like:
"Humanity has expanded to colonize the solar system, then the galaxy, and continues to expand beyond. On each planet/moon/ringworld, colonies are growing into cities, cities are growing into civilizations, which are growing into planet-spanning empires. Within each city, partnerships are forming and growing into corporations, and organizing and producing civilizational value. Individual citizens are improving themselves by growing stronger and creating value and discovering new technologies, and forming families which grow in strength and influence."
This now looks very different from utilitarianism-at-infinity. First of all, it is not a degenerate hellscape. Secondly, is robust -- we can lose many planets to asteroid strikes, but growth will continue (vs if the heroin machine breaks, the utilitarian infinity goes 100 to 0). Also, it involves a lot of suffering: every time we colonize a planet, that is risky and involves people suffering and dying in ways that they would not if they had stayed at home; for every corporation that thrives, many fail and their members suffer; when a family's power waxes, others must wane, some maybe even ending forever.
> If there were such interventions, I think vitalists would find that they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves devote more than ~10% of their time/energy/money to them, in the same way most effective altruists don’t devote more than 10% of their time/energy/money to altruism.
Vitalist interventions sound like this: "increase your strength an individual, increase the strength of your family, increase the strength of your community, increase the strength of your country, increase the strength of humanity; prioritize them in that order". Do you really think that people struggle to allocate more than 10% of their time to this intervention? I'd say most people dedicate as much as they can, impeded only by willpower and ability. An admirable/heroic person dedicates 100%.
> The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of).
You make the counterargument to this yourself, in this very same post. Mindlessly measuring "$4000 -> $56,000 of world GDP" and concluding this makes it a good use of funds is exactly the "ignorance of second-order effects" that you criticize here:
> But also, both of these scenarios ignore second-order effects. For example - aren’t happy families good, even to monomaniacal tank-builders, because they raise well-adjusted children who can build the next generation of tanks? Aren’t scientists good, because even the most theoretical among them may one day hit on an advance which could prove useful for tank construction? Aren’t cathedrals good insofar as they fill us with awe of God, who commands us to build more tanks?
In my experience, this is a classic characteristic of EA. First-order-effects are easy to measure and quantify, so interventions basically only end up ranked by first-order-effects. Second-order effects are given token acknowledgement but rarely if ever taken seriously.
I've spent a lot of time wrestling with the issue of EA/utilitarianism vs Vitalism over the past year, so I have a few questions about your perspective. I think the second order effect criticism is very strong, and I have yet to see a thought-out response from utilitarians of any stripe. I definitely think the expanding circles of priority is a far superior way of approaching problems, and is in fact true utilitarianism scaled for a societal level since any alternative is unsustainable and vulnerable to malicious hijacking (hence why the Soviet Union and any other attempt at a utopian society has failed).
What I would challenge is the idea of value maximization being bad, and rather suggest that EAs typically focus on the wrong value. To me the value that should be optimized is autonomy, meaning the ability to act in an independent and rational fashion without being subject to external influence or coercion. Following from that is the idea that intelligence is good because it increases autonomy, and the more intelligent humans are the better. This also allows for a continued belief in human rights, as a right violation is anything that involves external coercion against others (there may be situations where exceptions can be made but they need to be extreme and in some way "balance out"). Autonomy maximization also gives a good argument for why it is wrong to kill all humans and replace them with a superintelligent AI, since that goes against the autonomy of billions of sapient beings. Admittedly someone could go and say "we don't care about mouse autonomy" but to me that indicates severe misanthropy because I think humans have demonstrated objective value through our impact on the universe.
As for your vision as a futuristic vitalist society, I think it is intuitively obvious that people being inside heroin pumping machines 24/7 is a bad outcome (although if somehow that was the choice all humans independently made I think we would have to accept it). However when we get into high tech stuff and posthumanism I think the logic of what you're talking about might break down, which might be why vitalists tend to be skeptical of AI and other paradigm-shifting tech advancements. Biological immortality would shift the risk/reward ratio massively and deincentivize activities that involved physical danger. Most risky things that people do now have a high reward and a small chance of killing you, but even if you die at age 40 you are losing 50% of an 80 year lifespan. If your potential lifespan is instead a million or a billion years, any amount of physical risk far outweighs the reward you could get from doing it. Instead I think we would want to use remote controlled robots (piloted in an immersive VR like way) to explore uncolonized planets, which would offer the same benefits without the rewards. If we wanted the FEELING of danger, you could play high intensity VR sims that could even temporarily knock you out to make you feel like you had died, but which would not actually kill you. As a more extreme example, I imagine that a sufficiently powerful AI might be able to simply model large portions of the universe and create an almost indistinguishable VR replica for humans to explore, with the exception that it would be optimized to be comparatively more pleasant and if you died you would essentially "respawn". Unless you believe authenticity has some inherent value (which I don't unless the authentic version of a thing contains something which the copy lacks) doing all the same stuff in VR except without personal risk just seems like a better option.
> I think the second order effect criticism is very strong, and I have yet to see a thought-out response from utilitarians of any stripe.
Is it? It really looks like motivated reasoning to me. In the post you were responding to:
> Mindlessly measuring "$4000 -> $56,000 of world GDP" and concluding this makes it a good use of funds is exactly the "ignorance of second-order effects" that you criticize here
And then the reader is left up to themselves to conclude that Nigeria, as a country is... I don't even know what concrete thing the poster was trying to say.
The strength of the argument made, to me, looks like you double counting your preconceptions, rather than learning new information / understanding the implications better.
This is the pattern of why I personally don't want to reply to second order effects criticisms: they tend to be vague or hypothetical rather than concrete, or when they are not they are explicitly wrong (aka, here's the exact spreadsheet column on Givewell showing that at least one person has thought deeply about this). And since by their very nature there are more second order effects than first order ones, someone can just keep generating them as knockdown arguments.
I've basically never seen a vitalism advocate say things like "well, it's possible that directly trying to bring strength to society would have bad second order backlash effects, here's how we have prepared for them" (if this were true, why the hell would vitalism need to be advocated for in the first place, if it's so dang stable?).
So no, I deny that second order effects are a good argument, that all of its seeming virtues stem from double standards and ease of generation, rather than any fact about reality.
I don't totally understand all your arguments but as I see it most of the global economic and scientific value is produced by a small number of developed countries. What happens in those countries by and large determines the welfare of the rest of the world, and so far no amount of direct aid to the third world has changed its fundamental nature as miserable and impoverished (the few countries that have gone from third world to developed mostly did so through their own efforts and it seems likely that we have run out of untapped potential in the rest of the world). This means even from the perspective of maximizing the wellbeing of people in third world countries it is still better to primarily focus on improving the economic and technological productivity of the developed world, which means you need well-functioning societies that offer positive incentives to productive people rather than making masses of wretched unproductive people marginally better off.
Yes, yes, but what are you *doing*, concretely to bring this about? It may be true that the value of first world countries are 100x that of third world ones, but if what you can do for first world countries amounts to "post nonspecific plans in blog post comments", versus buy, actual real malaria nets, which, in many ethical systems of accounting, would have more than 100x the effects.
Like, I would totally support a project for education reform in the first world if it meant .1% of GDP growth per year (as a downstream measurement of the presumptively positive effects, not as an ends in and of itself). But what is it that someone can do, concretely, that can allow you to do so?
Because I suspect the *lack* of such a plan is why you can blithely say things like "second order effects" as a knockdown argument. If you had a plan, and then I came up to you and said "second order effects" in the same manner the original post had, do you abandon the plan or the idea that saying the words "second order effects" should stop action in the world?
I am saying the above because if you *did* have a plan and you *do address* the same types of "second order effects" arguments, then I can be decisively proven wrong and I am much more likely to listen.
Edit: to be absolutely clear, the type of objection I'm against is of the type "ah, have you considered that curing your child's cancer would diminish cancer research funding, by depriving it of a sympathetic victim" rather than "harvesting organs from random people is bad, because then hospitals would not be safe, and if they weren't safe people wouldn't go to them, so we're out both organ harvesting and hospitals."
I didn't include the concrete things because they have been said before by others, not because there is nothing thoughtful to be said. I'm happy to elaborate. Nigeria is a wonderful country that Nigerians should invest in and help to grow and prosper.
One example of specific negative second-order effects of global giving is that any money sent across the world is money not being reinvested in the community that created the surplus, which can in the long run cause progress to stall and the surplus to dry up. Julian's reply was largely along these lines. The meritocratic / "master morality" mindset is "those most capable of generating surplus deserve to keep it so they can leverage it to generate more".
A second specific negative second order effect is that a status quo of global giving incentivizes patheticness/victimhood, because whoever is able to portray themselves as most pathetic is the one that attracts the most charity dollars. This is at odds with the sort of self-directed progress that is required to build sustained wealth and genuinely improve economic conditions.
> One example of specific negative second-order effects of global giving is that any money sent across the world is money not being reinvested in the community that created the surplus, which can in the long run cause progress to stall and the surplus to dry up.
Am I to understand that spending 10k dollars on loot boxes and other virtual goods is going to help out the first world economy?
Or 12 million dollars to build a toilet?
On the margin that EA operates at, which constitutes less than 160x less money moved per year than the mobile gaming industry (a growth industry might I add!) It seems implausible to me on its face that if I were grand czar of the economy, that I'd want to move malaria net money into mobile gaming, even if I was maniacally focused on growth. Do you disagree? If so via what mechanism do you think mobile game growth contributes more to the economy?
Edit:in retrospect I don't think you had EAs in mind, leaving the above in there in case you thought this applies to EAs. I have no quarrel at all if you are criticizing altruism as practiced by most people.
> A second specific negative second order effect is that a status quo of global giving incentivizes patheticness/victimhood, because whoever is able to portray themselves as most pathetic is the one that attracts the most charity dollars.
I agree this is why altruism-the-emotion is bad, but I don't see how it's a bad downstream effect of altruism-as-ideology-seriously-acting-on-the-world. If you want to do altruism well, you also do research into economic policy reform--exactly what the ACX post is proposing!
[1] Approx general EA donor amountshttps://www.givewell.org/about/impact
To be transparent, this doesn't include the money billionaires like Dustin Moskovitz has put into the movement, but I'm presuming that your argument is intended for the general donor. If it's just for someone like Dustin I think I'm way more receptive.
In my opinion, spending money on mobile gaming is a far worse use than spending it on malaria nets in a remote African country. But malaria nets are worse than any of: donating it to a non-profit in your community, having + supporting an extra child, buying a gym membership or a textbook (if you put them to use), investing in a company, etc.
Altruism-as-emotion is bad, and altruism-as-ideology-seriously-acting-on-the-world-as-operationalized-by-EAs is bad for similar reasons. My critique of EAs is just that they are doing good...badly. They succeed when evaluated by their own metrics but fail when evaluated by reality. I discussed this here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-99303753
> When faced with a choice between doing good and feeling good, many give charity in ways that flatter their feelings. The distinction is that for EAs, positive feelings are derived from a self-perception of rationality.
The point about mobile gaming is that your "reinvesting into the community" point would be fully consistent with spending more money on mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is merely the most stark and accepted form of "not effective first world investment", but my fundamental question is: How do you know the things you are advocating for are closer to the malaria nets end of the spectrum than the mobile gaming end?
Heck, there even is a second order effect argument around it, which is that needing money to spend for mobile gaming makes people more ambitious (this is not intended as just a facile hypothetical, a semi common, but still relatively rare anecdote among gacha players is they got higher paying jobs than they otherwise would have to find money for their next rolls)
> donating it to a non-profit in your community
Where did your incentivizes victimhood/patheticness objection go? If there are good reasons you feel this objection doesn't apply, have you checked that EAs haven't already addressed it in the same way you are saying?
> having + supporting an extra child
EAs in general are, when they think about it, not purposefully trading off donations and children. If you have counterexamples, then by all means but, amongst prominent EAs (Julia+Jeff Kauffman, Kelsey Piper, maaayybe Scott?), they are all having the number of children they plan to. (now if we are going to make claims like "but their very lifestyle limits their children to n instead of n+1", why are you talking to EAs instead of, literally any other first world, non fecund ideology?)
> buying a gym membership or a textbook (if you put them to use)
This isn't close to mutually exclusive with EA, at least not more than having a job or social life. In fact, one of the more common EA lifestyle interventions suggested *is* exercise, and one of the criticisms of the rationalist arm of EAs is that they do too much autodidactism. Also if I had to say, the median EA is about 2x as likely as a median ACX commentator to have read a text book as an adult recreationally.
It would be absurd to say something like "I don't think you should spend money on cars because it might prevent you from reading a textbook or gym membership", so I don't think this criticism is well thought out. When I say you have a double standard, this is the type of thing I'm talking about. You would *never* make this mistake when talking about any other big ticket item with low maintenance like cars, funko pops or laundry machines, but when talking about altruism, whatever mental process filtering out that objection goes on vacation, or gets overridden.
> investing in a company
Once again, why is this specifically going to be better than saving a third world life, in expectation? If I wanted to invest in index funds, that's going to be 7-11% growth per year, and so think there's a reasonable expectation that this results in longer run economic growth, but is that worth more than a life? I don't know, but saying things like "second order effects" when you haven't even given a quantitative case for even the barest first order effect estimate makes me think this is unserious.
> My critique of EAs is just that they are doing good...badly.
Your critique is a bald assertion next to a mention of SBF.
My critique is that your critique is bad. It is bad because it mostly ignores the reality of what goes on with rationalists and EAs, instead choosing to visualize an autistic person and whispering the words "this is a rationalist in real life" under your breath. Once again this is what I mean by double standard: you criticize others for rationalizing things without checking yet fail to embody the virtues that should, in theory, be your defense against this failure mode. EAs, in fact, talk endlessly about second order effects, have "flow through" effects explicitly on their cost benefit calculations, controversially HAD A DEWORMING CHARITY WITH LESS EVIDENCE THAN THEY WOULD HAVE LIKED, where most of the proposed reasoning for including it was the large effect sizes on educational outcomes, something that is basically all second order effect. These are things publicly available to read online, on the absolute central example of global poverty EA organization. I'm not asking you to be familiar with a 3 karma post on the EA forums, I'm asking you to have at least skimmed GiveWell.
If an EA wants to save lives, I don't see how they are ineffective according to their own values, other than an assertion on your part. That SBF exists doesn't mean that the Against Malaria Foundation is ineffective or that second order effects were not considered.
I agree with your take that vitalism can largely be seen as "utilitarianism that works", but that misses the infinity case -- if we had a magic wand that could turn the world into heroin machines, vitalist-via-utilitarianism types would wave it, true vitalists would not.
I don't see autonomy as inherently valuable. Some people thrive under more autonomy, some under less. I for one am largely thankful for the ways in which my autonomy was restricted by my parents as a child, and the ways in which it continues to be constrained by society and my social support system to this day.
I don't know if all vitalists will agree with this (tbh I have no idea what vitalists think, I haven't even used that word before today) but I see no contradiction between vitalism and futurism. If putting on a helmet transmits my consciousness to a robot body on a remote world that I then terraform that's fine, assuming the impact on my mind, body, and the world I am terraforming is the same as if I were there. It's not like we directly experience things anyways (all action sensation is mediated through our bodies).
Your description of a vitalist utopia looks pretty good from an altruistic point of view. If you added details, those would probably also look good from an altruistic point of view.
The big problem with Nietzsche was that he was useless at discouraging his readers across Europe from going to war, catastrophically, in 1914. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere in his voluminous writings he said something anti-war, but the general impression that any masculine young European would have gotten from reading Nietzsche in 1890-1914 is that War Is Awesome.
"If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee"? That doesn't seem to be it. "God is dead!" I don't see anything about war after that. What quote are you thinking of?
"School of war" is a reasonable literal translation of "Kriegsschule", but "military academy" would be a more idiomatic one which probably gets closer to capturing the meaning.
Hmm... I don't know the original, and I _certainly_ don't know the German cultural context, but "_life's_ school of war" sounds like it might be close to the English (American?) idiom of "school of hard knocks". Is it?
"You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor." -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On War and Warriors"
To be fair, Nietzsche predates Maxim. OK, technically they overlap, but most of Nietzsche's writing was I think done before publication of Hiram's masterpiece. So he was writing for an era and from a history in which the Awesome:Terrible ratio of war was rather farther towards "Awesome" than it was about to become, and I'm not sure we can reasonably have expected him to anticipate that.
The big problem is that Nietzsche didn't have an intellectual heir who in the early oughts wrote "Wait, hang on, this is how all that Master/Slave Will to Power stuff needs to work in the age of fully mechanized warfare, maybe becoming a successful industrialist is vital enough"
I don't think the US can claim credit for inventing the microwave oven; a m̶a̶d̶ British scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock) almost-certainly* invented the microwave oven as part of his hamster-cryogenics research (no, really).
*Almost-certainly in that we don't have the exact dates, but Lovelock was very likely first in a sort of Newton-Leibniz sense.
Furthermore, given that *inventing the microwave oven* basically just consisted of *getting an already-existing magnetron and putting it in a box*, I'd argue that the magnetron was the real invention anyway - and this was effectively donated to the US during WWII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission)
I dunno: the standard story is that Percy Spencer (working for Raytheon) invented the microwave oven in 1945; Raytheon definitely submitted the patent for a microwave cooking device that year. Lovelock seems to have been doing his hamster revivification experiments in the 1950s, and even then he was using microwaves to warm them up, not to cook food (which is kind of what a microwave oven is: a device designed to cook things with microwaves). Like, credit the British with inventing magnetrons, but none of them thought to cook food with them.
I don't agree that it has to be used to cook food in order to count as an oven - it heats stuff up and if whoever invents the oven happens to want to heat frozen hamsters up but then the whole of the rest of the world subsequently chooses to use it to heat food up, I would still credit the original inventor.
That being said - I think you're absolutely correct that Spencer and Raytheon predate Lovelock and I concede the point. (Thanks for correcting me! I think my knowledge of Lovelock's microwave hamster-defrosting oven might have come from his obituary - which understandably probably didn't want to digress into talking about Raytheon...)
Thanks for trying to flesh this out more Scott. I am not Bismarck and don't agree with him on most things, but I do agree with a philosophy in the same general direction as his and feel that there is a real difference between the goals of Altruism and Vitalism. I'll try to make a succinct description of the difference, in my view.
I'm glad you used the word "real" near the end, as I think that's the most important word for Vitalism. Vitalism is, to me, an attempt at adjusting to the real world, not status games or what we would prefer the world to be. That's the source of the fascination with war. War forced WWII American torpedo makers to develop better technology, because the ones we made at the start of the war sucked. We also had to improve planes, ships, radar, whatever. Ukrainian economics aren't improving, but they are getting really good at drone warfare - because the current situation forces them to get good at it. The tactics developed may change how warfare is conducted around the world, and the Ukrainian military will be on the cutting edge of this. Kinda like how battleships became obsolete due to carriers, but we didn't know that until WWII happened and we saw it in action for a while.
Okay, to move away from strictly war-based ideas. Welfare payments reduce pressure on people to improve. The opposing side would never phrase it like that, but if phrased more positively ("welfare payments reduce pressure on people to [conform/work themselves to death]"), then pretty much everyone would agree about the effect. Pressure, in this sense, is anything at all that makes people act in a way that both recognizes the real effects of what they do, and move in a "positive" direction (with an acknowledgement that we're going to have a really hard time defining "positive" here). Altruism tries to circumvent the pressure and jump to the end goal, while vitalism says that goal is impossible. The very actions you take to reduce the pressure prevent the positive effects from the pressure and result in a worse society.
One side sees the lack of pressure as a positive, and would be considered altruists. The other side sees the lack of pressure as a negative, and would be vitalists. Vitalists would almost certainly agree that there's a level of pressure that's too much - the person under pressure will break rather than improve. Altruists would almost certainly agree that there's a level of pressure that is too little (as with those who don't want heroin drips). I mostly agree that in practice Vitalists and Altruists in the modern West should have similar methods. What Vitalists are saying is that the overall trend should either move towards more pressure, or at least not less pressure, while Altruists seem to want to continue removing that pressure.
All of this is well and good, but it seems to me that those hardcore vitalists should practice what they preach much more. Like moving to Ukraine to get a feel for what real pressure tastes like, instead of having pretty theories about it.
I think their ultimate goal is to strengthen their local countries, or at least stem the tide of what's weakening those countries. Not all pressure is equally good, and not all pressure produces what the person would want. Learning drone warfare is all well and good, I suppose, but it's not exactly the be-all, end-all important thing.
My impression is that such people aren't usually under particular pressure themselves, don't consider this to be a problem, but are eager to put (or keep) others under it. Even from a signalling perspective, knowing what you're talking about seems useful.
We're all under constant significant pressure. We just think of some things (like the pressure to eat and breath) to be perfectly normal and put other things (like the pressure to sexually submit to a boss) as outside of normal. Pressure here means anything at all, to any extent, that encourages us to act in a certain way instead of another.
The tricky part is determining which pressures are "normal" and "good" and which are not. Vitalists have a different list than Altruists, despite both hoping for similar end results. Vitalists think that there should be pressure for people to get jobs and be productive - most people agree, depending on the severity of the pressure and whether or not there's edge cases where the pressure is bad or too much. Ordinary people should not be pressured to the point of breakdown (even for a Vitalist, it's not helpful or productive in any case). Mentally handicapped people should not be pressured to have jobs in order to survive, but maybe pressured in a more mild way to have jobs so they can be more active and social.
A very partial list of benign/helpful pressures:
Pressure to socialize.
Pressure to text a friend back.
Pressure to not kill people or otherwise hurt them.
Pressure to tell your spouse "I love you" once in a while.
Pressure to not use racial slurs.
Pressure to not be evil.
You get the idea. Vitalists are not hypocrites is they want more pressure in more areas, but aren't moving to the place with the most pressure possible.
I don't think of myself as being in either camp, but it seems pretty obvious that they diverge very widely in very normal situations. You give an important example - welfare. Another similar example is UBI. These are both mainstream political positions that are absolutely not similarly recommended by altruism or vitalism systems
What evidence does it fly in the face of? I thought UBIs generally looked good in studies (e.g. https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f192616.pdf: key quote “Communities receiving UBI experienced substantial economic expansion—more enterprises, higher revenues, costs, and net revenues—and structural shifts, with the expansion concentrated in the non-agricultural sector.”)
I like the way you are thinking, but I feel like it misses something. Pressure can be an important tool, but the goal is flourishing. Nature provides one-size-fits-all pressure, and converts the failures into living food, but pressure designed by humans has the possibility of being intelligently tailored for optimal growth. (E.g., video games with a good skill progression, or weightlifting bro-science.) But this runs the risk of becoming unreal - we must always remember the true enemy is nature, or in other words, reality itself. (E.g., sports based on a real-world activity that have diverged so far that the skills involved have almost no transfer to the current interactions of the real-world activity itself.)
Teleologically, the goal is winning; enjoying facing pressure is how we get good enough to win, but we shouldn't fetishize pressure or ignore its costs. That's a road to masturbatory excess and to wasting human lives.
I didn't mean to wade into, e.g., dualism vs. monism waters with that statement. I just wanted to summarize what I consider to be the most salient and deep seated difference between the two philosophies.
(I admit freely that I am putting my own spin on the two definitions here in a way that might not align precisely with how they are used in the post, but in my defense I will say that I am doing this to try and reach a deeper and more fundamental delineating of the two psychologies. What follows below is speculation with dubious epistemic status, with the primary objective of elucidating and putting into words certain intuitions)
To vitalists, the ultimate locus of axiological value is *external*. Individual experiences (their internal states) are ultimately subordinate to some grand and glorious organization of the physical world. A vitalist, in my view, might consider a state of the universe beautiful or desirable even in the absence of anyone to observe it. An extreme vitalist might even embrace Bostrom's "Disneyland without children", because that world itself is aesthetically pleasing from "God's eye view". This external aesthetic locus is ultimately why, I think, pain and suffering are permissible in the vitalist view. In the context of futurism: e/acc is a vitalist philosophy -- a glorious sacrifice of humanity to the machine god is cool from an *external* view, and the internal states of those being sacrificed are subordinated. Vitalists find the SSA/SIA/doomsday argument type questions idle curiosities.
Altruists, on the other hand, make *internal* states the primary axiological locus. An altruist might consider an empty universe desirable (negative utilitarians), or not (pro-natal utilitarians), but an altruist would not distinguish e.g. the Disneyland without children from a homogeneous mass of dust, since they have the same internal states (none). In the context of futurism: AI safety is an altruistic philosophy, because the total accounting of happy internal states that will exist might vary greatly if some rogue (and, horrifyingly, not even conscious) AI kills everyone. Altruists care deeply about SSA/SIA/doomsday argument type questions, because these are required to do a proper accounting of how good a course of action is.
This post rests on the assumption that altruists and vitalists are utilitarians who happen to have different utility functions. Which is fine if you’re a utilitarian, but most people are not. I consider myself an altruist (a Christian actually) but the goal of altruism is to have (agape) love for all people, not to maximize their happiness. If virtue ethicists like myself can be said to want to maximize anything then it’s purely internal: I want to maximize my virtue, as in having just the right amount of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, righteousness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. It’s not loving to hook my neighbor up to an IV drip of hedonism: how will they be free to develop their own virtue if they’re blissed out 24/7?
I understand the argument that all moral systems boil down to utilitarianism, but in practice they always seem to cash out differently: a utilitarian like Scott will think of moral conflicts in terms of maximizing a utility function, while a virtue ethicist like myself will think of moral conflict in terms of virtue vs vice, sin against holiness.
EDIT: To say all this more succinctly, vitalists are not trying to maximize strength across all humans, they’re trying to maximize their own strength. They’re (most of them) virtue ethicists who, unlike good Christians, do not consider altruistic love a virtue. They don’t give a whit about making other people strong.
> This post rests on the assumption that altruists and vitalists are utilitarians who happen to have different utility functions.
Where did this (rationalist?) habit of using "utilitarianism" to mean "maximizing consequentialism" come from? It's not remotely consistent with how anyone else uses the word. Anything that could reasonably be called "utilitarianism" is at a minimum agent-neutral, and most likely trying to maximize some notion of well-being (happiness and preference-satisfaction being the two standard cases).
If altruistic love (agape) is one of the virtues you are trying to maximize, then treating others the way you would want to be treated *is* maximizing your own virtue. That's why Christian virtue ethicists are also altruists, love is literally the most important Christian virtue (see 1 Corinthians 13:13, and Matthew 22:37-39)
"vitalists are not trying to maximize strength across all humans, they’re trying to maximize their own strength"
The argument is that humans do better in groups, are stronger in groups. So being 'altruistic' to the group, so the group can more successfully hunt, and educate the young to have future big smart warriors, etc... Then the individuals within the group can reach higher levels of strength, they would be starting at a higher level of strength, boosted by the group. Rather than what a lone human is like, alone squatting in the bush starving.
That would make a vitalist favor helping other humans grow stronger, but only those humans that will make him grow stronger if they grow stronger (and only if they're utilitarian vitalists). Most humans do not make you stronger when they grow stronger! An argument could be made for utilitarian vitalists wanting to strengthen their own groups, such as their country, their political party, their social club, etc, but where is the argument for maximizing strength across all humans? Would a vitalist be in favor of strengthening his enemies by 50% because that would increase the world average level of strength? I can't imagine he would.
No, of course. I thought the original argument was about individuals versus the group. If you include all humans, even enemies, then no, they aren't in the group. I'm only saying that the 'rugged individual' that survives on his own, is a big myth. Groups build up the infrastructure that allow people to strive for me. But of course, there are different groups, and individuals in that group would want to support each other. It gets complicated if we try to expand to some kind of set theory and decide what the 'group' is. That is where all this breaks down. Some people are viewing this through the lenses of immediate family and friends, like around 150 Dunbar Number. But once you scale up to nations, other rules apply, we can't just break down into anarchy with every individual doing their own thing.
I can't just drive on the other side of the road because I've used my strength through my Super-Man striving and reached the ultimate of being able to drive on the other side of the road. And everyone else that doesn't is weak. You are all herd animals staying on that side of the road.
I think we're 180 degrees off the mark here. A society where robots churn out tanks (or beautiful statues, or buff guys) while its people kinda just do what they're told isn't anywhere close to a vitalist society. Nietzsche would hate those guys.
The whole point of vitalism is that you exercise will to break free of societal constraints. So in a maximally vitalist society, every person is pursuing a different personal goal for mostly aesthetic reasons and when those goals conflict they fight and maybe someone wins. The fighting isn't the point, the exercise of power over the self and others is. Joining a gym isn't vitalism unless you, completely independent of any outside influences, decide to get super buff.
I am not a vitalist and I don't really think vitalism is...real? Like it's not psychologically tenable, it just makes a really good story. So if a middle-class dude with support from his parents does a good job in business, that's not really a vitalist success story because he hasn't sua sponte created his own goal independent of his environment and pursued it against a host of challenges like Hercules. Comfort is the enemy of vitalism because vitalists define their philosophy to include an absence of comfort. It doesn't matter if comfort makes us better at reaching goals because the fact that the comfort was there makes the goals less meaningful.
Ironically, this post made that incoherent philosophy sound super appealing just by failing to understand it.
Nietzsche would hate those guys, but he might love the society that built that society. If vitalism ever exceeded, I think it would hate what it became - along the lines of "a strong society creates weak men" kind of thought. Philosophically, I think they believe it's impossible to actually win, in large part because of that cycle. Perhaps Rome won for a period of time, but then created weak men and the ongoing need for strong men to come back.
To me, I think the point of vitalism, or at least the variety of vitalism that I'd support, is to rescue "do cool things and be awesome" from the dull demands of "optimise your actions to create the greatest good for the greatest number".
It's hard to turn that into a coherent moral philosophy that you can put right up there next to "please maximise global utils". Vitalism doesn't optimise for anything in particular, it just gives you an excuse to do not-necessarily-optimal things just because they sound awesome.
If you really wanted to make a utilitarian argument for vitalism you could. Pure utilitarianism is a short-sighted optimisation procedure which is likely to get you stuck in a local maximum, while vitalism gives you the big random shocks that you need to get out of your local maximum and towards faraway higher ground.
This is a good comment. I agree and have nothing to add.
Wait - one thing: I think the vision/narrative you describe is useful because sometimes untrue stories can be useful and become more useful if you believe them. But that doesn't change the fact that vitalism in reality is wrong at best and destructive at worst. Comfortable, happy people do actually create more impactful and useful works than struggling folks in volatile societies.
Yeah, I'm not in favour of any form of vitalism that is pro "struggling folks in volatile societies".
The closest I'll get to endorsing that is saying that making everyone as comfortable as possible isn't the best possible goal, and I'd be comfortable with somewhat more of a comfort gradient between high achievers and low achievers, if that incentivises high achievement.
>To me, I think the point of vitalism, or at least the variety of vitalism that I'd support, is to rescue "do cool things and be awesome" from the dull demands of "optimise your actions to create the greatest good for the greatest number".
To me, that, at least, sounds reasonable. Depending on how stringent the "do cool things and be awesome" is, that can reduce to everyone having a hobby that they are enthusiastic about, which is a perfectly livable outcome, and will result in some people even doing the occasional thing that _other_ people think is cool too.
>because he hasn't sua sponte created his own goal independent of his environment and pursued it against a host of challenges like Hercules
Not really relevant to the overall point, but did you mean Odysseus? Hercules didn't set his own heroic goals himself, he was carrying out tasks assigned by Eurystheus.
Good catch actually, and I think it might be relevant. Odysseus wasn't really self-directing either, in fact none of the great heroes of culture were. The mythic hero archetype is based on the idea that you can overcome your environment but that's not really a thing - we're products of our environments and we take actions for reasons.
Which is why I tend to think of this idea of a superman who does things for "his own reasons" as an appealing but ultimately empty fiction.
Gilgamesh, I think, was writing his own path. He didn't *succeed* in finding immortality, but he's the one who decided on that quest (and I think most of his other adventures).
If you consider this reasoning to be sound, would you also say that anyone who believes otherwise should work AGAINST bringing "African countries" to "1st world" levels?
>If I wanted to strengthen humanity as much as possible, I’d probably work on economic development, curing diseases, or technological progress. I might have slightly different priorities from the effective altruists working on these same causes, but I’d consider them 99%-allies.
I think there's an entirely defensible argument the vitalist might make - that our culture is so inundated with slave morality memes that fighting against that (by, say, blogging about Bronze Age pirates) is the most important cause. Unlike economic development, it's also neglected and tractable, if you'll forgive me my EA jargon.
In general, this whole thesis of "vitalism and altruism are in 99% of cases allied out of convenience" just, I don't know, seems very weak. To begin with, "strengthening humanity", as I understand it, has nothing to do per se with technological progress, or economic development, or curing diseases. Those things are only interesting to the vitalist because it takes strong people to accomplish them, no? Just because you elevate Civilization (TM) to this hallowed position of instrumental and terminal goal at the same time, doesn't mean everyone has to.
Several of your examples seem utilitarian instead of individualistic; suppose chad wakes up on day and a homeless, immigrant, diagenic mental ill person throws poop at him. Chad being stotic, could take this in stride but doesn't want a society where this happens and simply kills the homeless person on the spot. In a vilitistic society, wouldn't chad be allowed to go free, in an hyper altruistic one, like, oh, parts of California, he wouldn't?
After aggregation, good ideas are good ideas and edge cases disappear(in thought experiments anyway), but in the real world you need to make calls on each case, with partial information.
Given a hard problem where it looks like an abuse of power is happening, do you side with the powerful or the (appearing) powerless? These two systems have different answers.
On the question of where vitalism differs from altruism on policy, you're saying that if everyone agrees on what the consequences of enacting Policy A will be, then vitalists and altruists will agree on whether Policy A is a good idea.
But in reality, vitalists and altruists clearly have different intuitions about the consequences of policy. Let's look at regulation of nuclear power: that was clearly implemented with an altruist justification, even if you can say they would have decided differently if they knew the outcome would be negative utility. You could say the same thing about FDA failures, or a bunch of other bad regulations that we're currently living with.
So maybe your version of altruism wouldn't do any of those things, but it's still a reasonable question to ask: why do people with altruistic motivations keep making such bad decisions?
Because the emotion of altruism is bad and predictably makes people make bad decisions. Altruism-the-feeling is pretty obviously generated from the incentives that encourage signalling. See: the "altruism" of making children do things neither the parent nor the child naturally like, is to signal to other parents how good a parent you are, and not to maximize the human potential of the child. The "altruism" of volunteering overseas or at a soup kitchen, the talk naturally drifts towards what the volunteer thought of the situation, how the subject of charity is in a bad position, rather than towards the effectiveness of the intervention.
If someone is feeling the emotion of altruism intensely, they are extremely likely to not be thinking primarily about the effects of the altruism on outcomes, but on what virtues can be demonstrated by their actions.
There's an almost unending list of disasters caused by people with altruistic impulses (usually wanting to avoid harm) not thinking through or being wrong about the consequences of their policies:
- BLM/depolicing killed many more through increased crime
- War in Iraq, interventions in Syria/Libya
- FDA rules about drug trials, CDC rules about covid testing, etc.
- Housing/zoning regulations
- Welfare policy causing disintegration of poor families
It's a little hard to construct a counterfactual because who knows what the world would look like if elites looked at things primarily through a vitalist lens instead of an altruistic one.
But at the margin anyway, using more vitalist intuitions for policy seems really likely to get better results, if only because it would likely fix the most obvious own goals -- especially over-regulation.
The problem is that when you generate the result of counterfactual, you don't end up having unlikely and unfavorable events to your ideology in them. You're not going to imagine riots based on false accusations of autonomy reduction, you're not going to generate wasteful provisions to bills, you're not going to generate 2 -degrees-of-separation-negative-effects, that you would currently ascribe to altruism, because your mind is going to be focused on all the nice things vitalism does, and only incidentally, on correctly modeling what happens with mass adoption of ideology.
To be clear, I am pro embiggening and would agree that your proposal does seem to make sense, but I don't agree intuitions on abstract motivations for policies are a good way of understanding or influencing the world.
I think where we agree is there's like a "pathological altruism" impulse or motivation that is very prevalent in recent history and causes people to miscalculate or ignore the consequences of policies because they sound altruistic.
And my point is that Scott shouldn't just wave off the difference between vitalism and altruism as negligible, because if people make the same calculations about consequences then they don't differ that much.
In reality, someone coming from vitalist ideology is just going to make very different calculations about the consequences of their policies. Like you said, the second order effects of people adopting vitalist ideology would probably be really dramatic, and not negligible at all.
Would it be better? Really hard to know. But the idea that it wouldn't be different at all is wrong.
I don’t like the argument “X was dumb, X was motivated by Y, therefore Y is dumb”. More policy is motivated by altruism than by vitalism, therefore more bad policy is motivated by altruism. Bad policy motivated by vitalism is also possible (most corruption is motivated by misguided vitalism, just like the FDA is motivated by misguided altruism).
Sure - I agree that currently altruism motivates much more policy than vitalism, and that we can't really know what a world where vitalism dominates would look like.
I'm just saying -- contra Scott -- you can't just wave away the differences between altruism and vitalism because they should theoretically agree about policy questions. In reality, vitalists clearly don't agree with altruists about policy, so a vitalist world would be very different - maybe better, maybe worse.
Vitalism and *happiness* may often go hand in hand, but arguably vitalism and *altruism* aimed to increase happiness often diverge.
Saving lives, curing diseases increases both happiness and a society's strength. But who can't pay for their own treatments? Old pensioners, disabled people, people with expensive chronic diseases whose treatment costs more than what they can ever produce. Likewise, technology can make people happier (and perhaps more advanced and productive), but we only need altruism for that if they aren't productive enough to pay for it themselves. We could say that vitalism and altruism diverge, even in fairly normal situations.
But I assume there are forms of altruism vitalists would approve of, like volunteering for the military, and being more heroic than the minimum required. So it's perhaps better to say that altruism aimed to increase the happiness of others diverges from altruism with vitalistic motivations.
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I'm not trying to defend vitalism, especially not as an end goal. The sort of sacrifices vitalism makes may be useful on the short run to increase happiness on the long run, which is probably the origin of vitalist ideas, and in which case they are perfectly compatible with and prescribed by consequentialist ethics; but they don't make sense as universal end goals. People may choose to defy challenges as a satisfying end goal instead of the pure hedonism of the heroin addict—even in a post-scarcity society there would be athletes who take pride in their strength—, but that's not something that needs to be forced on others, and it's also compatible with happiness-maximizing ethics if we interpret happiness as satisfaction of one's preferences, rather than activating opioid receptors.
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Re: specific examples:
If a Kenyan can produce $56,000, why can't Kenya fund the $4000 interventions to save lives? (AFAIUI the interventions in question don't require the $4000 to be paid as a lump sum, but are small costs that probabilistically may save a life, and come out to $4000/life in expectation.) Likely they can; the $4000 is around the very lowest cost to save a life of some of the poorest people in the poorest parts of Africa, not the average Kenyan.
Re: "Children don’t die of illnesses because they’re “dysgenic” or “weak”. They die because their immune systems haven’t developed yet": those are not mutually exclusive explanations, unless genetics can't possibly influence one's resistance to a disease, which definitely isn't the case for malaria; the heterozygotic sickle cell trait famously confers an advantage.
Here, too, that's not to say I endorse foregoing medical treatments so we evolve more genetic resistance to diseases. The valid purpose of genetic resistance would be to not die from diseases, but it's an ineffective and costly (in terms of lives) way to do something that can often be done more cheaply and effectively by technology. What's more, sometimes there are tradeoffs between different forms of genetic fitness (see the sickle cell trait again); preventing malaria through technology allows us to evolve towards having less sickle cell anemia.
Julius Caesar had a pleasant childhood, it appears, but his father died when he was only 15. He became the head of household and married a girl he loved, Cornelia; but when he was 17 the dictator of Rome, Sulla, ordered him to divorce her. He refused, and had to go into hiding for fear of his life.
When he was 19, he became an officer in the military and faced combat. He saved another soldier's life in battle, so presumably this was not easy at all. In other words, he led a life of danger and real threats by the most powerful man in the Western world -- threats to his very existence. These he faced with courage and dignity, but he seems to be more of a testament to the value of vitalism than anything else, and I think he has been viewed this way for two millenia.
A literal quarantine is for people with diseases. A societal quarantine, by analogy, is to contain the spread of diseased culture. There's a reason that no one, even their Arab neighbors, wants to take in Palestinians: the rest of the world has the better part of a century worth of history to look back on and see that every time someone does, they bring the intense violence and misery that they left along with them.
The most dangerous words ever spoken are "this time will be different, I swear!"
I think a big consideration is to weaken and eventually destroy Israel as a Jewish state via the Palestinian cause; moving the Palestinians from there would obviously play against it.
Palestinians moved geographically away from Israel can still do everything in their power to destabilize a host country to keep it from giving money to Israel.
I'm not sure it's "the West" that is doing most of the banning there. Today, it's pretty much specifically Israel. Before 10/7, it was mostly Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, partly UNRWA, partly Israel, and the rest of "the West" mostly not just doing much to *help* the Gazans emigrate.
Do you have any source that Israel and especially Egypt stop Palestinians from emigrating? Clearly, they don't allow Palestinians to *immigrate* but do you have a source that they wouldn't allow them to transit through their countries - or by sea - to some other country that would want them? I read about Egypt allowing Palestinians through in the rare cases that they could prove that they were immediately leaving to some other country that wanted them (or even foreign passport holders for whom that was a presumption).
I'm pretty sure you're right about Egypt's de facto policy being that Palestinians are only allowed to cross out of Gaza into Egypt if they've got confirmed transportation and entry visas for Someplace Not Egypt. Which raises the question, why do all the Not-Egypt places that claim to care so very very much about the poor suffering Palestinians, not arrange visas for Palestinians who want out?
Most countries have fairly restrictive immigration policies, in general. The US lets in about a million legal immigrants per year compared to something like 100 million people who'd like to immigrate to the US.
Restrictive immigration policies, yes, but note that Europe already hosts more than a million Syrian refugees, with another three million in Turkey. That's enough to absorb the entire population of Gaza twice over.
The only difference I can see between Syrians who want to live in e.g. Germany, and Gazans who want to live in Germany, is that w/re the Palestinians, Berlin can just do nothing and let Egypt be the baddies who stop the telegenic suffering refugees at the border; they'd have to do it themselves to stop the Syrians.
Hm, the "vitalism maximizing" examples certainly look to me, maybe not like outright strawmen, but like very little thought was given to them, just taking the basic shape of the utilitarian optimizatino goal, and swapping "happy agents" for something else.
I'm not an expert on vitalism, but if it's about strength and heroism, wouldn't taking these to the extreme involve having fewer people with more individual power to each of them? E.g. instead of tiling the galaxy with 10^23 of individuals leaving normal comfortable life, tile it with 100 billions people each with a robotic Kardashev II civilization all to themselves, which they can use to build planet-sized works of art, or develop ways to colonize other galaxies, or augment themselves to the levels never dreamt of, or (of course!) wage epic wars with each other, or whatever else they feel like. Granted this is more of a specific image than a function to maximize, but the corresponding function may be something along the lines "maximize the utility of each existing conscious agent while setting the utility of any not-yet-existing agents to zero". Or maybe just "make sure that the amount of resources available to each agent growth infinitely" (Implementation details on how to make an entire galaxy-spanning civilization to share the same moral philosophy are of course left as an exercise for the reader, just like in the EA visions of the future.)
A future along these lines looks to me definitely more appealing than the one of the eternal heroin bliss. If there are any True Vitalists in the comments, I wonder if something along these lines sounds like a better or worse approximation of their views at infinity than "building infinite combat capacity/art"?
Not a vitalist, but it is not really a vitalist exercise to locate what drives people to mimic great or unique people or gods. That is an exercise of the weak and detached. The vital being just is the case of our species and what makes their presence a representation driving mimitic forces throughout civilization has more to do with a plethora of legitimating forces. It's not necessary to locate, and no one giving distiction to it as a finality is truly distinguishing the vital sources. You may become that person in fulling embracing lifeaffirming pursuits, but it's not necessarily so, and it's just as well that you will become a failed imposture as many of the Italian fascists were that tried to unsuccessfully make vitalism a program. Vitalism that strives self-consciously always fails, but the world is still filled with representations of vitality that drive humanity as a legitamating force of our values. Vitality does have resonance in historical, universal abstractions like biological strength, but there is an incredible amount of diversity in biological strength suited for different purposes. And whether or not people recognise that vitality among those different biological strengths has nothing to do with if that mimic force will help vitality flourish in our civilization. It could very well become a dysegenic type of force and lead a civilization to ruin if not suited to their environment. The true vitalist is unconsciously engaged in their pursuits without seeking to be vital, instead embracing traedgy and cruelty, without knowledge of their tragdic influence on those influenced for better or worse. That's my main take away, that what is vital is not the heroism but those forces on the weak to seek in strong how they should become, how they should live. You can't really see one without the other, and you cant really say much about their legitimacy, and you sure as hell can't do so detached and self-conscious, trying to remake yourself, others, or the world. The people saying otherwise are just fools and charlatines and try-hards.
Those who talk of vitalism seem to generally crave *dominance* if not war, sort of an eternal NFL season where the losers are cast aside. I'm sure that the optimal fraction of the population that is megalomaniacs is not zero, but it's also quite small ...
I've always felt like there's a paradox in the vitalist and adjacent ideologies. They don't want people to just get what they want, "they should have to struggle for it"
"Well by opposing your worldview and stopping you from imposing this on others, I'm glad I'm helping you achieve your dream of having to struggle to get what you want" the system works!
"The strong should dominate the weak" They are, right now. The universe has spoken. Anyone not dominating at this moment is by definition weak. 10 weak people can dominate 1 strong person. Vitalism has no adherents because it is weak. gg
Oh you don't like the rules of the universe, what it requires to win, and who ended up being dominant? Sounds like you are in favor of dysgenic policies!
Moloch is either your god or your devil. Pick one please.
vitalists say: "Do what you really want to do, don't donate money to bed nets"
I say "I really want to donate money to bed nets"
vitalists say "that's just what other people tell you to do, you shouldn't do things that people tell you to do"
I say "You are an 'other person' and you just told me to do something"
I mean sure maybe they only mean to argue against the strong form of Altruism, ie the one that says "doing the most good is a real moral obligation" as opposed to just "an abstraction of our values we have chosen to centralize" which is where most EA end up.
But then again most people are neither EAs nor vitalists. Most people value their own happiness more than the happiness of others but value the happiness of others more than 0. For most people there is no extrapolated value system that says "I must pursue the most good for the most people and the way to do that is to prioritize my own well being so I am motivated to not abandon this system"
Rather for most people it's just "I will pursue what I like and I like my own comfort and I also like helping others so I will find some balance of doing both"
so most acts of altruism don't come from an "altruistic system" but from a selfish system.
But vitalism tries to argue that altruistic acts are wrong because they are not selfish and in so doing is telling people what they aught to be want instead of letting people want the things they want themselves - ie its just as paternalistic as it claims all the other ethical systems are.
>Effective altruists often spend money curing/preventing malaria in Third World countries...Isn’t this still just adding extra bodies to Third World countries ..? Not really. The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year...
I'm not sure why Kenya is being mentioned. Neither the Against Malaria Foundation's net distribution or Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention operate in Kenya.
The countries where anti-malarial programs operate are generally poorer, with AMF's largest beneficiary from 2012 to 2021 being the DRC, whose GDP per capita is just $715, and MC's largest beneficiary from 2018-2021 being Nigeria, whose GDP per capita is $1110.
Additionally, the parts of these countries where programs operate are probably much poorer than the countries as a whole. The estimate of annual income added from these programs could be high by an order of magnitude.
>If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP
Additionally, if we want to estimate the value of future earnings, we need to discount them to the present, as noted in another comment.
Next, it's not at all obvious that preventing children dying from malaria would lead to more people generations later, as lower infant mortality seems to lead to lower birthrates (and vice versa).
>Finally, I think a lot of people think of this in terms of “Africans’ lives are worse less than nothing and I want to get rid of them”. Even if this is where you’re coming from, you’re not getting rid of one billion people, sorry.
This argument is weaker given that as noted above, the ones dying of malaria are far poorer than the average African. They're likely some of the poorest people in the world.
>Your best option is to make Africa less of a mess, so that it can take care of itself and its people don’t try to immigrate elsewhere.
This seems dubious. Even if the people dying of malaria were 10 times richer (and probably much more than that, given the numbers above) they'd still want to immigrate elsewhere. Furthermore, immigration is selective, the people who immigrate tend to be the most fortunate within their regions, while as noted, those dying of malaria tend to be the poorest.
The would seem to be a development economics question that we may have answers to. I'll see if I can dig something up. (No response would mean I'm too lazy rather than the results came out unfavorably)
Also, it seems rather questionable to assume that the size of a country's economy would grow linearly with the size of the population, even if the inhabitants would be entirely fungible.
Maybe I've missed them all somewhere, but you seem to be arguing against a kind of consequentialist vitalism that seems a little odd. You're bang on that there would be lots of similarities between it and utilitarianism, but only because the whole thing would collapse into one of those utilitarian-light eudaemonia-maximisation ideas anyway.
Most vitalists presumably either want to strengthen something specific (eg themselves, a country, a race), or else approve of actions by the most vital that demonstrate their vitality without regard to the consequences. Think Nazis. Their goal wasn't a general preference for big militarised countries fighting each other, it was for Germany to be really big and 'vital.'
I think that part of the problem here is that vitalism is a really bad fit for applying rigour to modern mass/internet politics. The game is:
1. Look at this thing (text anecdote/graph/image/video)
2. Say if it's good/bad
3. Justify 2 using a framework
4. Say what needs to be done/should have been done instead
Vitalism may be geared towards practical ethical choices (what should I do in scenario x, what virtues/tendencies should I cultivate?), but for judging people's actions it's a complete mess if it tries to go beyond "I do[n't] like this person." You can use it to judge people, but that's not a politics argument because it doesn't have step 4, so it all falls flat.
(P.S., 'Vitalism' seems like a fairly daft moral system anyway; if you're leaning in that direction, you should probably try to learn to want things for non-signalling reasons without becoming the headline "heroin-addled homeless man arrested for masturbating while shoplifting tub of ice cream." I'm not sure this is 100% possible if you're raised by human beings, but sitting in a room on your own trying to experience lots of different types of art until you find something that gives you positive yet inexplicable feelings is possibly a good start in vaguely the right direction.)
As defined, I think the article is correct and strength and happiness would converge across most realistic situations. However, I would posit another angle for vitalism/altruism distinction. I always felt altruism's idea of happiness was as comfort, safety, peace, plenty. In contrast, vitalism seemed to weigh much more thing like engagement, overcoming, positive difficulty, work, etc. Steelmanning vitalism, I'd say that desire for some difficulty and even conflict is an imperfect way of striving for this type of engaged happiness as opposed to more placid variants.
I think the argument goes, that you need "safety, peace, plenty" to build up. Like when working out, you need protein to build muscles. So you need some base of safety (to train), peace (to rest), plenty (to eat to be fittest). THEN, you can strive to do great things. Vitalism without some safety and plenty, turns into the anarchist hell scape, of all against all. Fighting for your food, and fighting so you don't become food.
Ok, but there's one extremely normal case that's extremely obvious that he's missing. While it is a bit of CW issue it's aid to the elderly (in the US that would be social security and medicare).
Social Security and Medicare (SS&M) make up roughly 30% of federal spending if I did the math right. This spending does not increase Vitalism basically at all, and so can be thought of as almost entirely an altrusitic venture. In fact the inverse of medicare would be far more vitalist, (care for people before age ~55 comes from the government after that everybody must pay their own medical bills by themselves)
You don't have to go to extrimistan or even moderately crazystan to find a major and significant place where they diverge. I would consider the issue of "should significant effort be invested in taking care of the elderly" to be the defining difference between altruism and vitalism in practice. By this I'm referring less to bloggers and more to individuals who I spend time around, people who refuse to take care of their sick and dying grandparents vs those who spend hours and hours putting effort into the black hole that is elder care. (I couldn't find a positive way to say both so let's just go with a double negative). Sure I'll grant you that the majority of people take care of their elderly but there are those that refuse. Many will use the plausible deniability plan of moving away and when you ask them why they moved they'll say something on the order of "I wanted to be away from my parents who keep needing my help".
If Medicare were forced insurance then everyone would pay the same for it. Instead rich people pay millions of dollars in taxes to fund Medicare over the course of their lives, while others pay nothing at all. It's still an an enormous wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
I am tempted to agree, since you do not contradict anything I said. But it is seldom the case that everyone pays the same for insurance, unless they are in the same risk category. And redistribution is not necessarily altruistic, or theft is altruistic.
The Logan's Run society? You say 55, but once this is setup, the argument over that number would start. Why not 65, or 40.? It seems like for overall Vitality, it would be better to spend all that money on food and education for the young. Then after-55, after being productive, I take it, once people got sick, they would just be allowed to die?
