Re: Misanthropic Altruism (Philosophy)

On 8/1/26 3:51 PM, Dude wrote:
> On 8/1/2026 9:46 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
>> On Sat, 1 Aug 2026 09:37:27 -0700, dart200
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> On 8/1/26 9:01 AM, Wilson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> "Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a
>>>> world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, 
>>>> and so
>>>> are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over
>>>> many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and
>>>> dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the
>>>> adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in
>>>> every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy
>>>> is known as Effective Altruism (EA).
>>>>
>>>> Scandals in the EA world, most notably the downfall of the
>>>> cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, prompted many effective
>>>> altruists to renounce the name in recent years. But the ideas 
>>>> endure. In
>>>> 2025, six EA-aligned grantmakers deployed $1.25 billion, and this 
>>>> number
>>>> is set to grow along with the success of the world’s leading artificial
>>>> intelligence company, Anthropic, which was founded on EA principles. 
>>>> The
>>>> firm’s founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth upon
>>>> the firm’s IPO. These wealth pledges, combined with the company policy
>>>> of matching employee donations, will create billions in philanthropic
>>>> capital, channeled through EA’s entrenched institutions.
>>>>
>>>> Effective Altruism is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that
>>>> Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into 
>>>> Silicon
>>>> Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar
>>>> balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a
>>>> civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving 
>>>> America
>>>> in the name of humanity.
>>>>
>>>> Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the
>>>> rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might
>>>> have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the
>>>> 1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage
>>>> of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life. In
>>>> 1972, the philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence, and
>>>> Morality," the essay that would become EA’s foundation. His argument 
>>>> was
>>>> simple: If we can prevent suffering at little cost to ourselves, we
>>>> must, and it makes no moral difference whether the person we help is "a
>>>> neighbor’s child ten yards from me" or a stranger on another continent.
>>>> Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of
>>>> traditional sources of identity — nation, religion, family, tradition.
>>>> Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as
>>>> the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education
>>>> dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive 
>>>> the
>>>> EA program.
>>>>
>>>> In his 1981 book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that every
>>>> culture is defined by its stock of "characters," the social roles that
>>>> embody its moral ideals. "Characters," he wrote, "are the masks worn by
>>>> moral philosophies." The twentieth century’s main character was the
>>>> bureaucrat, whose authority was derived from a seemingly scientific
>>>> knowledge of human affairs, grounded in the supposed incommensurability
>>>> of facts and values. The bureaucrat administers according to facts,
>>>> while values are condemned to the private sphere. His expertise cannot
>>>> be challenged. The standard of his authority is effectiveness.
>>>> He flattens all goods into a single quantifiable dimension, converting
>>>> them into units like lives saved, suffering averted, and dollars per
>>>> outcome. The units’ apparent neutrality conceals a range of ideological
>>>> assumptions. The human "good" becomes a function of EA’s calculus. 
>>>> Then,
>>>> pretending value-neutrality, EA denounces defection as backwards,
>>>> unscientific, and immoral. Any challenge appears to spurn both science
>>>> and human dignity.
>>>>
>>>> More recently, EA’s impartiality has expanded far beyond those 
>>>> currently
>>>> living, to what "longtermists" envision as 10^58+ potential future
>>>> beings — human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on
>>>> the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the
>>>> dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated 
>>>> in a
>>>> few American labs.
>>>>
>>>> Some have taken the argument to its violent conclusion. Eliezer
>>>> Yudkowsky, the most influential of the doomsayers, wrote in Time that
>>>> nations should "be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike,"
>>>> nuclear war notwithstanding. And since 2022, the Zizians, a cult that
>>>> splintered off from the same Bay Area rationalist scene, have been
>>>> linked to six killings.
>>>>
>>>> Congress must treat the philanthropic apparatus of frontier AI as it
>>>> treats any concentration of unaccountable power. Lawmakers should 
>>>> demand
>>>> disclosure of the grantmaking networks that fund labs with national
>>>> security implications. They should condition federal contracts on terms
>>>> any defense contractor would recognize: Disclose the instructions and
>>>> value systems trained into the models, certify systems sold to the
>>>> government will execute lawful orders without an engineer’s veto, and
>>>> reserve the government’s right to audit.
>>>>
>>>> The machines our government buys must serve the American people, not
>>>> some present or future humanity. And procurement standards should favor
>>>> open-weight models, which anyone can download, run, and test, so that
>>>> the nation never depends on intelligence a handful of labs can 
>>>> withhold.
>>>> —William Thibeau
>>>>
>>>> https://www.compactmag.com/article/misanthropic-altruism/
>>>>
>>>> The philosophical and ethical question is, is it beneficial to value
>>>> those close to us more highly than others,
>>>
>>> no
>>>
>>>> or is it better to value all human life equally?
>>>
>>> yes
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is it even /possible/ to value all lives equally?
>>>
>>> yes
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Does attempting to see all life as equal inevitably lead to placing a
>>>> lower value on the lives of those close to us (both temporally and
>>>> physically)?
>>>
>>> no
>>>
>>>>
>>>> What about the lives of those who oppose the idea of seeing all life as
>>>> morally equal?
>>>
>>>   > subethical beliefs self-resolve in fate
>>
>> So it seems. 
>  >
> There's no "fate" - where did you two get that idea? The three ancient 
> goddesses (in Greek and Roman stories) who spin, measure, and cut the 
> thread of human life?
> 
> Everything happens for a reason.
> 
> Moral relativism is the view that right and wrong are not absolute or 
> universal truths. Instead, moral judgments are true or false only 
> relative to specific cultural, social, or individual standpoints.
> 
> Where's Creon?

being a lil bitch

>> Somewhere in the depths of the human psyche is the
>> potential to do better than that.  Maybe.
>>
>>>   > #god
> 

-- 
why are we god?
let's end war 🙃