the effectively altruistic AI's fans are gonna pipe bomb a Planned Parenthood (forum.effectivealtruism.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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[-] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is it just me or does the author just… not really spend any time trying to defend forced birth? Like, other than quoting counterarguments to abortion defences. It’s like he’s sort of assuming everyone already has ideas about why abortion itself is bad, but find it permissible for whatever reason. Is this a correct characterisation of the EA community? That they all harbour anti-abortion sentiment but for whatever reason permit abortion?

Overall it reads like a business proposal. Is this how you’re supposed to talk to an EA person? Instead of saying “here is why you should care about x”, you have to pitch them on the potential ROI of caring about something? If so, that’s a fucking frustrating way to think about the world, and this was a fucking awful article to read, just like every other treacles-y long form logorrhoea you get from these people.

[-] 200fifty@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is this a correct characterisation of the EA community? That they all harbour anti-abortion sentiment but for whatever reason permit abortion?

I actually wouldn't be surprised if this were the case -- the whole schtick of a lot of these people is "worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans", so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?

Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go "well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it's obviously bad and I don't really need to justify it." (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you're Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See also the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case – the whole schtick of a lot of these people is “worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans”, so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?

Same energy as those score-maximising Tetris AIs that taught themselves to stack blocks to the kill line and pause.

Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go “well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it’s obviously bad and I don’t really need to justify it.” (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you’re Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.

Ughhh yeah that sounds about right.