A: this was a hypothetical that I'm not actually proposing
B: Why is Medicare 65? Why not 70? why not 80?
In such an example after 55 (arbitrarily picked btw) it'd be like the modern day before you turn 65. You pay for your own medical expenses via insurance/cash of your own.
A: Hypothetical also. I think there are pros/cons to the 'put resources' more towards the young. Even something cheap like school lunches have huge benefit.
B: I'm not advocating any age. Just that if such a system were put in, then 'age' would become the next argument. 55,65,etc...
I think it would lead to more deaths, earlier, just because nobody can afford late life costs. That is why so many people fall on medicare today. Nobody can really afford to live once old age health problems kick in.
If war is too destructive, then perhaps we should culturally evolve a less destructive version of war. Something that removes incompetent regimes without so much collateral damage. I know Dune had its "war of assassins" between aristocratic houses, but I don't know one gets to there without political leaders surrounding themselves with meatshields.
NO country in ANY war is in the right. That said, you are better off ending up on the winning side than on the losing side, but your personal participation is unlikely to make a difference unless you happen to be a warlord or a general.
If you survive, it's best to be on the winning side. If you don't, it makes no difference. SOMETIMES, I guess getting killed is better than losing. See above. Most times ... maybe not.
Defensive wars seem justified. At the least, any people who refuse to defend themselves will be less populous than the people who like attacking them, so a moral stance against all wars has its stable state of a world full of war.
Calling yourself a liberator doesn't make you one. These words have meanings, and if you're not a damn fool or a damn liar it's usually very straightforward to figure out which one applies. And I'm looking straight at the Donbas here.
That reminds me of "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters". In one of his voiceovers he complains that the increasing average age of death means that heaven is filling up with ugly old people.
The most accurate one is that the Swiss didn't have 500 years of sedentary peace; they fought like lions all over Europe. There's a reason they guard the Popes, and it's because they were the absolute best of the best.
I think calling the philosophy of the 'right', Vitalism, is being a bit generous.
There is a clear streak that being cruel is a good because it shows strength. "Being cruel is just what we tough minded realists need to do in this horrible world and the left are just weak if they can't handle it."
Thus you have Republican leaders that virtue signal their 'toughness' by bragging about killing their dog. Even when veterinarians are available to do it humanely. The point is to be cruel on purpose, to show strength of will. This is what they tell themselves, and then dress it up in some Nietzschean philosophy. There is no actual underlying philosophy beyond the virtue signal, and a desire to be rid of other races. They aren't actually driving toward improving the world.
Scott has provided more justification, and argument for 'Vitalism' ,than the 'Right' does itself.
You're misunderstanding the point of toughness; it isn't promoting cruelty because cruelty is actually a signal for good virtue or something. Noem killed her dog because it attacked livestock and other people and kept doing so even after she tried to make it stop. The dog was her responsibility and killing it herself is not necessarily any worse than having a vet kill it. Animal cruelty is not a platform any right politician can run on, despite the impression you might have from Bismarck and his ilk. Note that even in a scenario where killing a dog is possibly justified, Noem was widely condemned and lost her popularity on the right.
Was it an active situation? Like other animals and humans were in immediate danger so action was needed ? Then it can be justified.
If there was time, like this was on-going problem, other methods had been attempted for training, and there was time to plan or mitigate, then I'd say there is a big difference. With a Vet, it's just sleep. With a gun, it's pretty painful, one of those things where the movies make everything look nice and sudden and clear cut.
On Toughness. I am not misunderstanding anything. This version of toughness is what is promoted on the 'right' for decades. I don't agree that these actions make someone 'tough', I'm just saying that is how the 'right' portrays it, this is part of the signaling amongst themselves.
Noem only lost popularity because people like dogs more than humans. Noem, and Bismarck, promote cruel things, even promote sexual harassment as 'just a bit of manly fun'. And maybe what you are saying is that garden variety Republicans don't support this stuff, but these are the people speaking for Republicans, she is a Governor, and the same language is used by their presidential nominee. So don't think you can say "sorry, we don't really mean this, that is just a few bad apples".
> Isn’t this still just adding extra bodies to Third World countries that already can’t take care of themselves, thus making the world worse off rather than better off? Not really. The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of).
This seems incorrect to me. Quality of life is determined by GDP per capita, not total GDP. Adding one person to a country increases that country's productivity and its needed resources by 1 person each, so its productivity:need ratio doesn't change.
(Of course if you're a total utilitarian then having more people in the world is a good in and of itself, but most people don't think that way.)
The primary reason it benefits a country to save child lives is because it prevents resources that were already spent on their upbringing from being wasted. Nobody argues that we should prevent abortion in developing countries in order to make them have more children and increase their total GDP; it's true that those results would occur, but this wouldn't significantly help the country, because it's almost costless to abort an early-term pregnancy. But a 5 year old child dying means that 5 years of the parents lives were wasted on raising a child without that child ever doing economic work for others.
(There's also the factor that old people absorb resources and need to be supported by younger people, which is why it's better for a country to have a growing population than a shrinking one, because it means the ratio of young people to old people is better. But this is to some extent just deferring the problem to later in a populational pyramid scheme; those young people will eventually become old and require even more new young people to support them, and populations can't continue growing forever. Plausibly this is still good because countries can leverage the time while they're growing to modernize quickly and then maintain that higher quality of life once they level off.)
I’ll join the chorus of people pointing out this post basically misunderstands where “vitalists” are coming from.
Instead, it pits two flavors of altruists against each other.
Between them, there is conflict of priorities - (based I think in people projecting the combination of experiences and virtues their personalities prefer onto society as a whole), of wanting a more dynamism and risk taking and “striving for excellence” ethos, rather than one that prioritizes safety and comfort and quality life years.
But those virtues are not always mutually exclusive - and even when they are they can be balanced when you realize maximization of any one thing is a mistake. This piece argues convincingly that these 2 visions are probably reconcilable by forcing specificity and considering Nth order effects.
But the whole endeavor is premised in universalist ethics and a framing of policies in terms of what would be good for *everyone*. That’s not what self proclaimed vitalists believe.
Their worldview is fundamentally particularist and hierarchical and supremacist, both in terms of their values and their ideal outcomes. From what I can tell, Good and Bad are determined by aesthetic considerations, driven by the whether a vitalist thinks something is Cool or Lame. This has nothing to do with actual dominance and strength, or they wouldn’t be whining all the time about how our slave morality society is oppressing the vital essences they think are superior. If a flu virus kills Achilles, the virus was “stronger” but not in any way a vitalist would recognize.
It’s interesting to see how supremacist ideologies try to rationalize the paradox of why they’re weak and unpopular, while the systems they decry as lame and pathetic are strong and popular. Obsessing about strength while being intimidated by “cancel culture” seems like a obvious contradiction but doesn’t register as one, because they’re still aesthetically butch in their actual weakness while their enemies are aesthetically effeminate in their actual strength.
This is an entirely useless conversation with bastardized terms and absurd rules. It's like children who don't understand chess making games from the pieces in which they always win.
The main worry about cruelty is itself the only interesting part, as it reflects how oughts are embeded in a deeply nihilistic culture, and how far removed the conversation is from the blunt materialistic goals of gov, industry, academia in reducing chances for imagined cruelty. There is no greater revelation of the secondary role of thought and lanaguage and human agency in steering civilation as these mindnumbingly boring takes on vitialism.
The strands of vitalism taken from a worship of Science are never more dissasscioated with the function of legitimacy as when it becomes a program, a way of institutional thinking disconnected from the forces that create meaning and value in society. The use of vitalism or of modernism, and the use of nihilistic humanism and postmodern ideals are speculatively entertaining and hold no barring on intrepreting the values of those who will make society. Scott might be usefully speculating for some vitalistic play such as increasing predictive capabilities, but that clearly is a useless tool in the internet age with AI. We will have what the powerful want to have, and that will be driven by the legimating forces of their beliefs and values. There's absolutely no reason to believe a vitalistic program is serious or rational or even possible, but vitalism is in itself a recognisable fact of the world, even in promotion of altruism that leads to species wide failures. The essence of vitalism is in the representation even where there is tragedy. It's locating the seemingly innate abstraction that pulls us to become.
Saying that pull is strength and making a program to lead us all to be stronger is a mockery of vitalism because what a real program should be is known to be a false and absurd method: people should be led to a religious ferosity over their value to be stronger and embiggin themselves. Vitalism remains an innate abstraction to be located only by those who will never succeed in attaining a unique, lifeaffirming presence that provides us evidence of what drives the world. Even the meaning making of the optomistic nihilists are secondary to the legitimating forces that drive our beliefs and values towards great ends – whether tragically a failure or not.
Stop bullshitting with weak minded, unimagitive soothsayers and their dull witted, status hungry, validation seeking fans. No one gives a shit how their party branding exercises are going or how their theft of identity in liue of having their own is helping them appeal to the centre vote, undecideds.
Generally the New Philosopher type should have fucked off to their own fantasy genre forum by now. But here we are, beyond the joke, talking about vitialism.
> although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure
What if instead of heroin, it was a drug that gives you the exact same feeling as what Elon Musk (I presume) will feel when a SpaceX rocket finally lands on Mars carrying the first human settlers? Or what Vitalik Buterin (I presume) will feel when ETH is adopted as the official currency of the United States after 50 years of hard work? People like "vitalism" because they like the feeling of seeing great achievements more than the feeling of pure euphoria. But who's to say we can't develop a drug that will give you _that_ exact feeling?
PS: I won't recommend this to anyone but I've tried heroin a couple of times out of curiosity (insufflated). Turns out some number of people (possibly even most, as per some sources) don't experience any euphoria from opiates. I also didn't experience any euphoria from a legally prescribed opiate painkiller, it got rid of my pain but I wasn't tempted to keep using it afterwards.
You've realized the truth that the feelings we get from accomplishments are the reason we assign positive value to them, and therefore it is the feelings themselves that should be maximized. From this it is logically trivial to arrive at the conclusion that we should be seeking to construct as many brains as possible feeling the full menagerie of every achievement-related pleasure imaginable.
This post seems like it doubles down on exactly the mistake I diagnosed in the comments on your previous post: treating master morality and slave morality as symmetrical. In this case, you're saying that they're both about maximizing something, and the question is what. But if we interpret vitalism not as consequentialist maximization, but rather as a personal life ethos, then the symmetry doesn't hold.
Another way of putting this: (your interpretation of) slave morality is consequentialist. Master morality is virtue ethics. In theory a consequentialist might be clever enough to adopt all the virtues which lead to the best outcomes. In practice human brains aren't very good at that, and it could be better by *everyone's* lights to just aim at virtues directly (or at least more directly than consequentialists currently do).
But a personal life ethos does what? I think it causes you to take actions which make you more virtuous so even if maximizing virtue isn’t the goal, making up newer and more impressive ways to be more virtuous still ends up at the galactic marble statue factory even if you don’t specifically have a maximization goal.
You could make the exact mirror of this critique, saying the virtues of slave morality are to make oneself smaller and less harmful while master morality is about maximizing the impact you have on the world. I’m not sure why master morality would be virtue ethics while slave morality is consequentialist. Both probably have aspects of consequentialism and virtues
Do vitalists have to listen to whoever wins wars? Like, if strength is a virtue do they have to submit to the strongest? What about on a personal level? If someone beats them up, then do they have to listen to that person without complaining that getting beaten up is unfair or bad?
Pontificating vitalism strikes me as the discursive equivalent of standing in the middle of the town square yelling "No, I don't have a small cock! I have a big cock! And big cocks are good, and people with big cocks, like me because my cock is big, are better than people with small cocks, who are not me, because my cock is NOT small!"
"The power-phantasies of an invalid" might not be a full and fair description of the content of Nietzsche's philosophy, but it is a complete description of the mode.
I can't be the only one that thinks the problem with maximizing values lies not in the values themselves but in the idea that these outlandish extrapolations would ever be possible. We just assume that science will eventually deliver us the ability to do anything we want, when in reality a 'more of the same' outlook on progress will have 95% of any system of values bound to the same constraints of practicality. At which point, if you want to put a bunch of rats on heroin it's little more than an affect, or a ritual like worshipping a golden heifer or a big phallus. The interesting part is how it effects the distribution of behaviors to have people *think* this is an ultimate ideal, not the silly reality of the ideal. Just assume for a second AI diamond nanobots are not a thing and most of this debate evaporates.
They're a thing in theory maybe but not actuality, and for a number of reasons I doubt they ever will be (same with ASI). If you want to present the theory at length you can feel free to do so, but perhaps you can see why, when all of life presents a more ecological visage, with integrated and graded types of life, I'm dubious about an ultimate departure from the norm. Now, I could see humanity fractionating in all kinds of crazy ways, but in the end it's just advanced racialism, a gradual intensification of what we already have.
Ok. So probably not a bot. Well it's worth checking on the modern internet.
> but perhaps you can see why, when all of life presents a more ecological visage, with integrated and graded types of life, I'm dubious about an ultimate departure from the norm.
What do you mean by this. All life has the same sort of DNA/RNA/protien structure, in a way strongly suggestive of a common ancestor.
If radically different diamond tech is possible, evolution wouldn't find it, evolution makes incremental changes.
> Now, I could see humanity fractionating in all kinds of crazy ways, but in the end it's just advanced racialism, a gradual intensification of what we already have.
Could you help me parse what you actually mean by these words. What would be an example of humanity fractionating? Do we already have some not-yet-advanced radicalism? Where? Why must the intensification be gradual, couldn't it be rapid?
I'm not addressing the exact science of diamond nanobots or my rationale for disbelieving in ASI. For what its worth I have a degree in data science so my points are not entirely those of a dilettante. But I'm sticking to philosophy for the moment.
What I mean by ecological visage is that most life is integrated with the levels below it. Humanity may be at an unimaginable level to an ant but ants still make up a massive portion of the biomass. I'm just dubious that the universe is set up such that radical game-breaking tech is possible, when up till now life has not found any version of game break. I think this probably has something to do with universal selection or the fermi problem.
I didn't say radicalism either I said *racialism*. The most weird thing we can expect to happen in the future if you believe intelligence has a natural cap as I do, is that intelligence becomes as diffused a biological advancement as chitin is in the world of bugs. Completely alien forms of intelligence can arise somewhat rapidly with advancement in biotech but is likely to be more gradual on a population level as new races and modes of existence emerge.
When reading the original article, it seemed to me that the "master morality" or what you are calling here "vitalism" is different from altruism not just by what the people do, but also what they care about.
I'm pretty sure that Andrew Tate barely acknowledges the fact that Africa even exists, unless he can get another Bugatti out of them. He probably couldn't care less if Malaria gets cured or not, because HE will not get it, or if he will, he will get cured by a great doctor.
So, altruism is externally focused, but vitalism is internally focused. However you are making the assumption that vitalists strive to make the world a better place (and maybe some of them do), but "master morality" people really don't, or maybe they do whenever it's good for furthering their power. But then it's not really caring about the world, just doing what's necessary to get more power/money/Bugattis.
Therefore, the whole premise of "which side can find a more effective way to better the world" is coming from the altruist world-view, whereas in the vitalist world view, that's not the goal. Having more life and experience and power and money is the goal.
So these things are not really comparable in the context you are presenting it seems...
"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
,,,No, they did not. The cuckoo clock is a German invention. Franz Ketterer from Schönwald was the visionary inventor. The Swiss were only very competent copycats.
"Once you’re self-motivated to display a virtue in order to fulfill an identity you’ve voluntarily built around it, and also self-motivated to critique your performance of the virtue in order to make it more effective rather than just signaling, then the difference between pretending at the virtue and actually having the virtue shrinks to zero."
This is Xenophon's Socrates: The easiest/least exhausting way to acquire a good reputation (as a good altruist/vitalist/whater you want to be perceived as) is to become the person you want others to believe that you are.
A major appeal of vitalism, and the general intellectual trend from which it springs, I feel, is that it has conjured an entire personal library's worth of text to try and avoid the conclusion that a good society has the great and talented working more or less for the benefit of the mediocre.
This reminds me of the time someone told me I should let my baby child eat dirt off the floor since it's good for his immune system.
I responded by saying rhetorically "ok, so eating dirt is good for babies. How often should I give him dirt to eat and in what dosages"
They responded "no, you don't need to give him dirt to eat. But if you coddle him and never let him eat dirt he will grow up with a weak immune system"
And I was like, buddy, the immune system doesn't know the difference between dirt the kid picked up and dirt I gave him.
It also doesn't know the difference between "kid who never ate dirt because he never picked it up" and "kid who never ate dirt because his parents actively stoped him from eating it"
If 'never eating dirt is bad for your' that implies that eating dirt sometimes is good for you. If you agree that dirt is not a beneficial part of a baby's diet then you agree that I'm not hurting my baby by preventing him from eating it.
And they were like "no, don't give him dirt. Just don't stop him from eating it."
This Walt Bismark guy is the same thing. He says we need "painful crisis" and says the "desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology " --- implying that pain is good or whatever. But then doesn't seem to advocate actively causing pain or crises, he just doesn't want us to try to hard to stop and prevent them.
But he can't have it both ways. Either pain and crises are good and necessary or they aren't. If they are good, we should try to foster them and not be content with not preventing them. And if they aren't good, we don't lose anything by trying to prevent them.
Your being extremely reductionist and not coping with the fuzziness of other world views.
When I say "you should let a child eat dirt". I *mean* 1000 different things; Im pretty sure most people mean at least 12.
"*you* should let a child eat dirt"(for your health, you need to not worry)
"you should let a child *eat dirt*"(children need to make stupid choices)
"you should *let* a child eat dirt"(watch in silence if it isnt lethal)
etc.
> But he can't have it both ways. Either pain and crises are good and necessary or they aren't. If they are good, we should try to foster them and not be content with not preventing them.
Physical pain should be roughly where it is; straping a shock collar on a toddler is child abuse(fostering pain) and its a major illness if you dont have pain receptors.
Pain is feedback, and you want the most honest feedback from the real tests you must survive.
Well when people mean 12 things they can say which one they mean. When I said
"ok, so eating dirt is good for babies. How often should I give him dirt to eat and in what dosages"
the other person could have responded "I mean for your own health not the baby's", they didn't respond that way. They didn't respond in a way that clarified their own view point. I mean, the point of asking these types of questions of people is to get them to clarify what they mean, it's annoying when they don't
....
"Physical pain should be roughly where it is"
and where is it I might ask?
Do you mean where it is right now?
So suppose I don't have a car and struggle to carry home my groceries. Is buying a car wrong because it removes a struggle and reduces physical pain "from where it is now"?
> Well when people mean 12 things they can say which one they mean.
... they mean all 12 and all 12 are the same actions
> "Physical pain should be roughly where it is" and where is it I might ask?
~ 1/4th an inch from the hot stove, you should neither slap children approaching stoves or tell children you can use water to provide short protection from any heat source
> the other person could have responded
No they cant; I mean 1000 things at once, when pushed I made a specific claim about stoves; I still meant the other 999. Other world views have more following the pattern of a narrative something like "what would jesus do" is a single sentence that obviously invokes every bible story, canon or non-canon, every sermon(gotten week for years), and every little interaction with other religious people.
Its a trade off, you'll hate this and want to insit on hard object facts rather then patterns but these are exant other world views.
"Bloomfield, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the key thing to remember is that all germs are not created equal.
Exposure to diverse microbes from other people, domestic animals and the natural environment do help build a healthy immune system and microbiome – the varied microbes normally living in the gut and respiratory tract, experts agree. However, exposure to the wrong types of germs can both weaken the microbiome and cause infections.
And if those infections require antibiotics, "good" bacteria in the gut get destroyed along with the bad, they pointed out.
So, how to find a balance between being a compulsive germaphobe who's constantly cleaning or the lax parent letting kids chow down on mud pies?
Bloomfield believes a new, more nuanced model, called "targeted hygiene", is probably the answer.
Targeted hygiene means intervening with kids and their environment, but only when you can stop the risk of infection. This doesn't necessarily mean avid cleaning. Cleaning does get rid of visible dirt, but it won't necessarily reduce the risk of infection.
What does? Handwashing.
Handwashing is a simple component of targeted hygiene, and should be timed to certain activities, Bloomfield said.
"Our own bodies, our food and our domestic animals are the most likely sources of spread of infection – so the times that matter are [times such as] when we handle raw food, when we use the toilet, when we care for our pets, when we are infected or caring for someone who is infected," she explained.
The obvious sane option is that some amount of dirt greater than zero is necessary for the healthy development of the immune system, but we don't know the exact value. Children traditionally got somewhere around that amount by freely playing in non-sterile environments, the lack of which harms them. I suppose one could in theory replace that with literally feeding them dirt instead, but that person would likely be insane in many other ways too, so the child is probably fucked anyway.
No, of course you shouldn't dig up a shovelful of earth from the back garden and give it as a meal to your child.
But if your house is ordinarily clean (not a dumpster of squalor) and the kid is crawling around on the floor or toddling around and getting into things, then they'll get grubby. Part of that *will* be putting things into their mouths. Where you, the parent, intervene is "No, don't eat that, it's a pebble/dog turd/choking hazard". You do not swoop down the second the child has the merest speck of dirt, scrub them clean, strip them and throw their clothing into a sterile wash, and dress them in freshly washed clothing while you confine them to an operating-theatre sterile environment.
Children *do* need exposure to build up their immune system, and it's the happy medium between "malnourished child with rickets in layers of filth" and "child living in a sterile plastic bubble".
People have been conditioned into thinking that they must have everything spotlessly clean and sterilised by advertising for cleaning products and labour-saving devices, and first time parents are so anxious and fearful that they do tend to swaddle the children in cotton wool.
A little bit of 'clean dirt' (that is, exposure to the ordinary environment) won't hurt and is healthy.
Eating dirt is like exercise. Eating too much dirt is like overtraining. Eating too little is like having a sedentary lifestyle.
There's no down-side to going to the gym, to become stronger than you have to be.
But if society lets you grow too weak, by taking away "harmful elements", then you might actually die the second society changes.
If you put warning labels on everything which could possibly kill you, then the day an idiot encounters a dangerous object without a label, maybe he'll die.
If you provide fish to people long enough that they forget how to fish, then they might die once you take the fish away.
Life is about adaptation, and when change occurs faster than a species can adapt, they die. So the idea is that you slowly introduce artificial difficulties, so that you may survive once the real difficulties arrive. Altruism does the opposite, it artificially makes life easier. This is why Nietzsche valued suffering and war. Nietzsche's will to power seems similar to the idea that humans are "anti-fragile"
Bonus: Nietzsche once said "In times of peace, the war-like man will attack himself", which sounds a lot like "If you over-sanitize your environment, your immune system will attack itself".
Wait, then doesn't that explanation essentially make Nietzsche into an effective altruist?
The flow being
1. We don't want people to die
2. If we make life easier people won't adapt and die
3. Therefore we need to make life harder
But why do we care about (1) in the first place unless we start from an altruistic assumption that people dyeing is bad?
In any case empirically more people die from wars then from peace so starting more wars to make people stronger so they won't die is not a good strategy. Similarly more people die without sanitation so deciding to like drink water from disease ridden streams or whatever is not a great strategy either.
Moreover, none of this is really operational. Like altruism makes life easier but also technology and human society and civilization makes like easier. In fact, the gains of technology are much greater than the gains of altruism in terms of actually improving standard of living. So if the goal is to decrease standard of living, the question becomes "decrease it to what?" Like, just forgoing altruism won't decrease it that much. Economic development is increasing it much more than altruism. So you would need some kind of program to try to decrease economic growth, or else for some kind of program of daily beatings for every citizen or something to decrease standard of living.
And if you say, no, it's fine when standard of living increases "naturally" because of technological progress and economic growth but bad if it increases "artificially" you would need some theory as to why that distinction should matter.
While Nietzsche knew this, I don't think he wanted to balance difficulty and ease in a way which makes the average person healthy. He wanted great men so badly that he'd suggest increasing the artificial difficulties to the limits, so much that weaker people would start dying.
Nietzsche wasn't against death, but degeneration, and he certainly thought in a "quality over quantity" kind of way. He wanted to increase the rate of great people, and the "height" they could attain. He didn't want to make life easier, he wanted to improve people directly, not anything outside of them, not even society.
I don't think that more people die from wars than from peace. A war is not just the cause of problems, but also the result of them. Whatever caused the war to occur would have formed doing the peaceful period, so it's hard to separate the two can call one good and the other bad.
Technology is something you have, it's not something you are. A car doesn't make you faster, the speed belongs to the car, it's not you who is improving. Nietzsche liked humanity a lot, he disliked modern society and I think he'd dislike technology for the same reason. Even if the "standard of living" is improving, humanity itself doesn't seem to be, and neither do we seem to enjoy life more as a result of said improvements. We're not braver, more honest, more confident, more resilient, more interesting, more prideful. Ones mentality is essential for greatness, and something different from intelligence is meant, and it's also not morality. You can call it "spirit", "maturity", "character", "nobility" or "willpower" but there's no way for me to point directly at it.
Even if I agree that War, in the real world is the result of problems. War in a world where we are artificially creating wars because we are trying to be good Nietzschins would not be the result of problems but the result of us artificially creating the wars.
Regarding the suggestion to be "more honest to just be selfish instead of signaling all the time" it fails also by it's own metric since it's really just making honesty the system you choose to hitch your start to.
But then if you are claiming you'r not hitching your star to any ideology, your not even honest.
I mean, if you were maximally selfish then you would do signaling since signaling is fun and makes life meaningful and makes people respect you which makes you happy.
Deciding to specifically avoid signaling even when you want to do it is hard and emotionally painful and therefore not selfish.
"I mean, if you were maximally selfish then you would do signaling since signaling is fun and makes life meaningful and makes people respect you which makes you happy."
...Do you really find it incomprehensible that some people don't find signaling fun and meaningful? I often like expressing opinions and viewpoints that I consider true or at least likely to be true, but not out of a desire to gain more respect from such expressions, but simply out of a desire of coming closer to actual truth. And also out of a desire to be sincere and authentic, which still goes back to caring about the truth.
To me, voicing a sincere opinion is often the first step in starting a genuine dialogue with another person, and through the process of sharing different and similar opinions, perhaps people can come closer to understanding the truth of a particular situation or topic or issue.
There are people I want to feel love and/or respected by, but they're people inherently close to me, family and friends. And I want to be as honest as possible to my family and friends, which runs counter to my understanding of signaling. Signaling just to earn the respect of strangers... I can understand it as part of a money-making scheme, like a popular YouTuber or social media activist, but doing it for fun? Definitely not my idea of fun.
To me, putting on a mask, pretending to be something I'm not, feeling like I have to hitch my wagon to a specific political ideology even if I have private misgivings about it... that's not fun at all. That sort of fakery or at least forced exaggeration seems exhausting to me, at best. I'd much rather just share what I really think and feel, regardless of what other people think of it.
I didnt say I find it incoprehensible that someone doesnt like signaling, just that I think for most people they do like it.
But this anyway was for a deffinition of signaling that says that having any ethical ideolgy at all as opoosed to just watching movies all day is deffitionally considered "signaling" because it forces you to signal to yourself that you have the ideology and then signal to yourself that you practice it by actually practicing it.
That might seem like a weird deffinition of signaling but it its the deffinition used in the article. And my point is just "people want to have ideologies so having an ideology is not not-selfish, even if you define the act of ideology having as "signaling"
You treat the "extremistan" version of altruism as a reductio ad absurdum to be avoided, but what if the extreme is the moral conclusion we should be taking if we really want to take our ethical commitments seriously? I wholeheartedly believe that utilitarianism compels us to seek a state where as much of the universe as possible has been converted into minds experiencing as much pleasure as possible. I think that it is perfectly reasonable to declare that if there is some aesthetic intuition that objects to this outcome, that it is our aesthetic intuition that is wrong. (It's also telling that the aesthetic intuition appeals to the sensationalistic "rats on heroin" rather than a more neutral descriptor of minds maximized for pleasure). Surely it is at least possible that our moral intuitions are wrong, and that we should proceed with what absolute logic concludes even if it doesn't "feel right." So I find it strange when the "extremistan" conclusion is rejected out of hand due to an appeal to absurdity bias. It is entirely possible that the proper conclusion of some moral system might feel gross and weird to us, and yet still be correct!
That's a circular argument. If you a priori accept that some moral system is correct, then of course you must accept whatever conclusion it spits out. But why would a sane man commit himself to that?
I don't see how you think my argument is circular, especially since I was merely stating what the ultimate conclusion of my belief in utilitarianism was without going into the reasons I think utilitarianism is true in the first place. If you want an actual argument for why I think as such, it's as follows: we can know from direct experience that positive emotions are immediately felt as good in themselves, and negative emotions are felt as bad in themselves. This direct subjective experience allows us to conclude that positive emotions are a moral good and negative emotions are a moral evil, and if we take it as granted that we should maximize moral good, then it follows that we should seek to maximize the total amount of pleasure less pain being experienced. And from this it follows that if we want to maximize the universal experience of net pleasure, then constructing as many minds as possible experiencing as much pleasure as possible is the most effective way to do so.
You were saying: "Surely it is at least possible that our moral intuitions are wrong, and that we should proceed with what absolute logic concludes even if it doesn't "feel right." I don't see how this can be derived from anything other than a priori accepting that a correct moral system could be perfectly constructed with absolute logic.
As for your argument here, I actually happen to agree (weakly), that for our currently available minds something like this looks like the optimal strategy. But how can you be sure that once we discover how to improve our minds, better ways to maximize total good won't appear?
You've finished convincing me that I don't need to read Walt Bismarck, but I do thank you for introducing me to the term "vitalism". I just finished reading Bostrum's *Deep Utopia*, in which he asks whether life will still have meaning after (by assumption) we navigate the Singularity into a world where there is literally nothing a human can do as well as a machine. Bostrum argues that it will. I am still assimilating it though (naturally) as I was actively reading it I found it fairly convincing.
But to explore the question he starts by considering various things that might give life meaning now: raising a family, advancing science, helping the unfortunate, exploring the universe. He writes all these off in pretty short order, but in the context of this post it's really striking how *completely* his analysis is founded on utilitarianism.
Even raising a family falls by the wayside. If (again by assumption) a machine can do a better job -- more patient, more flexible, just plain wiser -- than a human, would we not choose to let it, rather than subject our children to the vagaries of mere human upbringing?
It seems to me that many of these sources of meaning would survive if he had incorporated vitalism into his toolkit. We raise children not to optimize them but because human life is richer if that is one of the things we do.
Still, it's interesting that in many ways his scenario is the result of "taking it to infinity" but he is not out to disprove anything by displaying a dystopia but rather to show that even after reaching infinity what might sound like a dystopia at first glance can still be redeemed: we can still have meaning even in a post-progress infinite wealth far future.
Last time I half-joked that Scott had reinvented the Republic. This time, the joke is that Scott has suddenly rediscovered virtue ethics, which IIRC he previously disparaged as pretty incomprehensible and useless to most people.
Utilitarians take action because they believe it will result in some better outcome, old-school Aristotle-stans take action because it makes them feel badass, but either way, as Scott points out, in a lot of normal cases the actions themselves might look the same provided people are actually committed to their philosophies.
Pretty sure this is also how you get Starfleet, my own personal favorite utopia. The most current versions of the show treat everyone in Starfleet as altruistically motivated, but its pretty clear if you go back to the original show, those people are exploring the galaxy out of a sense that its the single most awesome and heroric thing they could possibly be doing with their time, hence the emphasis on "boldness" and why Captain Kirk gets remembered as a wild-west gunslinger who thinks mostly with his penis as opposed to a diplomat or a strategist when he's certainly those things as well.
I feel like this is talking past the Internet vitalists. I'm not a vitalist, so maybe I'll also misrepresent them, too. But I'll give it a try:
Humans are animals. Our brains and bodies evolved to be a certain way and do certain things, like all animals. We are truly living human lives if we do those things. If we're prevented from doing those things, we might have human bodies, but we're not living human lives. "Things human animals evolved to do" is what Scott is reducing to "strength".
Pigs like to root around and find food, and take mud baths, and socialize with other pigs. If you have 10,000 pigs in a huge factory farm in separate cubicles where they can't do those things, you might have 10,000 pig bodies, but you have 0 pig lives. If you were to burn down the factory farm and let all the pigs go, and 9,990 died and only 10 survived and found a way to root around, take mud baths and socialize with other pigs, then you would have ten more pigs than you had before.
Neither altruism nor strength-maximalizing "vitalism" (as imagined by Scott) destroys the factory farm and lets the pigs be pigs. They're both trying to make factory farms that efficiently maximize some abstract and measurable quality.
The Internet vitalists are promoting a life lived as a "wild" human. They don't want to see themselves as caretakers of the zoo that encloses humanity (which is how Scott's arguments implicitly position him) and they don't want to see themselves as inhabitants of the zoo. They don't want to be in a zoo at all, or have anything to do with a zoo, even in their minds. It seems to me that they would see a sentence like this as despicable and ridiculous:
> The solution isn’t to stop pretending and “do it for real”, because that’s not an action available to humans.
They might say something like, "Only what you can do for real, as a genuine expression of your true nature, is a human thing to do. Do that. Whatever society forces you to pretend to be, isn't human. Don't live like that."
(The advantage of the "humans are animals" stance is that they do have an actual stronger position against Scott's reductio ad extremis arguments than either the "pleasure-simply-defined" altruists or the "strength-simply-defined" vitalists, since the true life of an animal can include many different principles or virtues, and they can even contradict. Nothing says an animal can't be built by evolution to accommodate mutually-contradictory passions, skills or virtues.
The disadvantage is that the actual vitalists have lumped everything they think is cool into their Vitalist To-Do List, and they actually have no idea what a healthy human animal is like. We've been in the zoo of the city for six thousand years, at least. They wouldn't know a healthy ubermesch if one bit them.)
Ok, so vitalists should never post on social media or read or write anything at all, right? After all, reading, writing, and the internet are all artificial inventions of effete, degenerate civilization! Hunter-gatherers in the State of Nature are too wild and free for posting on Reddit!
Yeah, exactly. If you look at what people like Walt Bismarck write online, you'll see that your criticism here points to a genuine tension, which they argue about. They don't seem to have coalesced around a single solution to the problem.
I think it's not hard to say, "healthy humans are social creatures, reading and writing are natural for us," and a healthier vitalism might genuinely incorporate that idea. But the particular vitalists Scott is arguing with are extremely married to the cheap pleasures of the Internet and extremely dependent on the idea of themselves as oppressed.
The problem with normies is that they don't know how to defend their life-affirming ways in the face of insidious changes driven by eggheads, like, say, the Internet. There's the hive-mind of them, called the culture, that does slowly adapt, but the concern is that it's no longer up to the task, due to the speed of change.
I think we're saying the same thing, but I'd specifically call it out as "the problem with normies is that they're enmeshed in fully adversarial systems harvesting them for labor, eyeballs, clicks, and outrage, and they don't see anything really wrong with that."
But I suppose "eggheads" is a synecdoche for those fully adversarial systems (ie the 10k+ Phd's at FB or GOOG or wherever on the other side of any app, exercising their collective 10k Phd brainpower to keep people staring at the apps).
I just think it's a bit more than "eggheads." The only reason the finest minds of our generation are being wasted in finance and driving clicks and harvesting eyeballs is because of deeper things like economics and game theory and winner-take-all dynamics, as well as alternatives like academia and research being poorly funded, practiced, and ideologically captured.
Speaking as a former egghead, I was *much* happier doing research, and if our societal priorities were aligned such that researchers could make, say, half what FAANG and finance folk make, without having to play dumb political and ideological games, I would have loved to keep doing it instead of working in finance and FAANG-ish companies.
On the topic of "suffering breeds vitality", I I would say adversity and pressure helps that but not necessarily suffering. The Manhattan project is a classic example: the scientists themselves had nice lives in a pleasant New Mexico town, but they still had the kind of enormous pressure to succeed that could drive them to push through barriers and get something done.
This doesn't require pain in itself, but it might require some real threat of danger or conflict, which I think a utilitarian utopia would want to not have. Otoh, we can probably find ways to do it that don't require much actual suffering.
Suffering is a fail-safe, just like hunger and the law, and police.
If you act before you suffer, then you don't need suffering in order to act.
If you eat before you're hungry, then you don't need hunger in order to act.
If people do the right things without laws, then we don't need laws.
If people follow the law without being forced to do so, then we don't need police.
Necessity teaches, but only if people let something become necessary. Your chronic back pain teaches you to take care of your body, but only after you've neglected it long enough that it has started to hurt.
You don't need to feel any negative emotions, they're evolutionary fail-safes, which activate when you've already left the best path you could take.
Suffering forces vitality in people who aren't sufficiently healthy that they seek vitality by their own nature.
I agree, but like with any other system, designing our society so that we actually reach the failsafe as rarely as possible is better. Just like how second strike nuclear capabilities are a failsafe, but one we hope we never actually need to rely on (but still need to have).
I don't think you necessarily better people by bettering society, perhaps you do the opposite, as improving society reduces individual peoples need to improve themselves, and most people only improve when they're forced to do so.
If you built an exo-skeleton suit for me, would that make me stronger? In my view, I'd just become dependent on it, and I'd actually grow weaker myself.
What we can do, is improve the mentality and value systems of individuals, in a way which makes them value their own growth, and even find joy in overcoming problems and challenges. Rather than getting rid of suffering, you can get rid of the idea that suffering is negative, because then people will be able to love life despite their suffering. This is sufficient to prevent life from being seen as a problem to be solved, or as some sort of punishment, and I believe that these viewpoints are what causes the most pain and what makes the suffering meaningless and unbearable.
Some parents give their three-year-olds ipads and then they demand the internet to be designed in such a way that it doesn't mess with their childs development, when it's actually their job to parent the child. They're just trying to escape effort and responsibility. I'm skeptical of any call to improve society, as the improvement people ask for is often this kind. It's also the case that one "can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink", there's only so much society can do for the individual.
In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: "What is mediocre in the typical man? That he does not understand the necessity for the reverse side of things: that he combats evils as if one could dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other-that he wants to erase and extinguish the typical character of a thing, a condition, an age, a person, approving of only one part of their qualities and wishing to abolish the others". I think he's essentially correct that great things are born from terrible things and vice versa. He even believes that people with great virtues must also have great evil in them.
What's the difference between hunger and curiosity? I think it's that hunger feels worse, although curiosity can be unpleasant as well. What matters is that a tension is created between the current state and a desired state, a tension which drives one to action. What's required is only the drive, not the unpleasantness, positive and negative reinforcement seems equal in utility. If suffering is the stick of "Carrot and the stick" then perhaps we can replace it with a carrot successfully. What we must not get rid of, though, is the desire. Given that buddhism labeled desire "the root of all suffering", it seems that suffering is essential to life in one form or another.
nitpick, but i dispute napoleon as an example of Great Works Proceeding from Privilege. first, because, while his family was better off than most corsicans, they weren't any great nobility and he mostly spent his youth being picked on for his poor french and social skills. plus, his father's death cut the family income enough that he couldn't afford to finish out a second year at the military academy.
second, because he showed no signs of greatness until being thrust into hardship. before the revolution he basically spent his time fantasizing about corsican independence and writing melodramas where his self-insert dies a heroic death and his crush regrets spurning him
Cuckoo clocks aren't really Switzerland, they're more Black Forest and other nearby regions of Germany. The clocks Switzerland is famous for is extremely precise watches, precise enough that they usually use them for timing Olympic athletes. For that matter, Switzerland is also famous for giving us the International Olympics Committee, which has its issues, but seems like a paragon of the kind of agonistic struggle for human greatness that vitalists should love.
My objection to this argument is that Extremistan is where we already spend all our moral-debating time.
Yes fine, every moral system agrees that we should cure diseases and create wealth and use our lungs to breathe. But any time there's an interesting moral decision to make, we're already in Extremistan by definition, and it doesn't make sense to round that off. Questions like "Should we feed the hungry or colonise Mars" or "What should I do this afternoon?" are where we feel the divergence between altruism and vitalism are already keenly felt, not just in weird hypotheticals.
The other thing is that we're not just talking to regular altruists, we're talking to Effective Altruists, who by definition live in Extremistan.
I agree that vitalists need better answers to the "What should I do this afternoon?" question. Is it any different to what I would have done anyway?
I agree that on many things, probably most things, altruism and vitalism are in agreement. It's also good to point this out, so full credit to Scott for that. His examples of points of agreement between the two are very sound.
However, you don't need to go to any extremes to find common/important points of divergence between altruism and vitalism. In fact, I think it could be argued that much of our current 'culture war' disputes come down to altruism vs. vitalism.
There's a definite vibe in much of modern American society of simply accepting various personal weaknesses, or even redefining them as strengths. I think about a lot of the language surrounding mental illness here in 2024, and also the growth of obesity in the west. I've read a lot about this over at Freddie DeBoer's blog.
I suspect that this modern tendency to downplay various personal weaknesses, or even redefine them as strengths, arises from a deeply altruistic spirit. The people who do this want others to feel good about themselves, they want people to have good self-esteem. And there is value to good self-esteem! But if you emphasize this too much, it's possible to lose sight of serious underlying problems that we ideally would be honest about and seek to remedy/combat as much as reasonable possible.
There's the classic scenario of a woman asking her boyfriend/husband if she looks fat, or if her clothes look too tight on her. The altruist will want to answer "no" and reassure her, even if his eyes are telling him that the answer is "yes". The vitalist will want to give her the same answer that his eyes are telling him, perhaps even in the case of a mild "yes".
Who is right here, the altruist or the vitalist? I would argue the altruist is right... up to a certain point. At a certain point, a white lie turns into a potentially dangerous lie that can enable serious problems to go unaddressed. Now, it could be argued that the truly altruistic thing to do is to balance concern for the other person's feelings with concern for the other person's basic physical well-being... but I do get a strong sense that the way things tend to play out IRL is that very altruistic people will tend to err on the side of caring for feelings while the vitalist people will tend to err on the side of caring about basic physical well-being (i.e. strength, vitality).
Is our modern society very sick in some ways? Is it in denial about that? Is it putting off recognizing painful realities because it doesn't feel we can cope with facing them head-on?
I don't know, but there are some worrisome indicators.
I want to make clear that I'm more of an altruist than a vitalist myself, but I truly fear the vitalists might have a point about our modern society. I fear that we might be culturally killing ourselves with excessive niceness... denying serious growing societal problems that cry out to be corrected, ones that perhaps can only be corrected with expressing and reinforcing harsh truths than continuing to say comforting white lies. Perhaps when the vitalist looks out over modern society, this is what they see, and what is merely a worry for me is a clear-cut reality to them, giving rise to how they are.
Deep down, I'd rather altruists seriously try to fix the problems in our modern society than see the vitalists do that. I think the altruists are more likely to find a solution that balances love/caring with practical concerns... but perhaps to achieve this, the altruists need to appreciate at least some of what the vitalists are saying.
> I fear that we might be culturally killing ourselves with excessive niceness... denying serious growing societal problems that cry out to be corrected, ones that perhaps can only be corrected with expressing and reinforcing harsh truths than continuing to say comforting white lies.
Two thoughts: At the macro level, isn't divisiveness and outgrouping an increasing problem vs "niceness?" All the political stuff, woke witch hunting, feasting on liberal tears, national divorce and similar vibes / topics seem to be the major visible fault lines in US society, and I don't really see any of those being driven by niceness.
The other thought, is if expressing harsh truths is so much more successful, where is the evidence in the world? Shouldn't there be societies that vary on this measure enough that we could point to "harsh truths" or other vitalistic practices driving empirically better outcomes in some of our problem areas? If so, I don't see them anywhere, or really hear any vitalists trumpeting them, besides vague gestures at RETVRN-ing to some sort of Roman or Greek-flavored societal LARP.
Don't get me wrong, I'd MUCH rather LARP (or live in) a Republican or early Imperial Roman society than whatever we have going on now, I just don't think it's a realistic solution. There's no road to there from here.
>"The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of)."
Ugh, where to begin.
1) For starters you have to discount future cash flows to net-present value.
2) No one's arguing that the opportunity cost of saving a life in Kenya is to save a life in the US - the opportunity cost is investment in a first-world economy.
3) The marginal person saved by a bed net is going to be at the absolute bottom of society and is badly represented by median GDP figures.
4) If you're saving a 4-year-old then that person isn't going to contribute economically for ~10 years so you'll have to double the cost of the intervention (since the value of that $4000 will have doubled by the time the saved life starts returning any value).
5) If a 4 year old dies from malaria, Kenya isn't losing $2000/year of production. The child's mother will just have another kid so the economic cost of the malaria death is the cost to raise a poor-even-by-Kenyan-standards child to the age of 4 plus the net-present value of delaying the economic contribution of that child (which wouldn't have started for 10 years anyway) by 4 years. That is very obviously much less than $4000.
6) Most importantly these aren't comparable quantities because that $4000 is investible economic surplus while the vast majority of the $2000/yr is going to be consumed by the Kenyan. Switching resources from investment to consumption is bad for economic development.
7) At the end of thirty years you can have either a) $4000 invested in the US stock market at the historical average nominal return of 10% ~= $70,000 or b) A Kenyan with 3 kids, all of whom will still need your charity. If you have $70k then you can save 70/4 = 17 lives. Hard to say which way inflation cuts here but I'm pretty confident that it won't erase a 4-fold advantage. Even if your terminal value is "number of lives saved" then it's objectively stupid to buy bed nets unless you're applying a discount rate to moral value, which I'd love to hear the argument for.
Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning. You can't outsmart the market. I repeat: you can't outsmart the market. This is why communism always fails. Point to one lasting positive economic impact charity has ever made in sub-Saharan Africa, anywhere by anyone at any time. Just one "40 years ago this village couldn't find drinking water and now they host a successful textile exporter which is the anchor of a bustling local economy". I'll wait.
Economic interventions should always target the most-capable because that both establishes a good incentive structure and puts capital in the hands of those most able to use it. Charity always targets the least capable end of society, which is exactly wrong from an economic perspective. If you really wanted to maximally help Africa then you should psychometrically test everyone and just hand $5000 to everyone who scores in the top 5% of IQ. Cash transfers always outperform other interventions because at least they're not making uninformed allocation decisions (i.e. you don't wind up with bed nets being used to overfish local estuaries).
Still waiting by the way.
Nothing any charitable organization does in Africa makes one bit of lasting economic difference and all you're doing is loudly patting yourselves on the back for setting money on fire. You're calling out the national guard to helicopter-rescue a stranded goat that will then get eaten by a wolf 30 seconds after you let it go, and then you're throwing yourself a ticker-tape parade. Which if you just want make yourselves feel better, fine. But quit being sanctimonious about being in any way rational about it. You're just signaling.
>No, for almost all of us, the opportunity cost of charitable giving is either our own consumption or less effective local charitable giving
Ok fine. Then the EA message should be "stop being economically short-sighted and invest your money! Fewer BMW's more mutual funds!" They should turn into Puritans, at least that might have some positive social value.
>in addition to being inhumanly callous, this would also be taking the child’s parents out of the labor force for years as they repeat the hardest phase of childrearing.
Yes, by 4 years. I'm guessing starving Kenyan mothers don't devote quite as much time to teaching their kids to read as US mothers do. And as for 'callous' ... these are the facts, man. If you can't look them squarely in the eye then do something else with your time and stop pretending that you can solve the world's problems. I have zero interest in your squeamishness. I guarantee the Kenyan mother isn't squeamish about it and I bet the average Kenyan would gladly sell their child into prostitution/indentured servitude for less than $4000. I mean, that's twice their per capita GDP. You don't think the average hoodrat or hillbilly in the US would do the same for 140k?
>And the risk of child mortality increasing total fertility is an also bad because it increases total population growth. It would be better to reduce child mortality to negligible amounts so we get the demographic transition and people stick to having one or two kids because they know they’ll survive to adulthood.
I agree. I also prefer this outcome.
>No, I don’t think most people would sell their children for two years of annual income, that’s absurd.
I have no idea, one way or the other. Is there actual information of some kind (historical???) available?
"Acha’s granddaughters helped pay for the family’s new ceramic tile roof with the $1,200 they have sent home since the pair was sold for the equivalent of $200 seven years ago at ages 15 and 16."
Google tells me that per capita GDP in Thailand was $2500 in 1994, so that quote seems to indicate that those girls were sold for some small fraction of typical income. Plus I guess they're each generating $100 a year on top of that. Now we can argue about how best to interpret this data point but I think it makes it pretty clear that my point wasn't absurd. Life in the third world is cheap. You should really internalize that concept before you start pontificating about how best to intervene there.
The concrete lesson here is: that family willingly traded 2 daughters for a new tile roof. That's what rational economic self-interest looks like in the third world. Do you think that spending 2x annual income to save one life is reasonable in that context? Do you think THEY would think it was reasonable? Do you think they would make an informed economic choice to spend $4000 to save their child? If not, then why do you think it's rational in any way for YOU to make that choice on their behalf?
Many Thanks! Always good to see an actual example of real actions. ( Of course I'd ideally want to see statistics, but I don't want to make unreasonable requests. )
> Even most “investment” from an individual level takes the form of buying bonds and stocks from other investors, which does not create any net investment because your money is going to cash out another investor, not directly to the company to invest.
Every cent invested in the second-hand market makes the primary market more attractive and thus leads to cheaper capital for firms.
Ah, the sweet serenade of economic misunderstandings sung in the key of vitriol. How I long for the days when debates were cordial, engaging, and perhaps even informative. But here we are, in the grand theater of "I Know More Than You," and you, dear commenter, have taken center stage with a performance worthy of a standing ovation.
Let us begin with your intricate ballet of discounting future cash flows to net-present value. A classic move, indeed, one that would make even the most stoic accountant shed a tear of joy. But alas, we are not in the hallowed halls of a finance lecture. We are in the wild, untamed jungle of the internet, where nuance goes to die and simplicity reigns supreme. Your elaborate dance, while beautiful, is but a distraction from the crux of the matter: the value of a human life.
And oh, the opportunity cost! The ever-elusive phantom that haunts the dreams of economists and armchair philosophers alike. You conjure it with such fervor, as if it were a ghost that could be exorcised with enough charts and graphs. But let us not forget that the real opportunity cost here is not the hypothetical investment in a first-world economy, but the very real, tangible difference between life and death. A net, a life, a future. These are not abstract concepts; they are the beating heart of humanity.
Your third point, dear commenter, is a masterstroke of cynicism. To reduce a human being to a mere statistic, a cog in the great machine of GDP, is a feat of cold detachment that even the most hardened bureaucrat would envy. But let us not forget that beneath the layers of economic jargon and fiscal calculations lies a person. A person with dreams, hopes, and the potential to change the world in ways that cannot be quantified by any spreadsheet.
And oh, the children! The poor, unfortunate children who must bear the brunt of your economic calculus. To suggest that their lives, their futures, are but a burden on the scales of cost and benefit is a tragic misstep. For it is in the laughter of children, in their boundless curiosity and unbridled potential, that we find the true measure of a society's wealth. To dismiss them as mere liabilities is to miss the forest for the trees.
But perhaps the pièce de résistance of your argument is the notion that charity is indistinguishable from central planning. A bold claim, to be sure, and one that would no doubt find favor among the most ardent libertarians. But let us not forget that charity, at its core, is an act of love, of compassion, of reaching out to our fellow human beings in their time of need. To equate it with the cold, calculating hand of central planning is to strip it of its very soul.
In the grand tapestry of human history, there have been countless acts of charity that have left an indelible mark on the world. From the establishment of hospitals and schools to the eradication of diseases and the alleviation of poverty, charity has been a force for good, a beacon of hope in the darkest of times. To dismiss it as mere self-congratulation is to do a great disservice to those who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place.
So, dear commenter, I implore you: take a step back from the spreadsheets, the charts, and the graphs. Look beyond the cold, hard numbers and see the humanity that lies beneath. For it is in the compassion, the empathy, and the love that we show to one another that we find the true measure of our worth. And in that spirit, I bid you farewell, with the hope that one day you will see the world not through the lens of economics, but through the eyes of a fellow human being.
Hey if people want to exercise their humanitarian impulses I'm all for it. They should fly to Africa and express their compassion in the context of a one-on-one human relationship and try to understand the situation well enough to make a lasting impact. But don't write a check to a utility-destroying exercise in futility and then crow about either your rationality or your ethical superiority. Calling that charity is like monogamously jerking off to the same OnlyFans girl every day and calling it a relationship. Yes, it fulfills some narrow technical definition of the term but leaves out far more than it captures, and in so doing just debases and dilutes the original concept. Charity, like love, is valuable because of the human connection it enables, not because of the direct practical results it generates. Outsourcing that to an efficient process is just missing the point.
Me reducing a starving child to an abstract economic data point is no more objectifying than an EA'er reducing it to a variable in their ethical calculus. The only difference is that my abstraction is actually accurate (yet theirs is the one that garners social approval).
