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This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.

She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.

I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals refuge and independence from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things.

Now the frame Piper used was relatively banal in the neoliberal era. Everything was about "equality of opportunity, not outcome." But wait a minute, isn't Piper in an IQ-obsessed cult? I thought genetic differences determine people's human capital, and that she was one of the good ones that says "yes and" we should throw a few bones at the dullards for their misfortune. She's also a market fundamentalist that presumably understands that her preferred political economic arrangements lead to ever greater pre-transfer inequality.

When you start with a left hereditarian and take away their commitment to welfare, because in certain RCTs it doesn't change people's human capital enough (a thing they believe is mostly immutable), what does that make her?

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

I missed our friend Kelsey Piper joining the fray deep in this quote tweet thread and crashing out defending Big Yud: https://xcancel.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1954785099964383313

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

Not your main point, but the "this is an ancient feud" line is a mystifying trope. Jews lived in peace and safety among Muslims (and Christians) all around the Levant all the way through the Ottoman era, especially compared to their brutal persecution in Europe. The precipitating shift was modern Zionism, a European settler colonial project with an explicit goal of displacing the inhabitants of Palestine to create a supermajority ethnic Jewish state.

29

The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.

After being admonished by Paul Graham for baselessly questioning the veracity of a Palestinian child saying goodbye to their dying father, Yud writes

Why do you believe that any of this is true? Serious question. I haven't been able to find any blog with two serious nerds fighting it out, each side says the other side's stuff is all fake, and each side has compelling instances of other-side stuff being fake.

Aella too finds this all very confusing due to the low IQ of everyone with an opinion

I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world

Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to "open a newspaper" will change that

I respect Eliezer’s public confusion here. I too am confused and struggling to find good sources to understand Gaza.

Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.

The important thing is that they are actually very open minded and unbiased and will figure this all out someday when the mass graves are exhumed.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

Woodgrains and fans are taking a victory lap now for getting Vox to take up one of their anti-diversity memes, claiming that FAA endangered lives by adding a biographical assessment to their application process: https://www.vox.com/politics/399804/trump-dei-democrats-faa

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago

Excellent work. These pseudonymous post-liberal Nazis creep me the hell out.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

Honestly not the most succinct guidance, but here's an Amerocentric style guide: https://styleguide.transjournalists.org/#neutral-health-terms

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

Somehow he makes it sound even more misanthropic

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 15 points 1 year ago

In my skim of the two posts I didn't get to any suggestion of "used to be favorable, then realized they're led by duplicitous misanthropes" as a pathway.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 9 points 2 years ago

Short answer: "majority" is hyperbolic, sure. But it is an elite conviction espoused by leading lights like Nick Beckstead. You say the math is "basically always" based on flesh and blood humans but when the exception is the ur-texts of the philosophy, counting statistics may be insufficient. You can't really get more inner sanctum than Beckstead.

Hell, even 80000 hours (an org meant to be a legible and appealing gateway to EA) has openly grappled with whether global health should be deprioritized in favor of so-called suffering-risks, exemplified by that episode of Black Mirror where Don Draper indefinitely tortures a digital clone of a woman into subjugation. I can't find the original post, formerly linked to from their home page, but they do still link to this talk presenting that original scenario as a grave issue demanding present-day attention.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 8 points 2 years ago

less than 1%...on other long-term...which presumably includes simulated humans.

Oh it's way more than this. The linked stats are already way out of date, but even in 2019 you can see existential risk rapidly accelerating as a cause, and as you admit much moreso with the hardcore EA set.

As for what simulated humans have to do with existential risk, you have to look to their utility functions: they explicitly weigh the future pleasure of these now-hypothetical simulations as outweighing the suffering of any and all present or future flesh bags.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 11 points 2 years ago

Perhaps present-day humans are more obviously aided by questioning literally any aspect of hyper-capital. Better to cast out to the far future and insist (without any real basis) that fellating billionaires is the best course.

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 8 points 2 years ago

Perhaps the beneficiaries of the most efficient public health interventions (the previous focus of the movement) are somehow more difficult for them to identify with...

[-] cornflake@awful.systems 6 points 2 years ago

Unfortunately I think this is a win for those companies; you already had to create an account to interact, but now you can't even see other people's complaints without one.

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cornflake

joined 2 years ago