If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism

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Followup to: If The Media Reported On Other Dangers The Way It Does AI Risk

1. Leading UN climatologist Dr. John Scholtz is in serious condition after being wounded in the mass shooting at Smithfield Park. Scholtz claims that his models can predict the temperature of the Earth from now until 2200 - but he couldn’t even predict a mass shooting in his own neighborhood. Why should we trust climatologists to protect us from some future catastrophe, when they can’t even protect themselves in the present?

2. Recently, bright young people have been energized by the political activist movement. Political activism says that instead of helping your friends or spending time with your family, you should have opinions on national politics, vote for candidates you like, donate to campaigns, and go to protests. But these high-sounding ideas came crashing down when President Bill Clinton, a hero of the political activism movement, was caught having sex with his intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky, herself a political activist, was lured into the White House with grandiose promises of “making a difference” and “doing her civic duty”. But in the end, political activism’s ideas proved nothing more than a cover for normal human predatory behavior. Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.

3. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is in trouble, with their treasurer accused of evading millions of dollars in taxes. Something like this was bound to happen at MADD - anyone who truly believed that hundreds of innocent children were being mowed down by drunk drivers would feel licensed to take any action, no matter how antisocial, to prevent this calamity. While we admit that MADD leaders have specifically said that members should always be trustworthy and obey the law, these statements are belied by their continued insistence that children will die unless drunk driving is prevented. They need to do better.

4. Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation. We need to make it harder for people to be nice to their children, so that the masses don’t keep falling for this ploy.

5. How would Medicare For All affect rising health care prices? We asked Emile Torres, then refused to consult anyone else or double-check anything they said.

6. It’s tempting to think that if your wife is kidnapped, you should try to help her. But in the myth of the Trojan War, Menelaus tries to rescue his wife after she was kidnapped, and it ends in disaster. This is the glorious humanistic tradition warning us against people who care too much about wife-kidnapping. If these tech bros would just read a book, they would learn that excessive concern about wife-kidnapping is dangerous and unnatural.

7. The NAACP wants to end racism. But we’ve seen how these kinds of seductive utopian movements to redesign the world have turned out in the past. Maybe the NAACP should focus on changing their own hearts instead.

8. Some epidemiologists are worrying that a new virus from Wuhan could become a wider catastrophe. Their message is infecting people around the world with fear and xenophobia, spreading faster than any plague. Perhaps they should consider that in some sense, they themselves are the global pandemic. OR DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND? SERIOUSLY, DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE? IN CASE YOU WANT TO SEND ME PULITZER PRIZES FOR THAT AMAZING CONCLUSION, MY ADDRESS IS . . .