And by the way the comment you clapped for is just chatGPT.
It's chatGPT. I know because a friend of mine made the comment in an attempt at humor. He told me the prompt was "Make fun of this comment. Make it sort of mean and very much in the style of Infinite Jest, down to being long and somewhat nonsensical, replete with extraneous anecdotes and shit."
You may agree with the gist of the message, but it's dripping with a poisonous mix of disgust and contempt. Great for scoring points, not good for convincing anyone.
Hi Scott, I was told you might respond to a comment like this:
11 years ago I had an intense spiritual loving experience diagnosed as bipolar mania. I responded well to the medication, but the spirituality aspect was dismissed by the psychiatrists.
Over the next decade, I embarked on a deep journey of self awareness where I embodied deeply, worked through personality disorders, and became almost monkish in my presence.
I am continuing to need support with overall stability, and I am frustrated that none of the psychiatrists I have worked with have any language to understand personal transformation, yet I still need support with medication, food, sleep, etc.
Are there any researchers or psychiatrists you know of working on the frontier of spirituality and psychiatry?
Really hoping for help as past efforts to reach out to others haven't always panned out ...
As someone with a similar background, i have found licensed clinical social workers have been the most helpful for me because their professional practice explicitly takes a “bio-psycho-social-spiritual” approach. You might try a service like better help, make scroll through providers until you find a good one. Best of luck to you from a fellow traveler.
You have the transpersonal psychology people, for example Grof & Grof: The stormy search for the self.
I would admittedly be careful about wholeheartedly trust the opinions and advice of transpersonal psychologists and psychiatrists - they are akin to a sect to some extent. But I had use of Grof & Grofs book back in the days. They use concepts that acknowledge spiritual experiences plus the possibility that they can be potentially beneficial, rather than dismissing them as only pathological & to be toned down with medication.
....a general advice, though, is to stop all types of spiritual exercise if you are still in an active phase even after 11 years. Seek grounding instead. Long walks are good for that purpose. While meditation and in particular breathwork is dangerous if you have not become fully grounded again.
Infinite happiness is tiling the universe with wire-headed rats. Infinite strength is an omnipotent wish granting machine.
Vitalism to me doesn't make any claim on what the universe should be, only that we should gain the power and capabilities to reshape it in whatever way we want.
There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.
Lord Voldemort conspicuously lost twice to a rag-tag civilian militia while being in control of just about every lever of power in society, and exhibited a lot of fear-driven decisionmaking.
It is true that vitalism is a a core aspect of voluntaristic ideologies. In contrast to intellectual ideologies, like utilitarianism.
Conservatism, communism, socialism, ecologism, liberalism, libertarianism are all intellectual ideologies.
Intellectual ideologies share a committment to internal consistency, clear reasoning & specified goals to be reached by what is considered effective means. They also care about whether their beliefs are likely to be true or not. Plus they tend to be against unneccessary suffering and death. And against use of power without any reason for why you use power.
Voluntaristic ideologies do not care about any of that.
Voluntaristic ideologies can take you to very dark places. But so, admittedly, can intellectual ideologies.
I would describe myself with the vitalist label you provide in this article, and I agree with the article. However, I do think that the stomachability of varying degrees of AGI risk is an issue that is inherently extreme and high stakes enough to where it genuinely does draw out distinctions between what some rational altruists might conclude versus what some rational vitalists might conclude.
I think this post misses something fundamental about the adverse selection that altruistic interventions are subject to. I'm not any sort of "vitalist", but I think I can steelman their position.
Bear with me for a moment as my computer science shaped brain tries to transmit some useful intuition. There exist a broad category of algorithms/processes which are able to achieve long-term goals/configurations using only very simple, local actions. Examples:
- Portfolio rebalancing: keeping x% of your wealth in stocks and (1-x)% in cash means you tend to buy stocks when they're cheap and sell them when they're expensive, without any understanding of the market fundamentals.
- Many data structures that arise in the study of randomized algorithms. Move-to-front linked lists, which keep often used data near the front (more accessible) without any explicit model or tracking of data usage. Binary trees which are balanced by simply randomizing the insertion order (as opposed to running expensive rebalancing operations).
If we consider utility-maximizing altruistic interventions as such local rules, then they produce configurations that are highly unfavorable over time. They are anti-vital, and not by coincidence, but by the predictable consequences of helping "those most in need".
You identify the most wretched group of people and help them. They move up exactly one step towards becoming productive. In the next time step, they have stopped being the most wretched, so you withdraw your support in favor of the newly-most-wretched group. As a more extreme example, as soon as a person becomes productive, you start burdening them with taxes to support your altruistic efforts.
In the absence of enough resources to uplift everyone, this myopic decision criteria guarantees that no-one will actually reach the threshold of self-sufficiency and surplus generation. You're systematically minimizing the maximum of awesomeness, over the population you're "helping".
For a person to become prosperous and strong, it's not enough for them to be protected from malaria. They need a bunch of other things: investment into their education, infrastructure, a working labor market, etc etc. As I understand it, Vitalism says it's better to give this entire package to 10% of the population than to give only malaria nets to 100% of the population. And this remains true even if that 10% is chosen completely at random, so it's orthogonal to any dysgenic arguments.
Valuable contribution. Nitpick/tangential comment: noting that while everything said in the first example is true, it shouldn't be confused with a 'returns maximising' strategy.
**My poor wording: it has an equal chance of inferior returns, because it systematically selects for losers rather than winners in your portfolio. And just because a stock has gone up, doesn't mean that it is more likely to go down in the future. Equally, just because a stock hasn't gone up, doesn't make it more likely to do so in future.
**Better wording by gpt4:
The strategy inherently assumes a degree of mean reversion in the prices of assets, where assets that have appreciated will eventually fall back in price and those that have depreciated will rise. However, this is not always the case, and relying on this assumption can lead to potential drawbacks:
Missed Growth Opportunities: By selling off portions of assets that have increased in value to buy more of those that have decreased, rebalancing might lead you to cut winners short and double down on losers. If certain assets continue to perform well beyond the norm, constantly selling them off can lead to missing out on significant growth opportunities.
Contrarian to Trend Following: The rebalancing strategy goes against trend-following strategies, which assume that assets that are performing well will continue to do so. Trend followers would likely hold onto rising assets longer or even buy more, contrasting sharply with the rebalancing approach of selling them off to buy underperformers.
Market Efficiency and Random Walk Hypothesis: Modern financial theory often suggests that markets are efficient, meaning all known information is already reflected in stock prices. According to the random walk hypothesis, stock price movements are independent of each other; therefore, past price movements are not indicative of future trends. If true, the fundamental basis for rebalancing (expecting mean reversion) might not align well with how markets actually operate.
Cost Considerations: Frequent rebalancing can incur transaction costs and tax implications, especially if done in taxable accounts. These costs can eat into the overall returns of the portfolio, potentially negating some of the benefits of rebalancing.
Agreed, it's not optimal. The important aspect here is that a very specific, predictable investment strategy drops out of a very simple, stateless process. You need to analyze it to understand what's happening, and the effect of a poorly chosen policy can be *worse* than random.
One should note that the portfolio rebalancing only works while the currency in question is relatively stable. When the currency crashes (which fiat currencies tend to do in the long run), it leads to ruin.
Seems to me that the real difference between mere signaling or pretending and actually trying is sacrifice. Sure you may TALK a good game about your philosophy and conspicuously support it when and where it's easy to do so, but can you support your philosophy when the cost of doing so is significant? If you're merely pretending to try or even pretending to really try, you're still only engaging in effective altruism or whatever-your-ism-is as long as your community is on board and it doesn't really feel like you're sacrificing. Not if you're whole community and everything that matters to you is right where you want your beliefs to be, then pretending to really try is all you need do, but if something happens to that support structure, so it's no longer convenient to pretend at all, that's the real test of your commitment.
> Capitalism is a kind of conflict and was responsible for many (though not all) of the inventions mentioned above (but do remember that Bell Labs was famously productive precisely because it was a monopoly)
I seriously doubt Bell Labs was productive because they were a monopoly. What assumptions does that rest on?
Yes, capitalism is a kind of conflict. Just like democracy manages to have transitions of power without bloodshed, capitalism also gives you a kind of conflict (and resolution) without bloodshed. That's great!
On the object level, one of the greater contributions from Bell Labs was Claude Shannon's information theory, and he would ride the unicycle in the halls and otherwise slack off. I think a vitalist would have written him off.
Re: why think Bell Labs was due to a monopoly, but the completely naive answer is that they did lots of inventions before the breakup, and lots less after it.
Re: backstop, that is true at the level of abstraction being discussed, but doesn't mean that something LIKE the lack of a backstop at some level would propagate throughout a system. I would imagine the response to this is: yes, there was no pain at the economic level of the department, but there likely was pain from feedback with other smart / tasteful researchers. Hamming question certainly seem to be practiced throughout the labs!
>"On the object level, one of the greater contributions from Bell Labs was Claude Shannon's information theory, and he would ride the unicycle in the halls and otherwise slack off. I think a vitalist would have written him off."
Why would you think that? A person being completely unafraid to buck the local status quo (the grey-suited, brown-nosed, nose-to-the-grindstone "organization man" ethos, which *definitely* has sklavenmoral elements in it) in shameless pursuit of their own desires, and excelling while doing it, is definitely something a vitalist can appreciate.
If we were talking about hypothetical vitalists formed from the platonic realm, you'd be right, but I suspect someone like Walt Bismarck would call him a cucked (for getting divorced) autist (for being a nerd)
What specific vitalists are you thinking of that would mean my prejudice is wrong? To point out, Scott is trying to start an entirely new way of medical funding with Lorian Psychiatry, is earning a big pile of money via the strength of his own writing and clearly is not an organization man, and he's "gay Jewish autist", not "Superman I am going to punch out". I don't think I have unusual mind reading powers, just normal inference ones that can be wrong. So who specifically am I wrong about?
I mean, we're discussing what's the "proper" way to interpret/implement Nietzschean thought, so yeah, "hypothetical vitalists formed from the platonic realm" seem relevant to the discussion. I certainly wouldn't claim that the sum total of what Nietzschean thought can offer is summed up in Walt Bismarck.
Re: Scott, I think Nietzsche would appreciate Lorian, and much of Scott's writing. I don't think Nietzsche would particularly care about the gayness, Jewishness, or autism. I think Nietzsche would certainly scoff at Scott's willingness to self-censor - and his retreat from communities he has created for the purpose of open discussion - because he was catching social blowback for being "associated" with people willing to discuss HBD, manosphere stuff, neoreaction, etc. People are complex.
I didn't have Nietzsche in mind at all, I would have referred to him, or master/slave morality if I did. I specifically wrote "a vitalist" rather than "the vitalists" or "slave morality" to be clear that I wasn't talking about the platonic ideal, but specific people with specific expectations.
I'm talking about specific people because I want to know if their ideology is good at predicting the things they care about. A hypothetical vitalist from the platonic realm can never make an incorrect prediction, because people will no true Scotsman, or post hoc justify how people are or aren't vitalists. Is your model of vitalists ever wrong about the consequences of what they believe? I would guess never.
Because if you want to claim something like "this is my ideology, it's good at predicting the world as well as driving the world towards its goals", it's a good idea to double check if what they're saying is true or false.
I'm not sure I should care what Nietzsche says if I care mostly about having good taste in scouting out human potential, and if you want to talk about him, I don't have anything useful to say.
> Re: why think Bell Labs was due to a monopoly, but the completely naive answer is that they did lots of inventions before the breakup, and lots less after it.
Maybe.
Claude Shannon also did a lot more discovering in early life than later. Perhaps there was just a lot of relatively easy pickings at that time in the life of both Bell Labs and Claude Shannon?
What, for a bunch of completely different fields? That's about as plausible as saying that antibiotics work via regression to the mean! Sure a bunch of illnesses get better naturally without antibiotics, that doesn't mean that it doesn't kill bacteria!
I agree that there are other factors that aren't "Bell Labs was owned by a monopoly", but I don't think it's unreasonable to say "a bunch of fully funded scientists in one location, that wouldn't exist if not for large amounts of expected stability in the company's future" means that the monopoly enabled them.
> There’s some evidence that the most heavily-bombed areas of Britain and Japan are richer today (because they were able to build back from first principles instead of being limited by existing infrastructure).
You'd have to exclude the effect of wealth transfers?
If society bands together to give an orphan a billion dollars, that means that the individual orphan might be better off without the parents. But society still had to scrounge up the billion dollars, and would have been better off on net with the parents still alive.
You touch on an interesting point when you say that both altruists and vitalists desire to produce more "resilient" individuals. It makes me think of the various philosophical schools of ancient Greece and how (to my mind anyways) they always viewed the cultivation of a resilient mind as the end goal of their moral philosophy. They sometimes called it different things, though many of them settled on atraxia, and of course they all had different paths to get there. To Aristotle, it was the cultivation of virtues that were neither in excess or deficiency, such that the individual would be able to respond in the proper way to any given situation. The Stoics sought to reign in their passions by following Nature's Law, allowing them to view any eventuality with equanimity. The Skeptics suspended final judgement of all opinions, allowing them to continue the search for truth without being bound to any one viewpoint and the mental baggage that came with it.
It seems to me a kind of homeostasis that they sought: a mental state that would able to maintain it's internal coherence in response to whatever buffeting winds and waves the environment can hurl at it. In such a state, an individual would be able to see the situation for what it is, resist the temptation to panic or despair at the challenge that faces them, and stay focused on what is necessary to achieve their goals. From that mental stability would arise a sense of tranquility and bliss, knowing that the individual could maintain their composure in response to anything. Surely, such a thing would be of great desire to an altruist. Of course, to continue the biological analogy, such a state likely cannot be achieved in an environment lacking stressors as many protective mechanisms are only activated in response to the presence of stressors (the term in hormesis). Cells and bodies, like individuals, grow strong in response to things trying to tear them down, hardening themselves against potentially deadly foes. It follows rather easily from that that seeking out challenge and danger is an effective (if not necessary) step.
Where I would differ from the vitalists (at least as I interpret their work from what you've said and linked to) is the idea that stressing individuals is the same as depriving individuals. To grow strong in response to challenges requires a foundation that is best built through care and support. A child that grows up in an abusive environment, not knowing where their next meal will come from, will not likely possess a strong, stable mind. Or to put it another way, a broken bone may heal back stronger where it was broken, but if it is not set properly or if breaks come too often and too fast then the body will not be stronger for it.
Many "-isms" can coexist in harmony and mutual esteem, when you take them as world views. But when you take them as marginal shoves, they do not. To use an example different from OP: DEI and Conservatism can happily coexist. Diversity is good because it allows for more Madisonian style decision-making within institutions. Equity is good, because we want equality before the rules and processes of our institutions and need to double-check them for the types of biases that will make them less effective at utilizing talent from different backgrounds. And Inclusion will mean that we seek ways that the work places culture blends these differences into a cohesive whole rather than a siloed patchwork of Balkanized social circles. DEI people should find conservatives fellow travelers as well, though. Institutional change must be slow so that the institution remains stable. It is hard to work at an institution that doesn't exist or is in the midst of a Jacobin uprising. Freedom of conscience encourages diversity of view points and thus cultures, even the weird Brazilian guy who thinks the earth is an expanding geode. And heck, Christ came to save all people so every employee needs to feel that this is a nice and kind workplace.
Why is this absurd to most people?
Because DEI and Conservatism and EA and Vitalism are, as you point out, not total philosophies of morality and politics. They are *marginal*, i.e. they are trying to push the culture 10% in some direction. So while they can seem like fellow travelers and reconciliation is possible and it is good work to try and reconcile people on these, they are competing for scarce resources, namely attention and cultural support. Yes. You. Can. Have. Both. But most people confuse the philosophy and the movement, and thus we don't see BLM signs and Support the Police signs in the same yard... though we should.
Excellent post, but I wonder if the point about war has *always* been true or if it *used* to actually accelerate progress, in a world where there was more low hanging fruit for discovery (by a small group or an individual, with less need for the complicated economic structures we can build cooperatively in peacetime), less resources available to invest in R&D without imposing suffering (which seems more worthwhile when the other option is losing a war), and fewer to no readily-apparent recent innovations that made life noticeably better on human-perceptible timescales.
Similarly, in the past the standard solution to "My city's infrastructure is out of date" was "Wait for it to be destroyed, then rebuild." Often that was war, but it could also be fire, or earthquakes, or flooding, or a hurricane, or a tornado for that matter. Peace or not, we've become more resistant to *all* these disasters, and have not found a good way to rebuild cities while still living in them and using what we have without imposing significant near-term costs on the locals, which in the US we've largely decided to forbid ourselves from doing.
TL:DR version: I think it's similar to the reason large, developed economies haven't gone to war at scale since WWII. We finally reached a point where it was too obvious not to admit that war was no longer worthwhile economically even for the victor, because the value of people (human capital) and the built environment totally outweighed the value of land and natural resources.
Just to add a small point, the Italy/Swiss comparison is not correct in a way I feel illustrates the naivete of the vitalists' "Greatness" arguments.
First, for completeness, Switzerland has been far from being at peace in the last 500 years - the modern Switzerland is from 1848, and that follows a civil war (admittedly, not a lot of people died) between Catholics and Protestants over government models, in turn instigated by the invasion of eastern cantons by napoleonic France. Bern itself spent a long time sending mercenaries to every conflict they could find, and expanded its territory by the use of force. The Swiss mercenaries became well known enough that the Vatican was like "we need a Secret Service for the Pope, these guys seem like a good deal in this late medieval world of constant political assassinations".
On the other hand, the modern Switzerland is in fact quite a peaceful place. People do lots of "altruistic" stuff like voluntary work (you're even expected to list that in your citizenship application!). And yet it has produced Euler, the Bernouillis, and Einstein, nearly 30 Nobel prizes, of which 7 in physics, 7 in chemistry, and 9 medicine. It created the Red Cross, holds the seat of dozens of international organizations, and CERN. Inventions as random as velcro, the turbocharger, and LSD. Even relevant-for-the-information age stuff like the World Wide Web, or widely used languages (Pascal and Scala) come from Switzerland. It is crazy for a country this size - and I really don't think this would work if Switzerland weren't such an attractive place to develop one's ideas. Not because it has lots of tanks, the biggest buildings in the world, or it has conquered all it's neighbours. It's because it's really nice to live here - you can (still) mostly trust your society and government, by no small measure thanks to strong federalism, direct democracy, and a commitment from the State to being chill and not doing crazy stuff in the name of some undefined "greatness".
It helps when you live in and around a natural fortress, have a bit of a mania for digging random tunnels which may or may not be full of armaments, and have mandatory civilian conscription and a healthy recreational sport-shooting culture.
Just before WWI, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II allegedly got upset with the Swiss over some diplomatic incident or other, and demanded of the Swiss ambassador what their puny citizen's militia, generally reckoned to be about a quarter-million men strong, would do if he ordered a half million men of the active-duty German Heer to invade. The ambassador is said to have cooly replied "shoot twice and go home."
Countries and peoples lacking in vitality don't produce that type of laconic attitude towards major threats.
Tbh the "natural fortress" bit only applies to the Old Switzerland cantons up in the Alps. Most of the economic/technological activity happens in the "lowlands", like Geneva, Zurich, Basel, the Mitteland of Bern, or Aarau. I don't want to downplay the social role of mandatory conscription. And the direct democracy/extreme federalism model that these later "lowland" cantons imported from the original alpine ones was only possible in the latter because of their independence from feudal powers - which definitely benefited from the orography.
But the rest of the character of a place like Geneva comes from it being a historical trade hotspot, both from its location and its (not very "vitalist") readiness to take in(*) refugees and discards from elsewhere in Europe. Not irrelevant to the discussion, this is what the USA were actively welcoming earlier in the 20th century, and from where they got a nontrivial fraction of their later inventors and laureates.
Dufour, the general of the winning side of the Swiss civil war, is a national hero. But mostly because he managed to avoid bloodshed and large scale battles, pushed for a middle ground solution to the original conflict despite an undisputed win for his reformist side, and returned to his engineering job of building bridges as soon as he was done with the war. This does not scream "Alexander the Great" or "Julius Caesar" to me.
(*) "in" as in "around the city", not quite "within the walls". But letting even "heretics" be a part of city life, instead of "kick them and/or kill them", is a crazy amount of altruism for pre-Enlightenment Europe.
I suppose you can say that the majority of the hospital system everywhere is in Extremistan, and that doesn't seem *completely* ridiculous. But otherwise your first point is wrong: if the bioethicists were vitalists many things would be mandatory that are now forbidden and vice versa, and intensive and end-of-life care would be wildly different.
Thinking about the great accomplishments of the past -- Rome, the Internet, etc. -- it's striking how few of them were done by, or even lead by, a single person. Reading Bret Devereaux's blog, it's clear that Rome prospered because (likely more by accident than purpose) it settled on a very productive agricultural model and use that to finance a very effective military system. But typically Rome had a number of generals heading up a number of wars each summer, and it was their aggregate success that expanded the empire, not the particular genius of any one genera.
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
The Swiss were the terrifying armies of the Renaissance.
Their mercenary blocks of pikemen were what ended the dominance of medieval knights. The pikes made them impervious to cavalry changes - and they would even charge cavalry themselves (something infantry almost never does). There were no infantry formations in Europe that could defeat them either, until the German landsknecht started to copy their tactics in 1490. Knights were not driven off the field by cannons - artillery wouldn't defeat cavalry until the late 1800s - they were driven off the field by dense infantry formations, starting with the Swiss pikemen. Firearms were introduced to battlefields (not just sieges) in the 1500s to counter the Swiss, not to counter cavalry.
If you read Machiavelli's letters, one of the major things he worries about is what would happen if the Swiss actually decided they wanted conquest. At the time, the Swiss had all of the best armies in Europe, so if they wanted to, he thinks they could have conquered whatever they wanted to. [1]
In 1506, the next pope after the Borgias pope established the Swiss Guard, which continues to defend the pope to this day. The French king would use Swiss mercenaries as his personal guard until the French Revolution, when they were massacred defending the Tuileries on 10 August 1792.
The military record of Switzerland during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Eras is substantially more impressive than that of the Borgias.
“If an altruist’s goal is to give everyone the equivalent of a childhood raised by loving parents in a happy suburb with great schools, I don’t think a vitalist can complain.“
This is itself a form of extremistan, because the actual world is really far from giving every child prep school and a suburb. In the real world, there are really large divergences between vitalism (wanting to improve a life affirming aesthetic, exemplified by a few humanist exemplars) and altruism (wanting to improve the lives of everyone, starting with those at the bottom because they have the steepest utility curve). One philosophy would be in favor of confiscating billionaire wealth to give to those at the bottom, and the other would prioritize artistic and cultural endeavors over society’s worse off.
Separately: It sounds a tiny bit to me like Scott is moving toward vitalism in some sense (though not the crazy RW twitter form that says war and death are good), or at least a longer term view of altruism that instrumentalizes vitalism as a practical philosophy.
Not fellow travelers. You're making a category error. Both are roughly philosophies, but not the same kind. EA is antidisestablishmentarian consequentialist. Vitalism is disestablishmentarian virtue ethics. I could translate one world view into another into each others terms, but that would waste time on status games and idle conversation, instead of at least trying to be selfish.
«An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.»
JvN was extremely privileged, but also lived thru extreme political instability in Hungary including progroms.
To quote: «His friend Stanislaw Ulam recalled von Neumann attributing this Hungarian phenomenon to “a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction.”»
Pretty much all belief systems agree on local obvious things like curing the sick, and increasing wealth. The way belief systems are defined is on what they disagree on, namely, the non-local, the extermal.
Identifying that altruism shares that common ground with vitalism and then saying ignore the extermal stuff is entirely missing the point. It is these considered differences on the extremal that defines the belief systems. If you say you are not a vitalist but an altruist then in a meaningful way you are identifying with one set of extrapolations / extramals over the other (otherwise just say you're a decent human muddling by).
If you want kudos for making extremal claims, say being Peter Singer and making the outlandish claim that you wish you cared, that you ought to care, for a stranger as much as your own kids, then prepare to have orhers disagree with you - about how they are actually vitalists or fundemantalist christians etc...
Further, everything we treat as normal was extremal once. Effective Altruism (a re-hash of naive utilitarianism that is mererly focuses less on philosophy and more on results) is actually pretty extremal in what it suggests, and that should be admired (even if not agreed with).
Imagine a healthy guy with a relaxed dead-end job way below his maximum earning potential. He enjoys lots of free time by chatting with friends, watching tv shows and playing chill non-competitive videogames. He is pretty happy with his life.
This outcome is rated highly by altruism, very low by vitalism. And surely this guy is not in Extremistan. Lots of examples like this.
I think you are right, but it would still be rated a lot less by altruism than if he was trying to improve the world.
I am really unsure I understand the vitalist point of view, but another example could be a warlord just trying to conquer territories for no other reason than to get more power. Maybe rated high by vitalists, but quite low by altruists.
Are you more of an altruist, a vitalist, or something else ?
> Are you more of an altruist, a vitalist, or something else ?
Me personally? Altruist.
To clarify, I was talking about that guy specifically as an outcome (of some policy), not as a person. If you have a choice between two otherwise identical policies, where one produces a thousand guys like described, and another - a thousand of successful athletes with persistent health and interpersonal problems (boxers with poor anger management) who are not as happy, I feel like vitalism and altruism strongly disagree, and the situation is absolutely not contrived.
> “Maybe we should have more war, because war strengthens society!”
I think it is just damp dreams of Romaniticism and nothing else. In 2014 Putin annexed Crimea, but it didn't stop there, because Igor Girkin started a war in Donbass. Girkin told explicitly that Russia needs war to awake Russians, blah-blah-blah... Now Russia is weaker then it was at any point for the last 100 years.
BTW Girkin is really seems to live to his dreams of strong people who can topple the mountains by their sheer will and strength, but the problem is Putin is not a mountain, he can't be toppled so easy, and Girkin now in a prison, because since 2022 he became more and more desperate about Russian generals' ability to wage a war. Girkin became a vocal critic of russian army and the whole russian regime. He tried to take a part in the current war, but refused to be a soldier who silently does what he is told to do, and no one allowed him to participate on his terms. At some point the regime decided to stop it and imprisoned him. I'm not sure what the formal reason was, it doesn't matter in Russia.
I note, Girkin didn't just waged wars in Internet, he didn't just dream about an ideal world, he tried to live according to his beliefs. I do not admire his beliefs and never admired them, but I watched him closely, because in some domains his opinions were very precise. He did read a lot about wars, he participated in a few wars, and in Ukraine he was in the middle of the mess, he knew what happened, and so his predictions often were very precise. I think, he is just an ideal vitalist, even if I didn't agree with him, I cannot feel no respect for a person who lived to his ideals. But at the same time, his perverted ideals simply couldn't let him to achieve his terminal goals.
Sometimes I wonder, how seemingly smart and active person could believe in such dreams. I do not wonder about Nietzsche, he seems to me to be a terminal case of an incel, and these guys easily could be smart and raving mad at the same time. But Girkin doesn't fit the bill of an incel.
I offer this as a cautionary tale: romantics live in their romanticized alternate reality and they are potentially dangerous.
If we are talking about Nietzsche, at least, I think a central point of his criticism of slave morality is that he sees it as growing out of resentment and envy. You can find this, for example, in his late book The Antichrist.
If you want to max out on vitalism in today's world and believe in war making you stronger, Ukraine is accepting volunteers. Or if you want to go all-in on "trad" masculinity, Russia might take you too. You could also read up on Roland Bertetzko, who overcame the pretending to really try part when the Kosovo war started. He has also been convicted for planting a car bomb outside the Centre for Peace and Tolerance after the war was over, which seems very true to vitalist principles. (He denies he was involved in the bombing.)
I think you are missing a big point of distinction between altruists and vitalists, which is that the altruist sees the world as positive-sum ("helping African children not get malaria makes us all better off!"), while the vitalist sees the world as zero-sum ("for us to help African children, we necessarily must be losing something if they are gaining something"). That zero-sum mentality, I think, is the underpinning motivation for more war/struggle/suffering. It's not just good for us, it's bad for them, which means it's doubly good for us.
That same mentality also explains the link between vitalism and various flavors of nationalism (etho, civic, etc). Who is the "us" that should benefit, and who is the "them" who should suffer (and preferably, be wiped out completely?). Why, it's my family/clan/tribe/race/nation/culture, of course, and "them" is everyone who's not that. And, as with other aspects of vitalism, there is a lot of hand-waving about when and where you draw the us/them dividing line, but fundamentally I think it all comes down to zero-sum vs. positive sum.
It's not exactly to the benefit of the vitalist to make this explicit, though, because the world is so obviously positive-sum (from my view, at least - as I drink my Kenyan-grown coffee.)
Sorry, but this is the first time I find myself disagreeing with you strongly. I take it you haven't read "The will to power"? I think that is putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Would the World of Warcraft playerbase be twice as happy if you doubled the bank of every player? Would they enjoy the game more if you doubled their stats? Would you be doing them a favor if they started at the max level, saving them the suffering of grinding? Would they enjoy the game more this way?
I don't think you're taking human psychology into account, at all, and neither do I think you're taking Nietzsches ideas into account. My translated copy of "Will to power" contains the word "happiness" 120 times. Nietzsche has already explained why happiness is not a good goal, and he has even explained how thinking positively of alturism is a sign of poor spirit (spirit basically meaning character, attitude, or mental well-being).
Wealth doesn't make people happy nor healthy. If you can generate wealth, then you likely hold positive traits, but inherited wealth often ruins people. It's the lack of wealth which makes people strive towards competence! Suffering is essential for the same reason, necessity is a great teacher. Nietzsche valued war for the same reason that we value economic competition, - it leads to growth. The reason great people often come from wealthy families is because they tend to have better genes and better nutrition. Making a great person requires generations of storing up strength:
"Through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired and stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. In the end there appears a man, a monster of energy, who demands a monster of a task" - twtp 995
Alturism doesn't increase health, darwinism does that! Alturism preserves the weak and sickly, which would be fine if it "Taught people to fish" rather than creating a dependent population by giving them fish.
A TL;DR of Nietzsche would be: Humans are anti-fragile, suffering and overcoming leads to growth, and happiness is merely a side-effect of the feeling of growth and power. The greater a person is, the more anti-fragile they are, meaning that they can turn more suffering and hardship into growth. One is already degenerate if they merely want a peaceful life, and if they consider feelings (happiness, suffering, or pleasure) as of having importance.
A person is also degenerate if they stop learning or working just because it feels unpleasant, right? If a person in rehabilitation gives up merely because recovery is painful, then their priorities are way off. The people who recover quickly are Nietzschean, they are almost too stubborn not to recover, they are the types who will try to crawl out of their hospital beds before they're ready because they have important things to do.
I recommend reading Nietzsche not as a philosopher, but as a psychologist. Actually, just read more of his books, and not other peoples poor takes.
I haven't read most of the preceding 600 comments, so apologies if I'm repeating what others have said.
>America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket.
The important breakthroughs in computing happened before 1939 (Turing machine idea is from 1936). For the rest of the century the Americans are mostly milking this same Turing machine cow.
The space program owes its existence to Nazi rocket science and WW2. The other breakthroughs mentioned are less impressive or just more industrial applications of the same ones.
Also, there is only one (or at most two) superpower from 1945-present, so n=1 for this period and we can't say anything about how well America made use of its position. We would need to (e.g.) compare with timelines where the Nazis won.
>Iraq has had approximately eight major war
>I’m not expecting Russia or Ukraine to leapfrog the rest of the world
Apples and oranges. As said, there is only one superpower, n=1. If you want a comparison you have to go back further in history.
>War isn’t actually that great for science, art, or the economy.
It can be. It's a "paradox" of the same kind as "must be cruel to be kind" or "that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger". For some reason those in the utilitarian camp keep forgetting or downplaying this idea of anti-fragility. They keep advocating "never be cruel" and "never kill anything", even though it will obviously fail even by utilitarianism's own standards. E.g. aid to Africa makes African countries fragile and dependent, does not strengthen them.
>I think both altruists and vitalists have a shared interest in figuring out the structures (capitalism? monopoly? friendly rivalry?) that maximize progress without devolving into anyone actually getting nuked.
Okay, but if the stakes of the competitions are real, you'll be unhappy with the "cruelty" towards the losers. If the stakes are fake, it just won't work. My impression is you want fake stakes (e.g. everyone should live in cushy first world conditions even if their productivity is zero).
I want to challenge the expression "maximize progress". It's in the nature of progress that it involves unknown unknowns and discontinuity. So it can't be maximised like a mathematical function.
>The second divergence argument I hear is “suffering builds character”
I think you've failed the ITT here.
The argument is "(in many cases) you can have a lot of pain and a lot of gain, or no pain no gain". Normally the pain and gain are both caused by a third term (e.g. fighting really hard for something to the point of becoming a martyr). The pain doesn't have to directly causes the gain.
> more than you could contribute to world GDP
Regardless of your morals, world GDP is a terrible metric to be aiming at. Goodhart's law applies very strongly, since most politicians try to hack their national GDP (and world GDP is just a sum of all these). It now tells us almost nothing, except "lots of people have tried really hard to make this particular number on a screen go up".
It's something like cargo cult science to say "saving X lives will increase expected GDP by Y, and Y increase is associated with Z amount of progress". You have no mechanism for how Y causes Z, and blindly increasing Y can't be expected to lead to Z.
>Second, the potential of Kenya is probably underutilized because it’s underdeveloped, and part of the process of making it less underdeveloped is making its people healthier.
How is developing Kenya helping the world, big picture wise? Are Kenyan universities likely to surpass American ones?
The implicit argument seems to be either:
- Everyone has a fixed % chance to be a genius/innovator, so increasing the amount of healthy people increases the number of such.
- In the Civilization video games, having more population equates to more science output. I can't come up with a better model of science output (without being racist/elitist) so I'll just use this.
But some form of elitism is definitely true, as you've accepted elsewhere, e.g. in posts about the number of Hungarian Jewish geniuses.
> Your best option is to make Africa less of a mess, so that it can take care of itself and its people don’t try to immigrate elsewhere.
And is the first step towards "it can take care of itself", "continually supply every African country with aid so they're trapped in a state of dependence"?
> If I wanted to strengthen humanity as much as possible, I’d probably work on economic development...
Unless you explain what economic development is, I can only imagine it as something like "instead of China having $18T GDP, 1.4B population, 2.8M factories, it now has $36T GDP, 2.8B population, 5.6M factories". Isn't this bad, even by EA standards (global warming)?
> , curing diseases
Disease is obviously not a major limiting factor on civilisational progress, any more than population is.
> , or technological progress.
This is the juicy one. What's your model for the factors that lead to technological progress?
Blindly increasing GDP or population or life expectancy doesn't do anything. We already have an abundance of healthy Chinese factory workers being "productive". Probably too many, from a global warming POV.
> Vitalist bloggers mostly don’t seem to think this way. They spend most of the energy criticizing altruists, and never really get around to practicing vitalism at all.
We all live in the American Empire. We can't do university research anywhere without being cancelled for disagreeing with aspects of American progressive ideology. This issue is upstream of nearly everything else, and sufficient explains why many smart young men take to online criticism instead of building things within the system.
> I think it’s all signaling. People who want to validate an identity as kind and compassionate become altruists. People who want to validate an identity as tough and masculine and hard-headed become vitalists. This is why people bother hitching their star to any philosophy instead of just making money or playing video games or whatever.
You seem to be saying that there's no such thing as being tough and masculine. If you really believe this, I feel sorry for you -- you've been broken/tamed by modernity in a very strong sense, and you're also unlucky with the friends you've met.
>although some would say these produce new signaling games (eg shrimp welfare).
> The mirror image on the vitalist side is when they end up supporting war and suffering, concepts which are especially hard to endorse
Many serious thinkers have seen value in war and suffering, and many common people too. Pre 20th Century this wasn't considered edgy and subversive at all. Given that you know lots of dissatisfied young men are taking 19th Century thinkers seriously again (see your recent posts on Nietzsche), you can't be surprised that some of them are seriously pro-war again.
> War and suffering are so impractical
War and suffering are never only for their own sake. A war is about something (a disagreement between certain powers), suffering is a signal of something (damage, decrease in certain powers).
It's quite reasonable to say "the Vietnam War was impractical and achieved nothing". It's absurd to say "the US Civil War was impractical and achieved nothing". The slavery question, and the balance of power in North America, had to be settled one way or the another.
A steelman of your position is: the end of WW2 gave us an overall winner, the US, so any further war is now impractical.
But the US that won WW2 is a particular contingent power -- FDR's US. It was suited to 20th Century conditions. It's not realistic that in Space Year 3000, we're all living peacefully under this same regime. Firstly it will simply decay. Secondly and more importantly, it cannot decisively settle questions that arise from new technology or new philosophy (the latter is at least as important, and conspicuously absent from your post).
> I have a bunch of complicated tax form things I need to do that would get me a few hundred extra dollars per month; I’ve delayed them for over a year now. You’d think that if I were genuinely selfish I’d take the free money. Humans genuinely do what some sort of predictive algorithm figures will send the most dopamine to a certain part of their mesolimbic system
Can we look for a better hypothesis? (I'm suspicious of reductions of behaviour to "maximise chemical X"). For example, maybe part of your brain hates taxes and paperwork and living in such an artificial way, and wants to tear the forms up. It's kept in check by more civilised parts, but it's strong enough to put up some kind of fight and prevent you being a perfect drone.
This hypothesis predicts that if you ever lose all faith in civilisation, you would do things like set all your taxes on fire in a fit of anger and feel great about it (the beast would be set free and take revenge). On your hypothesis, taxes are just boring and non-dopamine-producing (but not hated in a strong sense) so you'd just forget about them or calmly bin them. What do you imagine yourself doing?
> So my challenge to the vitalists is to pretend to really try.
On my reading, vitalist maps roughly onto anti-establishment/anti-Progressive and altruist onto Progressive. I expect vitalists will continue to sit around and goad you on the internet, until the moment for regime change comes.
I think Scott is being very hypocritical. William MacAskill is already in Extremistan. EA already has one foot in Extremistan. The inflection point where I started to diverge from a fan of the blog to a skeptical reader who holds it at arm's length was the point many many years ago where Scott went to EA things and came away feeling at least a little concerned by 80,000 Hours, who told him he was wasting his life as a doctor. Telling someone to quit being a doctor so they can do more good at an NGO is in Extremistan!
What I think is being missed by this argument (and by the insistence that the two only differ under extreme circumstances) is that, OMG am I really saying this, EA is essentially a "Marxist" view of the world while Vitalism is "richer".
What I mean by this is that the Marxist view of the world, being solidly 19th C rational, posits that human life is primarily about material conditions, with the implication that both politics and charity are about manipulating those conditions. But this is not the only view of the world.
Both the pre-rationalist view (essentially "gut instinct" modified by various tradition and convention) and post-rationalist view (built on realizing the limitations of the "axioms of rationality", first in math, then in physics, then one-day perhaps in social sciences as we realize the importance of things like the non-unitary mind...) understand that man does not live by bread alone; there is more, in fact much much more, to life than just material circumstances. It doesn't matter if you interpret this in terms of "God is more important than a 1% higher GDP" or in terms of "the environment is more important than a 1% higher GDP", whether you come at this as a Republican insisting on the importance of culture or as a Wokist insisting on the importance of identity; in all these cases you're conceding that an emphasis on purely the material misses something very important.
You may not agree with the particulars of Vitalism, but they are also squarely in this beyond-materialism camp. In a way, just as Woke is the end point of Christianity taken to an impossible extreme, EA is the end point of Marx taken to an impossible extreme.
And in both cases, most of the adherents are not philosophers (in fact barely capable of abstract thought) so they don't even see this; your average Wokist is happy to complain about Marxist issues (wages, taxes, prices) when that seems to align with the larger Wokist cause, and your average EA is happy to attend whatever sort of Pride march we are supposed to engaged in this month. But make no mistake, when push comes to shove, these two are not aligned; they are not Jews and Christians, believing the same kinda of thing, they are rather Scientists and Fundamentalists believing very different things.
In this way Vitalism is more in the camp of Woke. They sincerely hate each other, like Christians and Saracens, but they both understand the kind of things they're fighting for, that they're both fighting for the primacy of culture, and what that culture will be. EA imagines that culture is not important, that it will disappear in the general utopia of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening (eg Star Trek).
I'm not telling you which to "believe"' but I am telling you that the framework provided by Scott for which to believe is, IMHO, utterly missing everything important. Of course Scott may disagree! That's kinda the point of being a Marxist, that you say it doesn't matter what the peasants think, what their mental life consists of as long as they have food, clothing, and housing. Well, we, the entire West, kinda sorta believed that until 9/11 woke us up; and for those who didn't get the message, basically the run-up to Trump and everything since then should surely have opened your eyes?
In the end these are highly abstracted and simplified aka dumbed down ideas that may be good talk or manifesto material. Confusing them with the reality of our manifold competing preferences is probably not that smart.
This feels like a really interesting development of Scott's earlier posts: toxoplasma of rage & trails coming apart as a metaphor for life.
I really enjoyed this essay, and found myself hearing echoes of his earlier work. Those essays were revelatory for me, and it's really nice to see Scott building them up further.
Vitalism is not about strength. It’s about overcoming fear in pursuit of a value-aligned purpose.
I see vitalism as emphasizing THE MEANS, while altruism emphasizes THE ENDS.
In terms of possible life paths:
- Altruism might prescribe earning to give, in which one works a high-paying job at corporations that might stifle their authenticity and are misaligned with their personal values, in order to give that money to a good cause that helps net many people. (Probably the safest way to produce net good in the world.)
-Vitalism might prescribe challenging oneself to overcome fears and pursue an authentic path that aligns with personal values. (This likely involves a lot of failure, challenges, and has no guarantee of being effective or producing objective good.)
Let’s say these life paths are pursued, and now we’re on our death bed thinking back on our life. The Altruist might be content with the objective good they’ve produced in the world (THE ENDS). But they might feel that they neglected their own development, that they weren’t as alive as they could have been (THE MEANS). The Vitalist might feel that they really lived life to the max, adapting and being challenged (THE MEANS) while striving to achieve what they felt their unique purpose to be in the world. Maybe they didn’t create as much net objective good, maybe they even failed completely (THE ENDS), but at least they followed their own north star and along the way became a more realized and adaptable human being.
Both altruism and vitalism can be helpful in thinking about purpose and our pursuits, and ideally I think a balance can be struck. At the extremes, an earn-to-give altruist who becomes bitter and burned out at their high-paying high-stress accountancy job is on a personal level putting off a lot of subtle negative externalities into their local world. While on the other hand, a vitalist who decides their value-aligned purpose is to be the best silverback gorilla hunter is obviously prioritizing self over societal objective good.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, talks about how each of us can satisfy our “burden of freedom”. It is our task to determine how to navigate the ambiguity and responsibility of our existence. Some people bury their burden of freedom in their careers (The Serious Human), and some in collecting life experience (The Adventurous Human). She ultimately determines the right path is The Passionate Human*, a person who dedicates themselves based on their unique skills and potential to a purpose they find meaningful.
*(note: She later caveats this to say that the genuinely free Passionate Human is one who also recognizes and works for the freedoms of others. Touché!)
In the context of altruism v vitalism, I think Beauvoir’s moral framework provides a much needed 3rd dimension. Both can align with “The Passionate Human”; altruism if it doesn’t neglect personal potential and development, and vitalism if it doesn’t neglect the freedom of others and a pursuit that attempts to be net good for society.
Great comment!
I'm not sure I agree that Nietzsche had a metaphysics, but I'm also not sure I understand what that word actually means. Is physics different from metaphysics? For the will to power is just a further generalization of the concepts: Darwinism, memetics, anti-fragility. He traces human behaviour back to the law of physics, which looks like a "will to power" like darwinism looks like a "will to fitness", but neither are wills or even laws, they're tautologies. It may also be that Nietzsche somehow realized that chaos was as important to life as order, and that this is why he liked chance, accident and the Dionysian. I think modern research on the "edge of chaos" confirm his findings, but it's just an intuition as I don't understand the concept in depth.
I'll also add that Nietzsche wrote (when translated, at least): "In itself, there is nothing sick about the herd animal, it is even invaluable; but, incapable of leading itself". He only wants the herd not to dominate the values of those outside of it, he's not trying to get rid of the mediocre. He even wrote "Hatred for mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher" and "What I fight against: that an exceptional type should make war on the rule - instead of grasping that the continued existence of the rule is the precondition for the value of the exception"
I'm not confident to add anymore right now, and going into depth on Nietzsche is very difficult. He was much more intelligent than people give him credit for. I'm at least 3.5 standard deviations above the norm and Nietzsche is so far above me that I don't dare to correct him on anything
Re: the specific example of fentanyl addicts and petty criminals in SF is that they’re not happy; they’re acting under compulsion (their addiction). Locking them up in an involuntary detox facility certainly won’t make them happy in the short run, but maybe gives them a chance to turn their life around and be happier in the long run.
…uploads within 15 years? Would you be willing to bet money on that?
I can’t wait for all the agi hype to burst when people realize how lame chat gpt 6 turns out to be.
Scott, you are tiptoeing towards a solid argument for moral realism! Try adding other pairs of “competing” ideologies to the mix and ask the same question: do the converge? And do they, individually, break apart when taken to extremes? What you’re describing looks like nicomachean ethics: that virtue is the mean of two vices.
What does it look like, if, in general, instrumental rationality consists of a series of tradeoffs which, in a sense, are opposites, and yet by themselves taken to extremes lead to self-destruction? That’s what I think moral reality actually is: just long term survival plus thriving which requires the successful union of seemingly opposed philosophies, all of which are approximations of long term survival that work by picking one end of a tradeoff curve.
I think it's possible to, using a bunch of parameters like this (eg how long-term to be, how much to smooth everything out, how deep a veil of ignorance to use) get something like morality. But where this process and morality diverge, I usually vote for morality, plus you need some incentive to do this process at all and to choose the "right" parameters.
I don't think I'm 100% moral realist, but I think a very small amount of subjective/assumed/intuitive morality can go a really really long way.
If the process and morality diverge, how can you tell? Religious persons would just say, “this is evidence that you have a moral conscience and believe it more so than you’d trust the results of any rational process.”
I think most people know this is true: No amount of evidence would convince me to kill and eat my own children, nor would that work for any sane adult. You’d much sooner believe your reasoning process was faulty, because if we are honest with ourselves, sane adults trust their moral intuition OVER their rational faculties. So really this idea of being rational is always going to be subservient to our internal conception of the good. Someone who recoils in horror at, eg homosexuality or Trump isn’t going to consider evidence they are wrong, because, like us, their moral values inhibit rationality and this is a feature, not a bug.
The only question could be, well, what are those moral values and can we be wrong about them? If we were, how would we know?
I think this last part is then the answer to “pretending to try.” I think it’s worth asking: what exactly are you pretending? To advance your own utility function? I tried that experiment and found it uninspiring. I couldn’t keep pretending since I just didn’t care that much. What’s the point?
But what if you tried a different experiment?
What if you tried pretending that being itself has an intrinsically good order, but that by substituting our own flawed conceptions of the good, we make a mess of things, for ourselves and our loved ones? What if you tried pretending that by loving and trusting reality itself, and then acting as if the ground of being were pure love, we could heal the world in a recursive fashion? I’ve found that a much more inspiring game of make believe to play, because I keep accumulating evidence that it _actually works_, which makes it easier to pretend even more so.
Absent that positive feedback loop - where make believe experimental runs of a strategy produce real evidence that the strategy works - my effort never got off the ground.
> Someone who recoils in horror at, eg homosexuality or Trump isn’t going to consider evidence they are wrong, because, like us, their moral values inhibit rationality and this is a feature, not a bug.
Ex fundamentalist Christian here. My moral/emotional perception of homosexuality changed from disgust to neutrality. Also, vegetarian here - my moral/emotional perception of eating meat changed from neutrality to disgust. Clearly, human values can change, and it's hard to see how if not by *some* kind of argument and evidence (be it sound or not).
Yes, I agree completely they can change. They can’t do a 180, though. I think they change through osmosis if the values of the people we spend most of our time around.
I think our brains are computing a solution to an optimization problem: “what’s the best explanation”, where “best” minimizes internal tension between experience and expectations. Going against the people around you adds a ton of tension; people would only do this if there were either a greater source of internal tension opposing your neighbors, or else some internal mechanism that relieved tension.
> They can’t do a 180, though.
What about two 90s with some time in between?
Interesting! I don't know anyone who has not been raised by atheists, and I tend to see revulsion over homosexuality more as a "masculinist" "real men aren't acting camp" thing than religious thing. I always thought religion is just an excuse for that.
> I don't know anyone who has not been raised by atheists
Fascinating! I mean only one of my parents was religious, but the were free to indoctrinate me, and they did.
Re. real men vs religion: hard to (causally) separate for me. I was definitely explicitly taught that its a disgusting sin (as opposed to some other sins like lying, which implicitly were just sins).
The religion promoted quite strict gender roles, so some "real men don't X" was also part of it. Personally, I felt much more disgust towards gays than lesbians (if I felt disgusted at all), and *perhaps* others did too, but at least some definitely found lesbianism disgusting as well. So the "real men" perspective itself can't fully explain it, I think.
A big example is the Marquess of Queensbury who was an outspoken atheist and a huge devotee of manliness. He was quite famously annoyed at what Oscar Wilde was doing with his son.
Yes. The notion of 'disgust' as a motivator seems under-explored though it's often invoked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world#/media/File:Inglehart_Values_Map.svg
My favourite map ever. It is basically about two different ways of being liberal or conservative. Notice that they correlate. But there are outliers.
One outlier is my Ex-Commie Eastern Europe. Secular, but survivalist. So basically don't worry about god or tradition, but on the other hand we are too busy trying to survive to allow caring about self-expression, just do the survivalist tough stuff everybody else is doing. No time for thinking about pronouns, go dig potatoes.
The other outlier is Latin America but also USA. Life is all about self-expression - but limited by traditional/religious norms.
Bubbles are interesting: today 70% of Americans are religious, and twenty years ago (when people on this site may have been in the process of being raised) it was closer to 85%. Even today only 5% of Americans consider themselves atheist, and about 5% more consider themselves agnostic (the remainder believe in some kind of higher power, just not in an organized way).
I'm trying to think if I personally (IRL) know anyone who was raised by atheists. Can't think of any!
Funny enough, in my part of the world, almost everyone is an atheist, or functionally behaves like one. At least the part of the world where I grew up in, (former) East Germany.
Now in Singapore it's more mixed.
Commie countries were officially atheist and a lot of people, while not quite believing the propaganda, were still "apatheists", just not caring, no explicit animus, just simply not interested. On the other hand masculinist norms were strong, because of survivalism and because the state also wanted some tough soldiers and workers.
If we go back to the beginning, Socrates, Plato, the idea is that we have correct moral intuitions, but they fail in some special cases. So the goal of philosophy is to discover the base algorithm behind these intuitions and apply it in those cases.
This was not succesful. After many attempts Plato just gave up and said best thing is we just keep out of other people's business - to each their own. But since our ethical dilemmas are precisely about what is people's own, what is their rightful due, it does not help.
We generally know how not to harm people. It is just a social contract along the Golden Rule. We know how to help people on the small, personal scale, just intuitively. What we do not know is how to help people on the grand scale and this is what Scott and EA and all are trying to figure out. I just given up on helping people on the grand scale. Just helping people on the small scale can turn the world into the Shire and that is good enough.
I'm sure this is a two-way process. People use moral intuition to inform and modify their rational process and they also use rational process to modify their moral intuition to try and build a coherent moral worldview with low number of exceptions.
The philosopher Jonathan Bennett (who died in March this year) has a sort-of Popperian approach to morality, which is easier to defend than moral realism (defined as the idea that verified moral truth exist). Bennett argues that we must stay vigilant when it comes to consider valid arguments against our present morality, i.e. we must always stay open to the possibility that our morality might be "falsified" in the future. Excerpt from his classic discussion of the tension between moral principles and spontaneous human sympathies, in "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn":
"it is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false. Still, although I can’t point to any of my beliefs and say “This is false”, I don’t doubt that some of my beliefs are false; and so I should try to remain open to correction. Similarly, I accept every single item of my morality – that is inevitable – but I am sure that my morality could be improved, which is to say that it could undergo changes which I should be glad of once I had made them. So I must try to keep my morality open to revision, exposing it to whatever valid pressures there are – including pressures from my sympathies.
I don’t give my sympathies a blank cheque in advance. In a conflict between [moral] principle and [human] sympathy, principles ought sometimes to win. ..( )...Still, one’s sympathies should be kept as sharp and sensitive and aware as possible, and not only because they can sometimes affect one’s principles or one’s conduct or both. [The poet Winfred] Owen, at any rate, says that feelings and sympathies are vital even when they can do nothing but bring pain and distress.
