Hegemony shapes discourse in its image. I believe the issue is not which ideology ‘truly’ affirms some self evident notion of self interest, but which ideology can successfully assert its own notion of self interest as self evident.
This is wonderfully perfectly provocative. A clever button pushing projectile innocently lobbed into the everyday pitter patter. An imposter post meant to deviously short circuit the HN tropes' internal logic.
Plenary Talk by Michael Levin on "Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition: Evolution, synthetic organisms, and biomedicine" at the Virtual Miniature Brain Machinery Retreat, September 16, 2021. Introduction by William Baker.
I want better systems and I am cynical about pursuing other ends in this willfully politics-blind isolated manner, impressiveness of their achievements having a slightly tragic quality under that light.
I am not from the US but I think the US is a great case study in the disconnect between technological progress and improved general conditions (in particular for but not exclusively relating to healthcare). I think cynicism is the correct response to this trend.
Since wealth is concentrated more and more into a minority, redistributing wealth is surely aligned with increasing the quality of life for a majority of people. Why do you say it would be worse for everyone?
I think the big problems the OP alluded to are more about politics and cohesion than these neat science puzzles. Medical innovation does not inspire me when the medical system which administers these innovations remains so dysfunctional.
Conversation & social matters are so variable and vibe based that I think trying to get grip on something like 'likability' via a metric like 'contributions ratio' seems absurd.
Everyone vaguely informed about this story knows it was a scam. Reporting anything else is untruthful. Why do you defend reporting you know to be untruthful?
The key topic discussed in the OP, which I engaged with in my comment, is the extent to which 'simple logic' fails to map to complex problems. Naturally, sometimes it is appropriate to describe a problem in a simple way, sometimes it has shortcomings yet remains a useful compromise, and sometimes it is completely inappropriate and misleading. The problem at hand is, in the broadest sense, how to try improve conditions of (human) life throughout the world.
Your take seems to be that there is no complexity, no square to be circled in trying to apply vague principles like "do maximum good" to a discussion of how to tackle all of the worlds problems. To me that seems like a very unserious take.
To me what it means to properly engage with this question is to discuss what we mean by good, to discuss the notion of quantifiability, etc.. I think avoiding these discussions is just a game of whackamole - as best you try to stamp it out you never escape the thorny issue that so much complexity hides in our silly contradictory human language notions of things.
Our vague human language notions serve a purpose but to be uncritical of them or even deny their importance when they are doing the heavy lifting of your argument seems strange to me. Notions like 'do more good' are very vague loose suggestions and so their value is only realised if also applied in a loose human common sense manner. Utilitarianism is the opposite of this loose human common sense approach, it demands your loose notions removed of their blurry edges and inherent contradictions and if you succeed in this unnatural transfiguration you will unhappily discover later on that the contradictions just pop up in your new solution because when you force natural language into an unnatural rigid form like that you find that you are no longer saying that which you thought.
I would love to know what in particular about my perspective you find interesting / flawed. I have tried to make arguments that aren't too flowery but if you find my chains of logic unsatisfactory please let me know where, although don't expect to find any very very clean lines of formal reasoning because I am writing in a conversational style.
I’m not saying anyone should go after them. They followed the rules, how do you go after someone who followed the rules?
I’m just saying that it’s still okay to condemn (just as an act of casting judgement) rule following when it’s anti social and the question of what sort of society we would like to live in is the more prescient point to bare in mind.
I put legally in quotes because I think legality is an unsound basis for reasoning about whether something is normatively okay or not okay.
I think it’s still worth being critical of individuals even if they follow all the rules. The super rich have the largest influence on society as a whole. They cast a vote on the status quo by endorsing anti-social policies with their actions. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. I’m not arguing any particular consequences etc. whatever. I also agree that ‘news’ which emphasises a misleading causality is not helpful.
Nevertheless, the super rich ‘legally’ avoiding the proportional contribution to society nominally expected of them _because they can_ is still anti-social behaviour and however the laws came to be is irrelevant in my opinion. Democracy is so flawed especially at the individual policy level I consider the argument that ‘the populace voted for this’ conservative in the worst most nebulous way, defending the status quo for no reason other than it is the status quo.
Of course policies that protect the super rich are beyond the normal reach of democracy because lobbying and donations are so prevalent.
Do we approve of this behaviour in a normative sense? That seems like a more important thing to keep in mind than if individual’s playing of the game is technically above board. Or how the rules came about. To me the details of the case amount to details of a symptom and what is of more interest is the underlying condition which is revealed.
FWIW I don’t know the details of the case I’m just trying to nudge the discourse in a direction I find more interesting.
The point of the speaker is that /in general/ these types of comparison amount to equivocation of the incommensurable, and this characteristic leads to progressively more unintuitive results as the breadth of application expands. The fact that the trolley problem intuitively suggests the opposite (it just makes sense!) is kind of the jumping off point for the interesting conversation.
This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’.
The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle.
I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
I think you’ve just each used a different sense of the word ‘actual’.
Sense 1) “‘Actual’ mathematics does not consist in notational embodiments”
‘Actual’ as in essence rather than appearance, territory rather than map. Implies platonic reality of an eternal ephemeral mathematics. Conceived of as beyond and beneath all the particulars of any given representation.
Sense 2) “‘Actual’ mathematics consists in notational embodiments”
‘Actual’ as in embodied. Material. That ‘actual’ mathematics is the set of mathematics which has been ‘actually’ done.
You describe the second sense as self evident but with mathematics in particular this is bound to cause trouble. The sense ‘actual as in essence’ is perfectly reasonable and has a particular affinity to a discussion of mathematics.
I find it hard to even write the description of the second sense without tying some linguistic knot. If ‘actual’ mathematics is its embodiments, what is the thing being embodied? Either the notation embodies nothing (what does it mean to describe the characteristics of a thing which doesn’t exist?) or if it does refer to something then according to the designation of embodied mathematics as ‘material’ then it embodies something which exists immaterially. So either mathematics describes the characteristics of a non existing thing, or a thing which exists, but exists immaterially. If ‘actual’ mathematics is the materially existing embodied form of a separate immaterial thing, what is that thing? So that ‘Actual mathematics’ is the embodiment of a separate immaterial thing called ‘not actual mathematics’. I’m not trying to make a watertight argument here just trying to outline the course of thought that your assertions inflame.
From another angle, what does it mean for something to ‘materially exist’ so that it can be considered ‘actual’. I think this concept so nebulous as to make impossible the patching up of all the holes a cursory investigation reveals.
Personally I think the distinction between the two is the root of trouble here. In the sense that anything exists, it exists according to mathematics. The essence of material existence, to the extent that it can be specified, is a structure of formal relational principles. Such formal structures are the domain of mathematics.
Of course ‘material existence’ is used and understood perfectly well in ordinary circumstances but when the topic at hand is “what counts as ‘actual’ mathematics?” it seems shaky ground to build a house.
I think the sense in which that counts as 'voting' (in the sense of a democratic political system) is only analogous in such a distant tenuous way that it is really a poor use of the word