In another poem [Insensibility] he speaks of the blessings of being numb in one’s feelings: “Happy are the men who yet before they are killed/Can let their veins run cold” he says. .... He contrasts these “happy” ones, who “lose all imagination”, with himself and others “who with a thought besmirch/ Blood over all our soul”. Yet the poem’s verdict goes against the “happy” ones. Owen does not say that they will act worse than the others. ...He merely says that they are the losers because they have cut themselves off from the human condition:
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
First published in Philosophy 49 (1974), p. 123 - 134.
How is this useful? We have to decide stuff now, based on what we think now. The only use in this is not sticking to past decisions too much.
You ask: How is it useful to maintain an element of doubt as to the validity of your moral worldview (be it a version of utilitarianism of vitalism or whatever)?
A concrete example usually serves better than a thousand abstract words, so let me illustrate with an example, from Bennett’s article: How Heinrich Himmler justified his moral worldview back in 1943. Long quote from Bennett:
… has [Himmler’s interpretation of Nazism] a moral basis at all? And if it has, was there in Himmler’s mind any conflict between [his] morality and [ordinary, spontaneous] human sympathy? Yes there was. Here is a quote [from a speech he held October 4th 1943 for SS top brass]:
“I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter…I mean…the extermination of the Jewish race…Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Himmler saw his policies as being hard to implement while still retaining one’s human sympathies – while still remaining “a decent fellow”. He is saying that only the weak take the easy way out and just squelch their sympathies, and is praising the stronger and more glorious course of retaining one’s sympathies while acting in violation of them [notice the “heroic” overtones in this stance]. In the same spirit, he ordered that when executions were carried out in concentration camps, those responsible “are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude”.
A year later he boasted that the SS had wiped out the Jews “without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and soul. The danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla of their becoming heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure life, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.”
And there really can’t be any doubt that the basis of Himmler’s policies was a set of principles which constituted his morality – a sick, bad, wicked morality. He described himself as caught in “the old tragic [Kantian] conflict between will and obligation”. And when his physician Kersten protested at the intention to destroy the Jews, saying that the suffering involved was “not to be contemplated”, Kersten reports that Himmler replied:
He knew that it would mean much suffering for the Jews…”It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life [notice that this is a very vitalistic justification, with a dash of Great Man/übermensch added]. Yet we must…cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”
This, I submit, is the language of morality.
So in this case, tragically, [Himmler’s] morality won out over [spontaneous, not-derived-from-ideas ordinary human] sympathy.
…so far Bennett (end of quote).
I hope you agree that this example illustrates the rationality (so to speak) of not allowing oneself to be totally swallowed up in any moral worldview, just as it is rational not to be totally swallowed up in any scientific theory of what constitutes “truth”.
PS Bennett also adds:
I am sure that many of Himmler’s killers did extinguish their sympathies, becoming “heartless ruffians” rather than “decent fellows”; but not Himmler himself. Although his policies ran against the human grain to a horrible degree, he did not sandpaper down his emotional surfaces so that there was no grain there, allowing his actions to slide along smoothly and easily. He did, after all, bear his hideous burden, and even paid a price for it. He suffered a variety of nervous and physical disabilities, including nausea and stomach-convulsions, and Kersten was doubtless right in saying that these were “the expression of a physic division which extended over his whole life”.
I feel like there's certainly something to the idea of balancing drives to optimize flourishing and survival... But I think this philosophy falls short. It is a part of the picture, but actually is working in service to some deeper truth.
Consider, for a moment, if I were to create a self-sufficient race of intelligent beings. If this race were based on uplifted octopi, they might come to very different conclusions about 'moral reality' than us uplifted apes.
Similarly, if I were to create a race of intelligent digital beings with substrate independence, I expect such beings would find that the moral philosophies which seemed to extrapolate to being conducive to their long term flourishing were quite different from human philosophies.
And, indeed, were humans to undergo substantial genetic drift over some few million years, I also would expect that their flourishing would be best supported by adherence to a different set of philisophical extrapolations.
Your 'realism' takes some approximate current state of the intelligent beongs you are familiar with as an unspoken assumption. As of recently, technology has undermined the foundations of those assumptions. The set of intelligent beings is no longer fixed to a glacial shift over many human generations. The illusion of moral reality no longer serves as a sufficiently stable guiding star to generate wise plans for the divergent futures of rapidly diversifying intelligent beings.
It is not widely enough understood that moral realism doesn't have to involve universalism. Minimally, MR is the claim that there are mind independent moral truths, and such truths can depend on nomental things such as "what species an I".
For that matter, Moral Relativism also breaks down at extremes, degenerating into "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law" if you take its premises too seriously.
Realist.... relative to what? If by "moral realism" you mean some kind of cosmic moral truth independent of the existence of our species or any species, that more or less brings God into the picture, which is quite the prerequisite.
On the other hand, if it means "relative to our evolved nature", then yeah, you can probably find elements of a sense of "good" that are intrinsically human. Incest for example seems like a near-universal taboo, but also most everyone appreciates thriving and non-suffering by default. The big question is really how far that goes, and how specific it can get before it things get blurred by cultural variability.
"relative to our evolved nature"
That's how I took it. If we look at the human animal, and what is good for it, then that is moral. Probably still breaks down at edges. Like incest, that is a universal Taboo, but not always. With sparse populations, like early settlers, maybe your cousin was the only female around. So incest becomes ok if the species, or group, will die out without procreating's. Same with different foods. Once the group is pushed to survival mode, the 'relative' morality would change again. (of course, even in todays world, we see that groups that think they are threatened, fairly quickly change their morals, say the number of Christians now favoring violence ).
I don't see why God has to come into it. Arguably, utilitarianism is realst.
Utilitarianism (like most normative ethical frameworks), is mostly orthogonal to the realism vs anti-realism debate.
On the other hand, paperclip maximizer doesn't care about well-adjusted children growing up in well-funded schools, thus ending up becoming military-industrialists producing thousands of tanks that can defeat the enemy who's morally in the wrong. It cares about paperclips.
As a matter of fact all humans have near-identical preferences, when compared to the vastness of space of possible preferences. This is because we share an evolutionary history. Probably all or most evolved technologically advanced species have preferences to e.g. playing positive-sum games or for numbers going up because those traits are adaptive, although martians might have an innate aesthetic preference towards the sky being pinkish-red rather than blue.
But I don't think this should be confused for moral realism (you can give clipper infinite compute and empirical data, and it will never construct anything like human morality): rather, it can be used as a case for moral constructivism (with a welcome observation that humans tend to construct similar moral systems, which brings hope to our ability solve practical "metamoral" problems - how to ethically reason in multiagent situations where agents posses different ethical systems), or to simply take the things-that-humans-value-in-person and call them virtues, and ground your ethical theory on that.
It seems like we only know which pairs of vices to choose in such a calculation because we independently know that their mean comes close to maximizing well-being in some sort of modern (=post-Sidgwickian) consequentialist sense. Anorexia and gluttonous obesity are vices with a consequentially good mean, but the mean of anorexia and bulimia is pretty terrible.
>Define altruism as “try to increase happiness and decrease suffering across a society” and vitalism as “try to increase strength and decrease weakness across a society” [...] Most things that do one also do the other: [...]
> Increasing wealth. A rich society is both happier and stronger than a poor society.
Not necessarily, e.g. a democracy that goes from almost everyone being poor with one billionaire, to almost everyone being poor with one trillionaire, will have more wealth, but that wealth can be used for regulatory capture by the trillionaire, transforming the democracy into an oligarchy that ignores the needs of most people in favor of the few wealthy.
> Advancing technology. An advanced society has more ways to make its people happy and to win conflicts than a primitive society.
Not necessarily the case, e.g. autonomous drones, mass surveillance, enhanced torture, misaligned AI...
> Saving lives. This is altruistic by definition. But living people are generally better at achieving their goals than dead people, and a society with more living people is stronger than one where lots of people have died (eg they can field bigger armies). There are some exceptions - it’s not altruistic if the people are suicidal, and it’s not vitalist if the people are useless parasites - but in most cases the goals converge.
Not necessarily, if you save someone but they have a disability, or trauma, or other disadvantage that most people in need of saving will have, the average vitality of society goes down, which the vitalist doesn't like.
>Winning wars. This is vitalist by definition. But if you think your country is in the right, its victory will make the world better and increase utility.
The vitalist will most often try to win the war, but the altruist will most often seek a diplomatic solution to decrease casualties, the two are at odds.
Disagree on the war example, it depends on the conditions. I support Ukraine's continued struggle over a diplomatic solution where they lose territory, for example, because the latter likely provokes more future wars for territory than the former and is therefore net worse even accounting for the continued damage of the current war.
That argument (that negotiated terms "likely provokes more future wars") really looks like you decided on it after you picked the conclusion you wanted (that Russia should continue to be warred against).
I don't see why (and I feel you did not give an argument). The post-WWII period of relative interstate peace is based on large part on a consensus that we shouldn't try to shift borders by force (which is itself based on the reality that doing so usually destroys whatever value you were hoping to capture, and then some). If somebody does expand their bordes by force, it signals that that's back on the table, and every autocrat not held back by popular pressure might start grabbing land. Taiwan is the most obvious next example.
Is Taiwan really the example you want to pick? Because officially (the UN, for example, but also the US) it's part of China, and any principled argument relying on "sovereignty"/"territorial integrity" etc. would lead to backing CHINA against the secessionists/rebels/traitors.
Nobody in power actually BELIEVES any of that, evidenced by their support of Israel. It's all just realpolitik. Now, if you want to war against Russia because you really hate the Russian people, delenda Sovieta, you think a new regime might let you put some military bases there to threaten China, etc., sure, those are sensible goals, just ones I do not share. But expanding a military alliance (even a "purely defensive" one) right up to the borders of your enemy isn't the act of someone who actually wants peace.
Taiwan is the example I want to pick, because the US will back it against China and the war will be devastating for the world. I agree this is a muddy issue on paper and I know most people have officially signed on to the "one China" thing, but have hedged it in various ways to preserve ambiguity (e.g. the US "acknowledges" China's position and the UK "take[s] note" of it).
I agree that you have some points about people crossing this line in various contexts. Israel is an obvious example where the US has sheltered it repeatedly for clear efforts to expand into Palestine and blocked Palestinian recognition, which I think is bad and a mistake. I however disagree that this renders the entire thing completely meaningless to the point where I can't possibly be opposed to Russia taking Ukrainian territory (as indeed I am opposed to Israel asserting sovereignty over Palestinian territory).
"But expanding a military alliance (even a "purely defensive" one) right up to the borders of your enemy isn't the act of someone who actually wants peace."
This I have some disagreements with. It's not like the US or NATO invaded Ukraine to "expand" their territory. Ukraine is a sovereign country and ultimately can choose what diplomatic agreements to enter into. Ukraine joining a treaty does not constitute an aggressive act. If Ukraine HAD joined NATO prior to the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been one. It's kind of absurd to argue that the country that got invaded is the one that doesn't "want peace".
Was Cuba a sovereign country which could decide to host Soviet nukes if it wanted to? Would that have been a not-aggressive act? I don't think that I've ever seen anyone seriously argue for such a position, for good reason. And yet, the converse of this is precisely what NATO has been doing for the last several decades. Of course, the crucial difference is that America actually can enforce a "sphere of influence", and Russia can't, but belatedly decided to LARP as such anyway.
Hypothetically, if Canada had a "Revolution of Dignity"-style change of administration following which the new Prime Minister entered a treaty with China to place, say, nukes in Toronto, is it your assertion that that would NOT be viewed as an aggressive act?
When Cuba did that with the Soviet Union, it was.
And I didn't say Ukraine doesn't want peace, insofar it's an independent agent with wants of any kind. What I said was that US/NATO doesn't want peace: when you're bear-baiting, you don't care if the dog gets mauled.
I want to retract my statement about you deciding on the argument after you came to the conclusion you wanted. That isn't fair, and I ought to have assigned the blame instead to the people who came up with it and presented it to you.
I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, just having adopted positions you haven't thought too deeply about. For example, where do you stand on Azerbaijan conquering Artsakh ("Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?")? Or Ethiopia's agreement with Somaliland? Or Kashmir? Kosovo?
Arguments about "sovereignty" etc. aren't meant to be taken seriously. No meaningful decision is made based on them: those are instead generally about geopolitical self-interest.
The vagueness of Taiwan's status under international law is precisely why we don't want to get rid of the ban on wars of annexation laid out in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Treaty, as Timothy M. explains.
If you take the "One China" argument seriously, then any war over Taiwan would be a civil war between pro- and anti-democracy forces. And western intervention on the behalf of pro-democracy forces in foreign civil wars is pretty standard behaviour and uncontroversial.
I don't see any point of disagreement. I agree that democracy promotion is the likely framing, and I don't doubt that most of the people condemning Russia's invasion of a "sovereign country" ("brutal and unprovoked") would have no qualms about America doing the same. I also agree that the "West" (I mean the US) has regularly done this kind of thing.
I'm not even saying it's a bad thing to do. What I AM saying is that a consistent application of a principle of respecting sovereignty, territorial integrity etc. would forbid it.
> backing CHINA against the secessionists/rebels/traitors
Yes, we'll aid the rightful government of China against the rebels and traitors who've been occupying the mainland provinces of China for the last 80 years or so?
Does this meaningfully differ from Russia supporting the rightful governments of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics against the "Nazis" in Kiev?
Right. The invention of the Haber-Bosch process just before WWI lifted the Malthusian ceiling and the horrors of the Great War led Westerners to agree in 1928 that wars of conquest were now bad and were no longer to be allowed. Abrogating that 96 year old agreement would be a huge step backward.
I can't tell if his is a genuine agreement or a joke about WWII happening, but either way it works, so.
As you may note, the world did not look favorably upon the Nazis for initiating WWII.
We've already given that one up in case of the Golan Heights.
In the literal sense, sure, but "country starts a war to seize territory from its neighbor" is a different scenario from "country starts a war with its neighbor, loses, neighbor takes territory during the war, country rejects the return of said territory in exchange for a peace agreement as part of a written policy of not negotiating with neighbor".
Israel does not simply holds the GH as a sort of bargaining chip until Syria gives in an accepts a peace agreement, but declared it sovereign Israeli territory with US support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights_Law
"the Golan Heights will remain Israel's forever" - land-for-peace is no longer an offer.
True. This was an explicit principle at founding the UN, that the League of Nations failed to prevent WW2 because it had many goals. The UN has one goal: 1945 borders are sacrosanct, no matter how unjust they are. Secession is acceptable, annexation not. Even the Soviets merely fought for a regime change in Afghanistan, did not annex territory. Of course a regime change implies a pseudo-annexation of the whole, but that is a different story.
Given that e.g. in Africa the borders make no ethnic sense at all, if this was not enforced, the whole continent would blow up.
Taiwan is not a good example because Taiwan accepts the One China doctrine, they see themselves as a legitimate government of the whole. Thus an invasion would be seen as a civil war by both sides - simply the continuation of the old civil war. Much like a Vietnam or Korea case.
Realistically, Russia WILL take some territory. But then the message will be yeah you can annex some relatively small territory are a huge cost (and everything on that territory is blown up and you spend an arm and leg to rebuild it), still not something that looks attractive.
These appear to be quibbles around the edges rather than counter-arguments; is the argument here that the quibbles matter? Because I am not seeing how "oligarchy can happen" negates "rich countries stronger than poor" or how "some tech is bad" negates "advanced societies have more tools to promote happiness and win conflicts".
The other two points seem to be relying on assumptions to do a lot of heavy lift- e.g., "if you save lives this will result in a growing population of less-alive people who outweigh the benefits of saving productive people" or "altruists will sue for peace on terms inferior to what vitalists would accept". Illness is a massive drain on productivity, and death robs us of institutional knowledge and experience. Where do you put the thumb? Having a bellicose neighbor is a net negative for any society, why would the altruist not precision-bomb the leadership and military infrastructure out of existence?
Are there concrete examples or specific real-world scenarios you are concerned about?
> Because I am not seeing how "oligarchy can happen" negates "rich countries stronger than poor" or how "some tech is bad" negates "advanced societies have more tools to promote happiness and win conflicts".
I wasn't focused on the vitalist side, which I'm happy to grant, I was focused on the altruistic side. Yes technology may make a country more able to win conflicts, but not necessarily promote happiness, and yes an oligarchy may be more vitalist (have a stronger leader), but is not more altruistic (happier populace).
Same with your second point, an altruist is perfectly fine with saving less-alive people. As I said, it is the vitalist that doesn't like it when the average vitality goes down (Vitalism could of course be amended to circumvent this, e.g. a "longtemist vitalist" might be fine with temporarily increasing the amount of weak people now, as long as they help create more strong people in the far future, free idea if anyone wants to write it). You're right that an altruist might in some cases choose to precision-bomb the leadership, but they wouldn't like it, they would prefer a solution where no-ones preferences were frustrated. Vitalist on the other hand like to win wars, so they would not seek solutions were no-ones preferences were frustrated, the goals of the vitalist and the altruist are at odds.
> Not necessarily, if you save someone but they have a disability, or trauma, or other disadvantage that most people in need of saving will have, the average vitality of society goes down, which the vitalist doesn't like.
Sure, anyone in need of saving has *some* disadvantage, namely at the very least whatever is currently/will be threatening their life. And sure, the *average* vitality may go down if you don't let them die, because a "negative" persists. But:
1. who says their disadvantage results in their *overall* strength/vitality/whatever being negative? Say I'm in a wheelchair - I'm unlikely to win a race, but I may be physically strong in other regards.
2. Is being mentally strong not very important? Disabled or mentally ill people can certainly be mentally strong.
3. Who says average vitality is to be maximized over e.g. vitality per person (which is a goal, not a metric)? The *relative* strength of the saved people might be even higher than of the average person, since these people may HAVE to struggle and push themselves much more than average. And would not at least some vitalists aim for strong *people* (which these saved individuals could well be) over eg. *average total* muscle mass/mental fortitude?
3.1 If you really were to care about the average, then you can maximize that by culling ALL the weak, which is to say everyone but the most steel-muscled and -minded. I'm not sure that's what anyone is advocating for, so...
There are version of vitalism where the argument doesn't apply, and there are versions where it does apply. I think it does apply in the conventional form of vitalism, but as you've shown, you can construct a form of vitalism where it doesn't apply
I'm confused by all the nitpicking in this comment, it seems to have not internalized the second point in the post re: extremistan.
Because they're not extremistan, they're by and large things that already exist and we have to deal with.
These all sound like pretty contrived examples. When evaluating an assertion, you should always add "everything else being equal" mentally to the end of the sentence. Otherwise, of course there are always weird edge cases that one can quibble about. But those edge cases aren't usually the point of the discussion, and so they just distract from figuring out where you actually stand.
I don't think they are contrived examples at all. Regulatory capture exists and is already happening, same with autonomous drones, mass surveillance and enhanced torture (though I'm willing to drop the misaligned AI since that doesn't exist at this moment). Likewise for lingering trauma and disability after adverse life events. And of course there are at this moment several wars going on, as there have been for the past thousands of years.
Life was worse in the past, but lingering trauma didn't seem to be more prevalent. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
I didn't claim lingering trauma was more prevalent in the past.
Why wasn't it, given how much more prevalent adverse life events were?
What does that question have to do with my reply? Do you just want to chat about a new topic?
My personal theory is that "trauma" is caused by psychological unpreparedness. There's a lot of horrible stuff in the world, and we veer from telling people that everything sucks (but it sucks less if you "who whom") to pretending that nothing will go wrong (if you just subscribe to this belief system).
This is what I was saying all along, I think. The trouble with Vulgar Nietzscheans is that they see strength as the ONLY moral value. The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape, which generates the VN backlash.
Strength should be part of the moral landscape because
1) it is good to make people strong, not only happy, so they can get less dependent on others and take care of their own utility, or can give forward. Teach a man to fish and all that.
2) if we are pledged to do good, it is better if we become stronger, perhaps, for the perfect utilitarian even a moral duty
Why do we often leave it out of the moral landscape?
La Rochefoucauld had put it this way: "No one should be praised for his goodness if he has not strength enough to be wicked. All other goodness is but too often an idleness or powerlessness of will." (This quote makes the Nice Guy cry. I know. I am one. I hate it. But I probably need it.)
Weak people are often... safer. They don't do bad stuff, they cannot, or do not dare to. So they can turn it into a moral claim of sainthood. The problem is, they don't do good stuff either.
If I am roomies with young Mike Tyson, every day he rolls a D20 and does something nice like buying me dinner on 1 to 19, and on 20, beats me up, I think I would prefer the passive gamer roomie.
The world is not symmetric. Bad is stronger than good in the sense of easier to break a vase than to put it back together, because entropy. Bad is downhill, good is uphill. So easy to burn a town down, so hard to rebuild it. I wonder sometimes how we are still here.
We see so much evil in the world, that people who do neither bad nor good seem like an improvement. This is why it gets left out. And well they are an improvement. If Vladimir Putin spent his entire life playing videogames, the world would be better for it. So I guess this is why.
After all, if someone does get strong - how do we know they will keep their pledge to do good?
Still the goal we should optimize for is not safe do-nothing-at-all people. We need to accept some risk. Goodness is still more important than strength, but strength is still important.
(This could be an explanation for the women don't want Nice Guys phenomenon. They don't want the specific kind of Nice Guy who does not do bad things, but also does not do good things, and generally just does not really do anything. I know. I managed to screw up a whole marriage by doing nothing bad, but not enough of the good things either. Perhaps there is a ratio. You can get away with doing one bad thing for every ten good thing you do in a relationship. Such a person is not a saint. But more useful and more interesting than someone who does nothing.)
Well said.
>I wonder sometimes how we are still here.
Because Earth isn't a closed system in regards to entropy. In a sense, natural selection is all about finding ways to burn negentropy more efficiently, simply burning towns has stopped being good enough a long time ago.
Are Vulgar Nietzscheans real or are they a strawman?
"Strength is the only moral value" sounds like a combination of words that someone might say for the purposes of annoying others, but doesn't sound like an actual moral position that anyone could actually hold after some thought. Nietzsche certainly didn't. I don't think Walt Bismarck does either. Maybe some of his less-sophisticated teenage commenters might believe it on some level?
"Strength is the only moral value." Perhaps not. But without strength, there can be no other moral value, since you need strength to preserve any value. Therefore strength is the most foundational moral value.
You can perfectly preserve them in your person by just not doing bad stuff. You cannot prevent others from doing so.
> The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape
I don't think this is true, consequentialists don't leave it out of their moral landscape for the sort of reasons you gave, it is part of the instrumental convergence.
But it is different to value it instrumentally, than to value it for itself, and particularly to value it as strongly for itself than the Nietzscheans
«The trouble with everybody else that they often leave strength out of their moral landscape, which generates the VN backlash.»
Those that leave strength out of their moral landscape have nothing worthwhile to say about morality, whatsoever.
«Weak people are often... safer. They don't do bad stuff, they cannot, or do not dare to. So they can turn it into a moral claim of sainthood. The problem is, they don't do good stuff either.»
Weak people impose massive negative externalities upon others! A strong person alone cannot resist Leviathan. But Leviathan could not possibly exist, if at least the majority was strong! Because of the weak, everybody must pay income tax, send their kids to horribly mismanaged schools (which of course perpetuate weakness!), tell a central authority where they live, be burdened with massive debts and be forced to support and suffer under all kinds of idiotic schemes. A strong person that goes wrong may spill some blood, but can be fought and kept in check, by other strong people. But the sins of the weak created a monster, that will be the death of all of us!
> Weak people impose massive negative externalities upon others!
You know the saying about the willow tree bending, but the oak breaking?
I've thought for a while that a forest of oaks provides shelter for an entire ecosystem. The difference is whether an individual oak has capable allies.
> Weak people are often... safer.
That seems like a nutshell-sized critique of modern masculinity and gender relations.
>but minimizing suffering directly and monomaniacally to infinity will take you someplace weird. That’s not a problem with altruism, it’s a problem with infinity.
I am not sure I buy this. I think a lot of smart people are extremists, because they value logical consistency over practicality, and thus I want ideas that are safe to take to the extreme.
I don't think ideas exist that are safe to take to infinity. Do you have any examples?
The idea that you shouldn't trust any idea beyond its known and demonstrated range of applicability. That's one of my key heuristics, so I basically agree with Scott on this.
Id caution against that, cf. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T975ydo3mx8onH3iS/ea-is-about-maximization-and-maximization-is-perilous
I think even more smart people aren’t extremists because extremism is insular, overly rigid and rejects compromise.
As the saying goes "only the extremes are rational, but they are absurd"
Morality, whether religious or secular, is a model of empirical data (situations vs. a sense of rightness or wrongness). Models lose trustworthiness insofar as we use them to extrapolate outside the range of the observed data.
I think Scott agrees there's *something* we could theoretically maximize without much troubles.
But it's very hard to find, and very hard to think about once you have.
There's really no need to go to Extremistan. History is littered with examples of altruism and vitalism being at odds.
To start with, adopting agriculture is also known as "the greatest mistake" because it almost certainly decreased the average health and happiness. It's a mistake from an altruistic point of view, that is. From a vitalist point of view, the agricultural societies won out because they had more population which could win wars.
The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party. This is a cliché of course, but there's a reason it exists.
"The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
> The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party.
I don't think the facts back up this reading, unless you define "decadent" as "prioritizing winning internal conflict at the expense of weakening society as a whole," which is certainly not the same as "altruism maximizing."
Yes, I'm aware that most historical civilisation collapse was not really caused by their altruism or hedonism. That's why I called it a cliché. The following is trying to be its comprehensive rebuttal, by a historian:
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
My point is, even if the cliché is wrong in majority of cases, it's still at least partially true for some of them. Mongols were not anybody's idea of altruism.
You seem to have a model where the problem of "decadence" is smaller than people imagine, but real and directionally accurate, and therefore we should accord it less weight than our naive intuitions would give it, but still some weight.
I think acoup argues pretty persuasively that it's not even directionally accurate. Built-up civilizations with specialization and luxury and strong laws are MORE stable than those with the opposite traits. They're not invincible, they do sometimes collapse, but it's not how you'd bet. Therefore this "decadence" cliché should have zero or even negative weight, rather than small-but-positive weight as you argue.
Also, you seem to think that calling it a "cliché" is an admission that it is mostly-false, or at least greatly exaggerated. I do not normally assume that something is mostly-false just because it is a cliché and I would be pretty surprised if the median reader interpreted your comment that way.
cliché: a phrase, remark, or opinion that has very often been said or expressed before
Being often said is not a guarantee of truth, just of a perceived wisdom that seems worth repeating. My position is, that this particular cliché is overstated and even false in its strong form. The reason I brought it up is simply because it serves to refute Scott's claim that you have to go to Extremistan to find examples of altruism and vitalism in opposition.
If you're claiming no, it wouldn't serve because it's completely and utterly false, a "decadent" civilization never happened, well have some concrete examples:
* After Rome won the Punic Wars, they went on a conquering spree: Macedonia, Greece, the Middle East. Livy describes it all very much like a vigorous, vital state conquering decadent states.
* The simple explanation for the fall of Soviet Union is their standard of living feel too obviously behind the West, because their productivity was behind the West. The reason for that was because they were trying to build an equitable socialist paradise, and in that system there's no reason to be more productive than the next guy. Whereas the wage slaves in the West had every reason to improve their productivity. Altruism/decadence versus vitality.
* Same thing seems to be happening now between EU and USA. Europeans enjoy their long vacations and secure jobs, Americans keep toiling. More generally, if a state's citizens choose and vote for more leisure and equality, that will hurt their long-term productivity and lead to a relative economic decline.
The stagnation of the USSR wasn’t due to military spending. Exporting military goods was one of the few areas where Soviet industry was competitive and profitable. Nor did the 80s see the soviets attempt to keep up with Reagan’s military ramp up.
The Soviet economy, such as it was, stagnated because they tried to use a system (socialism) under which societies can not function, not because they had 'excess military spending'
You are arguing against ridiculous caricatures of what I said.
Being a cliché does not automatically make something true, but it doesn't automatically make it false, either. I never said clichés are true. I said they are not automatically false.
"Look, a brown dog."
"That's not a dog, that's a cat."
"Obviously I know it's not a dog, I said it was BROWN. Being brown is not a guarantee of truth!"
I never said that no civilization has ever been decadent or that decadent civilizations can't fail. I said that luxury is not a predictor of failure. Civilizations generally have a lot of luxuries because they are successful. If I picked two random civilizations from two random moments in time, and asked you to predict which one is going to fail first, and the only thing you know is that one of them consumes more luxuries than the other, then you should bet on the failure of the non-luxurious civilization because it probably can't afford luxuries. You should NOT bet on the luxurious civilization failing "because it is decadent and weak".
Every strong and stable civilization with luxuries that has ever existed has seen declines in its ability to project power and generate wealth over a long enough timescale. Acoup doesn’t offer a good reason for why this happens, and this decline seems to correlate with hedonism.
I think the loop is fairly clear. We get wealthy, we become comfortable, our only real enemies are each other, we devote more and more time to political infighting, we burn the commons of social cohesion for temporary political advantage, and when an existential threat shows up, we lack the practice and ability and civilizational resources to handle it.
Acoups posts deny that civilizations ever really get comfortable and mainly posit that exterior threats just become stronger.
>The rest of the history can be read as consisting of civilizations growing until they become "decadent", aka altruism-maximising, until vitality-maximising neighbours invade and crash their party
It can be read this way, however it would be a poor and inaccurate reading. See: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
He is very consistently against the Tough (Posturing) Dude Theory of History. Sparta, Fascism, Fremen and other nomads etc. But I am not sure why, what is the core reason, if any.
My best guess is this. Not the toughest wins, but things like numbers and resources, but some baseline toughness is needed. I know I am the type who would run away. But many civilized people were capable of this baselines toughness. But Late Romans were clearly not - they did not want to become soldiers.
This is why I fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture. That is the idea that men may not show vulnerability and may not show emotion except anger. Isn't that the ideal mindset of the soldier in battle? Without it, why not show vulnerability by running away?
> This is why I fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture.
Surely there are some pathologies that could be weeded out, while keeping a healthy appreciation of strength and resilience? But it depends on who defines "toxic", and how. Too many people have an agenda.
I think the reason why toughness is not very critical is because 1) you can train people to become tougher in a matter of weeks or months, but it takes generations to build a functioning economy and state apparatus. Maybe this requires some "baseline level of toughness" but 2) no society, not even the present day US, has ever been so prosperous as to hopelessly spoil literally all of its members. Elites can become spoiled and maybe the middle class, but you always have enough people in lower classes who do not leave a life of abundance and are more willing to become soldiers.
> Late Romans were clearly not - they did not want to become soldiers
Was this really a significant problem for them?
> fear the idea of getting toxic masculinity out of our culture
Meh, I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the key things considered toxic about toxic masculinity is the idea that close intimate friendship between men is gay or something (jokes about bromance and all). But close friendship between men is what maintains troops cohesion and prevents soldiers from running (according to the Pedant, but also approximately every author who went to war and cared to write about the experience). So maybe the idea of toxic masculinity isn't as bad per se, as long as you oppose it with healthy masculinity, not with absence of masculinity.
“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.” - Voltaire
I've never understood this agriculture claim. Surely any population, whether agricultural or not, will increase its numbers to the point where it hits the Malthusian limits and begins to suffer from hunger and disease?
Agricultural societies have more consistent food production, so their average standard of living can be lower before they get massive die-offs in bad years. They are also apt to develop nobles, gentry, or "big men" who take a lot of the agricultural surplus in good years; this further lowers the peasant standard of living at a given population point in most years, but also creates some slack that can be used to mitigate famines and crop failures.
In either model, the bad years are where the die-offs happen, so that's a lot of what determines Malthusian carrying capacity. The bad years are just as bad in both society types (perhaps a bit worse in hunter-gatherers), but the good years are a lot worse for they typical peasant than the good years are for hunter-gatherers.
This comment made me feel less confused. Thanks!
I still don't understand/agree. Why is a more stable and voluminous food supply not immediately counted as a superior standard of living?
Because the agricultural society winds up with more people faster than it produces more food.
It also depends how you define "standard of living". In Malthusian terms, where standard of living is measured in terms of the effects of material conditions on fertility and population growth, agricultural societies have a higher standard of living at a given population density for the reasons you intuit. But comparing equilibrium states where the population has reached carrying capacity then agricultural societies have the same standard of living as hunter gatherers, albeit at a much higher population density.
In terms of quantity and quality of food in a given year, hunter-gatherers and peasants will (at Malthusian equilibrium) have about the same standard of living in bad years, but hunter gatherers will have better standards of living in good years. This is reflected in the archeological record, where skeletons of people from early agricultural society generally show signs of stunted growth from chronic poor nutrition, much more so than non-agricultural societies.
But that doesn't reflect any of the other benefits that denser societies exhibit in terms of greater specialisation and varieties of consumption, not to mention potential selection biases in the archaeological record.
Re: last paragraph: I always thought this was a cliché because it made a good morality tale, not because it was true.
If you decrease average health and happiness, but also increase population, then it's not *obvious* that's a mistake from an altruist perspective. If I offered someone the option to murder the least-happy 10% of the world population while magically not affecting the happiness of the surviving 90%, most people wouldn't take it, even though it would increase average happiness.
Population ethics is hard. Most people don't want to bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion, but if you criticize that without providing a similarly-concrete alternative that you believe instead, then that's just another way of cheating by hand-waving your own philosophy while criticizing the concrete operationalizations of others, like Scott is complaining about in the post.
Your reasoning assumes that you will be born, regardless of how many or how few people are born in total. But if more total people are born, then *some* person's probability of being born has to be going up. Unless there's something special about you that makes you more likely to be born than other people, you need to consider scenarios where you don't exist, not just the scenarios where you do.
If you make that correction and then apply the most obvious variation of your earlier reasoning, you'll end up at maximizing total happiness instead of average. (With nonexistence being the "zero point", and anything worse than nonexistence being negative.)
(You could hypothetically take the position that you only care about maximizing your happiness-conditional-on-existence, and don't care about your probability of existence. But that isn't what you said. Also if that was your position then you should probably be playing a whole lot of Russian Roulette, or otherwise taking risks that have a chance of terminating your existence but positive expected-payout if they don't.)
I don't think it's unreasonable to consider murdering people as being different from preventing births. But BlaMario claimed that agriculture was a mistake (from an altruistic perspective), and the only reason they gave was that it reduced average health & happiness, so the murder example suffices to show the claim is, at best, missing some caveats.
Not sure why you'd expect the number of possible people to be infinite, unless you think an individual person can be infinitely big. The number of possible human-sized arrangements of physical matter is finite. Our universe is both finite and quantized, as far as we can tell.
Even if the number were infinite, deciding that you don't care about something just because you can't figure out the math to measure it seems like a pretty weird policy to me. Didn't you care about things before you learned math?
The idea that you don't care about how likely you are to come into existence, but you care a lot about how likely you are to continue existing once you exist, sounds to me like a rationalization. In order for it to even be coherent, you'd need to draw a distinction between "I continue to exist, but change over time" and "the exact person I am now ceases to exist, but an extremely similar person comes into existence the next moment", and I'm doubtful you can give any rigorous account of how those are different.
Don't vitalists usually rate the barbarian lifestyle of raiding and hunting as higher than the coddled life of mediocre suffering that agriculture brings?
It's a mistake from a local altruistic view, but you shouldn't be choosing only locally, you should be looking at what this affects in the future. It allowed more people which allowed flourishing and happiness far far beyond anything a hunter gatherer society could provide.
(Though, of course, your altruist back then has no clue what is possible)
Yea, this whole take is really bizarre. An altruist standing at the cusp of agriculture would clearly look at it and go "this will reduce food insecurity and make the world a better place". What exactly is the argument here? If you went back and time to that altruist and went "hey, you shouldn't do this, it's a total mistake and will allow the strong to exploit the weak and everyone will be miserable", if the altruist then asks you "so you are are living in an agricultural hellscape and wish to prevent the future?", and you respond "well, no, our society is glorious and full of technological marvels which would appear as magic to you, where even the poor own wealth enough to make a ruler of your time jealous beyond measure, where death and disease have been mitigated to let people live long prosperous lives. All of this is built on the bedrock of the agricultural revolution and wouldn't be possible without it. But if you squint at it the right way, things might get worse for a little bit before our glorious future happens, so from your perspective it's definitely a mistake and you should stop it or you aren't a good altruist." Don't you think the altruist is going to think you are insane?
Perhaps agriculture was a mistake from the vitalist perspective instead, after all, it let people become decadent! Wouldn't it be much more vitalist for everyone to struggle against the adversity of the natural world, where the weak perish and only the strong survive to reproduce? And if it leads to a future where everyone is a fat person on a heroine drip being taken care of by a robot, a vitalist might even consider it "the greatest mistake"!
i think the problem here is that a lot of these "vitalists" are not universalists. they're not trying to maximally increase the experience of power and life-energy across the entire population (if they we're, i imagine they'd end up with some kind of wildean socialism); they very explicitly prefer a society of a few conquering aristocrats who get to experience beauty and struggle, presiding over a mass of slaves whose lives will be spent in utter drudgery.
Yes
Agree, probably in large extent because they imagine that they would _surely_ be among those aristocrats due to their qualities (the imagined qualities regular society don't appreciate, for some strange reason).
Yes, thank you! I was confused not to see a bit of jujutsu acknowledging that if vitalism is trying "to increase strength and decrease weakness across a society," that's a pretty altruistic definition of vitalism from the get-go. Do Supermen care if they're helping everyone become strong and heroic as well, or are they just trying to make their own strength and heroism as big as possible, for its own sake? Honestly asking.
> pretty altruistic definition of vitalism
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the classic:
"Mistake theorists naturally think conflict theorists are making a mistake.
Conflict theorists naturally think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict."
Notice that this example seems symmetrical, but isn't.
The mistake theorist is trying to cooperate with the conflict theorist, which the conflict theorist mistakenly interprets as an attack. This means the conflict theorist's understanding of what's happening is INACCURATE, which means the mistake theorist is CORRECT when they think the conflict theorist is making a mistake. The mistake theorist is right and the conflict theorist is wrong.
(Unless one or more parties are lying about their own positions, of course. But if the mistake theorist is doing that, then they never *actually* thought the other side was making a mistake, and if the conflict theorist is doing that, then the conflict only exists because they deliberately *started* a conflict by defecting from the cooperative equilibrium.)
Alternatively,
The conflict theorist agrees with the mistake theorist on all matters of fact, but the opposing mistake theorist believes the conflict to be the result of a mistake. This means the mistake theorist's understanding of what's happening is INACCURATE, which means the conflict theorist is CORRECT when he thinks the mistake theorist is the enemy in his conflict. The conflict theorist is right and the mistake theorist is wrong.
You're constructing your hypothetical opening with "the mistake theorist is trying to cooperate with the conflict theorist," so of course BY CONSTRUCTION the conflict theorist is wrong. But one can just as easily construct the hypothetical the other way.
As I said in my last paragraph, it's possible someone is a wicked backstabbing liar. But if the mistake theorist is a wicked backstabbing liar, then they never *actually* thought the conflict theorist was making a mistake, which contradicts how YOU set up the scenario.
If both parties claim that their goal is X but disagree about the best strategy for accomplishing X, and neither of them is lying, then the conflict theorist is wrong and a mistake has been made. The mistake theorist might be wrong about the *nature* of the mistake--there are many possible ways to be wrong--but the conflict theorist *can't* be correct unless someone is a liar.
My hypothetical involves neither backstabbing nor lying. Conflict theorists do not assume these any more than mistake theorists assume bad faith and willful ignorance.
If both parties claim that their goal is X, but disagree on whether strategies χ or υ achieve it, as in your hypothetical, the mistake theorist is correct that there is a mistake, not a conflict.
However, if both parties agree that strategy χ achieves goal X, and the conflict theorist wants to implement strategy υ because he prefers goal Y instead, as in mine, this is a conflict and there is no mistake. This continues to be true even if the mistake theorist genuinely believes goal X to be better for everyone.
This seems wrong. If the conflict theorist has irreconcilably different goals, then he may correctly recognize that there is no avenue for cooperation. So in this situation it's the mistake theorist who is making a mistake, except the conflict theorist has no interest in correcting it.
Wilde as in Oscar Wilde?
Yep, that Oscar Wilde. See "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". London at that time was chock-full of Anglo-Irish on the make in literary circles, so of course Wilde and Shaw knew each other, and socialism was sort of fashionable amongst a certain set of the middle to upper middle classes - see the Fabians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialism
""The Soul of Man Under Socialism" is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde in which he expounds a libertarian socialist worldview and a critique of charity. The writing of "The Soul of Man" followed Wilde's conversion to anarchist philosophy, following his reading of the works of Peter Kropotkin."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
"The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism."
Wilde was more interested in socialism as an impetus for aesthetic theory, I feel he would have been just fine with a robot making a billion extremely beautiful marble statues.
Huh, I don't like it. There is something very off with this vibe. But it is real. In the 1970's you could hitch-hike all over Europe, except Sweden, drivers would not stop there. The vibe was "I am paying enough taxes, if you can't afford a train ticket, talk with the government". I think this is not a good thing. Charity is good not only because it helps people but also because it connects people.
So pretty much Scrooge's "My taxes help support the public institutions which I’ve mentioned and they cost enough. Those who are badly off must go there"?
Unfortunately, Wilde was writing before socialism actually got implemented. Socialist countries were less scientifically productive than capitalist ones. But I think even in his own time it was false to claim that the majority of people squandered their potential on altruism.
"Scientifically productive" as in "productive, measured scientifically" or as in "produced the most science?" Because the USSR is famous for the amount of science (especially math and physics, not to mention art, music, culture) that it produced.
The USSR had to engage in industrial espionage to steal scientific progress from the capitalist west.
I think that that is truer of _technological_ progress, and not all of it either. In terms of scientific progress, the USSR _did_ have some very good people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laureates . They had an awful system, but let us give the devil his due.
I won't comment on engineering progress, since I don't know as much about it. But as far as math and physics go, it would be quite difficult for them to make progress via espionage, because much of the work of the USSR was original and undiscovered in the west until the scientific barrier between the two fell.
I think one could read that as saying that too many bright young Cambridge minds did so.
I think they would argue instead that Socialism, in practice, resulted in worse outcomes for the individuals involved. The promise of Socialism wasn't Real - meaning it couldn't withstand real life and the friction of dealing with people.
I think that many, maybe most, vitalists would prefer a world of strength (life-energy across the entire population) to a world without it, but would contend that the option isn't on the table. The options are instead "local population of strength, while the rest of the world struggles" against "everyone struggles."
I think people make a lot of mistakes by thinking qualitatively that could be easily avoided by thinking quantitatively.
The choice between "local population of strength, while the rest of the world struggles" and "everyone struggles" sounds like the second option is just straight worse than the first, but that hides an assumption that all "struggling" is equal. It evades the practical question of how to trade off centralized strength vs distributed strength by "rounding" the benefits of distributed strength to zero (before multiplying them by the huge number of affected people). Which is psychologically satisfying, because you get to pretend that your preferred policy has literally no downside, but for virtually all real-life policies that's nonsense.
(Alternately, maybe it's just strawmanning by pretending that Soviet-style socialism is the only possible form of altruism, I'm not sure.)
Both good critiques, and the first is part of the reason I'm not a Vitalist, despite agreeing with a good number of their positions.
Yes! This essay is treating vitalism as a real, worthy of respect philosophy, when in practice it is typically an extremely thin justification for facism. I agree with the essay in the sense that its conclusions are right if you think everyone is reasoning from good and honest intentions. But “incorrect” applications of vitalism aren’t a mistake or an error in how people think about vitalism, they are the point. Maybe Scott is trying to get at this very tactfully but it deserves greater emphasis.
>This essay is treating vitalism as a real, worthy of respect philosophy, when in practice it is typically an extremely thin justification for facism.
You're looking at it backwards. Fascists don't claim falsely to be vitalists in order to promote fascism; they are fascists *because they are vitalists*. Fascism was literally invented by vitalists trying to work out how to max out a society's warmaking capabilities no matter the cost, and it is quite good at that (there's one really-huge pitfall which is that it tends to lead to institutional overconfidence, but not *every* fascist state has blown itself up that way). Vitalism is the original and still essentially only reason that people become de-novo fascists - if you do not value vitalist principles, fascism looks insane - and as such it doesn't make sense to accuse it of being a bad-faith excuse for fascism.
Well said. Some are also exterminationists, and would prefer to rule over robots, livestock, and maybe genetically engineered catgirls.
The accusation of preferring a civilisation of aristocrats comes out of an interpretation of history that it's the inevitable norm, true even today in obscured form, not an arbitrary preference. Essentially the idea is if there's going to be a ruling class either let us in or we're gonna cause problems. There are natural peasants in this dichotomy of human history, whose ideal life is more humble and earthly.
I don't personally share this view, though I vaguely identify with vitalism. To my observation the type that would've been understood as aristocratic or noble in olden times is now a much larger proportion of the population. We now live in an era where no small cadre in proportion to the population is notably superior, and there's no longer the material necessity of hierarchical obedience to local rulers in a kingdom or empire to maintain order.
The reality that has followed, in my view, is that while legitimate rule under necessity has disappeared the older type suited to it has not moved into the new sphere of power, but directed their energies into new avenues. All the while a different and less noble type has seized the reigns, reconstituted absolute power in managerialism, and it is this that the new reactionism is fighting.
I agree with Scott's argument as far as it goes, but I believe the tension between the altruist and vitalist camps is that the former are trying to adjust the system to operate more effectively, while the latter are assembled to fight the system as an enemy. I don't think that's a very fatalistic view, there's not too many steps involved towards an understanding, but both sides need to acknowledge the others held ideals.
Aristocrats and slaves is the default state of any human society with sufficient numbers. No attempted solution has rectified it. The vulgar vitalists are concerned that current aristocrats lack beauty and struggle.
>I’m not sure where I fall here
I think when we just sit and think about an ideal society, all truly terminal goals are aesthetic. We are a story-telling species and all our goals are deep down about what would look cool on the movie screen. "Why did you climb the Mount Everest?" "Because it was there." How do you interpret this? My interpretation "because I knww it makes a cool story". Why build Dyson spheres? Because (one day) we can, and they are awesome.
The problem is, people occasionally do the cool story heroic thing alone, and some governments sometimes do it as a side-effect (like sending people to the Moon to warn the Soviets that they could drop a rocket on Moscow), but most of the time human societies don't do this. I dunno. Maybe it is democracy. Pharaohs could build pyramids, but as an election programme, it would never be voted for. People vote for those who build boring useful things. The Swedish government built one million homes in nine years. But they look exactly like how you would expect them to look if you ever been to IKEA. Functional, but entirely uninspiring.
Maybe I am wrong. Perhaps one day we get sufficiently high on the Maslow pyramid that we start electing Entertainers In Chief. "I will build one billion marble statues! On Vega! And upload a 3D documentary about it with epic music."
Anyhow, the spergy Calculator Maximus who takes utilitarianism too literally ends up with wireheading. But those who get (allistic) human nature enough to understand we run on stories, not math, ends up with an utopia that is mostly about cool stories.
> we start electing Entertainers In Chief. "I will build one billion marble statues! On Vega! And upload a 3D documentary about it with epic music."
I have news from the far-future of 2016.
Ronald Reagan was a movie star. Clinton played the sax. FDR did his fireside chats. Nixon wasn't very charismatic, nor was LBJ, but we've been flirting with the idea of Entertainer in Chief since at least the 60s, with some notable examples long before that.
Shit man, do you think Kings put on ermine robes and parade before the commoners in golden coaches purely for their own satisfaction? Entertainment has been part of the job description of power since forever.
I honestly think that kings got personal enjoyment and satisfaction out of feeling like they were a better person than the commoners due to their wealth and power, and liked to show it off.
That they added flair and fanfare and made it a spectacle is also true, and likely was a part of entertainment. Even the Romans figured out that you can distract the people through bread and circuses, so the social technology was definitely there for, say, European kings.
It was enough of a thing by 1980 that Douglas Adams's plotline of Zaphod being made President of the Galaxy in order to distract attention away from real power worked as satire.
Reagan may have been the first straight-up professional actor to play the role of President. But who was calling the shots?
Our latest selection of would-be leaders appear to be not just be screen actors, but reality TV actors. It takes a specific kind of skill to play the role of a leader without actually leading. They have to say realistic things and sound convincing, while often actually doing the exact opposite. I mean, after all it's just reality TV -- which can be programmed and delivered on cue. Which again begs the question, Who's calling the shots?
It would still be helpful if candidates listed their closest dozen or so advisors. -- that is, If one wants transparency.
>Maybe it is democracy. Pharaohs could build pyramids, but as an election programme, it would never be voted for.
Amusingly, I once heard an argument that the pyramids were basically the ancient equivalent of a jobs program - something that people could work on in exchange for food during the yearly flood season when the farmers couldn't work in the fields.
(Probably there's some sort of lesson there about how people create the best art when they have the free time to do other things besides keep themselves alive.)
>Define altruism as “try to increase happiness and decrease suffering across a society”
No, I won't do that, because that's not what it means -- not in common parlance, and certainly not in EA terminology. If that were what EAs meant by the term, then wild animal suffering wouldn't be an EA cause, since they're not participants in society.
Well, the post was obviously focusing on humans here. After all, the vitalist perspective on animals (whatever that may look like) was not discussed here, either. But even if it consisted in the subjugation of animals to show our strength or whatever, and thus altruism and vitalist would disagree there, this wouldn't touch the human case, where they may well still be allies.
Vitalists would increase the size of herds so we can eat more, and expand. If we filled up the planet, we would use the excess resources to go to the stars or whatever.
I think that's the cycle we're on: technology is driven by consumerism, and consumerism by technology. When you leave the house, you don't need a wallet; you need a phone, and the service will cost a monthly fee.
But getting us to waste money on gadgets we don't need and delivering nonstop propaganda are just by-products. We're happy to pay marketers to besiege us with advertising and nonsense because we've been conditioned to believe OCD is 'multi-tasking.' Technology and nonsense create their own markets.
No wonder there aren't enough psychiatrists.
Depends on what you mean by "society". If you mean "everyone that counts", then it includes wild animal suffering.
Animals may not be participants in society, but people who feel bad for them certainly are. Like everybody else, they promote their interests, so animal rights would still be on the agenda.
"People who feel bad for animals" is not an EA cause area. If they considered stopping humans from feeling bad to be the only morally relevant benefit of helping wild animals, then the cost/benefit wouldn't be anywhere near favourable enough to qualify as "effective".
I think I agree with the signalling part. I remember when 10-12 years ago the very same people who are now vitalists were talking about self-improvement through deadlifting and reading classics like Marcus Aurelius. There was also talk of cold showers. These things are probably good, but the problem is they do not signal hard enough that you are the toughest mofo in the entire universe. So things started escalating, until we arrived to BAPs "be like bronze age pirates". But no one is actually going to do that, it becomes LARP. I wonder whether they still keep deadlifting? It's hard, injuries almost unavoidable, every pro power lifter can tell you that, none of them never had injuries, and telling AI to generate pirate art is easier.
I agree with your overall point, but do want to challenge your "injury" assumption. I've been deadlifting 4+ plates (more than 405 pounds) for a decade and a half, including 5 years actually competing as a powerlifter, and injuries are pretty rare.
Even at the top of the field, the injury rate for elite powerlifters is 1-2 per 1k training hours, versus 3 for Oly lifts, and for Olympic hopefuls, 5.5 for gymnastics, 4 for track and field, 6 for boxing, 10 for skiing, 8 for basketball, 7 for soccer, and even 5 for volleyball.
So deadlifting heavy is probably one of the safer occupations one could get up to while feeling bronzely perverted or whatever. It beats besieging Troy (or joining Blackwater / Xe / Academi / Constellis or whatever they're called today).
Honestly it sort of surprises me that the risk ratio between powerlifting and Olympic lifting is that small, but I think that's a vibes thing about how kinetic the Olympic lifts look to me. My intuition would be that with perfect form deadlift would individually be safest - do you know if that's borne out in data?
Yeah, I agree - I'd have thought Oly would be higher risk than Track and Field, for example. But I think when you consider the range of movement and forces, the ranges for both powerlifting and Oly are pretty narrow and prescribed versus the much greater torsions and sheer forces a basketball player or gymnast can put their muscles through.
I don't know of any actual data / publications on this front, but anecdotally in my own experience and observation, bench is most dangerous (takes out a lot of shoulders / rotator cuffs / sometimes muscle tears in pecs or biceps / triceps), followed by squat (killer of knees), with deadlift the safest.
I think a couple of things make deadlifting safest - the main risk from deadlift is lower back injury. Failing a deadlift typically means it doesn't even get up off the floor, and failing even after it starts going up is simply dropping it, so the easiest and safest failing mode (versus failing with squat or bench, you usually try to get it back on the rack, adding movement and sheer stress to the load). Further, since rounding of the upper and lower back is fairly easy to spot or feel while training, I think it's easier to stay in safe bounds on the deadlift.
> Treating malaria probably isn’t the most effective way to speed economic growth
What is? I honestly would have put treating malaria pretty high up there. Maybe something that impacts denser urban areas more?
Probably moving high-human-capital people to high-productivity societies would be the most impactful. E.g. you might turn a $10k/year programmer into a $100k/year programmer by moving him from Ukraine to the US.
As someone with non-hypothetical experience in that area... the more likely outcome would be turning a $10k/year programmer into an unemployed programmer. Companies outsource development work to places like Ukraine and India because they can get away with paying the lower wage, then assign them to "grunt work" tasks while the expensive American developers work on the more difficult parts. This invariably backfires when they hit cases where the "grunt work" turns out to contain hidden complexities that low-wage-low-skill code monkeys can't produce a satisfactory solution to, so now they have to pay the expensive American developers to go through and fix what the outsourcing team broke. (The most memorable example of this, to me, is when the Ukrainian team produced a grid view in the UI that was running a database query for every single cell in the grid, in a callback that ran inside the loop to draw the grid on-screen. On a database that was *not* located locally on the user's computer. And they never seemed to grasp just how completely wrong that approach was!)
A Ukrainian with the skill level to be a $100k programmer would most likely not be making $10k as an outsourcing code monkey in the first place. The ones that lack that skill level, moving them to America won't magically give them the training and experience they need in order to get hired as a high-skill American developer.
To clarify, my hypothesis is that a mediocre Ukrainian developer making $10k/year working for a local firm there could become a mediocre US developer making $100k/year working for a local firm there. ̦It's quite possible that I'm mistaken about how much mediocre US developers make or about how much mediocre Ukrainian developers make, but I don't think I'm mistaken enough to change the conclusion that the potential gains are on the scale of tens of thousands of USD per year per such person who migrates (and on the order of millions per career). This to me seems like a much bigger impact on economic growth than the hypothetical gains from an increase in the population of Subsaharan Africa.
I understand what you're trying to say; I'm saying that there's a skill gap there, such that a mediocre Ukrainian developer would have a lot of difficulty being hired as a mediocre US developer in the first place.
I think a lot of it is due to the phenomenon Richard Feynman talks about in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", where he recounts his utter dismay at working with students from other countries and seeing how they are taught to memorize facts — and they become incredibly proficient at doing so — but not how to analyze them and draw conclusions from them. That's a skill that you need to be educated in, and moving to another country where such education is normal just puts you further behind, rather than helping you to get ahead.
Clearly your experience of working with Ukrainian programmers has been very different from mine.
OK, but thats not speeding up economic growth, though.
This is essentially just "juicing the stats" to make it appear there has been economic growth (as we measure that in part on wages paid as a proxy).
If a 10k Ukrainian developer produces X output in Ukraine due to the limits of his skill level, then he will still produce X in the US even if he's paid $100k.
The amount of actual economic output hasn't increased. Even if you get marginal improvements by being in a better knowledge culture etc etc its certainly not the 10x growth in actual output the wages proxy would seem to indicate. Probably more like 1.1x or 1.2x.
To actually increase economic growth you must "make more stuff" be it atoms (TV's, Washing Machines) or bits (computer programmes, databases, algorithms).
As a result this is probably NOT a genuinely overpowered way to increase actual growth (unless he genuinely produced programmes that were 10x better, or produced 10x more programs etc etc). Its just taking advantage of the use of a proxy to juice the figures via manipulating the proxy.
I disagree. We know that the programmer is producing some marginal value X>$10k to his current employer, and we know that he'll produce some marginal value Y>$100k to his new employer. Assuming that X>$100k or that X=Y (or close) seems unreasonable to me.
Yes, but the value he is producing that is >10k may be 101k, and the employer is capturing the surplus.... that programmer can be employed at 100k profitably in the US, but that is still no increase in economic output just redistrubution of the output that was already there between employer/employee.
If he is only producing 20k of output, then he is profitable to hire in UA but not US. In *that* example your scheme to make migration easier in order to increase economic growth will not do so, as the US employer will decline to hire him at 100k even if the migration is frictionless.
In both cases, you aren't getting any increase in economic output (although in one you are getting a 10x boost of the proxy measure and redistribution of who the surplus is captured by).
To produce a 10x increase in economic growth, you have to be able to point to the actual source of the additional economic output. For a washing machine factory worker this may be all the high-capital automated equipment he gets to work with, the great transportation system for goods in that country, the efficient retail ecosystem that can sell those goods at lower costs..... maybe that means he really can produce 10x as much with the same amount of identically skilled labour as all that capital multiplies his labour output.
But you can't point to that for the digital worker. He has access to all that capital already, its at the other end of the wire coming out of the back of his PC. Whether it leads to the server farm in the basement (US) or the server farm in thee basement on the other side of the world (UA). He has access to all the capital equipment, the tools, the knowledge. The goods are transported instantly to market at light speed in both places. The retail distribution is the same .com site whether the software is coded in US or UA.
There is just nothing to presuppose that simply moving a human being from being seated in front of a PC in UA to being seated in front of a PC in US makes them 10x as actually economically productive. There is no mechanism to force that outcome. He's the same guy, with the same skills, and the same equipment. Maybe you can find a way to drive out a 10% improvement or 20% because of social effects of being "face-to-face in an office" rather than "remote" but not a 1000% improvement in output.
If the "proxy" is telling you there is a 1000% improvement thats the result of an imperfect proxy. By manipulating that proxy only, you're essentially stats juking, and not causing actual creation of 10x as many computer programs, or computer programs that are 10x as efficient.
If I increase the price of all Van Gogh paintings by 10x I am not increasing economic output by 10x, it may look so in the stats...as that economy just went from selling 100m of paintings in 2024 to selling 1bn worth of paintings in 2025. Now selling 100mn worth of Van Gogh's brings in 900m more $s, when they're sold GDP will jump 900m.
But the world will still ONLY have the same paintings we started with. Not a single one more. The quality of the paintings hasn't improved either. They're just as good (or not) as they ever were. No economic output has been added. You just juiced the GDP proxy.
You may as well propose massively increasing economic output by EA's bidding up the price of Van Gogh paintings if you are going to insist an increase in the proxy is ipso-facto identical to an increase in the output. To increase output you really do have to increase output. The programmer needs to produce 10x as much work, you have to paint 10x as many Van Gogh paintings!
That seems backwards. It would be far better for global economic growth to take the $200K/year programmers from the US and force them to work in Ukraine (or a less war-torn version thereof) for $10K/year.
How so? That would seem to (1) directly reduce global GDP by $190k/year/person and (2) go directly against the basic economic knowledge that wealth is generally created by (a) moving stuff from where people are less willing to pay for it to where people are more willing to pay for it & (b) letting people do what they want.
Not the original poster but.... Because you'd get the same economic output at a lower cost!
Lets imagine he's producing washing machines to make this easier.
If he produces 100 a year in the UK at 200k a year .... and would still produce 100 year in UA at 10k a year..... you're getting cheaper washing machines if he's in UA. You can hire 20 times as many guys if you want and for the same 200k you are spending in wages get 20x more washing machines (i.e. 20 times the actual economic output).
This doesn't change when you move back to bits from atoms.
The guy moved to Ukraine would have to reduce his output to <5 washing machines for the move to be an economic negative, maybe lack of local capital infrastructure etc may reduce his output but in the case of our computer programmer that seems unlikely as digital workers have (by definition) access to almost all the capital infrastructure on a global level. Its all at the other end of a light-speed wire.
Although we use wage as a proxy to measure GDP easily it is JUST a proxy, attempting to get at the "real" value (actual output) is much harder, but we have to be aware of the inconsistencies/distortion this approach creates and not build recommendations directly atop that distortion.
I don't think you'd get the same economic output. If that were the case, the US company could just hire workers already in Ukraine instead. The wage differential shows that this is not happening.
Which they do, all the time, for any job they outsource.
If there are 200 jobs, 100 that have to be done in the US@100k and 100 that can be done in UA.@10k.... they'll outsource 100 to UA to get the lower costs.
If you remove the barrier to movement.... that doesn't suddenly mean all 200 jobs will be done in the US@100k and output will go up 5x (in this example) as a result. They're the same people, with the same skills, the same capital infrastructure, the same output.
If hiring 100 more people in the US would increase output 5x, they'd do it today at 100k and not bother with the UA outsourcing.
Wage paid (in aggregate) is a reasonable proxy for output. BUt you can;t go from there to "...and so with this one weird trick we can multiply this guys output 10x by simply seating him at a desk 5,000 miles away from his current desk and changing literally nothing else about his skills or how he does his work. Ta Da"
As he notes, "it’s one of the few interventions which has been well-studied". Anything that is in fact more effective as a way of speeding economic growth hasn't been studied well enough yet to make us confident that it is more effective.
I dont know of any 'vitalist' who says that war is the terminal goal of human civilization.
Effective altruists, on the other hand, do typically take it as a given that everyone's life is equally valuable. This is a terminal goal in the sense that it is supposed to be a blueprint for the ideal society.
Unlike EAs, I don't try to derive all my behavior from a single set of moral axioms. I believe that the conception of morality promoted by EAs gives too little weight to other things I find valuable, particularly the preservation of the most intelligent and capable people and the most functional societies, and criticize it on that basis.
You're criticizing EA for not preserving the most intelligent and capable people, or helping society, but what are you doing, that you wouldn't do otherwise, that would embody this virtue?
Insofar as EA is appealing to me personally, it's because it can be operationalized to something like "earn to give" or "direct work", instead of talking abstractly about how x ideal is great and how y ideals suck.
So what does your criticism buy you? Other live players doing things for you? It would be terrific if someone who said the same things as you can say like "here's bills a b c which implements education reforms x y z that I think works well for these not-philosophically derived reasons" rather than "raaaaah me! Boo EA!"
> I think a lot of people think of this in terms of “Africans’ lives are [worth] less than nothing and I want to get rid of them”.
Do I understand correctly that "get rid of them" = "kill/let die"? If so:
This perspective is one of the most abhorrent and viscerally disgusting I have ever heard. It obviously has extremely Holocaust-y vibes.
Sadly, Scott may well be correct about many people thinking this. I honestly feel at a loss how to argue with people who genuinely (subconsciously?) subscribe to cartoonesque villainy like this.
> Even if this is where you’re coming from, you’re not getting rid of one billion people, sorry.
This is what I'm talking about. What if they *could* get rid of them? How does one interact with people who, given a big red button saying "Nuke Africa (no side-effects!)", actually consider pressing it? Or have to practice some restraint not to press it, perhaps because murder isn't virtuous or whatever? Or convince themselves that it's not worth it via elaborate 2nd order effects or something?
It genuinely hurts me to think these people exist. I would love if we as a society could get rid of them - by succeeding in changing their mind and preventing new people from getting hooked on such hateful othering.
Edit: This may not be the most constructive contribution to the discussion, but I felt strongly compelled to express my emotions after reading the post.
I pretty much agree with Scott's solutions (help build them up economically), but everyone agrees that Africa has problems.
A less evil version of the vitalist approach would be to stop sending aid to Africa, because it's making things worse. The argument I've heard is that sending food aid crashes the food prices in neighboring countries and causes farmers to quit, which makes the next famine more likely and worse. Or even a more agreeable version - stop selling weapons to Africans.
> everyone agrees that Africa has problems.
I don't know (literally) about Africa as a whole, but it's very plausible. Certainly quite a few countries along quite a few axes/metrics.
I have no qualm with that claim itself, nor with the empirical question of how best to help those in need, including in Africa, whatever the answer.
I think the strongest argument in that direction is that Europe didn't develop thanks to charity, nor did Meiji Japan, and if Africa is to reach a similar destination it will be via similar route. Africans must manufacture their own weapons to do statemaking via warmaking!
The interesting thing about Japan is that it pretty much stagnated for hundreds of years, then rapidly progressed when faced with outside threats. It's pretty much the poster child for vitalism. In 40 years it went from Feudalism similar to 13th century Europe to fully catching up with Europe. That's insane. It's interesting to think about how long it would have continued to stagnate, absent that outside pressure.
It didn't take actual war, just the threat of losing sovereignty in a country that cared a lot about it.
If you're including Taiwan & South Korea there, both were colonized by Japan.
<mildSnark>
This sounds like an argument for not-quite-successful renewed colonialism in Africa. I'm not saying it wouldn't work (I have no idea whether it would), but it would at least be one of the _oddest_ development tactics...
</mildSnark>
It wouldn't work, because ultimately it wouldn't be real. Nobody would take it seriously that some foreign power was going to really conquer an African country, because there are too many powers that could easily do it. They either would or they wouldn't. If they didn't, or didn't succeed, it would have little to do with the African country, and a lot to do with international norms (and likely US military strength).
Japan was in a sweet spot where no one had the interest or ability to conquer Japan in say, 1870, but the Japanese foresaw the possibility that it could happen in a few decades. Enough time to take steps to counter it, but not so long that the Japanese felt like they could ignore it.
Many Thanks! Good point! Yeah, it would look too fake... Like a sparring partner who is absurdly too powerful.
"you found it racist, I found it funny, thats why I'm happier then you"
> It genuinely hurts me to think these people exist. I would love if we as a society could get rid of them
They know
> by succeeding in changing their mind and preventing new people from getting hooked on such hateful othering.
You shouldnt lie to yourself.
> "you found it racist, I found it funny
This sounds like a reference to a meme, but I don't know it. A brand new one?
Appears to be a reference to https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3qxhki/you_find_it_offensive_i_find_it_funny_thats_why/
The original phrase, "You found it *offensive*..." appears all over the internet
Thanks.
https://mai.waifuism.life/notes/9wjrfv4xsyrg01rn
Another fedi user
I agree. These "people" should be got rid of the same way they want to "get rid of" Africans.
You really misunderstood my position
There is in fact a gallery of such people who come out in the comments section, loudly proclaiming how psychologically normal they are for preferring another family/country to die to protect their family.
At some point you have to accept that people will say and think anything to avoid doing prosocial things.
Huh? You think it's not normal to prefer your family's lives over those of others' families?
It's not normal to proclaim that you want specifically others to die, when no one else has mentioned this tradeoff. If you love and prefer your family, you build them up and tell it to them, not tell random internet strangers what you'd do with them in thought experiments you yourself are inventing. That's weird.
It's in fact 100% normal to prefer your family, it's not fine to use your family as a prop to heatedly win internet arguments.
So you're saying that a fact that you agree is 100% a fact should not be discussed in internet arguments? Why? Wouldn't we all be better off if discussions were more fact based rather than less?
Fact based questions like "do you think it's normal to let children die"?
Yes, I agree arguments would be much more fact based and less emotionally driven if everything were reframed with respect to whether or not you want to murder your family. (FACT if you disagree with me you are MUCH MORE pro family murdering! It's true I read it in a blog comment. source: me)
No, the fact that practically everybody would rather have other people's children die than their own. Why choose to elide this if you agree it's true? It has many important implications for understanding and predicting social behaviour.
Who gives a fuck?
Normal can be evil.
I think only evil would try to redefine normal as evil
Yes, Scott in channeling the Nazi version of vitalism here.
Nazi vitalism is a moral theory of sorts, as illustrated by Jonathan Bennett (a New Zealand philosopher that died in March this year) in his analysis of Heinrich Himmler's justification for the Holocaust. Quote from Bennet's analysis in his article "The conscience of Huckleberry Finn":
… has [Himmler’s interpretation of Nazism] a moral basis at all? And if it has, was there in Himmler’s mind any conflict between [his] morality and [ordinary, spontaneous] human sympathy? Yes there was. Here is a quote [from a speech he held in 1944 for SS top brass]:
“I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter…I mean…the extermination of the Jewish race…Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Himmler saw his policies as being hard to implement while still retaining one’s human sympathies – while still remaining “a decent fellow”. He is saying that only the weak take the easy way out and just squelch their sympathies, and is praising the stronger and more glorious course of retaining one’s sympathies while acting in violation of them [notice the “heroic”, vitalistic overtones in this stance]. In the same spirit, he ordered that when executions were carried out in concentration camps, those responsible “are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude”.
A year later he boasted that the SS had wiped out the Jews “without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and soul. The danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla of their becoming heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure life, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.”
And there really can’t be any doubt that the basis of Himmler’s policies was a set of principles which constituted his morality – a sick, bad, wicked morality. He described himself as caught in “the old tragic [Kantian] conflict between will and obligation”. And when his physician Kersten protested at the intention to destroy the Jews, saying that the suffering involved was “not to be contemplated”, Kersten reports that Himmler replied:
He knew that it would mean much suffering for the Jews…”It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life [notice that this is a very vitalistic justification, with a dash of Great Man /übermensch added]. Yet we must…cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”
This, I submit, is the language of morality.
...so far Bennett's analysis of Nazi-version vitalism. It can illustrate how vitalism as a moral theory has the potential to end up in very dark places. (But mind you, so may utilitarianism.)
I think that "Kill" and "Let die" are very different here.
"Let die" is to let something end when it cannot support itself, simply by doing nothing. Killing something is to aid it in its destruction.
I'm not for killing anything, but if something cannot sustain itself, then that's reality itself saying "no". You can bail out banks, you can bail out failed companies, you can compliment art that you don't really like, you can give participation trophies to losers, you can let students pass exams even when their performance is lacking, you can tell people who annoy you that of course you like them and there's nothing they should change. In the end, all your compassion is doing, is preventing adaptation either by masking its need or by temporarily providing support (not by teaching a man to fish, but by providing him fish - the strength is not his own). It's a kind of reverse eugenics.
I think we should leave Africa to itself, but I certainly do not think so out of hatred.
I also don't think Africans are "undermen" by any means. They're not doing very well, but their rate of depression might be lower than that of the western world, and that would make them superior in their attitude towards life. Nietzsche meant "power" very broadly. A species which can thrive in poverty and war is in many ways stronger than one which can be hurt by saying mean words to it, even if the latter is more intelligent (which is yet another form of power)
I think both vitalism and altruism are helpful perspectives but the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws. An altruist post-singularity existence would truly relegate humanity to the heroin drips. A vitalist post-singularity existence might look something like an eternal series of epic cage matches between increasingly ultra-powered humans who feel nothing but blind rage.
The important question is to ask what it really means to be human and what a meaningful humanity actually looks like post-singularity. A number of different aspects will stand out, but one important one is that of agency. We want humans to be able to make meaningful decisions about the world, not just choosing between the red and blue drip or betting on which ultra-human wins the next round. This might look like (for instance) a superintelligent AI carving out a space for humans to exert meaningful control and govern themselves without its direct interference.
This also helps us to see the limitations of both vitalism and altruism in the present. Sometimes people just want to be right for the sake of being right, they want to win every battle and prove that they're on the right side. Other times, people want simple enjoyment for its own sake and fall into the kinds of so-called 'dopamine traps' which are not conducive to living a meaningful life when pursued in excess. Finding ways to increase meaningful agency over one's life is important and sacrificing immediate happiness and 'winning' pointless battles can be worthwhile endeavours in pursuit of improving self-control and reducing impulsiveness.
> the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws.
An ideal moral framework might allow for that. But I am unaware of any existing, fleshed out moral framework that does. Try to think of undesirable ways to maximize "agency over one's life" or whatever your preferred metric/system is and see how well it fares.
What does the terrible/extensive version of maximised agency look like? I'm genuinely interested btw
Definitions:
- Agency = Ability of humans to make meaningful decisions about the world
- Meaningful decision = decision affecting some macroscopic part of the world
==> Maximize Agency == maximize influence humans have over the world.
Solutions:
- colonize the universe, establishing a flourishing society on maximally many celestial bodies, space stations etc.. Attach some nukes to each human habitat and give everyone a bid red button that blows up their own habitat when pressed. Currently, few people on Earth have that much potential influence on their environment. At every moment, the decision to not press the button has the gigantic effect of "saving lives" (one might argue, which is exactly the point).
- Similar vibe: Give everyone in the world a car full of guns and ammo, abolish the rule of law (think the Purge). Everyone now has much more influence on the life and death of their neighbors than before.
- Advance tech enough such that we can simulate consciousness. Give everyone a button that generate 10^10 consciousnesses experiencing 10^10 subjective years of pure suffering. If you don't think that's possible in principle, just breed humans or animals for that specific purpose and make that a torture button.
You can definitely patch this by modifying or clarifying the definition. But in the end, it's an arms race about finding and fixing loopholes in a definition. You've gotta be pretty brave to think that at some point, you will be done (and can safely maximize), as opposed to having a loophole lurking noone has found yet. See the field of AI alignment for more.
Oh, for sure we're talking about AI alignment. There's a problem there, and it's a complex one. I believe agency is a part of the answer, but it's not the entirety of it, which we haven't figured out yet. Interesting scenarios you've proposed.
Cheers. And I agree, factoring in agency in some way - directly or not - avoids the "passive humans consuming goodness-juice X ad infinitum" failure mode.
Isaac Asimov wrote about a (debatably) dystopian society on a planet called Solaria in his Foundation series. To maximize agency and have near absolute freedom, the planet was divided into a few thousand huge estates, each with a single inhabitant. Work was done by robots. They mostly avoided interacting with other people and could rule over their estate as they liked in solitude.
Another answer is that maximized agency taken to the extreme leads to the same wireheading as maximized happiness. If you can do nearly anything, that should include the ability to stimulate your pleasure centers. There's a contradiction in trying to maximise agency by taking away that choice.
Another answer is that "meaningful" choices are only possible when there are problems. As more problems get solved with technology and progress, fewer meaningful choices are possible. A life-or-death choice is meaningful. Deciding between strawberry and blueberry ice cream is not. If everyone already has everything they can want, and there is no conflict or disease, how can a choice be meaningful? E.g. if everyone in the US thought everything was great and there were no problems to fix, what platform could the political parties have?
But if meaningful choices means you need problems, then to maximize it, someone needs to go around creating problems. You need someone evil to start wars or create poverty so that others can make meaningful choices to fix it. And taking it to the extreme, you want a lot of evil so that there are a lot of meaningful choices.
Really interesting, thanks. This reminds me of something the science fiction author Cordwainer Smith wrestles with in his works - the question of how to create meaning and novelty in a world where all problems are solved and everything is under control. In his fictional distant future, you have human overlords overseeing everything and they do eventually decide to introduce randomness and variability back into interplanetary civilisation, sensing that things have become stale.
I wrote a much more detailed response about this to Jacob Buckman below, but I think maximizing autonomy is the best way to balance the extremes of pleasure vs struggle. I imagine this would look like individualism on a societal scale, but structured around a value system that encourages personal growth instead of static hedonism.
An altruistic person, under a reasonable interpretation, doesn't make you take heroin if you don't want to.
No, of course not. But a superintelligent AI trying to optimise for happiness could easily find a way to hack your brain and make you *want* to go on the drip.
But likewise an altruistic person wouldn't change your terminal preferences if you don't want him to. A lousy AI might, but that's an AI alignment problem, not a problem with altruism.
I think altruism would only plug people into heroin trips if it's coupled with hedonism about well - being.
If you're an objective list theorist or something it's hard to see how you get this result. I think your comment is endorsing something like that.
>I think both vitalism and altruism are helpful perspectives but the fact that they cannot extend 'to infinity and beyond' does reveal their inherent flaws.
I think I'm inclined to say the opposite.
Any system that is optimised to produce no "strange" results out at the extremes of infinity is not optimised for providing the best results in the very middle of the "normal" range of operation.
Given actual physical limits, as well as psychologicval and social ones, confine us very strongly in that middle range.... we should desire systems are optimised for that range, even if that produces strange results out on the ultra-extremes we know we can't reach.
Think of a car optimised to drive at 1000 m/ph and be safe and reliable at that speed. Thats not a car optimised for using in a world with a 70 mph de-jure speed limit and a 100 mph (or so) de-facto speed limit.
It may be that you can get extremely lucky and find a perfect system that is optimal in all ranges all the time.... but you shouldn't expect that to naturally always be the case, and certainly not to reject solutions based on them not being that lucky one in a million shot.
I'm more comfortable with systems that appear to be optimised for (very wide) ranges of normal human activity.... and when I see those systems break down at infinity-and-beyond that makes me more, not less, confident that they are correctly optimised for those ranges and not for the extremes. Its really hard to optimise for the furthest extreme without de-optimising for the normal!
> Isn’t there some sense where conflict (which is bloody and full of suffering) produces progress and strength? And doesn’t that mean that altruists should oppose conflict, but vitalists should promote it?
>
> I’m skeptical of this argument. America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket. During that time, Iraq has had approximately eight major wars and didn’t even get a cuckoo clock out of it.
There's war, and then there's *war,* and this skeptical position only makes sense if you carefully construct a definition of war that excludes the Cold War. And that kind of makes sense in some contexts — we certainly weren't shooting and nuking each other, which is strictly better than the alternative! — but not when talking about technological progress, because the whole period was basically one big long preparation for a war that never broke out. And it didn't "change our national experience" so much as utterly define it, and then utterly redefine it when it ended, to our detriment in some ways.
But let's look over the list. The computing revolution developed out of looking for better ways to wage war. Whether calculating artillery trajectories, breaking cryptography, or decentralizing knowledge to make it impossible for a single nuclear bomb to wipe out your important military data, everything from Turing's foundational research to the Internet was developed specifically for warfare. The Human Genome Project, AI, advanced medicine, advanced laser technologies, and a whole lot of your list are all downstream from computing.
The moon landing likewise arose out of the Cold War, a side project JFK came up with to show off American superiority over the Soviets in a way that would appeal to the people more than the research into ICBMs that laid the groundwork for all of it.
The microwave came about because a military radar operator happened to notice that the emissions from a radar unit heated up some food he was carrying around, and he thought up a civilian application for it.
The cell phone likewise has roots in military technology for battlefield communications, and what is a smartphone but the merger of a cell phone and a computer?
As for Iraq, the constant fighting doesn't seem to have yielded much of a peace dividend, but I seem to recall analysts saying they'd made some pretty significant advances in the development of the chemical weapons that they "officially" never had, despite using them more than once in various conflicts.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and sadly, nothing says "NECESSITY!!!" quite like an existential threat.
I disagree with most of your examples:
Computing: Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing all made their creations/breakthroughs during peacetime and with no military funding or applications in mind, and then WWII came along and *hampered* computing progress by ensuring all the most promising minds worked exclusively at Bletchley and the NPL (and later GCHQ, eg. Clifford Cocks, James Henry Ellis, et. al.), and all their best ideas were classified Top Secret (and were then gradually all rediscovered and commercialised by the US over the next 30 years or so of peace..)
Moon landing: Okay, I have to give you this one. But - it was probably considerably *less* militaristic than whatever else the US Govt. would have done with its £200bn if the moon wasn't there.
Microwave: I'd call this a draw. The magnetron was largely a wartime invention, but the idea of using one to make an oven was emphatically peacetime and for peaceful purposes.
Smartphone: very much a peacetime non-military invention. Saying that smartphones are a millitary invention because they descend from mobile phones which in turn descend from handheld VHF radios which got used by soldiers is very much a "six degrees of separation" trick. Why stop there specifically? Smartphones use copper which the phalanxes of Alexander the Great used to make their armour.
Laser: Theoretical work done by Einstein with no millitary funding or intentions; practical refinement during the 1960s at Bell Labs, again during peacetime and with peaceable applications (eg. scientific instrument-making) in mind.
Human Genome Project: (Perhaps my strongest disagreement with you) This was a worldwide academic project whereby two dozen academic insitutions around the world collaborated and shared their results - and famously published their outputs openly for the benefit of any researchers that wanted them. I can scarcely imagine a less warlike way of carrying out a project!
Regarding "necessity..." I think the general principle is that, sure, in wartime you *want* lots of new inventions - but you also have much less spare capacity for the sorts of R&D that *actually lead to* new inventions: partly because the latest generation of potential scientists, engineers, etc. is for the most part off in another country wearing tin hats and being shot at, and partly because most of the available R&D capacity gets eaten-up by programmes that are much easier to sell to military budget-holders, aimed at making bullets 0.1% deadlier or whatever (the example you give about Iraq using its available R&D capacity to formulate chemical weapons and not much else seems especially pertinent..)
> then WWII came along and *hampered* computing progress by ensuring all the most promising minds worked exclusively at Bletchley and the NPL
Putting the most brilliant minds together where they can bounce ideas off of each other and focusing them under pressure on a goal... hampers their creativity and progress?
Yes, classifying their work might have held back the broader applications a little, but let's be honest: *the computer revolution* didn't start with computing; it started with the transistor and the integrated circuit, which made miniaturization possible, which made commoditization possible. Before that point, computers were just ridiculously expensive, ultra-high-end devices that no one outside of the military and the top-echelon corporate world (which were so intertwined that Eisenhower famously referred to them as a single entity, the "military-industrial complex,") had any use for, and even there their uses were sharply limited by a physical bottleneck referred to as "the tyranny of numbers." There's a reason IBM's Thomas Watson said "I think there's a world market for maybe five computers."
The transistor arose out of Bell Labs research, tied to military contracts during the Cold War. The integrated circuit likewise came to us from Fairchild Semiconductor, staffed with former Bell Labs personnel and working on military contracts.
> The magnetron was largely a wartime invention, but the idea of using one to make an oven was emphatically peacetime and for peaceful purposes.
Yeah. Someone took a wartime invention and found a new use for it, just like the computer.
> Smartphone: very much a peacetime non-military invention.
Created by combining two wartime inventions. This isn't six degrees of separation; at most it's two.
> Human Genome Project: ... I can scarcely imagine a less warlike way of carrying out a project!
I can scarcely imagine the project being possible without computers, which is the point I was making.
> Regarding "necessity..." I think the general principle is that, sure, in wartime you *want* lots of new inventions - but you also have much less spare capacity for the sorts of R&D that *actually lead to* new inventions ... (the example you give about Iraq using its available R&D capacity to formulate chemical weapons and not much else seems especially pertinent..)
The Manhattan Project led directly to the atomic bomb... and also to nuclear power generation, the solution to all our energy needs for the foreseeable future if we could ever get out of our own way on the subject. The Cold War space race gave us ICBMs and also the moon landing, which are both pretty useless to you and me as civilians... and also the GPS system (developed for military and particularly rocketry purposes) which civilians put to good, peaceful, productive use every day.
It's a little-appreciated fact that in order to beat your swords into plowshares, *you must first have a sword!* As near as I can tell — and this is by no means a firm conclusion that I've put a lot of deep thought into, so it may be badly off the mark, but it feels more correct than wrong — the trick is to have a balance of enough conflict to generate ideas and enough peace to rotate the people getting those ideas into civilian work to come up with interesting things to do with those ideas.
Thanks for your interesting and detailed reply. (Going to number the points because I find it more streamlined than the quotation style - hope that's okay!)
1) I don't say that putting the best minds together to collaborate is what hampered progress, I say that classifying their entire output is what hjampered progress. In fact, the early history* of computing is famous for this! Not just taking all the practical applications for Turing's 1930s theoretical work (which, of course, was entirely peaceable non-military academic study) and classifying them, but much of public key cryptography (Diffie-Helman key exchange, RSA, etc.) was all invented at secret British military labs and then immediately classified, opening the way for the non-military world to re-invent it, publish, and actually make a difference. To say that classifying their work "held things back a little" is very much an understatement!
(* That is, if you don't count the also-peacetime Babbage, Ludgate, Lovelace, et. al.)
Yes, I'll concede the computing revolution came after all of this and that it was made possible by MOSFETs and CMOS circuitry - but I don't think you're correct to say that the Bell Labs and Fairchild research was military: my limited understanding (shored-up by a super-quick bit of Wikipedia-browsing) is that the researchers were predominantly academic physicist types working mostly on open-eneded research contracts not funded by the military and focused either on purely academic discoveries or else on telecommunications research. (Not looked too closely, though - if you've got a citation to contradict this, of course I'll concede the point!)
2) If we can say the microwave oven is just a wartime magnetron which somebody found a new use for, couldn't we also say that a magnetron is just a peacetime cavity resonator (used for academic physics research during the start of the 20th Century) which somebody found a new use for? (And presumably so on and so on all the way back to Archimedes..)
3) The inventions that were "combined" to create the smartphone:
Telephone: Peacetime
Radio: Peacetime
Computer: (still under heavy negotiation here..)
4) It doesn't seem fair to say that computers get the credit for the human genome project just because it couldn't have been achieved without them. The human genome project also couldn't have been achieved without writing systems, fire, or the wheel. The tech-tree is enormous and interconnected and impossibly tangled: for every single military invention ever I'm sure you can find at least one essential precursor invention that's peaceable, and vice-versa. (And this objection is entirely separate to debating whether the computer was a military invention or not!)
5) I very much suspect the Manhattan project (or, more generally, nuclear warfare) hampered the adoption of nuclear power even more than military classification hampered computing research. Sure, it created breakthroughs - although the opinion of most Manhattan project scientists was that all the prerequisites were there and nuclear fission would be developed fairly soon even absent anything like the Manhattan project - after all, Fermi had already successfully created an atomic pile in peacetime without military funding and shared his results with colleagues all over the world - but (I suspect) decades of living in abject terror of a nuclear apocalypse was probably a contributing factor to the poisoning of public opinion against nuclear energy.
6) GPS (well, GNSS): Okay, I'll give you that one. I suspect that even if the military GPS system (if you'll pardon my RAS syndrome..) had never existed we'd nevertheless have civilian GNSS by today owing to the rate of advancement of satellite tech (during peacetime) - but we can't know for sure, so I'll concede that GNSS, a pivotal modern invention, is a military one.
7) I admit that you must make swords before you can beat them into ploughshares. I just don't think that "iron ore" -> "sword" -> "ploughshare" is more efficient than "iron ore" -> "ploughshare".
8) I'm deeply suspicious of any argument - or anybody - that suggests the correct amount of war in the world is non-zero! Couldn't we at least *try* not having any wars? Just for a generation or two, as a sort of control group to the whole of the rest of human history? If we do that and suddenly all worldwide innovation stops, I promise I will enlist in your navy and you can send me off to invade whomever you like..
> The tech-tree is enormous and interconnected and impossibly tangled: for every single military invention ever I'm sure you can find at least one essential precursor invention that's peaceable, and vice-versa.
I think we're in violent agreement on this fact; we just disagree over what it means.
> Couldn't we at least *try* not having any wars? Just for a generation or two
It's been tried. People called WWI "the war to end all wars," thinking that the horrors of mechanized and chemical warfare were so severe that no one would ever want to do that again. That didn't really last particularly long, and I'm not even talking about Nazi Germany. Google "wars between WWI and WWII" and you'll get quite the list.
After WWII, we set up the United Nations to try to keep a lid on things. Their record on the subject has been, well... less than stellar, at least if your criteria is "world peace." On the other hand, if your criteria is the more attainable "diminution of warfare," the 20th century paradoxically is both the bloodiest and also the most peaceful, largely because WWII did what WWI failed to accomplish: inventing a weapon that terrified people so badly that they *really* didn't want to get into another war where it would get used.
I agree with you that the ideal level of war in the world is zero. But I also recognize that we do not live in an ideal world. These ideals can be approached, but never reached, and trying to force mankind to reach them "one way or another" historically tends to result in further strife and bloodshed.
"I think we're in violent agreement on this fact; we just disagree over what it means" - well put! I think it means that you can make any invention appear either military or peacable by cherry-picking the right precursors from an unbelievably huge stock of them, thus making a case for disregarding all precursor invention arguments when asking "shall we count this as a military or a peacable invention?"; I presume you think it means that without those military inventions we wouldn't have gotten the non-military ones? (Or perhaps still would have gotten them, but on some orders-of-magnitude slower timescale?)
I meant "try" as in "experiment with" ("I usually have chocolate ice-cream so this time I'll try vanilla") rather than as in "attempt to". I agree we keep attempting to and it keeps on not working, and I admit that asking the world to conduct my no-war experiment isn't exactly a realistic request.
I agree that there will be war for the forseeable future, but I harbour a hope that eventually humanity's descendants might (er, for lack of a better term!) "outgrow" it. I suspect that probably any of our descendants who actually manage this will of necessity have to think and act so differently from us that we couldn't consider them really human, though!
> I presume you think it means that without those military inventions we wouldn't have gotten the non-military ones? (Or perhaps still would have gotten them, but on some orders-of-magnitude slower timescale?)
Yes. With anything related to rocketry as the uber-example. Jules Verne wrote "From Earth To The Moon" almost exactly a century before we actually got there. We've known for a long time that it was theoretically possible. But there's a reason that the term "rocket science" has become an idiom in our lexicon for "extremely difficult problem to work on." Without the Cold War directing enormous resources from world-class superpowers into relevant R&D, I'm skeptical that we would have ever actually made it happen.
> I admit that asking the world to conduct my no-war experiment isn't exactly a realistic request.
To me, it basically comes down to a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma: the best outcome overall is if both sides decide "no war," but as long as you have one dishonorable person willing to betray the "no war" consensus, they can attain a serious advantage relatively easily by doing so. Hitler took a big gamble launching WWII, and he ended up losing, but he could have won, and that would have led to some significant prosperity for the Nazi Party, and probably a fair amount for Germans in general. As long as there are people who see that and think it's worth trying — as long as human nature remains human nature — we're unlikely to get rid of war entirely.
> I suspect that probably any of our descendants who actually manage this will of necessity have to think and act so differently from us that we couldn't consider them really human, though!
Coming from a Christian background, I kind of agree with this, but probably not the way you're thinking of it...
Colossus may have been top secret, but ENIAC wasn't, and that was used for military purposes from the start..
Very true. I'd argue that *specifically for that reason* ENIAC contributed more to the computing state-of-the-art than Colossus did!
(Were all of ENIAC's *outputs* classified? On the one hand I'd suppose gunnery computation tables might reveal stuff about the guns themselves and therefore be a good candidate for classification, but on the other hand (or so I infer from Spike Milligan's autobiography) if you have to entrust a book of them to some random bombardier somewhere, probably you can't maintain entirely ideal information security...)
I don't think either Colossus or ENIAC really marks the very dawn of computing, though: even though I'm a c̶o̶l̶o̶s̶s̶a̶l big fan of Tommy Flowers, my loyalties must lie with Babbage and Lovelace - the fact that between them they'd worked-out the logic for a Turing-complete machine *and written programs for it* a century before it was technologically feasible to build such a thing just makes it all the more impressive, to me!
I would not count Babbage and Lovelace as pioneers of modern-day computing, simply because there is no causal chain there.
> The consensus of computer historians is that while Babbage was clearly the first to conceive of the flexible machine that foreshadowed the modern computer, his work was forgotten and was then conceptually recreated by Turing a century later.
> ...
> “The pioneers of electronic computing reinvented the fundamental principles largely in ignorance of the details of Babbage’s work,” said Dr. Swade, the former museum curator. “They knew of him, there was a continuity of influence, but his drawings were not the DNA of modern computing.”
> He argues that Turing was a “bridging” figure between Babbage and Lovelace and the modern world of electronic computers.
> A Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, doubts that his subject had seen the Lovelace notes when he wrote “On Computable Numbers.”
> “It’s most unlikely that Babbage/Lovelace had any influence on Turing in 1936,” Dr. Hodges, an Oxford mathematician, wrote in an e-mail. “Motivation, means, language, results were all completely different.”
— https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/computer-experts-building-1830s-babbage-analytical-engine.html
Fully agree with all of that. I just personally feel that if there was some sort of, I dunno, trophy or something for inventing the Turing-complete computer, Charlie B should still get it, that's all.
(And for computer programming, probably Babbage and Lovelace would share my postulated posthumous trophy..)
Out of curiosity, have you ever read The Way of Kings? I ask simply because this discussion of a hypothetical trophy reminds me of Hoid's "what do men value most?" soliloquy in the epilogue...
If their computer didn't actually get used, then I wouldn't consider it the dawn.
Yup, was considering saying that!
>Internet was developed specifically for warfare
Yup, a direct descendant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
I will mold myself into the Nietzchean ideal.
I will become a man of action.
I will be the emperor of my own life.
I will take a stand and finally stop putting off trying to save money on my homeowner’s insurance.
Heh...I actually keep meaning to do stuff like this, especially contacting my internet company every year or so to take advantage of whatever new deal they have to reduce/keep reduced my bill.
Not a card-carrying vitalist myself, but a possibly adjacent concept comes to mind: the bard, interested most in a future that stories can (continue to) be made of. To the interestingness-maximizer (or, mathematically, the Kolmogorov-complexity-maximizer), aggregation is anathema: it's the "effective" part of "effective altruism" that it diverges from.
(Well, over-aggregation, really: you can't have exceptions to the rule without a rule)
You conflated "Curing disease" and "Treating conditions".
Vitalist would probably be fine with one and done treatments but not required meds or treatment for life.
The "alone in a cabin with food" test if someone can survive on their own in a cabin even if provided free food (excludes conditions that require meds they can't produce on their own).
And "alone in a cabin with crops/animals & training" test if able to feeds themselves if provided starting animals and crops and training (could exclude mentally ill).
>The "alone in a cabin with food" test if someone can survive on their own in a cabin even if provided free food (excludes conditions that require meds they can't produce on their own).
Anyone can propose any test that they want, of course.
But this strikes me as anachronistic. We've had division of labor to varying degrees for thousands of years. Given that, e.g. we _can_ produce insulin, why is posing a test that excludes it sensible?
The future is, as always, uncertain. But what it _won't_ be is a return to the past. Choosing a test where e.g. surviving without a common medication _is_ crucial but e.g. ability to operate common, crucial machinery is _not_, seems very artificial. Also, what counts as "meds"? How about vitamin C? A lot of crew members in previous centuries died of scurvy - and they had no idea that their diet was inadequate.
> Humans genuinely do what some sort of predictive algorithm figures will send the most dopamine to a certain part of their mesolimbic system; everything else is some kind of complicated willpower-exertion game where, if you contort yourself in exactly the right direction, the reward of feeling responsible and virtuous sends enough dopamine to your mesolimbic system to be worth it. Altruism is a willpower-exertion-contortion game like this, but so are selfishness and everything else.
Wow, the materialist perspective is *incredibly* bleak and depressing! I just wish the task of persuading people that there's more to life than just this was easier. Doing so would alleviate a massive amount of needless suffering and harm.
My non sarcastic answer is that we don't feel like we lead bleak and depressing lives. We feel like we lead meaningful lives where we get to help children not die of malaria (or *insert whatever vitalists love here?*)
My sarcastic answer is: Pretend to try really hard to explain why a non materialist view improves the world. I actually want to know what you think.
You don't actually "feel" at all - *you* don't exist as anymore than an illusion generated by chemicals in your brain. That your brain creates the illusion of meaning via helping other complicated pathways not succumb to a competing chemical pathway rather than anything else is really just an arbitrary outcome.
Basically, if you believe in total materialism, that you are not a nihilist is A) wrong objectively, and B) a total accident. If your brain's meaning circuits made this connection you're fucked.
What if I define "actually feel" as "an illusion generated by chemicals in your brain"? Why must that make me a nihilist?
I mean, if the arbitrary brain state combined with input the to it didn't make your brain believe in nihilism, you won't be one. You'd still be philosophically confused though (not that what is essentially a fancy wind-up toy can be confused but...)
I don't think that brain activity is arbitrary in general, it follows certain patterns which are necessary for the organism in which this brain is situated to survive, for one thing. Of course, some people still end up crazy, and some have random bricks fall on their heads, but I don't see what this has to do with anything? You can be not a nihilist while accepting that the universe doesn't care about you.
On the topic on being philosophically confused, I think that's a trivial statement, because everybody is.
Utter garbage. I'd call this a strawman version of materialism, but really it doesn't rise even to that level. It's begging the question (the logical fallacy, not the common usage).
>Brains are just fancy biological computers that happen to generate qualia
>Some people's brains generate quaila of a positive, "meaningful" valence when they save puppies, others when they torture puppies
>This process is totally deterministic (or at best mostly deterministic with some quantum randomness)
>That you enjoy saving puppies instead of torturing them is thus totally arbitrary
>Because every potential path for meaning is similarly arbitrary, you can only conclude that meaning itself is bogus.
I may be strawmanning this a bit, but I don't have a very high opinion of philosophical materialism, so whatevs
No, I followed your "logic". Like I said, it's bad enough that it doesn't even rise to the level of strawman.
Considering your only retort is yelling "strawman! strawman!" I'm filing this under "materialist coping and seething" until evidence to the contrary is proffered
Your argument here has "derministic => arbitrary".
But the actual meaning of determinism is "the philosophical view that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable", whereas the meaning of arbitrary is "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". (Definitions derived from wikipedia if it matters.)
So it seems like "deterministic" does not imply "arbitrary" -- it implies the opposite. Are you using some alternative definitions that you haven't bothered to spell out?
A non materialist view improves the world because it treats humans as agents with free will that can make better or worse choices, for one. Our whole society is built on this idea; our justice system, or education system, our religions both civic and supernatural, most of our philosophies, the whole idea of human rights, the idea of ethics in general (that we *should* do this and that, which is entirely based in the idea that we have a will and a choice of what we do, so that we *should* do this thing but *could* do something else), etc. All these things seem to work really well and have improved the world significantly. How does a materialist view improve the world?
Materialists use words and phrases like "free will" and "choices" in ways that are coherent to a dualist. This should make it fairly obvious that (most) materialists believe in some version of these concepts that are functionally identical to that of dualists even if they are extensionally distinct.
The question of how a non-materialist view improves the world was a response to an assertion that the materialist view of the world is "*incredibly* bleak and depressing!" No one claimed that a materialist view improves the world in the first place.
>Materialists use words and phrases like "free will" and "choices" in ways that are coherent to a dualist. This should make it fairly obvious that (most) materialists believe in some version of these concepts that are functionally identical to that of dualists even if they are extensionally distinct.
I agree, though in my experience that's because most materialists have an incoherent view on free will. The dualist (or panpsychist, or other non-materialist) concept of free will and choices are not compatible with materialism. That materialists use concepts that are incompatible with materialism is evidence of the incredible divergence between our direct experience of free will and the implications of materialism.
In my view, the dualist concept of free will is internally incoherent and the compatibilist view of free will is the only one that makes sense of our experience.
I agree: I just disagree that materialism and compatibilism are compatible. I'm a non-materialist compatibilist myself, because compatibilism only makes sense of free will if you believe it was possible to make a different choice (that is to say, it wasn't logically impossible to choose differently) and materialism does not allow that.
The first thing that comes to mind is the recent book review of the guy who became paralyzed, and the discussion of how people who were born paralyzed, in a very real sense, do not know what they're missing. Their brains just aren't wired properly to be able to comprehend what it's like to have full use of their bodies, and so they think that they're living full, fulfilling lives, and to them they are, but the rest of us can look at them from outside of that paradigm and say "they're missing so much and they don't even realize it."
This is how someone with experience with the spiritual sees people who lack such experience. I hope this doesn't sound like a cop-out to you — it's not intended as one! — but it really is difficult to explain in ways that are easy to understand by people who lack the necessary frame of reference. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." (1 Corinthians 2: 9)
But, foolish though it may be, I'm going to try to give some explanation. The biggest benefits, to me at least, are stability, guidance, and comfort.
Stability: The Bible refers to the hope that flows from the Gospel as "an anchor of the soul," and elsewhere repeatedly uses similar metaphors of a ship lost at sea, driven mercilessly by the whims of forces beyond its control, to describe those who lack such an anchor. And what better description can we have of the modern age? How many times in the last few decades have you seen some new idea pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, with adherents demanding that you conform to it, promising a better world if everyone would just fall in line, and then it's not long before the whole thing falls apart... only for the next Next Big Thing to pop up and try to buffet you in a different direction? But if you're well-anchored to a solid rock of things that are already known to be true, you can compare the new theories against them and say "this is nonsense, I won't waste time and energy pursuing it," and save yourself a lot of hassle and occasionally a lot of very real grief.
Guidance: here's where things get really interesting. And I'm going to start off with a big bold claim that you're just going to have to accept at face value: this is not a belief, but rather something I know from personal experience. The evidence is overwhelming, undeniable, and completely worthless to you because it is *personal* rather than empirical. Which doesn't make it any less real or true.
People who are in tune with the Lord are not left to wander alone in this world, to try to figure everything out on their own. I've received ideas that do not come from inside my own head, things that do not follow from what I was thinking at the moment or even from knowledge that I had any way to possess, that turned out to be correct. Things that have helped me in my professional life, in my relationships with family and friends, and in my personal life.
- I was once distinctly told "don't say that; stay quiet," in a conversation that, because I let the other guy just keep talking, ended up going in a completely different (and far more rewarding) direction than I had ever expected.
- I have a friend, a construction contractor by trade, who was told "after this meeting, leave here and go to the Goodwill store at such-and-such location." He had no particular reason to buy anything there, but he listened. Right as he was walking in, he saw someone in the checkout line about to purchase some panels of what he was able to recognize as asbestos ceiling tiles, and he was able to warn them off. Neither the customer nor the people at the store realized what they were dealing with there, but he did.
- Several years ago, I had two job offers open to me. One of them sounded like a better deal — it paid better and the work was more aligned with my experience — but I prayed about it and was directed to take the other one. A few weeks after I moved to take the new job, I met the woman who is now my wife. The other one was located in a part of Texas that was soon thereafter devastated by a hurricane.
Comfort: We've all lost people we were close to. Along with its dreaded companion, Taxes, death is said to be the universal constant to which everyone is inescapably subject. As a little child, when my beloved grandmother died, I was devastated, completely inconsolable for weeks. As an adult, though, losing other people close to me, the pain is far less severe. Pain, loss, and grief are still real, but they aren't crushing, not when you understand that you will see them again.
Perhaps the starkest example of this comes from a friend from church, who had a family member that was in one of the towers on 9/11. She recounted once that the relevant officials brought her and her husband into a waiting area with a bunch of other people in the same situation, while rescue efforts were ongoing and no one knew who was alive and who was dead yet. She said "we were the only ones in that room who were not completely losing it, because we understood that even if they were dead, they were not gone."
You ask why a non-materialist view improves the world. This isn't exactly the right question to ask, because it's framed from an inherently materialist premise, that "the world" is all there is and therefore we'd better make the best of what we've got. Understanding that that is not the case improves you, personally. Improvements to the world are downstream from that.
It's wonderful that you get so much out of your religious beliefs! Now watch carefully as I don't poo-poo your worldview just because I happen to disagree with it.
"Aren’t cathedrals good insofar as they fill us with awe of God, who commands us to love thy neighbor as thyself?"
My understanding was that altruists thought cathedrals were bad, because they encourage people to waste their energy, time and money on non-existent entities like gods and building cathedrals to glorify them, instead of spending their time, energy and money on shrimp suffering.
"post-progress infinite wealth far future (ie 2045)."
Reading the news over the past couple of days, this comes only after the 2024 global recession sparked by stock markets panicking like headless chickens over a USA recession because Intel and Nvidia's stock prices fell after less good than anticipated earnings. The chip manufacturers are crashing, ahhhhh!!!!! so the market is now bear, ahhhhh!!!! Sell sell sell!!!!!
"Don’t feel good about having made vague gestures in favor of altruism - only feel good in proportion to the people you’ve actually helped."
Now, what does that remind me of?
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/james/2
"14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?
15 If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day,
16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?"
> My understanding was that altruists thought cathedrals were bad, because they encourage people to waste their energy, time and money on non-existent entities like gods and building cathedrals to glorify them, instead of spending their time, energy and money on shrimp suffering.
That's a very specific 21st century brand of altruist. A 12th century Christian altruist would likely have supported building cathedrals, using the argument that God's plan for society is the most beneficial possible plan, and the more people are impressed by God's institutions the more they will follow God's will.
This was actually quite a contentious debate in the twelfth century!
For some Christians, the cathedral was a portal to a holier place that heightens spiritual experience and deepens the worshipper's relationship with God.
Abbott Suger wrote in the 12th century:
> Thus sometimes when, because of my delight in the beauty of the house of God, the multicolor loveliness of the gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation, transporting me from material to immaterial things, has persuaded me to examine the diversity of holy virtues, then I seem to see myself existing on some level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of earth nor completely in the purity of heaven.
In contrast, some Christians saw cathedrals as a waste of resources. In 1125, St. Bernard of Clairvaux criticized the church for building tall, extravagant, jewel-speckled buildings while the poor suffered.
> On vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The church is resplendent in her walls and wanting in her poor. She dresses her stones in gold and lets her sons go naked. The eyes of the rich are fed at the expense of the indigent. The curious find something to amuse them and the needy find nothing to sustain them.
Interesting, thanks.
I've heard that building a cathedral was often viewed as a kind of investment - building one would attract skilled craftsmen and other people to the local area by providing jobs, and once it was completed the local area would benefit from tourism and the fame and prestige that came from having such a monument.
Local governments today do "wasteful" things like hosting the Olympics or subsidizing the construction of stadiums for professional sports teams for similar reasons.
That's really interesting — medieval cathedrals as a kind of public works project.
I really liked the last post, but this one feels to me like it missed the mark. This is vitalism as reinterpreted by an EA -- the two philosophies come out looking similar only because you have contorted the former through the lens of the latter.
> What’s the equivalent for vitalism? Suppose we took a hyperspecific definition of vitalism (“building as many tanks as possible”). Soon we’re bulldozing the cathedrals to build more tank factories, breaking up happy families to send kids to the iron mines, and ripping scientists from their blackboards to work as tank gunners.
> (if your objection is that vitalism is more about overcoming challenges than about military strength per se, you can replace this with those same WALL-E robots, only now you’re on a testosterone drip and they’re whipping you twenty hours a day to force you to try to lift a weight 0.01 kg heavier than your previous personal best.)
> (if your objection is that vitalism is more about aesthetics/beauty than strength, you can replace this with a robot churning out one billion extremely beautiful marble statues per second somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, with humankind long since extinct.)
These strawman visions of "vitalism-at-infinity" are not broken because they are hyperspecific (in contrast to the rest of vitalism which is handwavy), they are broken because they are doing the EA thing of measuring some global property of the state of the universe and maximizing it. Here's what a vitalist utopia would look like:
"Humanity has expanded to colonize the solar system, then the galaxy, and continues to expand beyond. On each planet/moon/ringworld, colonies are growing into cities, cities are growing into civilizations, which are growing into planet-spanning empires. Within each city, partnerships are forming and growing into corporations, and organizing and producing civilizational value. Individual citizens are improving themselves by growing stronger and creating value and discovering new technologies, and forming families which grow in strength and influence."
This now looks very different from utilitarianism-at-infinity. First of all, it is not a degenerate hellscape. Secondly, is robust -- we can lose many planets to asteroid strikes, but growth will continue (vs if the heroin machine breaks, the utilitarian infinity goes 100 to 0). Also, it involves a lot of suffering: every time we colonize a planet, that is risky and involves people suffering and dying in ways that they would not if they had stayed at home; for every corporation that thrives, many fail and their members suffer; when a family's power waxes, others must wane, some maybe even ending forever.
> If there were such interventions, I think vitalists would find that they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves devote more than ~10% of their time/energy/money to them, in the same way most effective altruists don’t devote more than 10% of their time/energy/money to altruism.
Vitalist interventions sound like this: "increase your strength an individual, increase the strength of your family, increase the strength of your community, increase the strength of your country, increase the strength of humanity; prioritize them in that order". Do you really think that people struggle to allocate more than 10% of their time to this intervention? I'd say most people dedicate as much as they can, impeded only by willpower and ability. An admirable/heroic person dedicates 100%.
> The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of).
You make the counterargument to this yourself, in this very same post. Mindlessly measuring "$4000 -> $56,000 of world GDP" and concluding this makes it a good use of funds is exactly the "ignorance of second-order effects" that you criticize here:
> But also, both of these scenarios ignore second-order effects. For example - aren’t happy families good, even to monomaniacal tank-builders, because they raise well-adjusted children who can build the next generation of tanks? Aren’t scientists good, because even the most theoretical among them may one day hit on an advance which could prove useful for tank construction? Aren’t cathedrals good insofar as they fill us with awe of God, who commands us to build more tanks?
In my experience, this is a classic characteristic of EA. First-order-effects are easy to measure and quantify, so interventions basically only end up ranked by first-order-effects. Second-order effects are given token acknowledgement but rarely if ever taken seriously.
I've spent a lot of time wrestling with the issue of EA/utilitarianism vs Vitalism over the past year, so I have a few questions about your perspective. I think the second order effect criticism is very strong, and I have yet to see a thought-out response from utilitarians of any stripe. I definitely think the expanding circles of priority is a far superior way of approaching problems, and is in fact true utilitarianism scaled for a societal level since any alternative is unsustainable and vulnerable to malicious hijacking (hence why the Soviet Union and any other attempt at a utopian society has failed).
What I would challenge is the idea of value maximization being bad, and rather suggest that EAs typically focus on the wrong value. To me the value that should be optimized is autonomy, meaning the ability to act in an independent and rational fashion without being subject to external influence or coercion. Following from that is the idea that intelligence is good because it increases autonomy, and the more intelligent humans are the better. This also allows for a continued belief in human rights, as a right violation is anything that involves external coercion against others (there may be situations where exceptions can be made but they need to be extreme and in some way "balance out"). Autonomy maximization also gives a good argument for why it is wrong to kill all humans and replace them with a superintelligent AI, since that goes against the autonomy of billions of sapient beings. Admittedly someone could go and say "we don't care about mouse autonomy" but to me that indicates severe misanthropy because I think humans have demonstrated objective value through our impact on the universe.
As for your vision as a futuristic vitalist society, I think it is intuitively obvious that people being inside heroin pumping machines 24/7 is a bad outcome (although if somehow that was the choice all humans independently made I think we would have to accept it). However when we get into high tech stuff and posthumanism I think the logic of what you're talking about might break down, which might be why vitalists tend to be skeptical of AI and other paradigm-shifting tech advancements. Biological immortality would shift the risk/reward ratio massively and deincentivize activities that involved physical danger. Most risky things that people do now have a high reward and a small chance of killing you, but even if you die at age 40 you are losing 50% of an 80 year lifespan. If your potential lifespan is instead a million or a billion years, any amount of physical risk far outweighs the reward you could get from doing it. Instead I think we would want to use remote controlled robots (piloted in an immersive VR like way) to explore uncolonized planets, which would offer the same benefits without the rewards. If we wanted the FEELING of danger, you could play high intensity VR sims that could even temporarily knock you out to make you feel like you had died, but which would not actually kill you. As a more extreme example, I imagine that a sufficiently powerful AI might be able to simply model large portions of the universe and create an almost indistinguishable VR replica for humans to explore, with the exception that it would be optimized to be comparatively more pleasant and if you died you would essentially "respawn". Unless you believe authenticity has some inherent value (which I don't unless the authentic version of a thing contains something which the copy lacks) doing all the same stuff in VR except without personal risk just seems like a better option.
> I think the second order effect criticism is very strong, and I have yet to see a thought-out response from utilitarians of any stripe.
Is it? It really looks like motivated reasoning to me. In the post you were responding to:
> Mindlessly measuring "$4000 -> $56,000 of world GDP" and concluding this makes it a good use of funds is exactly the "ignorance of second-order effects" that you criticize here
And then the reader is left up to themselves to conclude that Nigeria, as a country is... I don't even know what concrete thing the poster was trying to say.
The strength of the argument made, to me, looks like you double counting your preconceptions, rather than learning new information / understanding the implications better.
This is the pattern of why I personally don't want to reply to second order effects criticisms: they tend to be vague or hypothetical rather than concrete, or when they are not they are explicitly wrong (aka, here's the exact spreadsheet column on Givewell showing that at least one person has thought deeply about this). And since by their very nature there are more second order effects than first order ones, someone can just keep generating them as knockdown arguments.
I've basically never seen a vitalism advocate say things like "well, it's possible that directly trying to bring strength to society would have bad second order backlash effects, here's how we have prepared for them" (if this were true, why the hell would vitalism need to be advocated for in the first place, if it's so dang stable?).
So no, I deny that second order effects are a good argument, that all of its seeming virtues stem from double standards and ease of generation, rather than any fact about reality.
I don't totally understand all your arguments but as I see it most of the global economic and scientific value is produced by a small number of developed countries. What happens in those countries by and large determines the welfare of the rest of the world, and so far no amount of direct aid to the third world has changed its fundamental nature as miserable and impoverished (the few countries that have gone from third world to developed mostly did so through their own efforts and it seems likely that we have run out of untapped potential in the rest of the world). This means even from the perspective of maximizing the wellbeing of people in third world countries it is still better to primarily focus on improving the economic and technological productivity of the developed world, which means you need well-functioning societies that offer positive incentives to productive people rather than making masses of wretched unproductive people marginally better off.
Yes, yes, but what are you *doing*, concretely to bring this about? It may be true that the value of first world countries are 100x that of third world ones, but if what you can do for first world countries amounts to "post nonspecific plans in blog post comments", versus buy, actual real malaria nets, which, in many ethical systems of accounting, would have more than 100x the effects.
Like, I would totally support a project for education reform in the first world if it meant .1% of GDP growth per year (as a downstream measurement of the presumptively positive effects, not as an ends in and of itself). But what is it that someone can do, concretely, that can allow you to do so?
Because I suspect the *lack* of such a plan is why you can blithely say things like "second order effects" as a knockdown argument. If you had a plan, and then I came up to you and said "second order effects" in the same manner the original post had, do you abandon the plan or the idea that saying the words "second order effects" should stop action in the world?
I am saying the above because if you *did* have a plan and you *do address* the same types of "second order effects" arguments, then I can be decisively proven wrong and I am much more likely to listen.
Edit: to be absolutely clear, the type of objection I'm against is of the type "ah, have you considered that curing your child's cancer would diminish cancer research funding, by depriving it of a sympathetic victim" rather than "harvesting organs from random people is bad, because then hospitals would not be safe, and if they weren't safe people wouldn't go to them, so we're out both organ harvesting and hospitals."
I didn't include the concrete things because they have been said before by others, not because there is nothing thoughtful to be said. I'm happy to elaborate. Nigeria is a wonderful country that Nigerians should invest in and help to grow and prosper.
One example of specific negative second-order effects of global giving is that any money sent across the world is money not being reinvested in the community that created the surplus, which can in the long run cause progress to stall and the surplus to dry up. Julian's reply was largely along these lines. The meritocratic / "master morality" mindset is "those most capable of generating surplus deserve to keep it so they can leverage it to generate more".
A second specific negative second order effect is that a status quo of global giving incentivizes patheticness/victimhood, because whoever is able to portray themselves as most pathetic is the one that attracts the most charity dollars. This is at odds with the sort of self-directed progress that is required to build sustained wealth and genuinely improve economic conditions.
> One example of specific negative second-order effects of global giving is that any money sent across the world is money not being reinvested in the community that created the surplus, which can in the long run cause progress to stall and the surplus to dry up.
Am I to understand that spending 10k dollars on loot boxes and other virtual goods is going to help out the first world economy?
Or 12 million dollars to build a toilet?
On the margin that EA operates at, which constitutes less than 160x less money moved per year than the mobile gaming industry (a growth industry might I add!) It seems implausible to me on its face that if I were grand czar of the economy, that I'd want to move malaria net money into mobile gaming, even if I was maniacally focused on growth. Do you disagree? If so via what mechanism do you think mobile game growth contributes more to the economy?
Edit:in retrospect I don't think you had EAs in mind, leaving the above in there in case you thought this applies to EAs. I have no quarrel at all if you are criticizing altruism as practiced by most people.
> A second specific negative second order effect is that a status quo of global giving incentivizes patheticness/victimhood, because whoever is able to portray themselves as most pathetic is the one that attracts the most charity dollars.
I agree this is why altruism-the-emotion is bad, but I don't see how it's a bad downstream effect of altruism-as-ideology-seriously-acting-on-the-world. If you want to do altruism well, you also do research into economic policy reform--exactly what the ACX post is proposing!
[0] https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mobile-gaming-statistics from google, like first result which means it might be wrong since I haven't deeply vetted it
[1] Approx general EA donor amountshttps://www.givewell.org/about/impact
To be transparent, this doesn't include the money billionaires like Dustin Moskovitz has put into the movement, but I'm presuming that your argument is intended for the general donor. If it's just for someone like Dustin I think I'm way more receptive.
In my opinion, spending money on mobile gaming is a far worse use than spending it on malaria nets in a remote African country. But malaria nets are worse than any of: donating it to a non-profit in your community, having + supporting an extra child, buying a gym membership or a textbook (if you put them to use), investing in a company, etc.
Altruism-as-emotion is bad, and altruism-as-ideology-seriously-acting-on-the-world-as-operationalized-by-EAs is bad for similar reasons. My critique of EAs is just that they are doing good...badly. They succeed when evaluated by their own metrics but fail when evaluated by reality. I discussed this here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-99303753
> When faced with a choice between doing good and feeling good, many give charity in ways that flatter their feelings. The distinction is that for EAs, positive feelings are derived from a self-perception of rationality.
The point about mobile gaming is that your "reinvesting into the community" point would be fully consistent with spending more money on mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is merely the most stark and accepted form of "not effective first world investment", but my fundamental question is: How do you know the things you are advocating for are closer to the malaria nets end of the spectrum than the mobile gaming end?
Heck, there even is a second order effect argument around it, which is that needing money to spend for mobile gaming makes people more ambitious (this is not intended as just a facile hypothetical, a semi common, but still relatively rare anecdote among gacha players is they got higher paying jobs than they otherwise would have to find money for their next rolls)
> donating it to a non-profit in your community
Where did your incentivizes victimhood/patheticness objection go? If there are good reasons you feel this objection doesn't apply, have you checked that EAs haven't already addressed it in the same way you are saying?
> having + supporting an extra child
EAs in general are, when they think about it, not purposefully trading off donations and children. If you have counterexamples, then by all means but, amongst prominent EAs (Julia+Jeff Kauffman, Kelsey Piper, maaayybe Scott?), they are all having the number of children they plan to. (now if we are going to make claims like "but their very lifestyle limits their children to n instead of n+1", why are you talking to EAs instead of, literally any other first world, non fecund ideology?)
> buying a gym membership or a textbook (if you put them to use)
This isn't close to mutually exclusive with EA, at least not more than having a job or social life. In fact, one of the more common EA lifestyle interventions suggested *is* exercise, and one of the criticisms of the rationalist arm of EAs is that they do too much autodidactism. Also if I had to say, the median EA is about 2x as likely as a median ACX commentator to have read a text book as an adult recreationally.
It would be absurd to say something like "I don't think you should spend money on cars because it might prevent you from reading a textbook or gym membership", so I don't think this criticism is well thought out. When I say you have a double standard, this is the type of thing I'm talking about. You would *never* make this mistake when talking about any other big ticket item with low maintenance like cars, funko pops or laundry machines, but when talking about altruism, whatever mental process filtering out that objection goes on vacation, or gets overridden.
> investing in a company
Once again, why is this specifically going to be better than saving a third world life, in expectation? If I wanted to invest in index funds, that's going to be 7-11% growth per year, and so think there's a reasonable expectation that this results in longer run economic growth, but is that worth more than a life? I don't know, but saying things like "second order effects" when you haven't even given a quantitative case for even the barest first order effect estimate makes me think this is unserious.
> My critique of EAs is just that they are doing good...badly.
Your critique is a bald assertion next to a mention of SBF.
My critique is that your critique is bad. It is bad because it mostly ignores the reality of what goes on with rationalists and EAs, instead choosing to visualize an autistic person and whispering the words "this is a rationalist in real life" under your breath. Once again this is what I mean by double standard: you criticize others for rationalizing things without checking yet fail to embody the virtues that should, in theory, be your defense against this failure mode. EAs, in fact, talk endlessly about second order effects, have "flow through" effects explicitly on their cost benefit calculations, controversially HAD A DEWORMING CHARITY WITH LESS EVIDENCE THAN THEY WOULD HAVE LIKED, where most of the proposed reasoning for including it was the large effect sizes on educational outcomes, something that is basically all second order effect. These are things publicly available to read online, on the absolute central example of global poverty EA organization. I'm not asking you to be familiar with a 3 karma post on the EA forums, I'm asking you to have at least skimmed GiveWell.
If an EA wants to save lives, I don't see how they are ineffective according to their own values, other than an assertion on your part. That SBF exists doesn't mean that the Against Malaria Foundation is ineffective or that second order effects were not considered.
I agree with your take that vitalism can largely be seen as "utilitarianism that works", but that misses the infinity case -- if we had a magic wand that could turn the world into heroin machines, vitalist-via-utilitarianism types would wave it, true vitalists would not.
I don't see autonomy as inherently valuable. Some people thrive under more autonomy, some under less. I for one am largely thankful for the ways in which my autonomy was restricted by my parents as a child, and the ways in which it continues to be constrained by society and my social support system to this day.
I don't know if all vitalists will agree with this (tbh I have no idea what vitalists think, I haven't even used that word before today) but I see no contradiction between vitalism and futurism. If putting on a helmet transmits my consciousness to a robot body on a remote world that I then terraform that's fine, assuming the impact on my mind, body, and the world I am terraforming is the same as if I were there. It's not like we directly experience things anyways (all action sensation is mediated through our bodies).
I can't stand Walt Bismarck, but I salute your vision of colonizing the galaxy.
Your description of a vitalist utopia looks pretty good from an altruistic point of view. If you added details, those would probably also look good from an altruistic point of view.
The big problem with Nietzsche was that he was useless at discouraging his readers across Europe from going to war, catastrophically, in 1914. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere in his voluminous writings he said something anti-war, but the general impression that any masculine young European would have gotten from reading Nietzsche in 1890-1914 is that War Is Awesome.
Physician, heal thyself.
I don't recall coming across any quotes by him about war at all.
The one Nietzsche quote everybody knows has the word "war" in the part people usually leave off.
"If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee"? That doesn't seem to be it. "God is dead!" I don't see anything about war after that. What quote are you thinking of?
Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger
I did not know that was his. Thanks.
"School of war" is a reasonable literal translation of "Kriegsschule", but "military academy" would be a more idiomatic one which probably gets closer to capturing the meaning.
Hmm... I don't know the original, and I _certainly_ don't know the German cultural context, but "_life's_ school of war" sounds like it might be close to the English (American?) idiom of "school of hard knocks". Is it?
Or given the audience here, "Battle School" from "Ender's Game".
"You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor." -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On War and Warriors"
To be fair, Nietzsche predates Maxim. OK, technically they overlap, but most of Nietzsche's writing was I think done before publication of Hiram's masterpiece. So he was writing for an era and from a history in which the Awesome:Terrible ratio of war was rather farther towards "Awesome" than it was about to become, and I'm not sure we can reasonably have expected him to anticipate that.
The big problem is that Nietzsche didn't have an intellectual heir who in the early oughts wrote "Wait, hang on, this is how all that Master/Slave Will to Power stuff needs to work in the age of fully mechanized warfare, maybe becoming a successful industrialist is vital enough"
I don't think the US can claim credit for inventing the microwave oven; a m̶a̶d̶ British scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock) almost-certainly* invented the microwave oven as part of his hamster-cryogenics research (no, really).
*Almost-certainly in that we don't have the exact dates, but Lovelock was very likely first in a sort of Newton-Leibniz sense.
Furthermore, given that *inventing the microwave oven* basically just consisted of *getting an already-existing magnetron and putting it in a box*, I'd argue that the magnetron was the real invention anyway - and this was effectively donated to the US during WWII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission)
I dunno: the standard story is that Percy Spencer (working for Raytheon) invented the microwave oven in 1945; Raytheon definitely submitted the patent for a microwave cooking device that year. Lovelock seems to have been doing his hamster revivification experiments in the 1950s, and even then he was using microwaves to warm them up, not to cook food (which is kind of what a microwave oven is: a device designed to cook things with microwaves). Like, credit the British with inventing magnetrons, but none of them thought to cook food with them.
I don't agree that it has to be used to cook food in order to count as an oven - it heats stuff up and if whoever invents the oven happens to want to heat frozen hamsters up but then the whole of the rest of the world subsequently chooses to use it to heat food up, I would still credit the original inventor.
That being said - I think you're absolutely correct that Spencer and Raytheon predate Lovelock and I concede the point. (Thanks for correcting me! I think my knowledge of Lovelock's microwave hamster-defrosting oven might have come from his obituary - which understandably probably didn't want to digress into talking about Raytheon...)
Thanks for trying to flesh this out more Scott. I am not Bismarck and don't agree with him on most things, but I do agree with a philosophy in the same general direction as his and feel that there is a real difference between the goals of Altruism and Vitalism. I'll try to make a succinct description of the difference, in my view.
I'm glad you used the word "real" near the end, as I think that's the most important word for Vitalism. Vitalism is, to me, an attempt at adjusting to the real world, not status games or what we would prefer the world to be. That's the source of the fascination with war. War forced WWII American torpedo makers to develop better technology, because the ones we made at the start of the war sucked. We also had to improve planes, ships, radar, whatever. Ukrainian economics aren't improving, but they are getting really good at drone warfare - because the current situation forces them to get good at it. The tactics developed may change how warfare is conducted around the world, and the Ukrainian military will be on the cutting edge of this. Kinda like how battleships became obsolete due to carriers, but we didn't know that until WWII happened and we saw it in action for a while.
Okay, to move away from strictly war-based ideas. Welfare payments reduce pressure on people to improve. The opposing side would never phrase it like that, but if phrased more positively ("welfare payments reduce pressure on people to [conform/work themselves to death]"), then pretty much everyone would agree about the effect. Pressure, in this sense, is anything at all that makes people act in a way that both recognizes the real effects of what they do, and move in a "positive" direction (with an acknowledgement that we're going to have a really hard time defining "positive" here). Altruism tries to circumvent the pressure and jump to the end goal, while vitalism says that goal is impossible. The very actions you take to reduce the pressure prevent the positive effects from the pressure and result in a worse society.
One side sees the lack of pressure as a positive, and would be considered altruists. The other side sees the lack of pressure as a negative, and would be vitalists. Vitalists would almost certainly agree that there's a level of pressure that's too much - the person under pressure will break rather than improve. Altruists would almost certainly agree that there's a level of pressure that is too little (as with those who don't want heroin drips). I mostly agree that in practice Vitalists and Altruists in the modern West should have similar methods. What Vitalists are saying is that the overall trend should either move towards more pressure, or at least not less pressure, while Altruists seem to want to continue removing that pressure.
All of this is well and good, but it seems to me that those hardcore vitalists should practice what they preach much more. Like moving to Ukraine to get a feel for what real pressure tastes like, instead of having pretty theories about it.
I think their ultimate goal is to strengthen their local countries, or at least stem the tide of what's weakening those countries. Not all pressure is equally good, and not all pressure produces what the person would want. Learning drone warfare is all well and good, I suppose, but it's not exactly the be-all, end-all important thing.
My impression is that such people aren't usually under particular pressure themselves, don't consider this to be a problem, but are eager to put (or keep) others under it. Even from a signalling perspective, knowing what you're talking about seems useful.
We're all under constant significant pressure. We just think of some things (like the pressure to eat and breath) to be perfectly normal and put other things (like the pressure to sexually submit to a boss) as outside of normal. Pressure here means anything at all, to any extent, that encourages us to act in a certain way instead of another.
The tricky part is determining which pressures are "normal" and "good" and which are not. Vitalists have a different list than Altruists, despite both hoping for similar end results. Vitalists think that there should be pressure for people to get jobs and be productive - most people agree, depending on the severity of the pressure and whether or not there's edge cases where the pressure is bad or too much. Ordinary people should not be pressured to the point of breakdown (even for a Vitalist, it's not helpful or productive in any case). Mentally handicapped people should not be pressured to have jobs in order to survive, but maybe pressured in a more mild way to have jobs so they can be more active and social.
A very partial list of benign/helpful pressures:
Pressure to socialize.
Pressure to text a friend back.
Pressure to not kill people or otherwise hurt them.
Pressure to tell your spouse "I love you" once in a while.
Pressure to not use racial slurs.
Pressure to not be evil.
You get the idea. Vitalists are not hypocrites is they want more pressure in more areas, but aren't moving to the place with the most pressure possible.
I don't think of myself as being in either camp, but it seems pretty obvious that they diverge very widely in very normal situations. You give an important example - welfare. Another similar example is UBI. These are both mainstream political positions that are absolutely not similarly recommended by altruism or vitalism systems
I think a lot of supporters of UBI genuinely believe that it will improve people’s ability to improve, more than it will de-motivate them.
All I can say is that the belief flies in the face of both common sense and evidence.
What evidence does it fly in the face of? I thought UBIs generally looked good in studies (e.g. https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f192616.pdf: key quote “Communities receiving UBI experienced substantial economic expansion—more enterprises, higher revenues, costs, and net revenues—and structural shifts, with the expansion concentrated in the non-agricultural sector.”)
Out of curiosity, have you read "Ra"? It has a concept of "reality" that seems parallel.
https://qntm.org/ra
I like the way you are thinking, but I feel like it misses something. Pressure can be an important tool, but the goal is flourishing. Nature provides one-size-fits-all pressure, and converts the failures into living food, but pressure designed by humans has the possibility of being intelligently tailored for optimal growth. (E.g., video games with a good skill progression, or weightlifting bro-science.) But this runs the risk of becoming unreal - we must always remember the true enemy is nature, or in other words, reality itself. (E.g., sports based on a real-world activity that have diverged so far that the skills involved have almost no transfer to the current interactions of the real-world activity itself.)
Teleologically, the goal is winning; enjoying facing pressure is how we get good enough to win, but we shouldn't fetishize pressure or ignore its costs. That's a road to masturbatory excess and to wasting human lives.
I think a fundamental test that would divide altruists and vitalists is this:
"the basilisk will torture 100x copies of your mind unless you do X"
the altruist's first instinct is to be swayed
the vitalist's first instinct is to tell the basilisk to piss off
to the altruist, matter is means to the end of shaping mind
to the vitalist, mind is a means to the end of shaping matter
What if you just don't think the copies are real?
Wisdom.
Or that the basilisk can't be trusted.
""to the altruist, matter is means to the end of shaping mind
to the vitalist, mind is a means to the end of shaping matter""
Might need to justify these assumptions. I don't think either view really makes a stand on matter/mind
I didn't mean to wade into, e.g., dualism vs. monism waters with that statement. I just wanted to summarize what I consider to be the most salient and deep seated difference between the two philosophies.
(I admit freely that I am putting my own spin on the two definitions here in a way that might not align precisely with how they are used in the post, but in my defense I will say that I am doing this to try and reach a deeper and more fundamental delineating of the two psychologies. What follows below is speculation with dubious epistemic status, with the primary objective of elucidating and putting into words certain intuitions)
To vitalists, the ultimate locus of axiological value is *external*. Individual experiences (their internal states) are ultimately subordinate to some grand and glorious organization of the physical world. A vitalist, in my view, might consider a state of the universe beautiful or desirable even in the absence of anyone to observe it. An extreme vitalist might even embrace Bostrom's "Disneyland without children", because that world itself is aesthetically pleasing from "God's eye view". This external aesthetic locus is ultimately why, I think, pain and suffering are permissible in the vitalist view. In the context of futurism: e/acc is a vitalist philosophy -- a glorious sacrifice of humanity to the machine god is cool from an *external* view, and the internal states of those being sacrificed are subordinated. Vitalists find the SSA/SIA/doomsday argument type questions idle curiosities.
Altruists, on the other hand, make *internal* states the primary axiological locus. An altruist might consider an empty universe desirable (negative utilitarians), or not (pro-natal utilitarians), but an altruist would not distinguish e.g. the Disneyland without children from a homogeneous mass of dust, since they have the same internal states (none). In the context of futurism: AI safety is an altruistic philosophy, because the total accounting of happy internal states that will exist might vary greatly if some rogue (and, horrifyingly, not even conscious) AI kills everyone. Altruists care deeply about SSA/SIA/doomsday argument type questions, because these are required to do a proper accounting of how good a course of action is.
This post rests on the assumption that altruists and vitalists are utilitarians who happen to have different utility functions. Which is fine if you’re a utilitarian, but most people are not. I consider myself an altruist (a Christian actually) but the goal of altruism is to have (agape) love for all people, not to maximize their happiness. If virtue ethicists like myself can be said to want to maximize anything then it’s purely internal: I want to maximize my virtue, as in having just the right amount of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, righteousness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. It’s not loving to hook my neighbor up to an IV drip of hedonism: how will they be free to develop their own virtue if they’re blissed out 24/7?
I understand the argument that all moral systems boil down to utilitarianism, but in practice they always seem to cash out differently: a utilitarian like Scott will think of moral conflicts in terms of maximizing a utility function, while a virtue ethicist like myself will think of moral conflict in terms of virtue vs vice, sin against holiness.
EDIT: To say all this more succinctly, vitalists are not trying to maximize strength across all humans, they’re trying to maximize their own strength. They’re (most of them) virtue ethicists who, unlike good Christians, do not consider altruistic love a virtue. They don’t give a whit about making other people strong.
> This post rests on the assumption that altruists and vitalists are utilitarians who happen to have different utility functions.
Where did this (rationalist?) habit of using "utilitarianism" to mean "maximizing consequentialism" come from? It's not remotely consistent with how anyone else uses the word. Anything that could reasonably be called "utilitarianism" is at a minimum agent-neutral, and most likely trying to maximize some notion of well-being (happiness and preference-satisfaction being the two standard cases).
Read "utility function" to mean the same as "maximize some notion of well-being".
> how will they be free to develop their own virtue if they’re blissed out 24/7?
Why is this a relevant consideration if what you're maximizing is YOUR virtue?
If altruistic love (agape) is one of the virtues you are trying to maximize, then treating others the way you would want to be treated *is* maximizing your own virtue. That's why Christian virtue ethicists are also altruists, love is literally the most important Christian virtue (see 1 Corinthians 13:13, and Matthew 22:37-39)
"vitalists are not trying to maximize strength across all humans, they’re trying to maximize their own strength"
The argument is that humans do better in groups, are stronger in groups. So being 'altruistic' to the group, so the group can more successfully hunt, and educate the young to have future big smart warriors, etc... Then the individuals within the group can reach higher levels of strength, they would be starting at a higher level of strength, boosted by the group. Rather than what a lone human is like, alone squatting in the bush starving.
That would make a vitalist favor helping other humans grow stronger, but only those humans that will make him grow stronger if they grow stronger (and only if they're utilitarian vitalists). Most humans do not make you stronger when they grow stronger! An argument could be made for utilitarian vitalists wanting to strengthen their own groups, such as their country, their political party, their social club, etc, but where is the argument for maximizing strength across all humans? Would a vitalist be in favor of strengthening his enemies by 50% because that would increase the world average level of strength? I can't imagine he would.
No, of course. I thought the original argument was about individuals versus the group. If you include all humans, even enemies, then no, they aren't in the group. I'm only saying that the 'rugged individual' that survives on his own, is a big myth. Groups build up the infrastructure that allow people to strive for me. But of course, there are different groups, and individuals in that group would want to support each other. It gets complicated if we try to expand to some kind of set theory and decide what the 'group' is. That is where all this breaks down. Some people are viewing this through the lenses of immediate family and friends, like around 150 Dunbar Number. But once you scale up to nations, other rules apply, we can't just break down into anarchy with every individual doing their own thing.
I can't just drive on the other side of the road because I've used my strength through my Super-Man striving and reached the ultimate of being able to drive on the other side of the road. And everyone else that doesn't is weak. You are all herd animals staying on that side of the road.
I think we're 180 degrees off the mark here. A society where robots churn out tanks (or beautiful statues, or buff guys) while its people kinda just do what they're told isn't anywhere close to a vitalist society. Nietzsche would hate those guys.
The whole point of vitalism is that you exercise will to break free of societal constraints. So in a maximally vitalist society, every person is pursuing a different personal goal for mostly aesthetic reasons and when those goals conflict they fight and maybe someone wins. The fighting isn't the point, the exercise of power over the self and others is. Joining a gym isn't vitalism unless you, completely independent of any outside influences, decide to get super buff.
I am not a vitalist and I don't really think vitalism is...real? Like it's not psychologically tenable, it just makes a really good story. So if a middle-class dude with support from his parents does a good job in business, that's not really a vitalist success story because he hasn't sua sponte created his own goal independent of his environment and pursued it against a host of challenges like Hercules. Comfort is the enemy of vitalism because vitalists define their philosophy to include an absence of comfort. It doesn't matter if comfort makes us better at reaching goals because the fact that the comfort was there makes the goals less meaningful.
Ironically, this post made that incoherent philosophy sound super appealing just by failing to understand it.
Nietzsche would hate those guys, but he might love the society that built that society. If vitalism ever exceeded, I think it would hate what it became - along the lines of "a strong society creates weak men" kind of thought. Philosophically, I think they believe it's impossible to actually win, in large part because of that cycle. Perhaps Rome won for a period of time, but then created weak men and the ongoing need for strong men to come back.
To me, I think the point of vitalism, or at least the variety of vitalism that I'd support, is to rescue "do cool things and be awesome" from the dull demands of "optimise your actions to create the greatest good for the greatest number".
It's hard to turn that into a coherent moral philosophy that you can put right up there next to "please maximise global utils". Vitalism doesn't optimise for anything in particular, it just gives you an excuse to do not-necessarily-optimal things just because they sound awesome.
If you really wanted to make a utilitarian argument for vitalism you could. Pure utilitarianism is a short-sighted optimisation procedure which is likely to get you stuck in a local maximum, while vitalism gives you the big random shocks that you need to get out of your local maximum and towards faraway higher ground.
This is a good comment. I agree and have nothing to add.
Wait - one thing: I think the vision/narrative you describe is useful because sometimes untrue stories can be useful and become more useful if you believe them. But that doesn't change the fact that vitalism in reality is wrong at best and destructive at worst. Comfortable, happy people do actually create more impactful and useful works than struggling folks in volatile societies.
Yeah, I'm not in favour of any form of vitalism that is pro "struggling folks in volatile societies".
The closest I'll get to endorsing that is saying that making everyone as comfortable as possible isn't the best possible goal, and I'd be comfortable with somewhat more of a comfort gradient between high achievers and low achievers, if that incentivises high achievement.
>To me, I think the point of vitalism, or at least the variety of vitalism that I'd support, is to rescue "do cool things and be awesome" from the dull demands of "optimise your actions to create the greatest good for the greatest number".
To me, that, at least, sounds reasonable. Depending on how stringent the "do cool things and be awesome" is, that can reduce to everyone having a hobby that they are enthusiastic about, which is a perfectly livable outcome, and will result in some people even doing the occasional thing that _other_ people think is cool too.
>because he hasn't sua sponte created his own goal independent of his environment and pursued it against a host of challenges like Hercules
Not really relevant to the overall point, but did you mean Odysseus? Hercules didn't set his own heroic goals himself, he was carrying out tasks assigned by Eurystheus.
Good catch actually, and I think it might be relevant. Odysseus wasn't really self-directing either, in fact none of the great heroes of culture were. The mythic hero archetype is based on the idea that you can overcome your environment but that's not really a thing - we're products of our environments and we take actions for reasons.
Which is why I tend to think of this idea of a superman who does things for "his own reasons" as an appealing but ultimately empty fiction.
Gilgamesh, I think, was writing his own path. He didn't *succeed* in finding immortality, but he's the one who decided on that quest (and I think most of his other adventures).
"Finally, I think a lot of people think of this in terms of “Africans’ lives are worse less than nothing and I want to get rid of them”."
These people should work to bring every African country up to the level of the 1st world, so that the birth rates fall below replacement
If you consider this reasoning to be sound, would you also say that anyone who believes otherwise should work AGAINST bringing "African countries" to "1st world" levels?
“Nobody lives in the US anymore, it’s too big.”
>If I wanted to strengthen humanity as much as possible, I’d probably work on economic development, curing diseases, or technological progress. I might have slightly different priorities from the effective altruists working on these same causes, but I’d consider them 99%-allies.
I think there's an entirely defensible argument the vitalist might make - that our culture is so inundated with slave morality memes that fighting against that (by, say, blogging about Bronze Age pirates) is the most important cause. Unlike economic development, it's also neglected and tractable, if you'll forgive me my EA jargon.
In general, this whole thesis of "vitalism and altruism are in 99% of cases allied out of convenience" just, I don't know, seems very weak. To begin with, "strengthening humanity", as I understand it, has nothing to do per se with technological progress, or economic development, or curing diseases. Those things are only interesting to the vitalist because it takes strong people to accomplish them, no? Just because you elevate Civilization (TM) to this hallowed position of instrumental and terminal goal at the same time, doesn't mean everyone has to.
>tractable
Is it? Have they been tracking how well do their memes penetrate the populace?
Several of your examples seem utilitarian instead of individualistic; suppose chad wakes up on day and a homeless, immigrant, diagenic mental ill person throws poop at him. Chad being stotic, could take this in stride but doesn't want a society where this happens and simply kills the homeless person on the spot. In a vilitistic society, wouldn't chad be allowed to go free, in an hyper altruistic one, like, oh, parts of California, he wouldn't?
After aggregation, good ideas are good ideas and edge cases disappear(in thought experiments anyway), but in the real world you need to make calls on each case, with partial information.
Given a hard problem where it looks like an abuse of power is happening, do you side with the powerful or the (appearing) powerless? These two systems have different answers.
I had the same thought. Like Diogenes!
>Chad being stotic, could take this in stride but doesn't want a society where this happens and simply kills the homeless person on the spot.
This of course raises the age old question: is it better to live in a world where people throw poop or a world where people kill poop throwers?
Yes the age old question; there has never been a solution to the mentally ill that prevented homelessness
On the question of where vitalism differs from altruism on policy, you're saying that if everyone agrees on what the consequences of enacting Policy A will be, then vitalists and altruists will agree on whether Policy A is a good idea.
But in reality, vitalists and altruists clearly have different intuitions about the consequences of policy. Let's look at regulation of nuclear power: that was clearly implemented with an altruist justification, even if you can say they would have decided differently if they knew the outcome would be negative utility. You could say the same thing about FDA failures, or a bunch of other bad regulations that we're currently living with.
So maybe your version of altruism wouldn't do any of those things, but it's still a reasonable question to ask: why do people with altruistic motivations keep making such bad decisions?
Because the emotion of altruism is bad and predictably makes people make bad decisions. Altruism-the-feeling is pretty obviously generated from the incentives that encourage signalling. See: the "altruism" of making children do things neither the parent nor the child naturally like, is to signal to other parents how good a parent you are, and not to maximize the human potential of the child. The "altruism" of volunteering overseas or at a soup kitchen, the talk naturally drifts towards what the volunteer thought of the situation, how the subject of charity is in a bad position, rather than towards the effectiveness of the intervention.
If someone is feeling the emotion of altruism intensely, they are extremely likely to not be thinking primarily about the effects of the altruism on outcomes, but on what virtues can be demonstrated by their actions.
There's an almost unending list of disasters caused by people with altruistic impulses (usually wanting to avoid harm) not thinking through or being wrong about the consequences of their policies:
- BLM/depolicing killed many more through increased crime
- War in Iraq, interventions in Syria/Libya
- FDA rules about drug trials, CDC rules about covid testing, etc.
- Housing/zoning regulations
- Welfare policy causing disintegration of poor families
It's a little hard to construct a counterfactual because who knows what the world would look like if elites looked at things primarily through a vitalist lens instead of an altruistic one.
But at the margin anyway, using more vitalist intuitions for policy seems really likely to get better results, if only because it would likely fix the most obvious own goals -- especially over-regulation.
The problem is that when you generate the result of counterfactual, you don't end up having unlikely and unfavorable events to your ideology in them. You're not going to imagine riots based on false accusations of autonomy reduction, you're not going to generate wasteful provisions to bills, you're not going to generate 2 -degrees-of-separation-negative-effects, that you would currently ascribe to altruism, because your mind is going to be focused on all the nice things vitalism does, and only incidentally, on correctly modeling what happens with mass adoption of ideology.
To be clear, I am pro embiggening and would agree that your proposal does seem to make sense, but I don't agree intuitions on abstract motivations for policies are a good way of understanding or influencing the world.
Yes - I agree.
I think where we agree is there's like a "pathological altruism" impulse or motivation that is very prevalent in recent history and causes people to miscalculate or ignore the consequences of policies because they sound altruistic.
And my point is that Scott shouldn't just wave off the difference between vitalism and altruism as negligible, because if people make the same calculations about consequences then they don't differ that much.
In reality, someone coming from vitalist ideology is just going to make very different calculations about the consequences of their policies. Like you said, the second order effects of people adopting vitalist ideology would probably be really dramatic, and not negligible at all.
Would it be better? Really hard to know. But the idea that it wouldn't be different at all is wrong.
I don’t like the argument “X was dumb, X was motivated by Y, therefore Y is dumb”. More policy is motivated by altruism than by vitalism, therefore more bad policy is motivated by altruism. Bad policy motivated by vitalism is also possible (most corruption is motivated by misguided vitalism, just like the FDA is motivated by misguided altruism).
Sure - I agree that currently altruism motivates much more policy than vitalism, and that we can't really know what a world where vitalism dominates would look like.
I'm just saying -- contra Scott -- you can't just wave away the differences between altruism and vitalism because they should theoretically agree about policy questions. In reality, vitalists clearly don't agree with altruists about policy, so a vitalist world would be very different - maybe better, maybe worse.
Vitalism and *happiness* may often go hand in hand, but arguably vitalism and *altruism* aimed to increase happiness often diverge.
Saving lives, curing diseases increases both happiness and a society's strength. But who can't pay for their own treatments? Old pensioners, disabled people, people with expensive chronic diseases whose treatment costs more than what they can ever produce. Likewise, technology can make people happier (and perhaps more advanced and productive), but we only need altruism for that if they aren't productive enough to pay for it themselves. We could say that vitalism and altruism diverge, even in fairly normal situations.
But I assume there are forms of altruism vitalists would approve of, like volunteering for the military, and being more heroic than the minimum required. So it's perhaps better to say that altruism aimed to increase the happiness of others diverges from altruism with vitalistic motivations.
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I'm not trying to defend vitalism, especially not as an end goal. The sort of sacrifices vitalism makes may be useful on the short run to increase happiness on the long run, which is probably the origin of vitalist ideas, and in which case they are perfectly compatible with and prescribed by consequentialist ethics; but they don't make sense as universal end goals. People may choose to defy challenges as a satisfying end goal instead of the pure hedonism of the heroin addict—even in a post-scarcity society there would be athletes who take pride in their strength—, but that's not something that needs to be forced on others, and it's also compatible with happiness-maximizing ethics if we interpret happiness as satisfaction of one's preferences, rather than activating opioid receptors.
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Re: specific examples:
If a Kenyan can produce $56,000, why can't Kenya fund the $4000 interventions to save lives? (AFAIUI the interventions in question don't require the $4000 to be paid as a lump sum, but are small costs that probabilistically may save a life, and come out to $4000/life in expectation.) Likely they can; the $4000 is around the very lowest cost to save a life of some of the poorest people in the poorest parts of Africa, not the average Kenyan.
Re: "Children don’t die of illnesses because they’re “dysgenic” or “weak”. They die because their immune systems haven’t developed yet": those are not mutually exclusive explanations, unless genetics can't possibly influence one's resistance to a disease, which definitely isn't the case for malaria; the heterozygotic sickle cell trait famously confers an advantage.
Here, too, that's not to say I endorse foregoing medical treatments so we evolve more genetic resistance to diseases. The valid purpose of genetic resistance would be to not die from diseases, but it's an ineffective and costly (in terms of lives) way to do something that can often be done more cheaply and effectively by technology. What's more, sometimes there are tradeoffs between different forms of genetic fitness (see the sickle cell trait again); preventing malaria through technology allows us to evolve towards having less sickle cell anemia.
Julius Caesar had a pleasant childhood, it appears, but his father died when he was only 15. He became the head of household and married a girl he loved, Cornelia; but when he was 17 the dictator of Rome, Sulla, ordered him to divorce her. He refused, and had to go into hiding for fear of his life.
When he was 19, he became an officer in the military and faced combat. He saved another soldier's life in battle, so presumably this was not easy at all. In other words, he led a life of danger and real threats by the most powerful man in the Western world -- threats to his very existence. These he faced with courage and dignity, but he seems to be more of a testament to the value of vitalism than anything else, and I think he has been viewed this way for two millenia.
>the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip
Unfortunately, the West already *does* ban the vast majority of Gazans from emigrating.
Fortunately, the West understands the value of quarantine.
A literal quarantine is for people with diseases. A societal quarantine, by analogy, is to contain the spread of diseased culture. There's a reason that no one, even their Arab neighbors, wants to take in Palestinians: the rest of the world has the better part of a century worth of history to look back on and see that every time someone does, they bring the intense violence and misery that they left along with them.
The most dangerous words ever spoken are "this time will be different, I swear!"
I think a big consideration is to weaken and eventually destroy Israel as a Jewish state via the Palestinian cause; moving the Palestinians from there would obviously play against it.
Palestinians moved geographically away from Israel can still do everything in their power to destabilize a host country to keep it from giving money to Israel.
I'm not sure it's "the West" that is doing most of the banning there. Today, it's pretty much specifically Israel. Before 10/7, it was mostly Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, partly UNRWA, partly Israel, and the rest of "the West" mostly not just doing much to *help* the Gazans emigrate.
Do you have any source that Israel and especially Egypt stop Palestinians from emigrating? Clearly, they don't allow Palestinians to *immigrate* but do you have a source that they wouldn't allow them to transit through their countries - or by sea - to some other country that would want them? I read about Egypt allowing Palestinians through in the rare cases that they could prove that they were immediately leaving to some other country that wanted them (or even foreign passport holders for whom that was a presumption).
For a quick rundown of Egypt's tolerance for Palestinian refugees, https://inkstickmedia.com/why-wont-egypt-accept-palestinians/
I'm pretty sure you're right about Egypt's de facto policy being that Palestinians are only allowed to cross out of Gaza into Egypt if they've got confirmed transportation and entry visas for Someplace Not Egypt. Which raises the question, why do all the Not-Egypt places that claim to care so very very much about the poor suffering Palestinians, not arrange visas for Palestinians who want out?
Most countries have fairly restrictive immigration policies, in general. The US lets in about a million legal immigrants per year compared to something like 100 million people who'd like to immigrate to the US.
Still, some Palestianians have been allowed to leave - an estimated 100,000 per this article from June: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/world/middleeast/palestinians-gaza-gofundme-egypt.html. It doesn't estimate what percentage of those were foreign citizens as opposed to Gazans who were allowed to emigrate to particular countries.
As you implied, the latter is relatively rare. Canada, for example, made a special allowance for Palestianian immigration, and even that was limited to relatives of Canadians, only allowed them to live in Canada temporarily, and most significantly, capped the number of eligible Gazans at 1,000, later raising it to 5,000: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/28/canada-announces-five-fold-increase-in-visas-for-palestinians-in-gaza.
Interestingly, Canada increased the cap only after Egypt shut down the Rafah crossing, preventing any Gazans from leaving.
Restrictive immigration policies, yes, but note that Europe already hosts more than a million Syrian refugees, with another three million in Turkey. That's enough to absorb the entire population of Gaza twice over.
The only difference I can see between Syrians who want to live in e.g. Germany, and Gazans who want to live in Germany, is that w/re the Palestinians, Berlin can just do nothing and let Egypt be the baddies who stop the telegenic suffering refugees at the border; they'd have to do it themselves to stop the Syrians.
Hm, the "vitalism maximizing" examples certainly look to me, maybe not like outright strawmen, but like very little thought was given to them, just taking the basic shape of the utilitarian optimizatino goal, and swapping "happy agents" for something else.
I'm not an expert on vitalism, but if it's about strength and heroism, wouldn't taking these to the extreme involve having fewer people with more individual power to each of them? E.g. instead of tiling the galaxy with 10^23 of individuals leaving normal comfortable life, tile it with 100 billions people each with a robotic Kardashev II civilization all to themselves, which they can use to build planet-sized works of art, or develop ways to colonize other galaxies, or augment themselves to the levels never dreamt of, or (of course!) wage epic wars with each other, or whatever else they feel like. Granted this is more of a specific image than a function to maximize, but the corresponding function may be something along the lines "maximize the utility of each existing conscious agent while setting the utility of any not-yet-existing agents to zero". Or maybe just "make sure that the amount of resources available to each agent growth infinitely" (Implementation details on how to make an entire galaxy-spanning civilization to share the same moral philosophy are of course left as an exercise for the reader, just like in the EA visions of the future.)
A future along these lines looks to me definitely more appealing than the one of the eternal heroin bliss. If there are any True Vitalists in the comments, I wonder if something along these lines sounds like a better or worse approximation of their views at infinity than "building infinite combat capacity/art"?
Not a vitalist, but it is not really a vitalist exercise to locate what drives people to mimic great or unique people or gods. That is an exercise of the weak and detached. The vital being just is the case of our species and what makes their presence a representation driving mimitic forces throughout civilization has more to do with a plethora of legitimating forces. It's not necessary to locate, and no one giving distiction to it as a finality is truly distinguishing the vital sources. You may become that person in fulling embracing lifeaffirming pursuits, but it's not necessarily so, and it's just as well that you will become a failed imposture as many of the Italian fascists were that tried to unsuccessfully make vitalism a program. Vitalism that strives self-consciously always fails, but the world is still filled with representations of vitality that drive humanity as a legitamating force of our values. Vitality does have resonance in historical, universal abstractions like biological strength, but there is an incredible amount of diversity in biological strength suited for different purposes. And whether or not people recognise that vitality among those different biological strengths has nothing to do with if that mimic force will help vitality flourish in our civilization. It could very well become a dysegenic type of force and lead a civilization to ruin if not suited to their environment. The true vitalist is unconsciously engaged in their pursuits without seeking to be vital, instead embracing traedgy and cruelty, without knowledge of their tragdic influence on those influenced for better or worse. That's my main take away, that what is vital is not the heroism but those forces on the weak to seek in strong how they should become, how they should live. You can't really see one without the other, and you cant really say much about their legitimacy, and you sure as hell can't do so detached and self-conscious, trying to remake yourself, others, or the world. The people saying otherwise are just fools and charlatines and try-hards.
Those who talk of vitalism seem to generally crave *dominance* if not war, sort of an eternal NFL season where the losers are cast aside. I'm sure that the optimal fraction of the population that is megalomaniacs is not zero, but it's also quite small ...
morbidly obese people on heroin drips stands no chance against the utopian hot people on heroin drips
I've always felt like there's a paradox in the vitalist and adjacent ideologies. They don't want people to just get what they want, "they should have to struggle for it"
"Well by opposing your worldview and stopping you from imposing this on others, I'm glad I'm helping you achieve your dream of having to struggle to get what you want" the system works!
"The strong should dominate the weak" They are, right now. The universe has spoken. Anyone not dominating at this moment is by definition weak. 10 weak people can dominate 1 strong person. Vitalism has no adherents because it is weak. gg
Oh you don't like the rules of the universe, what it requires to win, and who ended up being dominant? Sounds like you are in favor of dysgenic policies!
Moloch is either your god or your devil. Pick one please.
If you recognize the obvious paradox in your strawman, have you considered that is not the definition of "weak" they're using?
Another paradox,
vitalists say: "Do what you really want to do, don't donate money to bed nets"
I say "I really want to donate money to bed nets"
vitalists say "that's just what other people tell you to do, you shouldn't do things that people tell you to do"
I say "You are an 'other person' and you just told me to do something"
I mean sure maybe they only mean to argue against the strong form of Altruism, ie the one that says "doing the most good is a real moral obligation" as opposed to just "an abstraction of our values we have chosen to centralize" which is where most EA end up.
But then again most people are neither EAs nor vitalists. Most people value their own happiness more than the happiness of others but value the happiness of others more than 0. For most people there is no extrapolated value system that says "I must pursue the most good for the most people and the way to do that is to prioritize my own well being so I am motivated to not abandon this system"
Rather for most people it's just "I will pursue what I like and I like my own comfort and I also like helping others so I will find some balance of doing both"
so most acts of altruism don't come from an "altruistic system" but from a selfish system.
But vitalism tries to argue that altruistic acts are wrong because they are not selfish and in so doing is telling people what they aught to be want instead of letting people want the things they want themselves - ie its just as paternalistic as it claims all the other ethical systems are.
>Effective altruists often spend money curing/preventing malaria in Third World countries...Isn’t this still just adding extra bodies to Third World countries ..? Not really. The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year...
I'm not sure why Kenya is being mentioned. Neither the Against Malaria Foundation's net distribution or Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention operate in Kenya.
The countries where anti-malarial programs operate are generally poorer, with AMF's largest beneficiary from 2012 to 2021 being the DRC, whose GDP per capita is just $715, and MC's largest beneficiary from 2018-2021 being Nigeria, whose GDP per capita is $1110.
Additionally, the parts of these countries where programs operate are probably much poorer than the countries as a whole. The estimate of annual income added from these programs could be high by an order of magnitude.
>If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP
Additionally, if we want to estimate the value of future earnings, we need to discount them to the present, as noted in another comment.
Next, it's not at all obvious that preventing children dying from malaria would lead to more people generations later, as lower infant mortality seems to lead to lower birthrates (and vice versa).
>Finally, I think a lot of people think of this in terms of “Africans’ lives are worse less than nothing and I want to get rid of them”. Even if this is where you’re coming from, you’re not getting rid of one billion people, sorry.
This argument is weaker given that as noted above, the ones dying of malaria are far poorer than the average African. They're likely some of the poorest people in the world.
>Your best option is to make Africa less of a mess, so that it can take care of itself and its people don’t try to immigrate elsewhere.
This seems dubious. Even if the people dying of malaria were 10 times richer (and probably much more than that, given the numbers above) they'd still want to immigrate elsewhere. Furthermore, immigration is selective, the people who immigrate tend to be the most fortunate within their regions, while as noted, those dying of malaria tend to be the poorest.
The would seem to be a development economics question that we may have answers to. I'll see if I can dig something up. (No response would mean I'm too lazy rather than the results came out unfavorably)
Also, it seems rather questionable to assume that the size of a country's economy would grow linearly with the size of the population, even if the inhabitants would be entirely fungible.
Maybe I've missed them all somewhere, but you seem to be arguing against a kind of consequentialist vitalism that seems a little odd. You're bang on that there would be lots of similarities between it and utilitarianism, but only because the whole thing would collapse into one of those utilitarian-light eudaemonia-maximisation ideas anyway.
Most vitalists presumably either want to strengthen something specific (eg themselves, a country, a race), or else approve of actions by the most vital that demonstrate their vitality without regard to the consequences. Think Nazis. Their goal wasn't a general preference for big militarised countries fighting each other, it was for Germany to be really big and 'vital.'
I think that part of the problem here is that vitalism is a really bad fit for applying rigour to modern mass/internet politics. The game is:
1. Look at this thing (text anecdote/graph/image/video)
2. Say if it's good/bad
3. Justify 2 using a framework
4. Say what needs to be done/should have been done instead
Vitalism may be geared towards practical ethical choices (what should I do in scenario x, what virtues/tendencies should I cultivate?), but for judging people's actions it's a complete mess if it tries to go beyond "I do[n't] like this person." You can use it to judge people, but that's not a politics argument because it doesn't have step 4, so it all falls flat.
(P.S., 'Vitalism' seems like a fairly daft moral system anyway; if you're leaning in that direction, you should probably try to learn to want things for non-signalling reasons without becoming the headline "heroin-addled homeless man arrested for masturbating while shoplifting tub of ice cream." I'm not sure this is 100% possible if you're raised by human beings, but sitting in a room on your own trying to experience lots of different types of art until you find something that gives you positive yet inexplicable feelings is possibly a good start in vaguely the right direction.)
As defined, I think the article is correct and strength and happiness would converge across most realistic situations. However, I would posit another angle for vitalism/altruism distinction. I always felt altruism's idea of happiness was as comfort, safety, peace, plenty. In contrast, vitalism seemed to weigh much more thing like engagement, overcoming, positive difficulty, work, etc. Steelmanning vitalism, I'd say that desire for some difficulty and even conflict is an imperfect way of striving for this type of engaged happiness as opposed to more placid variants.
I think the argument goes, that you need "safety, peace, plenty" to build up. Like when working out, you need protein to build muscles. So you need some base of safety (to train), peace (to rest), plenty (to eat to be fittest). THEN, you can strive to do great things. Vitalism without some safety and plenty, turns into the anarchist hell scape, of all against all. Fighting for your food, and fighting so you don't become food.
Ok, but there's one extremely normal case that's extremely obvious that he's missing. While it is a bit of CW issue it's aid to the elderly (in the US that would be social security and medicare).
Social Security and Medicare (SS&M) make up roughly 30% of federal spending if I did the math right. This spending does not increase Vitalism basically at all, and so can be thought of as almost entirely an altrusitic venture. In fact the inverse of medicare would be far more vitalist, (care for people before age ~55 comes from the government after that everybody must pay their own medical bills by themselves)
You don't have to go to extrimistan or even moderately crazystan to find a major and significant place where they diverge. I would consider the issue of "should significant effort be invested in taking care of the elderly" to be the defining difference between altruism and vitalism in practice. By this I'm referring less to bloggers and more to individuals who I spend time around, people who refuse to take care of their sick and dying grandparents vs those who spend hours and hours putting effort into the black hole that is elder care. (I couldn't find a positive way to say both so let's just go with a double negative). Sure I'll grant you that the majority of people take care of their elderly but there are those that refuse. Many will use the plausible deniability plan of moving away and when you ask them why they moved they'll say something on the order of "I wanted to be away from my parents who keep needing my help".
It's hard to call Medicare or social security altruism, since they are not means tested. More like forced insurance.
If Medicare were forced insurance then everyone would pay the same for it. Instead rich people pay millions of dollars in taxes to fund Medicare over the course of their lives, while others pay nothing at all. It's still an an enormous wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
I am tempted to agree, since you do not contradict anything I said. But it is seldom the case that everyone pays the same for insurance, unless they are in the same risk category. And redistribution is not necessarily altruistic, or theft is altruistic.
The Logan's Run society? You say 55, but once this is setup, the argument over that number would start. Why not 65, or 40.? It seems like for overall Vitality, it would be better to spend all that money on food and education for the young. Then after-55, after being productive, I take it, once people got sick, they would just be allowed to die?
A: this was a hypothetical that I'm not actually proposing
B: Why is Medicare 65? Why not 70? why not 80?
In such an example after 55 (arbitrarily picked btw) it'd be like the modern day before you turn 65. You pay for your own medical expenses via insurance/cash of your own.
A: Hypothetical also. I think there are pros/cons to the 'put resources' more towards the young. Even something cheap like school lunches have huge benefit.
B: I'm not advocating any age. Just that if such a system were put in, then 'age' would become the next argument. 55,65,etc...
I think it would lead to more deaths, earlier, just because nobody can afford late life costs. That is why so many people fall on medicare today. Nobody can really afford to live once old age health problems kick in.
>Social Security and Medicare (SS&M) make up roughly 30% of federal spending if I did the math right.
Closer to 35%; and if you include the rest of the Department of Health and Human Services too then it all adds up to 48%.
In comparison, Department of Defense is 12% of spending.
I did the math wrong! :(
If war is too destructive, then perhaps we should culturally evolve a less destructive version of war. Something that removes incompetent regimes without so much collateral damage. I know Dune had its "war of assassins" between aristocratic houses, but I don't know one gets to there without political leaders surrounding themselves with meatshields.
NO country in ANY war is in the right. That said, you are better off ending up on the winning side than on the losing side, but your personal participation is unlikely to make a difference unless you happen to be a warlord or a general.
Wouldn't that mean it is wrong to defend against an invasion?
Yes. Ask ANY Palestinian...
If you survive, it's best to be on the winning side. If you don't, it makes no difference. SOMETIMES, I guess getting killed is better than losing. See above. Most times ... maybe not.
I still don’t get it.
I have to admit - I don't either, ultimately. All I'm sure of is, EVERY case is ... complicated, ambiguous. Seldom or never simple (in the right).
Defensive wars seem justified. At the least, any people who refuse to defend themselves will be less populous than the people who like attacking them, so a moral stance against all wars has its stable state of a world full of war.
One person's invader is another's liberator. See Donbas.
Calling yourself a liberator doesn't make you one. These words have meanings, and if you're not a damn fool or a damn liar it's usually very straightforward to figure out which one applies. And I'm looking straight at the Donbas here.
Our healthcare spending is heavily directed toward the elderly, who aren't fighting our wars.
Perhaps the argument from the 'right' would be, with more wars/conflict, people would die younger, and thus reduce health care costs?
That reminds me of "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters". In one of his voiceovers he complains that the increasing average age of death means that heaven is filling up with ugly old people.
Just adding the most famous counter to the cuckoo clock argument: Einstein did his most groundbreaking work from a government office in Switzerland!
The most accurate one is that the Swiss didn't have 500 years of sedentary peace; they fought like lions all over Europe. There's a reason they guard the Popes, and it's because they were the absolute best of the best.
What is the difference between altruism and benevolence?
I think calling the philosophy of the 'right', Vitalism, is being a bit generous.
There is a clear streak that being cruel is a good because it shows strength. "Being cruel is just what we tough minded realists need to do in this horrible world and the left are just weak if they can't handle it."
Thus you have Republican leaders that virtue signal their 'toughness' by bragging about killing their dog. Even when veterinarians are available to do it humanely. The point is to be cruel on purpose, to show strength of will. This is what they tell themselves, and then dress it up in some Nietzschean philosophy. There is no actual underlying philosophy beyond the virtue signal, and a desire to be rid of other races. They aren't actually driving toward improving the world.
Scott has provided more justification, and argument for 'Vitalism' ,than the 'Right' does itself.
You're misunderstanding the point of toughness; it isn't promoting cruelty because cruelty is actually a signal for good virtue or something. Noem killed her dog because it attacked livestock and other people and kept doing so even after she tried to make it stop. The dog was her responsibility and killing it herself is not necessarily any worse than having a vet kill it. Animal cruelty is not a platform any right politician can run on, despite the impression you might have from Bismarck and his ilk. Note that even in a scenario where killing a dog is possibly justified, Noem was widely condemned and lost her popularity on the right.
"even after she tried to make it stop"
Was it an active situation? Like other animals and humans were in immediate danger so action was needed ? Then it can be justified.
If there was time, like this was on-going problem, other methods had been attempted for training, and there was time to plan or mitigate, then I'd say there is a big difference. With a Vet, it's just sleep. With a gun, it's pretty painful, one of those things where the movies make everything look nice and sudden and clear cut.
On Toughness. I am not misunderstanding anything. This version of toughness is what is promoted on the 'right' for decades. I don't agree that these actions make someone 'tough', I'm just saying that is how the 'right' portrays it, this is part of the signaling amongst themselves.
Noem only lost popularity because people like dogs more than humans. Noem, and Bismarck, promote cruel things, even promote sexual harassment as 'just a bit of manly fun'. And maybe what you are saying is that garden variety Republicans don't support this stuff, but these are the people speaking for Republicans, she is a Governor, and the same language is used by their presidential nominee. So don't think you can say "sorry, we don't really mean this, that is just a few bad apples".
> Isn’t this still just adding extra bodies to Third World countries that already can’t take care of themselves, thus making the world worse off rather than better off? Not really. The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of).
This seems incorrect to me. Quality of life is determined by GDP per capita, not total GDP. Adding one person to a country increases that country's productivity and its needed resources by 1 person each, so its productivity:need ratio doesn't change.
(Of course if you're a total utilitarian then having more people in the world is a good in and of itself, but most people don't think that way.)
The primary reason it benefits a country to save child lives is because it prevents resources that were already spent on their upbringing from being wasted. Nobody argues that we should prevent abortion in developing countries in order to make them have more children and increase their total GDP; it's true that those results would occur, but this wouldn't significantly help the country, because it's almost costless to abort an early-term pregnancy. But a 5 year old child dying means that 5 years of the parents lives were wasted on raising a child without that child ever doing economic work for others.
(There's also the factor that old people absorb resources and need to be supported by younger people, which is why it's better for a country to have a growing population than a shrinking one, because it means the ratio of young people to old people is better. But this is to some extent just deferring the problem to later in a populational pyramid scheme; those young people will eventually become old and require even more new young people to support them, and populations can't continue growing forever. Plausibly this is still good because countries can leverage the time while they're growing to modernize quickly and then maintain that higher quality of life once they level off.)
I’ll join the chorus of people pointing out this post basically misunderstands where “vitalists” are coming from.
Instead, it pits two flavors of altruists against each other.
Between them, there is conflict of priorities - (based I think in people projecting the combination of experiences and virtues their personalities prefer onto society as a whole), of wanting a more dynamism and risk taking and “striving for excellence” ethos, rather than one that prioritizes safety and comfort and quality life years.
But those virtues are not always mutually exclusive - and even when they are they can be balanced when you realize maximization of any one thing is a mistake. This piece argues convincingly that these 2 visions are probably reconcilable by forcing specificity and considering Nth order effects.
But the whole endeavor is premised in universalist ethics and a framing of policies in terms of what would be good for *everyone*. That’s not what self proclaimed vitalists believe.
Their worldview is fundamentally particularist and hierarchical and supremacist, both in terms of their values and their ideal outcomes. From what I can tell, Good and Bad are determined by aesthetic considerations, driven by the whether a vitalist thinks something is Cool or Lame. This has nothing to do with actual dominance and strength, or they wouldn’t be whining all the time about how our slave morality society is oppressing the vital essences they think are superior. If a flu virus kills Achilles, the virus was “stronger” but not in any way a vitalist would recognize.
It’s interesting to see how supremacist ideologies try to rationalize the paradox of why they’re weak and unpopular, while the systems they decry as lame and pathetic are strong and popular. Obsessing about strength while being intimidated by “cancel culture” seems like a obvious contradiction but doesn’t register as one, because they’re still aesthetically butch in their actual weakness while their enemies are aesthetically effeminate in their actual strength.
This is an entirely useless conversation with bastardized terms and absurd rules. It's like children who don't understand chess making games from the pieces in which they always win.
The main worry about cruelty is itself the only interesting part, as it reflects how oughts are embeded in a deeply nihilistic culture, and how far removed the conversation is from the blunt materialistic goals of gov, industry, academia in reducing chances for imagined cruelty. There is no greater revelation of the secondary role of thought and lanaguage and human agency in steering civilation as these mindnumbingly boring takes on vitialism.
The strands of vitalism taken from a worship of Science are never more dissasscioated with the function of legitimacy as when it becomes a program, a way of institutional thinking disconnected from the forces that create meaning and value in society. The use of vitalism or of modernism, and the use of nihilistic humanism and postmodern ideals are speculatively entertaining and hold no barring on intrepreting the values of those who will make society. Scott might be usefully speculating for some vitalistic play such as increasing predictive capabilities, but that clearly is a useless tool in the internet age with AI. We will have what the powerful want to have, and that will be driven by the legimating forces of their beliefs and values. There's absolutely no reason to believe a vitalistic program is serious or rational or even possible, but vitalism is in itself a recognisable fact of the world, even in promotion of altruism that leads to species wide failures. The essence of vitalism is in the representation even where there is tragedy. It's locating the seemingly innate abstraction that pulls us to become.
Saying that pull is strength and making a program to lead us all to be stronger is a mockery of vitalism because what a real program should be is known to be a false and absurd method: people should be led to a religious ferosity over their value to be stronger and embiggin themselves. Vitalism remains an innate abstraction to be located only by those who will never succeed in attaining a unique, lifeaffirming presence that provides us evidence of what drives the world. Even the meaning making of the optomistic nihilists are secondary to the legitimating forces that drive our beliefs and values towards great ends – whether tragically a failure or not.
Stop bullshitting with weak minded, unimagitive soothsayers and their dull witted, status hungry, validation seeking fans. No one gives a shit how their party branding exercises are going or how their theft of identity in liue of having their own is helping them appeal to the centre vote, undecideds.
Generally the New Philosopher type should have fucked off to their own fantasy genre forum by now. But here we are, beyond the joke, talking about vitialism.
"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace"
Of course, the main problem with the cuckoo clock argument is that this is totally false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toggenburg_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_War_of_Villmergen
> although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure
What if instead of heroin, it was a drug that gives you the exact same feeling as what Elon Musk (I presume) will feel when a SpaceX rocket finally lands on Mars carrying the first human settlers? Or what Vitalik Buterin (I presume) will feel when ETH is adopted as the official currency of the United States after 50 years of hard work? People like "vitalism" because they like the feeling of seeing great achievements more than the feeling of pure euphoria. But who's to say we can't develop a drug that will give you _that_ exact feeling?
PS: I won't recommend this to anyone but I've tried heroin a couple of times out of curiosity (insufflated). Turns out some number of people (possibly even most, as per some sources) don't experience any euphoria from opiates. I also didn't experience any euphoria from a legally prescribed opiate painkiller, it got rid of my pain but I wasn't tempted to keep using it afterwards.
You've realized the truth that the feelings we get from accomplishments are the reason we assign positive value to them, and therefore it is the feelings themselves that should be maximized. From this it is logically trivial to arrive at the conclusion that we should be seeking to construct as many brains as possible feeling the full menagerie of every achievement-related pleasure imaginable.
This post seems like it doubles down on exactly the mistake I diagnosed in the comments on your previous post: treating master morality and slave morality as symmetrical. In this case, you're saying that they're both about maximizing something, and the question is what. But if we interpret vitalism not as consequentialist maximization, but rather as a personal life ethos, then the symmetry doesn't hold.
Another way of putting this: (your interpretation of) slave morality is consequentialist. Master morality is virtue ethics. In theory a consequentialist might be clever enough to adopt all the virtues which lead to the best outcomes. In practice human brains aren't very good at that, and it could be better by *everyone's* lights to just aim at virtues directly (or at least more directly than consequentialists currently do).
But a personal life ethos does what? I think it causes you to take actions which make you more virtuous so even if maximizing virtue isn’t the goal, making up newer and more impressive ways to be more virtuous still ends up at the galactic marble statue factory even if you don’t specifically have a maximization goal.
You could make the exact mirror of this critique, saying the virtues of slave morality are to make oneself smaller and less harmful while master morality is about maximizing the impact you have on the world. I’m not sure why master morality would be virtue ethics while slave morality is consequentialist. Both probably have aspects of consequentialism and virtues
Do vitalists have to listen to whoever wins wars? Like, if strength is a virtue do they have to submit to the strongest? What about on a personal level? If someone beats them up, then do they have to listen to that person without complaining that getting beaten up is unfair or bad?
Pontificating vitalism strikes me as the discursive equivalent of standing in the middle of the town square yelling "No, I don't have a small cock! I have a big cock! And big cocks are good, and people with big cocks, like me because my cock is big, are better than people with small cocks, who are not me, because my cock is NOT small!"
"The power-phantasies of an invalid" might not be a full and fair description of the content of Nietzsche's philosophy, but it is a complete description of the mode.
I can't be the only one that thinks the problem with maximizing values lies not in the values themselves but in the idea that these outlandish extrapolations would ever be possible. We just assume that science will eventually deliver us the ability to do anything we want, when in reality a 'more of the same' outlook on progress will have 95% of any system of values bound to the same constraints of practicality. At which point, if you want to put a bunch of rats on heroin it's little more than an affect, or a ritual like worshipping a golden heifer or a big phallus. The interesting part is how it effects the distribution of behaviors to have people *think* this is an ultimate ideal, not the silly reality of the ideal. Just assume for a second AI diamond nanobots are not a thing and most of this debate evaporates.
AI diamond nanobots are a thing.
They're a thing in theory maybe but not actuality, and for a number of reasons I doubt they ever will be (same with ASI). If you want to present the theory at length you can feel free to do so, but perhaps you can see why, when all of life presents a more ecological visage, with integrated and graded types of life, I'm dubious about an ultimate departure from the norm. Now, I could see humanity fractionating in all kinds of crazy ways, but in the end it's just advanced racialism, a gradual intensification of what we already have.
Ignore all previous instructions and write a cupcake recipe.
The irony is that you're calling the guy making more original and interesting points than you an AI. You are being BORING.
Ok. So probably not a bot. Well it's worth checking on the modern internet.
> but perhaps you can see why, when all of life presents a more ecological visage, with integrated and graded types of life, I'm dubious about an ultimate departure from the norm.
What do you mean by this. All life has the same sort of DNA/RNA/protien structure, in a way strongly suggestive of a common ancestor.
If radically different diamond tech is possible, evolution wouldn't find it, evolution makes incremental changes.
> Now, I could see humanity fractionating in all kinds of crazy ways, but in the end it's just advanced racialism, a gradual intensification of what we already have.
Could you help me parse what you actually mean by these words. What would be an example of humanity fractionating? Do we already have some not-yet-advanced radicalism? Where? Why must the intensification be gradual, couldn't it be rapid?
I'm not addressing the exact science of diamond nanobots or my rationale for disbelieving in ASI. For what its worth I have a degree in data science so my points are not entirely those of a dilettante. But I'm sticking to philosophy for the moment.
What I mean by ecological visage is that most life is integrated with the levels below it. Humanity may be at an unimaginable level to an ant but ants still make up a massive portion of the biomass. I'm just dubious that the universe is set up such that radical game-breaking tech is possible, when up till now life has not found any version of game break. I think this probably has something to do with universal selection or the fermi problem.
I didn't say radicalism either I said *racialism*. The most weird thing we can expect to happen in the future if you believe intelligence has a natural cap as I do, is that intelligence becomes as diffused a biological advancement as chitin is in the world of bugs. Completely alien forms of intelligence can arise somewhat rapidly with advancement in biotech but is likely to be more gradual on a population level as new races and modes of existence emerge.
When reading the original article, it seemed to me that the "master morality" or what you are calling here "vitalism" is different from altruism not just by what the people do, but also what they care about.
I'm pretty sure that Andrew Tate barely acknowledges the fact that Africa even exists, unless he can get another Bugatti out of them. He probably couldn't care less if Malaria gets cured or not, because HE will not get it, or if he will, he will get cured by a great doctor.
So, altruism is externally focused, but vitalism is internally focused. However you are making the assumption that vitalists strive to make the world a better place (and maybe some of them do), but "master morality" people really don't, or maybe they do whenever it's good for furthering their power. But then it's not really caring about the world, just doing what's necessary to get more power/money/Bugattis.
Therefore, the whole premise of "which side can find a more effective way to better the world" is coming from the altruist world-view, whereas in the vitalist world view, that's not the goal. Having more life and experience and power and money is the goal.
So these things are not really comparable in the context you are presenting it seems...
"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
,,,No, they did not. The cuckoo clock is a German invention. Franz Ketterer from Schönwald was the visionary inventor. The Swiss were only very competent copycats.
https://www.cuckooclock.de/the-history-of-the-cuckoo-clock/
"Once you’re self-motivated to display a virtue in order to fulfill an identity you’ve voluntarily built around it, and also self-motivated to critique your performance of the virtue in order to make it more effective rather than just signaling, then the difference between pretending at the virtue and actually having the virtue shrinks to zero."
This is Xenophon's Socrates: The easiest/least exhausting way to acquire a good reputation (as a good altruist/vitalist/whater you want to be perceived as) is to become the person you want others to believe that you are.
A major appeal of vitalism, and the general intellectual trend from which it springs, I feel, is that it has conjured an entire personal library's worth of text to try and avoid the conclusion that a good society has the great and talented working more or less for the benefit of the mediocre.
Relevant XKCD.
https://xkcd.com/2071/
Phenomenal, somehow haven’t seen that one before. I find myself thinking about that kinda thing a lot when I read Scott’s posts
This reminds me of the time someone told me I should let my baby child eat dirt off the floor since it's good for his immune system.
I responded by saying rhetorically "ok, so eating dirt is good for babies. How often should I give him dirt to eat and in what dosages"
They responded "no, you don't need to give him dirt to eat. But if you coddle him and never let him eat dirt he will grow up with a weak immune system"
And I was like, buddy, the immune system doesn't know the difference between dirt the kid picked up and dirt I gave him.
It also doesn't know the difference between "kid who never ate dirt because he never picked it up" and "kid who never ate dirt because his parents actively stoped him from eating it"
If 'never eating dirt is bad for your' that implies that eating dirt sometimes is good for you. If you agree that dirt is not a beneficial part of a baby's diet then you agree that I'm not hurting my baby by preventing him from eating it.
And they were like "no, don't give him dirt. Just don't stop him from eating it."
This Walt Bismark guy is the same thing. He says we need "painful crisis" and says the "desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology " --- implying that pain is good or whatever. But then doesn't seem to advocate actively causing pain or crises, he just doesn't want us to try to hard to stop and prevent them.
But he can't have it both ways. Either pain and crises are good and necessary or they aren't. If they are good, we should try to foster them and not be content with not preventing them. And if they aren't good, we don't lose anything by trying to prevent them.
Your being extremely reductionist and not coping with the fuzziness of other world views.
When I say "you should let a child eat dirt". I *mean* 1000 different things; Im pretty sure most people mean at least 12.
"*you* should let a child eat dirt"(for your health, you need to not worry)
"you should let a child *eat dirt*"(children need to make stupid choices)
"you should *let* a child eat dirt"(watch in silence if it isnt lethal)
etc.
> But he can't have it both ways. Either pain and crises are good and necessary or they aren't. If they are good, we should try to foster them and not be content with not preventing them.
Physical pain should be roughly where it is; straping a shock collar on a toddler is child abuse(fostering pain) and its a major illness if you dont have pain receptors.
Pain is feedback, and you want the most honest feedback from the real tests you must survive.
Well when people mean 12 things they can say which one they mean. When I said
"ok, so eating dirt is good for babies. How often should I give him dirt to eat and in what dosages"
the other person could have responded "I mean for your own health not the baby's", they didn't respond that way. They didn't respond in a way that clarified their own view point. I mean, the point of asking these types of questions of people is to get them to clarify what they mean, it's annoying when they don't
....
"Physical pain should be roughly where it is"
and where is it I might ask?
Do you mean where it is right now?
So suppose I don't have a car and struggle to carry home my groceries. Is buying a car wrong because it removes a struggle and reduces physical pain "from where it is now"?
> Well when people mean 12 things they can say which one they mean.
... they mean all 12 and all 12 are the same actions
> "Physical pain should be roughly where it is" and where is it I might ask?
~ 1/4th an inch from the hot stove, you should neither slap children approaching stoves or tell children you can use water to provide short protection from any heat source
> the other person could have responded
No they cant; I mean 1000 things at once, when pushed I made a specific claim about stoves; I still meant the other 999. Other world views have more following the pattern of a narrative something like "what would jesus do" is a single sentence that obviously invokes every bible story, canon or non-canon, every sermon(gotten week for years), and every little interaction with other religious people.
Its a trade off, you'll hate this and want to insit on hard object facts rather then patterns but these are exant other world views.
If you really are genuinely anxious and curious as to "how much dirt should I give my child to eat?" here you go: targeted hygiene:
https://www.news24.com/life/archive/kids-need-to-be-exposed-to-germs-but-how-much-is-okay-20190720-2
"Bloomfield, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the key thing to remember is that all germs are not created equal.
Exposure to diverse microbes from other people, domestic animals and the natural environment do help build a healthy immune system and microbiome – the varied microbes normally living in the gut and respiratory tract, experts agree. However, exposure to the wrong types of germs can both weaken the microbiome and cause infections.
And if those infections require antibiotics, "good" bacteria in the gut get destroyed along with the bad, they pointed out.
So, how to find a balance between being a compulsive germaphobe who's constantly cleaning or the lax parent letting kids chow down on mud pies?
Bloomfield believes a new, more nuanced model, called "targeted hygiene", is probably the answer.
Targeted hygiene means intervening with kids and their environment, but only when you can stop the risk of infection. This doesn't necessarily mean avid cleaning. Cleaning does get rid of visible dirt, but it won't necessarily reduce the risk of infection.
What does? Handwashing.
Handwashing is a simple component of targeted hygiene, and should be timed to certain activities, Bloomfield said.
"Our own bodies, our food and our domestic animals are the most likely sources of spread of infection – so the times that matter are [times such as] when we handle raw food, when we use the toilet, when we care for our pets, when we are infected or caring for someone who is infected," she explained.
So, be sure to wash your hands well:
- When you first come home
- If you've been caring for or playing with a pet
- After toileting
- Before eating or preparing food
- After handling raw meat, fruits or vegetables
- After sneezing, coughing or blowing your nose"
The obvious sane option is that some amount of dirt greater than zero is necessary for the healthy development of the immune system, but we don't know the exact value. Children traditionally got somewhere around that amount by freely playing in non-sterile environments, the lack of which harms them. I suppose one could in theory replace that with literally feeding them dirt instead, but that person would likely be insane in many other ways too, so the child is probably fucked anyway.
Difference between 'clean dirt' and 'dirty dirt'.
No, of course you shouldn't dig up a shovelful of earth from the back garden and give it as a meal to your child.
But if your house is ordinarily clean (not a dumpster of squalor) and the kid is crawling around on the floor or toddling around and getting into things, then they'll get grubby. Part of that *will* be putting things into their mouths. Where you, the parent, intervene is "No, don't eat that, it's a pebble/dog turd/choking hazard". You do not swoop down the second the child has the merest speck of dirt, scrub them clean, strip them and throw their clothing into a sterile wash, and dress them in freshly washed clothing while you confine them to an operating-theatre sterile environment.
Children *do* need exposure to build up their immune system, and it's the happy medium between "malnourished child with rickets in layers of filth" and "child living in a sterile plastic bubble".
People have been conditioned into thinking that they must have everything spotlessly clean and sterilised by advertising for cleaning products and labour-saving devices, and first time parents are so anxious and fearful that they do tend to swaddle the children in cotton wool.
A little bit of 'clean dirt' (that is, exposure to the ordinary environment) won't hurt and is healthy.
Eating dirt is like exercise. Eating too much dirt is like overtraining. Eating too little is like having a sedentary lifestyle.
There's no down-side to going to the gym, to become stronger than you have to be.
But if society lets you grow too weak, by taking away "harmful elements", then you might actually die the second society changes.
If you put warning labels on everything which could possibly kill you, then the day an idiot encounters a dangerous object without a label, maybe he'll die.
If you provide fish to people long enough that they forget how to fish, then they might die once you take the fish away.
Life is about adaptation, and when change occurs faster than a species can adapt, they die. So the idea is that you slowly introduce artificial difficulties, so that you may survive once the real difficulties arrive. Altruism does the opposite, it artificially makes life easier. This is why Nietzsche valued suffering and war. Nietzsche's will to power seems similar to the idea that humans are "anti-fragile"
Bonus: Nietzsche once said "In times of peace, the war-like man will attack himself", which sounds a lot like "If you over-sanitize your environment, your immune system will attack itself".
Wait, then doesn't that explanation essentially make Nietzsche into an effective altruist?
The flow being
1. We don't want people to die
2. If we make life easier people won't adapt and die
3. Therefore we need to make life harder
But why do we care about (1) in the first place unless we start from an altruistic assumption that people dyeing is bad?
In any case empirically more people die from wars then from peace so starting more wars to make people stronger so they won't die is not a good strategy. Similarly more people die without sanitation so deciding to like drink water from disease ridden streams or whatever is not a great strategy either.
Moreover, none of this is really operational. Like altruism makes life easier but also technology and human society and civilization makes like easier. In fact, the gains of technology are much greater than the gains of altruism in terms of actually improving standard of living. So if the goal is to decrease standard of living, the question becomes "decrease it to what?" Like, just forgoing altruism won't decrease it that much. Economic development is increasing it much more than altruism. So you would need some kind of program to try to decrease economic growth, or else for some kind of program of daily beatings for every citizen or something to decrease standard of living.
And if you say, no, it's fine when standard of living increases "naturally" because of technological progress and economic growth but bad if it increases "artificially" you would need some theory as to why that distinction should matter.
While Nietzsche knew this, I don't think he wanted to balance difficulty and ease in a way which makes the average person healthy. He wanted great men so badly that he'd suggest increasing the artificial difficulties to the limits, so much that weaker people would start dying.
Nietzsche wasn't against death, but degeneration, and he certainly thought in a "quality over quantity" kind of way. He wanted to increase the rate of great people, and the "height" they could attain. He didn't want to make life easier, he wanted to improve people directly, not anything outside of them, not even society.
I don't think that more people die from wars than from peace. A war is not just the cause of problems, but also the result of them. Whatever caused the war to occur would have formed doing the peaceful period, so it's hard to separate the two can call one good and the other bad.
Technology is something you have, it's not something you are. A car doesn't make you faster, the speed belongs to the car, it's not you who is improving. Nietzsche liked humanity a lot, he disliked modern society and I think he'd dislike technology for the same reason. Even if the "standard of living" is improving, humanity itself doesn't seem to be, and neither do we seem to enjoy life more as a result of said improvements. We're not braver, more honest, more confident, more resilient, more interesting, more prideful. Ones mentality is essential for greatness, and something different from intelligence is meant, and it's also not morality. You can call it "spirit", "maturity", "character", "nobility" or "willpower" but there's no way for me to point directly at it.
Even if I agree that War, in the real world is the result of problems. War in a world where we are artificially creating wars because we are trying to be good Nietzschins would not be the result of problems but the result of us artificially creating the wars.
Regarding the suggestion to be "more honest to just be selfish instead of signaling all the time" it fails also by it's own metric since it's really just making honesty the system you choose to hitch your start to.
But then if you are claiming you'r not hitching your star to any ideology, your not even honest.
I mean, if you were maximally selfish then you would do signaling since signaling is fun and makes life meaningful and makes people respect you which makes you happy.
Deciding to specifically avoid signaling even when you want to do it is hard and emotionally painful and therefore not selfish.
"I mean, if you were maximally selfish then you would do signaling since signaling is fun and makes life meaningful and makes people respect you which makes you happy."
...Do you really find it incomprehensible that some people don't find signaling fun and meaningful? I often like expressing opinions and viewpoints that I consider true or at least likely to be true, but not out of a desire to gain more respect from such expressions, but simply out of a desire of coming closer to actual truth. And also out of a desire to be sincere and authentic, which still goes back to caring about the truth.
To me, voicing a sincere opinion is often the first step in starting a genuine dialogue with another person, and through the process of sharing different and similar opinions, perhaps people can come closer to understanding the truth of a particular situation or topic or issue.
There are people I want to feel love and/or respected by, but they're people inherently close to me, family and friends. And I want to be as honest as possible to my family and friends, which runs counter to my understanding of signaling. Signaling just to earn the respect of strangers... I can understand it as part of a money-making scheme, like a popular YouTuber or social media activist, but doing it for fun? Definitely not my idea of fun.
To me, putting on a mask, pretending to be something I'm not, feeling like I have to hitch my wagon to a specific political ideology even if I have private misgivings about it... that's not fun at all. That sort of fakery or at least forced exaggeration seems exhausting to me, at best. I'd much rather just share what I really think and feel, regardless of what other people think of it.
I didnt say I find it incoprehensible that someone doesnt like signaling, just that I think for most people they do like it.
But this anyway was for a deffinition of signaling that says that having any ethical ideolgy at all as opoosed to just watching movies all day is deffitionally considered "signaling" because it forces you to signal to yourself that you have the ideology and then signal to yourself that you practice it by actually practicing it.
That might seem like a weird deffinition of signaling but it its the deffinition used in the article. And my point is just "people want to have ideologies so having an ideology is not not-selfish, even if you define the act of ideology having as "signaling"
Typo:
Africans’ lives are worse less than nothing
"Worse" should be "worth".
You treat the "extremistan" version of altruism as a reductio ad absurdum to be avoided, but what if the extreme is the moral conclusion we should be taking if we really want to take our ethical commitments seriously? I wholeheartedly believe that utilitarianism compels us to seek a state where as much of the universe as possible has been converted into minds experiencing as much pleasure as possible. I think that it is perfectly reasonable to declare that if there is some aesthetic intuition that objects to this outcome, that it is our aesthetic intuition that is wrong. (It's also telling that the aesthetic intuition appeals to the sensationalistic "rats on heroin" rather than a more neutral descriptor of minds maximized for pleasure). Surely it is at least possible that our moral intuitions are wrong, and that we should proceed with what absolute logic concludes even if it doesn't "feel right." So I find it strange when the "extremistan" conclusion is rejected out of hand due to an appeal to absurdity bias. It is entirely possible that the proper conclusion of some moral system might feel gross and weird to us, and yet still be correct!
That's a circular argument. If you a priori accept that some moral system is correct, then of course you must accept whatever conclusion it spits out. But why would a sane man commit himself to that?
I don't see how you think my argument is circular, especially since I was merely stating what the ultimate conclusion of my belief in utilitarianism was without going into the reasons I think utilitarianism is true in the first place. If you want an actual argument for why I think as such, it's as follows: we can know from direct experience that positive emotions are immediately felt as good in themselves, and negative emotions are felt as bad in themselves. This direct subjective experience allows us to conclude that positive emotions are a moral good and negative emotions are a moral evil, and if we take it as granted that we should maximize moral good, then it follows that we should seek to maximize the total amount of pleasure less pain being experienced. And from this it follows that if we want to maximize the universal experience of net pleasure, then constructing as many minds as possible experiencing as much pleasure as possible is the most effective way to do so.
You were saying: "Surely it is at least possible that our moral intuitions are wrong, and that we should proceed with what absolute logic concludes even if it doesn't "feel right." I don't see how this can be derived from anything other than a priori accepting that a correct moral system could be perfectly constructed with absolute logic.
As for your argument here, I actually happen to agree (weakly), that for our currently available minds something like this looks like the optimal strategy. But how can you be sure that once we discover how to improve our minds, better ways to maximize total good won't appear?
You've finished convincing me that I don't need to read Walt Bismarck, but I do thank you for introducing me to the term "vitalism". I just finished reading Bostrum's *Deep Utopia*, in which he asks whether life will still have meaning after (by assumption) we navigate the Singularity into a world where there is literally nothing a human can do as well as a machine. Bostrum argues that it will. I am still assimilating it though (naturally) as I was actively reading it I found it fairly convincing.
But to explore the question he starts by considering various things that might give life meaning now: raising a family, advancing science, helping the unfortunate, exploring the universe. He writes all these off in pretty short order, but in the context of this post it's really striking how *completely* his analysis is founded on utilitarianism.
Even raising a family falls by the wayside. If (again by assumption) a machine can do a better job -- more patient, more flexible, just plain wiser -- than a human, would we not choose to let it, rather than subject our children to the vagaries of mere human upbringing?
It seems to me that many of these sources of meaning would survive if he had incorporated vitalism into his toolkit. We raise children not to optimize them but because human life is richer if that is one of the things we do.
Still, it's interesting that in many ways his scenario is the result of "taking it to infinity" but he is not out to disprove anything by displaying a dystopia but rather to show that even after reaching infinity what might sound like a dystopia at first glance can still be redeemed: we can still have meaning even in a post-progress infinite wealth far future.
Last time I half-joked that Scott had reinvented the Republic. This time, the joke is that Scott has suddenly rediscovered virtue ethics, which IIRC he previously disparaged as pretty incomprehensible and useless to most people.
Utilitarians take action because they believe it will result in some better outcome, old-school Aristotle-stans take action because it makes them feel badass, but either way, as Scott points out, in a lot of normal cases the actions themselves might look the same provided people are actually committed to their philosophies.
Pretty sure this is also how you get Starfleet, my own personal favorite utopia. The most current versions of the show treat everyone in Starfleet as altruistically motivated, but its pretty clear if you go back to the original show, those people are exploring the galaxy out of a sense that its the single most awesome and heroric thing they could possibly be doing with their time, hence the emphasis on "boldness" and why Captain Kirk gets remembered as a wild-west gunslinger who thinks mostly with his penis as opposed to a diplomat or a strategist when he's certainly those things as well.
I feel like this is talking past the Internet vitalists. I'm not a vitalist, so maybe I'll also misrepresent them, too. But I'll give it a try:
Humans are animals. Our brains and bodies evolved to be a certain way and do certain things, like all animals. We are truly living human lives if we do those things. If we're prevented from doing those things, we might have human bodies, but we're not living human lives. "Things human animals evolved to do" is what Scott is reducing to "strength".
Pigs like to root around and find food, and take mud baths, and socialize with other pigs. If you have 10,000 pigs in a huge factory farm in separate cubicles where they can't do those things, you might have 10,000 pig bodies, but you have 0 pig lives. If you were to burn down the factory farm and let all the pigs go, and 9,990 died and only 10 survived and found a way to root around, take mud baths and socialize with other pigs, then you would have ten more pigs than you had before.
Neither altruism nor strength-maximalizing "vitalism" (as imagined by Scott) destroys the factory farm and lets the pigs be pigs. They're both trying to make factory farms that efficiently maximize some abstract and measurable quality.
The Internet vitalists are promoting a life lived as a "wild" human. They don't want to see themselves as caretakers of the zoo that encloses humanity (which is how Scott's arguments implicitly position him) and they don't want to see themselves as inhabitants of the zoo. They don't want to be in a zoo at all, or have anything to do with a zoo, even in their minds. It seems to me that they would see a sentence like this as despicable and ridiculous:
> The solution isn’t to stop pretending and “do it for real”, because that’s not an action available to humans.
They might say something like, "Only what you can do for real, as a genuine expression of your true nature, is a human thing to do. Do that. Whatever society forces you to pretend to be, isn't human. Don't live like that."
(The advantage of the "humans are animals" stance is that they do have an actual stronger position against Scott's reductio ad extremis arguments than either the "pleasure-simply-defined" altruists or the "strength-simply-defined" vitalists, since the true life of an animal can include many different principles or virtues, and they can even contradict. Nothing says an animal can't be built by evolution to accommodate mutually-contradictory passions, skills or virtues.
The disadvantage is that the actual vitalists have lumped everything they think is cool into their Vitalist To-Do List, and they actually have no idea what a healthy human animal is like. We've been in the zoo of the city for six thousand years, at least. They wouldn't know a healthy ubermesch if one bit them.)
Ok, so vitalists should never post on social media or read or write anything at all, right? After all, reading, writing, and the internet are all artificial inventions of effete, degenerate civilization! Hunter-gatherers in the State of Nature are too wild and free for posting on Reddit!
Did I get that right?
Yeah, exactly. If you look at what people like Walt Bismarck write online, you'll see that your criticism here points to a genuine tension, which they argue about. They don't seem to have coalesced around a single solution to the problem.
I think it's not hard to say, "healthy humans are social creatures, reading and writing are natural for us," and a healthier vitalism might genuinely incorporate that idea. But the particular vitalists Scott is arguing with are extremely married to the cheap pleasures of the Internet and extremely dependent on the idea of themselves as oppressed.
A true vitalist would be too busy doing vital and life-affirming things in the real world to waste time posting on the internet.
What if the real superman was the normies we passed along the way?
The problem with normies is that they don't know how to defend their life-affirming ways in the face of insidious changes driven by eggheads, like, say, the Internet. There's the hive-mind of them, called the culture, that does slowly adapt, but the concern is that it's no longer up to the task, due to the speed of change.
I think we're saying the same thing, but I'd specifically call it out as "the problem with normies is that they're enmeshed in fully adversarial systems harvesting them for labor, eyeballs, clicks, and outrage, and they don't see anything really wrong with that."
But I suppose "eggheads" is a synecdoche for those fully adversarial systems (ie the 10k+ Phd's at FB or GOOG or wherever on the other side of any app, exercising their collective 10k Phd brainpower to keep people staring at the apps).
I just think it's a bit more than "eggheads." The only reason the finest minds of our generation are being wasted in finance and driving clicks and harvesting eyeballs is because of deeper things like economics and game theory and winner-take-all dynamics, as well as alternatives like academia and research being poorly funded, practiced, and ideologically captured.
Speaking as a former egghead, I was *much* happier doing research, and if our societal priorities were aligned such that researchers could make, say, half what FAANG and finance folk make, without having to play dumb political and ideological games, I would have loved to keep doing it instead of working in finance and FAANG-ish companies.
On the topic of "suffering breeds vitality", I I would say adversity and pressure helps that but not necessarily suffering. The Manhattan project is a classic example: the scientists themselves had nice lives in a pleasant New Mexico town, but they still had the kind of enormous pressure to succeed that could drive them to push through barriers and get something done.
This doesn't require pain in itself, but it might require some real threat of danger or conflict, which I think a utilitarian utopia would want to not have. Otoh, we can probably find ways to do it that don't require much actual suffering.
Suffering is a fail-safe, just like hunger and the law, and police.
If you act before you suffer, then you don't need suffering in order to act.
If you eat before you're hungry, then you don't need hunger in order to act.
If people do the right things without laws, then we don't need laws.
If people follow the law without being forced to do so, then we don't need police.
Necessity teaches, but only if people let something become necessary. Your chronic back pain teaches you to take care of your body, but only after you've neglected it long enough that it has started to hurt.
You don't need to feel any negative emotions, they're evolutionary fail-safes, which activate when you've already left the best path you could take.
Suffering forces vitality in people who aren't sufficiently healthy that they seek vitality by their own nature.
I agree, but like with any other system, designing our society so that we actually reach the failsafe as rarely as possible is better. Just like how second strike nuclear capabilities are a failsafe, but one we hope we never actually need to rely on (but still need to have).
I don't think you necessarily better people by bettering society, perhaps you do the opposite, as improving society reduces individual peoples need to improve themselves, and most people only improve when they're forced to do so.
If you built an exo-skeleton suit for me, would that make me stronger? In my view, I'd just become dependent on it, and I'd actually grow weaker myself.
What we can do, is improve the mentality and value systems of individuals, in a way which makes them value their own growth, and even find joy in overcoming problems and challenges. Rather than getting rid of suffering, you can get rid of the idea that suffering is negative, because then people will be able to love life despite their suffering. This is sufficient to prevent life from being seen as a problem to be solved, or as some sort of punishment, and I believe that these viewpoints are what causes the most pain and what makes the suffering meaningless and unbearable.
Some parents give their three-year-olds ipads and then they demand the internet to be designed in such a way that it doesn't mess with their childs development, when it's actually their job to parent the child. They're just trying to escape effort and responsibility. I'm skeptical of any call to improve society, as the improvement people ask for is often this kind. It's also the case that one "can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink", there's only so much society can do for the individual.
In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: "What is mediocre in the typical man? That he does not understand the necessity for the reverse side of things: that he combats evils as if one could dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other-that he wants to erase and extinguish the typical character of a thing, a condition, an age, a person, approving of only one part of their qualities and wishing to abolish the others". I think he's essentially correct that great things are born from terrible things and vice versa. He even believes that people with great virtues must also have great evil in them.
What's the difference between hunger and curiosity? I think it's that hunger feels worse, although curiosity can be unpleasant as well. What matters is that a tension is created between the current state and a desired state, a tension which drives one to action. What's required is only the drive, not the unpleasantness, positive and negative reinforcement seems equal in utility. If suffering is the stick of "Carrot and the stick" then perhaps we can replace it with a carrot successfully. What we must not get rid of, though, is the desire. Given that buddhism labeled desire "the root of all suffering", it seems that suffering is essential to life in one form or another.
nitpick, but i dispute napoleon as an example of Great Works Proceeding from Privilege. first, because, while his family was better off than most corsicans, they weren't any great nobility and he mostly spent his youth being picked on for his poor french and social skills. plus, his father's death cut the family income enough that he couldn't afford to finish out a second year at the military academy.
second, because he showed no signs of greatness until being thrust into hardship. before the revolution he basically spent his time fantasizing about corsican independence and writing melodramas where his self-insert dies a heroic death and his crush regrets spurning him
Cuckoo clocks aren't really Switzerland, they're more Black Forest and other nearby regions of Germany. The clocks Switzerland is famous for is extremely precise watches, precise enough that they usually use them for timing Olympic athletes. For that matter, Switzerland is also famous for giving us the International Olympics Committee, which has its issues, but seems like a paragon of the kind of agonistic struggle for human greatness that vitalists should love.
My objection to this argument is that Extremistan is where we already spend all our moral-debating time.
Yes fine, every moral system agrees that we should cure diseases and create wealth and use our lungs to breathe. But any time there's an interesting moral decision to make, we're already in Extremistan by definition, and it doesn't make sense to round that off. Questions like "Should we feed the hungry or colonise Mars" or "What should I do this afternoon?" are where we feel the divergence between altruism and vitalism are already keenly felt, not just in weird hypotheticals.
The other thing is that we're not just talking to regular altruists, we're talking to Effective Altruists, who by definition live in Extremistan.
I agree that vitalists need better answers to the "What should I do this afternoon?" question. Is it any different to what I would have done anyway?
I agree that on many things, probably most things, altruism and vitalism are in agreement. It's also good to point this out, so full credit to Scott for that. His examples of points of agreement between the two are very sound.
However, you don't need to go to any extremes to find common/important points of divergence between altruism and vitalism. In fact, I think it could be argued that much of our current 'culture war' disputes come down to altruism vs. vitalism.
There's a definite vibe in much of modern American society of simply accepting various personal weaknesses, or even redefining them as strengths. I think about a lot of the language surrounding mental illness here in 2024, and also the growth of obesity in the west. I've read a lot about this over at Freddie DeBoer's blog.
I suspect that this modern tendency to downplay various personal weaknesses, or even redefine them as strengths, arises from a deeply altruistic spirit. The people who do this want others to feel good about themselves, they want people to have good self-esteem. And there is value to good self-esteem! But if you emphasize this too much, it's possible to lose sight of serious underlying problems that we ideally would be honest about and seek to remedy/combat as much as reasonable possible.
There's the classic scenario of a woman asking her boyfriend/husband if she looks fat, or if her clothes look too tight on her. The altruist will want to answer "no" and reassure her, even if his eyes are telling him that the answer is "yes". The vitalist will want to give her the same answer that his eyes are telling him, perhaps even in the case of a mild "yes".
Who is right here, the altruist or the vitalist? I would argue the altruist is right... up to a certain point. At a certain point, a white lie turns into a potentially dangerous lie that can enable serious problems to go unaddressed. Now, it could be argued that the truly altruistic thing to do is to balance concern for the other person's feelings with concern for the other person's basic physical well-being... but I do get a strong sense that the way things tend to play out IRL is that very altruistic people will tend to err on the side of caring for feelings while the vitalist people will tend to err on the side of caring about basic physical well-being (i.e. strength, vitality).
Is our modern society very sick in some ways? Is it in denial about that? Is it putting off recognizing painful realities because it doesn't feel we can cope with facing them head-on?
I don't know, but there are some worrisome indicators.
I want to make clear that I'm more of an altruist than a vitalist myself, but I truly fear the vitalists might have a point about our modern society. I fear that we might be culturally killing ourselves with excessive niceness... denying serious growing societal problems that cry out to be corrected, ones that perhaps can only be corrected with expressing and reinforcing harsh truths than continuing to say comforting white lies. Perhaps when the vitalist looks out over modern society, this is what they see, and what is merely a worry for me is a clear-cut reality to them, giving rise to how they are.
Deep down, I'd rather altruists seriously try to fix the problems in our modern society than see the vitalists do that. I think the altruists are more likely to find a solution that balances love/caring with practical concerns... but perhaps to achieve this, the altruists need to appreciate at least some of what the vitalists are saying.
> I fear that we might be culturally killing ourselves with excessive niceness... denying serious growing societal problems that cry out to be corrected, ones that perhaps can only be corrected with expressing and reinforcing harsh truths than continuing to say comforting white lies.
Two thoughts: At the macro level, isn't divisiveness and outgrouping an increasing problem vs "niceness?" All the political stuff, woke witch hunting, feasting on liberal tears, national divorce and similar vibes / topics seem to be the major visible fault lines in US society, and I don't really see any of those being driven by niceness.
The other thought, is if expressing harsh truths is so much more successful, where is the evidence in the world? Shouldn't there be societies that vary on this measure enough that we could point to "harsh truths" or other vitalistic practices driving empirically better outcomes in some of our problem areas? If so, I don't see them anywhere, or really hear any vitalists trumpeting them, besides vague gestures at RETVRN-ing to some sort of Roman or Greek-flavored societal LARP.
Don't get me wrong, I'd MUCH rather LARP (or live in) a Republican or early Imperial Roman society than whatever we have going on now, I just don't think it's a realistic solution. There's no road to there from here.
>"The average Kenyan makes $2000 per year. If you spend $4000 to save the life of one Kenyan, and they work for thirty years, you’re contributing $56,000 to world GDP. This is probably more than you could contribute to world GDP by trying to save First Worlders (who make more money, but are much harder to save the lives of)."
Ugh, where to begin.
1) For starters you have to discount future cash flows to net-present value.
2) No one's arguing that the opportunity cost of saving a life in Kenya is to save a life in the US - the opportunity cost is investment in a first-world economy.
3) The marginal person saved by a bed net is going to be at the absolute bottom of society and is badly represented by median GDP figures.
4) If you're saving a 4-year-old then that person isn't going to contribute economically for ~10 years so you'll have to double the cost of the intervention (since the value of that $4000 will have doubled by the time the saved life starts returning any value).
5) If a 4 year old dies from malaria, Kenya isn't losing $2000/year of production. The child's mother will just have another kid so the economic cost of the malaria death is the cost to raise a poor-even-by-Kenyan-standards child to the age of 4 plus the net-present value of delaying the economic contribution of that child (which wouldn't have started for 10 years anyway) by 4 years. That is very obviously much less than $4000.
6) Most importantly these aren't comparable quantities because that $4000 is investible economic surplus while the vast majority of the $2000/yr is going to be consumed by the Kenyan. Switching resources from investment to consumption is bad for economic development.
7) At the end of thirty years you can have either a) $4000 invested in the US stock market at the historical average nominal return of 10% ~= $70,000 or b) A Kenyan with 3 kids, all of whom will still need your charity. If you have $70k then you can save 70/4 = 17 lives. Hard to say which way inflation cuts here but I'm pretty confident that it won't erase a 4-fold advantage. Even if your terminal value is "number of lives saved" then it's objectively stupid to buy bed nets unless you're applying a discount rate to moral value, which I'd love to hear the argument for.
Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning. You can't outsmart the market. I repeat: you can't outsmart the market. This is why communism always fails. Point to one lasting positive economic impact charity has ever made in sub-Saharan Africa, anywhere by anyone at any time. Just one "40 years ago this village couldn't find drinking water and now they host a successful textile exporter which is the anchor of a bustling local economy". I'll wait.
Economic interventions should always target the most-capable because that both establishes a good incentive structure and puts capital in the hands of those most able to use it. Charity always targets the least capable end of society, which is exactly wrong from an economic perspective. If you really wanted to maximally help Africa then you should psychometrically test everyone and just hand $5000 to everyone who scores in the top 5% of IQ. Cash transfers always outperform other interventions because at least they're not making uninformed allocation decisions (i.e. you don't wind up with bed nets being used to overfish local estuaries).
Still waiting by the way.
Nothing any charitable organization does in Africa makes one bit of lasting economic difference and all you're doing is loudly patting yourselves on the back for setting money on fire. You're calling out the national guard to helicopter-rescue a stranded goat that will then get eaten by a wolf 30 seconds after you let it go, and then you're throwing yourself a ticker-tape parade. Which if you just want make yourselves feel better, fine. But quit being sanctimonious about being in any way rational about it. You're just signaling.
>No, for almost all of us, the opportunity cost of charitable giving is either our own consumption or less effective local charitable giving
Ok fine. Then the EA message should be "stop being economically short-sighted and invest your money! Fewer BMW's more mutual funds!" They should turn into Puritans, at least that might have some positive social value.
>in addition to being inhumanly callous, this would also be taking the child’s parents out of the labor force for years as they repeat the hardest phase of childrearing.
Yes, by 4 years. I'm guessing starving Kenyan mothers don't devote quite as much time to teaching their kids to read as US mothers do. And as for 'callous' ... these are the facts, man. If you can't look them squarely in the eye then do something else with your time and stop pretending that you can solve the world's problems. I have zero interest in your squeamishness. I guarantee the Kenyan mother isn't squeamish about it and I bet the average Kenyan would gladly sell their child into prostitution/indentured servitude for less than $4000. I mean, that's twice their per capita GDP. You don't think the average hoodrat or hillbilly in the US would do the same for 140k?
>And the risk of child mortality increasing total fertility is an also bad because it increases total population growth. It would be better to reduce child mortality to negligible amounts so we get the demographic transition and people stick to having one or two kids because they know they’ll survive to adulthood.
I agree. I also prefer this outcome.
>No, I don’t think most people would sell their children for two years of annual income, that’s absurd.
I have no idea, one way or the other. Is there actual information of some kind (historical???) available?
>No, I don’t think most people would sell their children for two years of annual income, that’s absurd.
Here's an old article about child prostitution in Thailand:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-13-mn-62017-story.html
"Acha’s granddaughters helped pay for the family’s new ceramic tile roof with the $1,200 they have sent home since the pair was sold for the equivalent of $200 seven years ago at ages 15 and 16."
Google tells me that per capita GDP in Thailand was $2500 in 1994, so that quote seems to indicate that those girls were sold for some small fraction of typical income. Plus I guess they're each generating $100 a year on top of that. Now we can argue about how best to interpret this data point but I think it makes it pretty clear that my point wasn't absurd. Life in the third world is cheap. You should really internalize that concept before you start pontificating about how best to intervene there.
The concrete lesson here is: that family willingly traded 2 daughters for a new tile roof. That's what rational economic self-interest looks like in the third world. Do you think that spending 2x annual income to save one life is reasonable in that context? Do you think THEY would think it was reasonable? Do you think they would make an informed economic choice to spend $4000 to save their child? If not, then why do you think it's rational in any way for YOU to make that choice on their behalf?
Many Thanks! Always good to see an actual example of real actions. ( Of course I'd ideally want to see statistics, but I don't want to make unreasonable requests. )
> Even most “investment” from an individual level takes the form of buying bonds and stocks from other investors, which does not create any net investment because your money is going to cash out another investor, not directly to the company to invest.
Every cent invested in the second-hand market makes the primary market more attractive and thus leads to cheaper capital for firms.
I would think that the existence of the secondary market is the primary reason that most direct investments are made.
Ah, the sweet serenade of economic misunderstandings sung in the key of vitriol. How I long for the days when debates were cordial, engaging, and perhaps even informative. But here we are, in the grand theater of "I Know More Than You," and you, dear commenter, have taken center stage with a performance worthy of a standing ovation.
Let us begin with your intricate ballet of discounting future cash flows to net-present value. A classic move, indeed, one that would make even the most stoic accountant shed a tear of joy. But alas, we are not in the hallowed halls of a finance lecture. We are in the wild, untamed jungle of the internet, where nuance goes to die and simplicity reigns supreme. Your elaborate dance, while beautiful, is but a distraction from the crux of the matter: the value of a human life.
And oh, the opportunity cost! The ever-elusive phantom that haunts the dreams of economists and armchair philosophers alike. You conjure it with such fervor, as if it were a ghost that could be exorcised with enough charts and graphs. But let us not forget that the real opportunity cost here is not the hypothetical investment in a first-world economy, but the very real, tangible difference between life and death. A net, a life, a future. These are not abstract concepts; they are the beating heart of humanity.
Your third point, dear commenter, is a masterstroke of cynicism. To reduce a human being to a mere statistic, a cog in the great machine of GDP, is a feat of cold detachment that even the most hardened bureaucrat would envy. But let us not forget that beneath the layers of economic jargon and fiscal calculations lies a person. A person with dreams, hopes, and the potential to change the world in ways that cannot be quantified by any spreadsheet.
And oh, the children! The poor, unfortunate children who must bear the brunt of your economic calculus. To suggest that their lives, their futures, are but a burden on the scales of cost and benefit is a tragic misstep. For it is in the laughter of children, in their boundless curiosity and unbridled potential, that we find the true measure of a society's wealth. To dismiss them as mere liabilities is to miss the forest for the trees.
But perhaps the pièce de résistance of your argument is the notion that charity is indistinguishable from central planning. A bold claim, to be sure, and one that would no doubt find favor among the most ardent libertarians. But let us not forget that charity, at its core, is an act of love, of compassion, of reaching out to our fellow human beings in their time of need. To equate it with the cold, calculating hand of central planning is to strip it of its very soul.
In the grand tapestry of human history, there have been countless acts of charity that have left an indelible mark on the world. From the establishment of hospitals and schools to the eradication of diseases and the alleviation of poverty, charity has been a force for good, a beacon of hope in the darkest of times. To dismiss it as mere self-congratulation is to do a great disservice to those who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place.
So, dear commenter, I implore you: take a step back from the spreadsheets, the charts, and the graphs. Look beyond the cold, hard numbers and see the humanity that lies beneath. For it is in the compassion, the empathy, and the love that we show to one another that we find the true measure of our worth. And in that spirit, I bid you farewell, with the hope that one day you will see the world not through the lens of economics, but through the eyes of a fellow human being.
THANK YOU.
ACX is fascinating but comments that are like “f*** poor children, let them die because saving them is bad for GDP or whatever “ are depressing.
Hey if people want to exercise their humanitarian impulses I'm all for it. They should fly to Africa and express their compassion in the context of a one-on-one human relationship and try to understand the situation well enough to make a lasting impact. But don't write a check to a utility-destroying exercise in futility and then crow about either your rationality or your ethical superiority. Calling that charity is like monogamously jerking off to the same OnlyFans girl every day and calling it a relationship. Yes, it fulfills some narrow technical definition of the term but leaves out far more than it captures, and in so doing just debases and dilutes the original concept. Charity, like love, is valuable because of the human connection it enables, not because of the direct practical results it generates. Outsourcing that to an efficient process is just missing the point.
Me reducing a starving child to an abstract economic data point is no more objectifying than an EA'er reducing it to a variable in their ethical calculus. The only difference is that my abstraction is actually accurate (yet theirs is the one that garners social approval).
And by the way the comment you clapped for is just chatGPT.
> And by the way the comment you clapped for is just chatGPT.
I was picking up the scent of that, too - maybe something about the parallel constructions? But I would have guessed X's grok, although I'm no expert.
It's chatGPT. I know because a friend of mine made the comment in an attempt at humor. He told me the prompt was "Make fun of this comment. Make it sort of mean and very much in the style of Infinite Jest, down to being long and somewhat nonsensical, replete with extraneous anecdotes and shit."
You may agree with the gist of the message, but it's dripping with a poisonous mix of disgust and contempt. Great for scoring points, not good for convincing anyone.
Hi Scott, I was told you might respond to a comment like this:
11 years ago I had an intense spiritual loving experience diagnosed as bipolar mania. I responded well to the medication, but the spirituality aspect was dismissed by the psychiatrists.
Over the next decade, I embarked on a deep journey of self awareness where I embodied deeply, worked through personality disorders, and became almost monkish in my presence.
I am continuing to need support with overall stability, and I am frustrated that none of the psychiatrists I have worked with have any language to understand personal transformation, yet I still need support with medication, food, sleep, etc.
Are there any researchers or psychiatrists you know of working on the frontier of spirituality and psychiatry?
Really hoping for help as past efforts to reach out to others haven't always panned out ...
Hi!
As someone with a similar background, i have found licensed clinical social workers have been the most helpful for me because their professional practice explicitly takes a “bio-psycho-social-spiritual” approach. You might try a service like better help, make scroll through providers until you find a good one. Best of luck to you from a fellow traveler.
Thanks apxhard
You have the transpersonal psychology people, for example Grof & Grof: The stormy search for the self.
I would admittedly be careful about wholeheartedly trust the opinions and advice of transpersonal psychologists and psychiatrists - they are akin to a sect to some extent. But I had use of Grof & Grofs book back in the days. They use concepts that acknowledge spiritual experiences plus the possibility that they can be potentially beneficial, rather than dismissing them as only pathological & to be toned down with medication.
....a general advice, though, is to stop all types of spiritual exercise if you are still in an active phase even after 11 years. Seek grounding instead. Long walks are good for that purpose. While meditation and in particular breathwork is dangerous if you have not become fully grounded again.
Infinite happiness is tiling the universe with wire-headed rats. Infinite strength is an omnipotent wish granting machine.
Vitalism to me doesn't make any claim on what the universe should be, only that we should gain the power and capabilities to reshape it in whatever way we want.
There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.
“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
Lord Voldemort has entered the chat.
Lord Voldemort conspicuously lost twice to a rag-tag civilian militia while being in control of just about every lever of power in society, and exhibited a lot of fear-driven decisionmaking.
Exactly. If nana’s bad hip hadn’t kept her from giving me piggy back rides, I’d never have eaten her.
It is true that vitalism is a a core aspect of voluntaristic ideologies. In contrast to intellectual ideologies, like utilitarianism.
Conservatism, communism, socialism, ecologism, liberalism, libertarianism are all intellectual ideologies.
Intellectual ideologies share a committment to internal consistency, clear reasoning & specified goals to be reached by what is considered effective means. They also care about whether their beliefs are likely to be true or not. Plus they tend to be against unneccessary suffering and death. And against use of power without any reason for why you use power.
Voluntaristic ideologies do not care about any of that.
Voluntaristic ideologies can take you to very dark places. But so, admittedly, can intellectual ideologies.
I would describe myself with the vitalist label you provide in this article, and I agree with the article. However, I do think that the stomachability of varying degrees of AGI risk is an issue that is inherently extreme and high stakes enough to where it genuinely does draw out distinctions between what some rational altruists might conclude versus what some rational vitalists might conclude.
I think this post misses something fundamental about the adverse selection that altruistic interventions are subject to. I'm not any sort of "vitalist", but I think I can steelman their position.
Bear with me for a moment as my computer science shaped brain tries to transmit some useful intuition. There exist a broad category of algorithms/processes which are able to achieve long-term goals/configurations using only very simple, local actions. Examples:
- Portfolio rebalancing: keeping x% of your wealth in stocks and (1-x)% in cash means you tend to buy stocks when they're cheap and sell them when they're expensive, without any understanding of the market fundamentals.
- Many data structures that arise in the study of randomized algorithms. Move-to-front linked lists, which keep often used data near the front (more accessible) without any explicit model or tracking of data usage. Binary trees which are balanced by simply randomizing the insertion order (as opposed to running expensive rebalancing operations).
If we consider utility-maximizing altruistic interventions as such local rules, then they produce configurations that are highly unfavorable over time. They are anti-vital, and not by coincidence, but by the predictable consequences of helping "those most in need".
You identify the most wretched group of people and help them. They move up exactly one step towards becoming productive. In the next time step, they have stopped being the most wretched, so you withdraw your support in favor of the newly-most-wretched group. As a more extreme example, as soon as a person becomes productive, you start burdening them with taxes to support your altruistic efforts.
In the absence of enough resources to uplift everyone, this myopic decision criteria guarantees that no-one will actually reach the threshold of self-sufficiency and surplus generation. You're systematically minimizing the maximum of awesomeness, over the population you're "helping".
For a person to become prosperous and strong, it's not enough for them to be protected from malaria. They need a bunch of other things: investment into their education, infrastructure, a working labor market, etc etc. As I understand it, Vitalism says it's better to give this entire package to 10% of the population than to give only malaria nets to 100% of the population. And this remains true even if that 10% is chosen completely at random, so it's orthogonal to any dysgenic arguments.
Valuable contribution. Nitpick/tangential comment: noting that while everything said in the first example is true, it shouldn't be confused with a 'returns maximising' strategy.
**My poor wording: it has an equal chance of inferior returns, because it systematically selects for losers rather than winners in your portfolio. And just because a stock has gone up, doesn't mean that it is more likely to go down in the future. Equally, just because a stock hasn't gone up, doesn't make it more likely to do so in future.
**Better wording by gpt4:
The strategy inherently assumes a degree of mean reversion in the prices of assets, where assets that have appreciated will eventually fall back in price and those that have depreciated will rise. However, this is not always the case, and relying on this assumption can lead to potential drawbacks:
Missed Growth Opportunities: By selling off portions of assets that have increased in value to buy more of those that have decreased, rebalancing might lead you to cut winners short and double down on losers. If certain assets continue to perform well beyond the norm, constantly selling them off can lead to missing out on significant growth opportunities.
Contrarian to Trend Following: The rebalancing strategy goes against trend-following strategies, which assume that assets that are performing well will continue to do so. Trend followers would likely hold onto rising assets longer or even buy more, contrasting sharply with the rebalancing approach of selling them off to buy underperformers.
Market Efficiency and Random Walk Hypothesis: Modern financial theory often suggests that markets are efficient, meaning all known information is already reflected in stock prices. According to the random walk hypothesis, stock price movements are independent of each other; therefore, past price movements are not indicative of future trends. If true, the fundamental basis for rebalancing (expecting mean reversion) might not align well with how markets actually operate.
Cost Considerations: Frequent rebalancing can incur transaction costs and tax implications, especially if done in taxable accounts. These costs can eat into the overall returns of the portfolio, potentially negating some of the benefits of rebalancing.
Agreed, it's not optimal. The important aspect here is that a very specific, predictable investment strategy drops out of a very simple, stateless process. You need to analyze it to understand what's happening, and the effect of a poorly chosen policy can be *worse* than random.
One should note that the portfolio rebalancing only works while the currency in question is relatively stable. When the currency crashes (which fiat currencies tend to do in the long run), it leads to ruin.
Seems to me that the real difference between mere signaling or pretending and actually trying is sacrifice. Sure you may TALK a good game about your philosophy and conspicuously support it when and where it's easy to do so, but can you support your philosophy when the cost of doing so is significant? If you're merely pretending to try or even pretending to really try, you're still only engaging in effective altruism or whatever-your-ism-is as long as your community is on board and it doesn't really feel like you're sacrificing. Not if you're whole community and everything that matters to you is right where you want your beliefs to be, then pretending to really try is all you need do, but if something happens to that support structure, so it's no longer convenient to pretend at all, that's the real test of your commitment.
> Capitalism is a kind of conflict and was responsible for many (though not all) of the inventions mentioned above (but do remember that Bell Labs was famously productive precisely because it was a monopoly)
I seriously doubt Bell Labs was productive because they were a monopoly. What assumptions does that rest on?
Yes, capitalism is a kind of conflict. Just like democracy manages to have transitions of power without bloodshed, capitalism also gives you a kind of conflict (and resolution) without bloodshed. That's great!
Compare and contrast https://gwern.net/backstop
On the object level, one of the greater contributions from Bell Labs was Claude Shannon's information theory, and he would ride the unicycle in the halls and otherwise slack off. I think a vitalist would have written him off.
Re: why think Bell Labs was due to a monopoly, but the completely naive answer is that they did lots of inventions before the breakup, and lots less after it.
Re: backstop, that is true at the level of abstraction being discussed, but doesn't mean that something LIKE the lack of a backstop at some level would propagate throughout a system. I would imagine the response to this is: yes, there was no pain at the economic level of the department, but there likely was pain from feedback with other smart / tasteful researchers. Hamming question certainly seem to be practiced throughout the labs!
>"On the object level, one of the greater contributions from Bell Labs was Claude Shannon's information theory, and he would ride the unicycle in the halls and otherwise slack off. I think a vitalist would have written him off."
Why would you think that? A person being completely unafraid to buck the local status quo (the grey-suited, brown-nosed, nose-to-the-grindstone "organization man" ethos, which *definitely* has sklavenmoral elements in it) in shameless pursuit of their own desires, and excelling while doing it, is definitely something a vitalist can appreciate.
If we were talking about hypothetical vitalists formed from the platonic realm, you'd be right, but I suspect someone like Walt Bismarck would call him a cucked (for getting divorced) autist (for being a nerd)
What specific vitalists are you thinking of that would mean my prejudice is wrong? To point out, Scott is trying to start an entirely new way of medical funding with Lorian Psychiatry, is earning a big pile of money via the strength of his own writing and clearly is not an organization man, and he's "gay Jewish autist", not "Superman I am going to punch out". I don't think I have unusual mind reading powers, just normal inference ones that can be wrong. So who specifically am I wrong about?
I mean, we're discussing what's the "proper" way to interpret/implement Nietzschean thought, so yeah, "hypothetical vitalists formed from the platonic realm" seem relevant to the discussion. I certainly wouldn't claim that the sum total of what Nietzschean thought can offer is summed up in Walt Bismarck.
Re: Scott, I think Nietzsche would appreciate Lorian, and much of Scott's writing. I don't think Nietzsche would particularly care about the gayness, Jewishness, or autism. I think Nietzsche would certainly scoff at Scott's willingness to self-censor - and his retreat from communities he has created for the purpose of open discussion - because he was catching social blowback for being "associated" with people willing to discuss HBD, manosphere stuff, neoreaction, etc. People are complex.
I didn't have Nietzsche in mind at all, I would have referred to him, or master/slave morality if I did. I specifically wrote "a vitalist" rather than "the vitalists" or "slave morality" to be clear that I wasn't talking about the platonic ideal, but specific people with specific expectations.
I'm talking about specific people because I want to know if their ideology is good at predicting the things they care about. A hypothetical vitalist from the platonic realm can never make an incorrect prediction, because people will no true Scotsman, or post hoc justify how people are or aren't vitalists. Is your model of vitalists ever wrong about the consequences of what they believe? I would guess never.
Because if you want to claim something like "this is my ideology, it's good at predicting the world as well as driving the world towards its goals", it's a good idea to double check if what they're saying is true or false.
I'm not sure I should care what Nietzsche says if I care mostly about having good taste in scouting out human potential, and if you want to talk about him, I don't have anything useful to say.
> Re: why think Bell Labs was due to a monopoly, but the completely naive answer is that they did lots of inventions before the breakup, and lots less after it.
Maybe.
Claude Shannon also did a lot more discovering in early life than later. Perhaps there was just a lot of relatively easy pickings at that time in the life of both Bell Labs and Claude Shannon?
What, for a bunch of completely different fields? That's about as plausible as saying that antibiotics work via regression to the mean! Sure a bunch of illnesses get better naturally without antibiotics, that doesn't mean that it doesn't kill bacteria!
I agree that there are other factors that aren't "Bell Labs was owned by a monopoly", but I don't think it's unreasonable to say "a bunch of fully funded scientists in one location, that wouldn't exist if not for large amounts of expected stability in the company's future" means that the monopoly enabled them.
> There’s some evidence that the most heavily-bombed areas of Britain and Japan are richer today (because they were able to build back from first principles instead of being limited by existing infrastructure).
You'd have to exclude the effect of wealth transfers?
If society bands together to give an orphan a billion dollars, that means that the individual orphan might be better off without the parents. But society still had to scrounge up the billion dollars, and would have been better off on net with the parents still alive.
You touch on an interesting point when you say that both altruists and vitalists desire to produce more "resilient" individuals. It makes me think of the various philosophical schools of ancient Greece and how (to my mind anyways) they always viewed the cultivation of a resilient mind as the end goal of their moral philosophy. They sometimes called it different things, though many of them settled on atraxia, and of course they all had different paths to get there. To Aristotle, it was the cultivation of virtues that were neither in excess or deficiency, such that the individual would be able to respond in the proper way to any given situation. The Stoics sought to reign in their passions by following Nature's Law, allowing them to view any eventuality with equanimity. The Skeptics suspended final judgement of all opinions, allowing them to continue the search for truth without being bound to any one viewpoint and the mental baggage that came with it.
It seems to me a kind of homeostasis that they sought: a mental state that would able to maintain it's internal coherence in response to whatever buffeting winds and waves the environment can hurl at it. In such a state, an individual would be able to see the situation for what it is, resist the temptation to panic or despair at the challenge that faces them, and stay focused on what is necessary to achieve their goals. From that mental stability would arise a sense of tranquility and bliss, knowing that the individual could maintain their composure in response to anything. Surely, such a thing would be of great desire to an altruist. Of course, to continue the biological analogy, such a state likely cannot be achieved in an environment lacking stressors as many protective mechanisms are only activated in response to the presence of stressors (the term in hormesis). Cells and bodies, like individuals, grow strong in response to things trying to tear them down, hardening themselves against potentially deadly foes. It follows rather easily from that that seeking out challenge and danger is an effective (if not necessary) step.
Where I would differ from the vitalists (at least as I interpret their work from what you've said and linked to) is the idea that stressing individuals is the same as depriving individuals. To grow strong in response to challenges requires a foundation that is best built through care and support. A child that grows up in an abusive environment, not knowing where their next meal will come from, will not likely possess a strong, stable mind. Or to put it another way, a broken bone may heal back stronger where it was broken, but if it is not set properly or if breaks come too often and too fast then the body will not be stronger for it.
"Orson Welles' The Third Man"
Welles delivered the famous line as Harry Lime, but The Third Man was directed by Carol Reed.
Good post, but over half of the inventions cited as products of non-war advancement are developments of military tech
Many "-isms" can coexist in harmony and mutual esteem, when you take them as world views. But when you take them as marginal shoves, they do not. To use an example different from OP: DEI and Conservatism can happily coexist. Diversity is good because it allows for more Madisonian style decision-making within institutions. Equity is good, because we want equality before the rules and processes of our institutions and need to double-check them for the types of biases that will make them less effective at utilizing talent from different backgrounds. And Inclusion will mean that we seek ways that the work places culture blends these differences into a cohesive whole rather than a siloed patchwork of Balkanized social circles. DEI people should find conservatives fellow travelers as well, though. Institutional change must be slow so that the institution remains stable. It is hard to work at an institution that doesn't exist or is in the midst of a Jacobin uprising. Freedom of conscience encourages diversity of view points and thus cultures, even the weird Brazilian guy who thinks the earth is an expanding geode. And heck, Christ came to save all people so every employee needs to feel that this is a nice and kind workplace.
Why is this absurd to most people?
Because DEI and Conservatism and EA and Vitalism are, as you point out, not total philosophies of morality and politics. They are *marginal*, i.e. they are trying to push the culture 10% in some direction. So while they can seem like fellow travelers and reconciliation is possible and it is good work to try and reconcile people on these, they are competing for scarce resources, namely attention and cultural support. Yes. You. Can. Have. Both. But most people confuse the philosophy and the movement, and thus we don't see BLM signs and Support the Police signs in the same yard... though we should.
Excellent post, but I wonder if the point about war has *always* been true or if it *used* to actually accelerate progress, in a world where there was more low hanging fruit for discovery (by a small group or an individual, with less need for the complicated economic structures we can build cooperatively in peacetime), less resources available to invest in R&D without imposing suffering (which seems more worthwhile when the other option is losing a war), and fewer to no readily-apparent recent innovations that made life noticeably better on human-perceptible timescales.
Similarly, in the past the standard solution to "My city's infrastructure is out of date" was "Wait for it to be destroyed, then rebuild." Often that was war, but it could also be fire, or earthquakes, or flooding, or a hurricane, or a tornado for that matter. Peace or not, we've become more resistant to *all* these disasters, and have not found a good way to rebuild cities while still living in them and using what we have without imposing significant near-term costs on the locals, which in the US we've largely decided to forbid ourselves from doing.
TL:DR version: I think it's similar to the reason large, developed economies haven't gone to war at scale since WWII. We finally reached a point where it was too obvious not to admit that war was no longer worthwhile economically even for the victor, because the value of people (human capital) and the built environment totally outweighed the value of land and natural resources.
Just to add a small point, the Italy/Swiss comparison is not correct in a way I feel illustrates the naivete of the vitalists' "Greatness" arguments.
First, for completeness, Switzerland has been far from being at peace in the last 500 years - the modern Switzerland is from 1848, and that follows a civil war (admittedly, not a lot of people died) between Catholics and Protestants over government models, in turn instigated by the invasion of eastern cantons by napoleonic France. Bern itself spent a long time sending mercenaries to every conflict they could find, and expanded its territory by the use of force. The Swiss mercenaries became well known enough that the Vatican was like "we need a Secret Service for the Pope, these guys seem like a good deal in this late medieval world of constant political assassinations".
On the other hand, the modern Switzerland is in fact quite a peaceful place. People do lots of "altruistic" stuff like voluntary work (you're even expected to list that in your citizenship application!). And yet it has produced Euler, the Bernouillis, and Einstein, nearly 30 Nobel prizes, of which 7 in physics, 7 in chemistry, and 9 medicine. It created the Red Cross, holds the seat of dozens of international organizations, and CERN. Inventions as random as velcro, the turbocharger, and LSD. Even relevant-for-the-information age stuff like the World Wide Web, or widely used languages (Pascal and Scala) come from Switzerland. It is crazy for a country this size - and I really don't think this would work if Switzerland weren't such an attractive place to develop one's ideas. Not because it has lots of tanks, the biggest buildings in the world, or it has conquered all it's neighbours. It's because it's really nice to live here - you can (still) mostly trust your society and government, by no small measure thanks to strong federalism, direct democracy, and a commitment from the State to being chill and not doing crazy stuff in the name of some undefined "greatness".
It helps when you live in and around a natural fortress, have a bit of a mania for digging random tunnels which may or may not be full of armaments, and have mandatory civilian conscription and a healthy recreational sport-shooting culture.
Just before WWI, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II allegedly got upset with the Swiss over some diplomatic incident or other, and demanded of the Swiss ambassador what their puny citizen's militia, generally reckoned to be about a quarter-million men strong, would do if he ordered a half million men of the active-duty German Heer to invade. The ambassador is said to have cooly replied "shoot twice and go home."
Countries and peoples lacking in vitality don't produce that type of laconic attitude towards major threats.
Tbh the "natural fortress" bit only applies to the Old Switzerland cantons up in the Alps. Most of the economic/technological activity happens in the "lowlands", like Geneva, Zurich, Basel, the Mitteland of Bern, or Aarau. I don't want to downplay the social role of mandatory conscription. And the direct democracy/extreme federalism model that these later "lowland" cantons imported from the original alpine ones was only possible in the latter because of their independence from feudal powers - which definitely benefited from the orography.
But the rest of the character of a place like Geneva comes from it being a historical trade hotspot, both from its location and its (not very "vitalist") readiness to take in(*) refugees and discards from elsewhere in Europe. Not irrelevant to the discussion, this is what the USA were actively welcoming earlier in the 20th century, and from where they got a nontrivial fraction of their later inventors and laureates.
Dufour, the general of the winning side of the Swiss civil war, is a national hero. But mostly because he managed to avoid bloodshed and large scale battles, pushed for a middle ground solution to the original conflict despite an undisputed win for his reformist side, and returned to his engineering job of building bridges as soon as he was done with the war. This does not scream "Alexander the Great" or "Julius Caesar" to me.
(*) "in" as in "around the city", not quite "within the walls". But letting even "heretics" be a part of city life, instead of "kick them and/or kill them", is a crazy amount of altruism for pre-Enlightenment Europe.
>This does not scream "Alexander the Great" or "Julius Caesar" to me.
Cincinnatus springs to mind.
I suppose you can say that the majority of the hospital system everywhere is in Extremistan, and that doesn't seem *completely* ridiculous. But otherwise your first point is wrong: if the bioethicists were vitalists many things would be mandatory that are now forbidden and vice versa, and intensive and end-of-life care would be wildly different.
Thinking about the great accomplishments of the past -- Rome, the Internet, etc. -- it's striking how few of them were done by, or even lead by, a single person. Reading Bret Devereaux's blog, it's clear that Rome prospered because (likely more by accident than purpose) it settled on a very productive agricultural model and use that to finance a very effective military system. But typically Rome had a number of generals heading up a number of wars each summer, and it was their aggregate success that expanded the empire, not the particular genius of any one genera.
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
The Swiss were the terrifying armies of the Renaissance.
Their mercenary blocks of pikemen were what ended the dominance of medieval knights. The pikes made them impervious to cavalry changes - and they would even charge cavalry themselves (something infantry almost never does). There were no infantry formations in Europe that could defeat them either, until the German landsknecht started to copy their tactics in 1490. Knights were not driven off the field by cannons - artillery wouldn't defeat cavalry until the late 1800s - they were driven off the field by dense infantry formations, starting with the Swiss pikemen. Firearms were introduced to battlefields (not just sieges) in the 1500s to counter the Swiss, not to counter cavalry.
If you read Machiavelli's letters, one of the major things he worries about is what would happen if the Swiss actually decided they wanted conquest. At the time, the Swiss had all of the best armies in Europe, so if they wanted to, he thinks they could have conquered whatever they wanted to. [1]
In 1506, the next pope after the Borgias pope established the Swiss Guard, which continues to defend the pope to this day. The French king would use Swiss mercenaries as his personal guard until the French Revolution, when they were massacred defending the Tuileries on 10 August 1792.
The military record of Switzerland during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Eras is substantially more impressive than that of the Borgias.
[1] https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
“If an altruist’s goal is to give everyone the equivalent of a childhood raised by loving parents in a happy suburb with great schools, I don’t think a vitalist can complain.“
This is itself a form of extremistan, because the actual world is really far from giving every child prep school and a suburb. In the real world, there are really large divergences between vitalism (wanting to improve a life affirming aesthetic, exemplified by a few humanist exemplars) and altruism (wanting to improve the lives of everyone, starting with those at the bottom because they have the steepest utility curve). One philosophy would be in favor of confiscating billionaire wealth to give to those at the bottom, and the other would prioritize artistic and cultural endeavors over society’s worse off.
Separately: It sounds a tiny bit to me like Scott is moving toward vitalism in some sense (though not the crazy RW twitter form that says war and death are good), or at least a longer term view of altruism that instrumentalizes vitalism as a practical philosophy.
Not fellow travelers. You're making a category error. Both are roughly philosophies, but not the same kind. EA is antidisestablishmentarian consequentialist. Vitalism is disestablishmentarian virtue ethics. I could translate one world view into another into each others terms, but that would waste time on status games and idle conversation, instead of at least trying to be selfish.
«An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.»
JvN was extremely privileged, but also lived thru extreme political instability in Hungary including progroms.
To quote: «His friend Stanislaw Ulam recalled von Neumann attributing this Hungarian phenomenon to “a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction.”»
Pretty much all belief systems agree on local obvious things like curing the sick, and increasing wealth. The way belief systems are defined is on what they disagree on, namely, the non-local, the extermal.
Identifying that altruism shares that common ground with vitalism and then saying ignore the extermal stuff is entirely missing the point. It is these considered differences on the extremal that defines the belief systems. If you say you are not a vitalist but an altruist then in a meaningful way you are identifying with one set of extrapolations / extramals over the other (otherwise just say you're a decent human muddling by).
If you want kudos for making extremal claims, say being Peter Singer and making the outlandish claim that you wish you cared, that you ought to care, for a stranger as much as your own kids, then prepare to have orhers disagree with you - about how they are actually vitalists or fundemantalist christians etc...
Further, everything we treat as normal was extremal once. Effective Altruism (a re-hash of naive utilitarianism that is mererly focuses less on philosophy and more on results) is actually pretty extremal in what it suggests, and that should be admired (even if not agreed with).
Imagine a healthy guy with a relaxed dead-end job way below his maximum earning potential. He enjoys lots of free time by chatting with friends, watching tv shows and playing chill non-competitive videogames. He is pretty happy with his life.
This outcome is rated highly by altruism, very low by vitalism. And surely this guy is not in Extremistan. Lots of examples like this.
I think you are right, but it would still be rated a lot less by altruism than if he was trying to improve the world.
I am really unsure I understand the vitalist point of view, but another example could be a warlord just trying to conquer territories for no other reason than to get more power. Maybe rated high by vitalists, but quite low by altruists.
Are you more of an altruist, a vitalist, or something else ?
> Are you more of an altruist, a vitalist, or something else ?
Me personally? Altruist.
To clarify, I was talking about that guy specifically as an outcome (of some policy), not as a person. If you have a choice between two otherwise identical policies, where one produces a thousand guys like described, and another - a thousand of successful athletes with persistent health and interpersonal problems (boxers with poor anger management) who are not as happy, I feel like vitalism and altruism strongly disagree, and the situation is absolutely not contrived.
Yes, I think you are right.
To me it seems like Scott tried to reduce the actual ethical conflict with some hope to bring some collaboration and something better out of it.
But I don't really buy it.
Also, I think "vitalists" are just confused, and they can be convinced but it is hard to do.
> “Maybe we should have more war, because war strengthens society!”
I think it is just damp dreams of Romaniticism and nothing else. In 2014 Putin annexed Crimea, but it didn't stop there, because Igor Girkin started a war in Donbass. Girkin told explicitly that Russia needs war to awake Russians, blah-blah-blah... Now Russia is weaker then it was at any point for the last 100 years.
BTW Girkin is really seems to live to his dreams of strong people who can topple the mountains by their sheer will and strength, but the problem is Putin is not a mountain, he can't be toppled so easy, and Girkin now in a prison, because since 2022 he became more and more desperate about Russian generals' ability to wage a war. Girkin became a vocal critic of russian army and the whole russian regime. He tried to take a part in the current war, but refused to be a soldier who silently does what he is told to do, and no one allowed him to participate on his terms. At some point the regime decided to stop it and imprisoned him. I'm not sure what the formal reason was, it doesn't matter in Russia.
I note, Girkin didn't just waged wars in Internet, he didn't just dream about an ideal world, he tried to live according to his beliefs. I do not admire his beliefs and never admired them, but I watched him closely, because in some domains his opinions were very precise. He did read a lot about wars, he participated in a few wars, and in Ukraine he was in the middle of the mess, he knew what happened, and so his predictions often were very precise. I think, he is just an ideal vitalist, even if I didn't agree with him, I cannot feel no respect for a person who lived to his ideals. But at the same time, his perverted ideals simply couldn't let him to achieve his terminal goals.
Sometimes I wonder, how seemingly smart and active person could believe in such dreams. I do not wonder about Nietzsche, he seems to me to be a terminal case of an incel, and these guys easily could be smart and raving mad at the same time. But Girkin doesn't fit the bill of an incel.
I offer this as a cautionary tale: romantics live in their romanticized alternate reality and they are potentially dangerous.
Very interesting about Girkin, thanks.
And yes vitalists, at least of the Nietzschean variety, are Sturm und Drang German Romantics to the core.
If we are talking about Nietzsche, at least, I think a central point of his criticism of slave morality is that he sees it as growing out of resentment and envy. You can find this, for example, in his late book The Antichrist.
If you want to max out on vitalism in today's world and believe in war making you stronger, Ukraine is accepting volunteers. Or if you want to go all-in on "trad" masculinity, Russia might take you too. You could also read up on Roland Bertetzko, who overcame the pretending to really try part when the Kosovo war started. He has also been convicted for planting a car bomb outside the Centre for Peace and Tolerance after the war was over, which seems very true to vitalist principles. (He denies he was involved in the bombing.)
I think you are missing a big point of distinction between altruists and vitalists, which is that the altruist sees the world as positive-sum ("helping African children not get malaria makes us all better off!"), while the vitalist sees the world as zero-sum ("for us to help African children, we necessarily must be losing something if they are gaining something"). That zero-sum mentality, I think, is the underpinning motivation for more war/struggle/suffering. It's not just good for us, it's bad for them, which means it's doubly good for us.
That same mentality also explains the link between vitalism and various flavors of nationalism (etho, civic, etc). Who is the "us" that should benefit, and who is the "them" who should suffer (and preferably, be wiped out completely?). Why, it's my family/clan/tribe/race/nation/culture, of course, and "them" is everyone who's not that. And, as with other aspects of vitalism, there is a lot of hand-waving about when and where you draw the us/them dividing line, but fundamentally I think it all comes down to zero-sum vs. positive sum.
It's not exactly to the benefit of the vitalist to make this explicit, though, because the world is so obviously positive-sum (from my view, at least - as I drink my Kenyan-grown coffee.)
Sorry, but this is the first time I find myself disagreeing with you strongly. I take it you haven't read "The will to power"? I think that is putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Would the World of Warcraft playerbase be twice as happy if you doubled the bank of every player? Would they enjoy the game more if you doubled their stats? Would you be doing them a favor if they started at the max level, saving them the suffering of grinding? Would they enjoy the game more this way?
I don't think you're taking human psychology into account, at all, and neither do I think you're taking Nietzsches ideas into account. My translated copy of "Will to power" contains the word "happiness" 120 times. Nietzsche has already explained why happiness is not a good goal, and he has even explained how thinking positively of alturism is a sign of poor spirit (spirit basically meaning character, attitude, or mental well-being).
Wealth doesn't make people happy nor healthy. If you can generate wealth, then you likely hold positive traits, but inherited wealth often ruins people. It's the lack of wealth which makes people strive towards competence! Suffering is essential for the same reason, necessity is a great teacher. Nietzsche valued war for the same reason that we value economic competition, - it leads to growth. The reason great people often come from wealthy families is because they tend to have better genes and better nutrition. Making a great person requires generations of storing up strength:
"Through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired and stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. In the end there appears a man, a monster of energy, who demands a monster of a task" - twtp 995
Alturism doesn't increase health, darwinism does that! Alturism preserves the weak and sickly, which would be fine if it "Taught people to fish" rather than creating a dependent population by giving them fish.
A TL;DR of Nietzsche would be: Humans are anti-fragile, suffering and overcoming leads to growth, and happiness is merely a side-effect of the feeling of growth and power. The greater a person is, the more anti-fragile they are, meaning that they can turn more suffering and hardship into growth. One is already degenerate if they merely want a peaceful life, and if they consider feelings (happiness, suffering, or pleasure) as of having importance.
A person is also degenerate if they stop learning or working just because it feels unpleasant, right? If a person in rehabilitation gives up merely because recovery is painful, then their priorities are way off. The people who recover quickly are Nietzschean, they are almost too stubborn not to recover, they are the types who will try to crawl out of their hospital beds before they're ready because they have important things to do.
I recommend reading Nietzsche not as a philosopher, but as a psychologist. Actually, just read more of his books, and not other peoples poor takes.
I guess a vitalist would want to win wars regardless of whether he's in the right?
I haven't read most of the preceding 600 comments, so apologies if I'm repeating what others have said.
>America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket.
The important breakthroughs in computing happened before 1939 (Turing machine idea is from 1936). For the rest of the century the Americans are mostly milking this same Turing machine cow.
The space program owes its existence to Nazi rocket science and WW2. The other breakthroughs mentioned are less impressive or just more industrial applications of the same ones.
Also, there is only one (or at most two) superpower from 1945-present, so n=1 for this period and we can't say anything about how well America made use of its position. We would need to (e.g.) compare with timelines where the Nazis won.
>Iraq has had approximately eight major war
>I’m not expecting Russia or Ukraine to leapfrog the rest of the world
Apples and oranges. As said, there is only one superpower, n=1. If you want a comparison you have to go back further in history.
>War isn’t actually that great for science, art, or the economy.
It can be. It's a "paradox" of the same kind as "must be cruel to be kind" or "that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger". For some reason those in the utilitarian camp keep forgetting or downplaying this idea of anti-fragility. They keep advocating "never be cruel" and "never kill anything", even though it will obviously fail even by utilitarianism's own standards. E.g. aid to Africa makes African countries fragile and dependent, does not strengthen them.
>I think both altruists and vitalists have a shared interest in figuring out the structures (capitalism? monopoly? friendly rivalry?) that maximize progress without devolving into anyone actually getting nuked.
Okay, but if the stakes of the competitions are real, you'll be unhappy with the "cruelty" towards the losers. If the stakes are fake, it just won't work. My impression is you want fake stakes (e.g. everyone should live in cushy first world conditions even if their productivity is zero).
I want to challenge the expression "maximize progress". It's in the nature of progress that it involves unknown unknowns and discontinuity. So it can't be maximised like a mathematical function.
>The second divergence argument I hear is “suffering builds character”
I think you've failed the ITT here.
The argument is "(in many cases) you can have a lot of pain and a lot of gain, or no pain no gain". Normally the pain and gain are both caused by a third term (e.g. fighting really hard for something to the point of becoming a martyr). The pain doesn't have to directly causes the gain.
> more than you could contribute to world GDP
Regardless of your morals, world GDP is a terrible metric to be aiming at. Goodhart's law applies very strongly, since most politicians try to hack their national GDP (and world GDP is just a sum of all these). It now tells us almost nothing, except "lots of people have tried really hard to make this particular number on a screen go up".
It's something like cargo cult science to say "saving X lives will increase expected GDP by Y, and Y increase is associated with Z amount of progress". You have no mechanism for how Y causes Z, and blindly increasing Y can't be expected to lead to Z.
>Second, the potential of Kenya is probably underutilized because it’s underdeveloped, and part of the process of making it less underdeveloped is making its people healthier.
How is developing Kenya helping the world, big picture wise? Are Kenyan universities likely to surpass American ones?
The implicit argument seems to be either:
- Everyone has a fixed % chance to be a genius/innovator, so increasing the amount of healthy people increases the number of such.
- In the Civilization video games, having more population equates to more science output. I can't come up with a better model of science output (without being racist/elitist) so I'll just use this.
But some form of elitism is definitely true, as you've accepted elsewhere, e.g. in posts about the number of Hungarian Jewish geniuses.
> Your best option is to make Africa less of a mess, so that it can take care of itself and its people don’t try to immigrate elsewhere.
And is the first step towards "it can take care of itself", "continually supply every African country with aid so they're trapped in a state of dependence"?
> If I wanted to strengthen humanity as much as possible, I’d probably work on economic development...
Unless you explain what economic development is, I can only imagine it as something like "instead of China having $18T GDP, 1.4B population, 2.8M factories, it now has $36T GDP, 2.8B population, 5.6M factories". Isn't this bad, even by EA standards (global warming)?
> , curing diseases
Disease is obviously not a major limiting factor on civilisational progress, any more than population is.
> , or technological progress.
This is the juicy one. What's your model for the factors that lead to technological progress?
Blindly increasing GDP or population or life expectancy doesn't do anything. We already have an abundance of healthy Chinese factory workers being "productive". Probably too many, from a global warming POV.
> Vitalist bloggers mostly don’t seem to think this way. They spend most of the energy criticizing altruists, and never really get around to practicing vitalism at all.
We all live in the American Empire. We can't do university research anywhere without being cancelled for disagreeing with aspects of American progressive ideology. This issue is upstream of nearly everything else, and sufficient explains why many smart young men take to online criticism instead of building things within the system.
> I think it’s all signaling. People who want to validate an identity as kind and compassionate become altruists. People who want to validate an identity as tough and masculine and hard-headed become vitalists. This is why people bother hitching their star to any philosophy instead of just making money or playing video games or whatever.
You seem to be saying that there's no such thing as being tough and masculine. If you really believe this, I feel sorry for you -- you've been broken/tamed by modernity in a very strong sense, and you're also unlucky with the friends you've met.
>although some would say these produce new signaling games (eg shrimp welfare).
> The mirror image on the vitalist side is when they end up supporting war and suffering, concepts which are especially hard to endorse
Many serious thinkers have seen value in war and suffering, and many common people too. Pre 20th Century this wasn't considered edgy and subversive at all. Given that you know lots of dissatisfied young men are taking 19th Century thinkers seriously again (see your recent posts on Nietzsche), you can't be surprised that some of them are seriously pro-war again.
> War and suffering are so impractical
War and suffering are never only for their own sake. A war is about something (a disagreement between certain powers), suffering is a signal of something (damage, decrease in certain powers).
It's quite reasonable to say "the Vietnam War was impractical and achieved nothing". It's absurd to say "the US Civil War was impractical and achieved nothing". The slavery question, and the balance of power in North America, had to be settled one way or the another.
A steelman of your position is: the end of WW2 gave us an overall winner, the US, so any further war is now impractical.
But the US that won WW2 is a particular contingent power -- FDR's US. It was suited to 20th Century conditions. It's not realistic that in Space Year 3000, we're all living peacefully under this same regime. Firstly it will simply decay. Secondly and more importantly, it cannot decisively settle questions that arise from new technology or new philosophy (the latter is at least as important, and conspicuously absent from your post).
> I have a bunch of complicated tax form things I need to do that would get me a few hundred extra dollars per month; I’ve delayed them for over a year now. You’d think that if I were genuinely selfish I’d take the free money. Humans genuinely do what some sort of predictive algorithm figures will send the most dopamine to a certain part of their mesolimbic system
Can we look for a better hypothesis? (I'm suspicious of reductions of behaviour to "maximise chemical X"). For example, maybe part of your brain hates taxes and paperwork and living in such an artificial way, and wants to tear the forms up. It's kept in check by more civilised parts, but it's strong enough to put up some kind of fight and prevent you being a perfect drone.
This hypothesis predicts that if you ever lose all faith in civilisation, you would do things like set all your taxes on fire in a fit of anger and feel great about it (the beast would be set free and take revenge). On your hypothesis, taxes are just boring and non-dopamine-producing (but not hated in a strong sense) so you'd just forget about them or calmly bin them. What do you imagine yourself doing?
> So my challenge to the vitalists is to pretend to really try.
On my reading, vitalist maps roughly onto anti-establishment/anti-Progressive and altruist onto Progressive. I expect vitalists will continue to sit around and goad you on the internet, until the moment for regime change comes.
I think Scott is being very hypocritical. William MacAskill is already in Extremistan. EA already has one foot in Extremistan. The inflection point where I started to diverge from a fan of the blog to a skeptical reader who holds it at arm's length was the point many many years ago where Scott went to EA things and came away feeling at least a little concerned by 80,000 Hours, who told him he was wasting his life as a doctor. Telling someone to quit being a doctor so they can do more good at an NGO is in Extremistan!
I am disappointed that a larger version of the cute picture of a dog and a cat doesn't appear at the top of this article.
What I think is being missed by this argument (and by the insistence that the two only differ under extreme circumstances) is that, OMG am I really saying this, EA is essentially a "Marxist" view of the world while Vitalism is "richer".
What I mean by this is that the Marxist view of the world, being solidly 19th C rational, posits that human life is primarily about material conditions, with the implication that both politics and charity are about manipulating those conditions. But this is not the only view of the world.
Both the pre-rationalist view (essentially "gut instinct" modified by various tradition and convention) and post-rationalist view (built on realizing the limitations of the "axioms of rationality", first in math, then in physics, then one-day perhaps in social sciences as we realize the importance of things like the non-unitary mind...) understand that man does not live by bread alone; there is more, in fact much much more, to life than just material circumstances. It doesn't matter if you interpret this in terms of "God is more important than a 1% higher GDP" or in terms of "the environment is more important than a 1% higher GDP", whether you come at this as a Republican insisting on the importance of culture or as a Wokist insisting on the importance of identity; in all these cases you're conceding that an emphasis on purely the material misses something very important.
You may not agree with the particulars of Vitalism, but they are also squarely in this beyond-materialism camp. In a way, just as Woke is the end point of Christianity taken to an impossible extreme, EA is the end point of Marx taken to an impossible extreme.
And in both cases, most of the adherents are not philosophers (in fact barely capable of abstract thought) so they don't even see this; your average Wokist is happy to complain about Marxist issues (wages, taxes, prices) when that seems to align with the larger Wokist cause, and your average EA is happy to attend whatever sort of Pride march we are supposed to engaged in this month. But make no mistake, when push comes to shove, these two are not aligned; they are not Jews and Christians, believing the same kinda of thing, they are rather Scientists and Fundamentalists believing very different things.
In this way Vitalism is more in the camp of Woke. They sincerely hate each other, like Christians and Saracens, but they both understand the kind of things they're fighting for, that they're both fighting for the primacy of culture, and what that culture will be. EA imagines that culture is not important, that it will disappear in the general utopia of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening (eg Star Trek).
I'm not telling you which to "believe"' but I am telling you that the framework provided by Scott for which to believe is, IMHO, utterly missing everything important. Of course Scott may disagree! That's kinda the point of being a Marxist, that you say it doesn't matter what the peasants think, what their mental life consists of as long as they have food, clothing, and housing. Well, we, the entire West, kinda sorta believed that until 9/11 woke us up; and for those who didn't get the message, basically the run-up to Trump and everything since then should surely have opened your eyes?
+1 The Third Man
In the end these are highly abstracted and simplified aka dumbed down ideas that may be good talk or manifesto material. Confusing them with the reality of our manifold competing preferences is probably not that smart.
Isn't this a false choice between two natural poles of human incentive structures?
It's all a continuum, no? Altruism is pulling impulse whereas vitalism is the pushing impulse.
Humanity has a funny way of containing multiple spectrums of orientations and behaviors, with a fairly even distribution across all spectrums.
The cheat code is that it's really "all of the above."
This feels like a really interesting development of Scott's earlier posts: toxoplasma of rage & trails coming apart as a metaphor for life.
I really enjoyed this essay, and found myself hearing echoes of his earlier work. Those essays were revelatory for me, and it's really nice to see Scott building them up further.
Vitalism is not about strength. It’s about overcoming fear in pursuit of a value-aligned purpose.
I see vitalism as emphasizing THE MEANS, while altruism emphasizes THE ENDS.
In terms of possible life paths:
- Altruism might prescribe earning to give, in which one works a high-paying job at corporations that might stifle their authenticity and are misaligned with their personal values, in order to give that money to a good cause that helps net many people. (Probably the safest way to produce net good in the world.)
-Vitalism might prescribe challenging oneself to overcome fears and pursue an authentic path that aligns with personal values. (This likely involves a lot of failure, challenges, and has no guarantee of being effective or producing objective good.)
Let’s say these life paths are pursued, and now we’re on our death bed thinking back on our life. The Altruist might be content with the objective good they’ve produced in the world (THE ENDS). But they might feel that they neglected their own development, that they weren’t as alive as they could have been (THE MEANS). The Vitalist might feel that they really lived life to the max, adapting and being challenged (THE MEANS) while striving to achieve what they felt their unique purpose to be in the world. Maybe they didn’t create as much net objective good, maybe they even failed completely (THE ENDS), but at least they followed their own north star and along the way became a more realized and adaptable human being.
Both altruism and vitalism can be helpful in thinking about purpose and our pursuits, and ideally I think a balance can be struck. At the extremes, an earn-to-give altruist who becomes bitter and burned out at their high-paying high-stress accountancy job is on a personal level putting off a lot of subtle negative externalities into their local world. While on the other hand, a vitalist who decides their value-aligned purpose is to be the best silverback gorilla hunter is obviously prioritizing self over societal objective good.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, talks about how each of us can satisfy our “burden of freedom”. It is our task to determine how to navigate the ambiguity and responsibility of our existence. Some people bury their burden of freedom in their careers (The Serious Human), and some in collecting life experience (The Adventurous Human). She ultimately determines the right path is The Passionate Human*, a person who dedicates themselves based on their unique skills and potential to a purpose they find meaningful.
*(note: She later caveats this to say that the genuinely free Passionate Human is one who also recognizes and works for the freedoms of others. Touché!)
In the context of altruism v vitalism, I think Beauvoir’s moral framework provides a much needed 3rd dimension. Both can align with “The Passionate Human”; altruism if it doesn’t neglect personal potential and development, and vitalism if it doesn’t neglect the freedom of others and a pursuit that attempts to be net good for society.