No need for you to address any particular political point I’m making. For now, it is sufficient for me to suggest that reigning progressive ideas about politics are flawed and holding EAs back, without you committing to any particular alternative view.
I’m glad to hear that EAs are focusing more on movement-building and collaboration. I think there is a lot of value in eigenaltruism: being altruistic only towards other eigenaltruistic people who “pay it forward” (see Scott Aaronson’s eigenmorality). Civilizations have been built with reciprocal altruism. The problem with most EA thinking is that is one-way, so the altruism is consumed immediately. This post argues that morality evolved as a system of mutual obligation, and that EAs misunderstand this.
Although there is some political heterogeneity in EA, it is overwhelmed by progressives, and the main public recommendations are all progressive causes. Moral progress is a tricky concept: for example, the French Revolution is often considered moral progress, but the pictures paint another story.
On open borders, economic analyses like Roodman’s are just too narrow. They do not take into account all of the externalities, such as crime and changes to cultural institutions. OpenBorders.info addresses many of the objections, sometimes; it does a good job of summarizing some of the anti-open borders arguments, but often fails to refute them, yet this lack of refutation doesn’t translate into them updating their general stance on immigration.
If humans are interchangeable homo economicus then open borders would be a economic and perhaps moral imperative. If indeed human groups are significantly different, such as in crime rates, then it throws a substantial wrench into open borders. If the safety of open borders is in question, then it is a risky experiment.
Some of early indicators are scary, like the Rotherham Scandal. There are reports of similar coverups in other areas, and economic analyses do not capture the harms to these thousands of children. High-crime areas where the police have trouble enforcing rule of law are well documented in Europe: they are called “no-go zones” or “sensitive urban zones” (“no-go zone” is controversial because technically you can go there, but would you want to go to this zone, especially if you were Jewish?). Britain literally has Sharia Patrols harassing gay people and women.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening with current levels of immigration. Just imagine what happens with fully open borders. I really don’t think its advocates have grappled with this graph, and what it means for Europe under open borders. No matter how generous Europe was, its institutions would never be able to handle the wave of immigrants, and open borders advocates are seriously kidding themselves if they don’t see that Europe would turn into South Africa mixed with Syria, and the US would turn into Brazil. And then who would send aid to Africa?
Rule of law is slowly breaking down in the West, and elite Westerners are sitting in their filter bubbles fiddling while Rome burns. I’m not telling you to accept this scenario as likely; you would need to go do your own research at the object-level. But with even a small risk that this scenario is possible, it’s very significant for future human welfare.
Do you have ideas for people or professions the movement would benefit from and strategies for drawing them in and making them feel welcome?
I’ll think about it. I think some of the sources I’ve cited start answering that question: finding people who are knowledgeable about the giant space of stuff that the media and academia is sweeping under the carpet for political reasons.
Before I delay my reply until I’ve read everything you’ve linked, I’ll rather post a WIP reply.
Thanks for all the data! I hope I’ll have time to look into Open Borders some more in August.
Error theorists would say that the blog post “Effective Altruists are Cute but Wrong” is cute but wrong, but more generally the idea of using PageRank for morality is beautifully elegant (but beautifully elegant things have often turned out imperfect in practice in my experience). I still have to read the rest of the blog post though.
Eigendemocracy reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s whuffie idea.
An interesting case for eigenmorality is when you have distinct groups that cooperate amongst themselves and defect against others. Especially interesting is the case where there are two large, competing groups that are about the same size.
No need for you to address any particular political point I’m making. For now, it is sufficient for me to suggest that reigning progressive ideas about politics are flawed and holding EAs back, without you committing to any particular alternative view.
I’m glad to hear that EAs are focusing more on movement-building and collaboration. I think there is a lot of value in eigenaltruism: being altruistic only towards other eigenaltruistic people who “pay it forward” (see Scott Aaronson’s eigenmorality). Civilizations have been built with reciprocal altruism. The problem with most EA thinking is that is one-way, so the altruism is consumed immediately. This post argues that morality evolved as a system of mutual obligation, and that EAs misunderstand this.
Although there is some political heterogeneity in EA, it is overwhelmed by progressives, and the main public recommendations are all progressive causes. Moral progress is a tricky concept: for example, the French Revolution is often considered moral progress, but the pictures paint another story.
On open borders, economic analyses like Roodman’s are just too narrow. They do not take into account all of the externalities, such as crime and changes to cultural institutions. OpenBorders.info addresses many of the objections, sometimes; it does a good job of summarizing some of the anti-open borders arguments, but often fails to refute them, yet this lack of refutation doesn’t translate into them updating their general stance on immigration.
If humans are interchangeable homo economicus then open borders would be a economic and perhaps moral imperative. If indeed human groups are significantly different, such as in crime rates, then it throws a substantial wrench into open borders. If the safety of open borders is in question, then it is a risky experiment.
Some of early indicators are scary, like the Rotherham Scandal. There are reports of similar coverups in other areas, and economic analyses do not capture the harms to these thousands of children. High-crime areas where the police have trouble enforcing rule of law are well documented in Europe: they are called “no-go zones” or “sensitive urban zones” (“no-go zone” is controversial because technically you can go there, but would you want to go to this zone, especially if you were Jewish?). Britain literally has Sharia Patrols harassing gay people and women.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening with current levels of immigration. Just imagine what happens with fully open borders. I really don’t think its advocates have grappled with this graph, and what it means for Europe under open borders. No matter how generous Europe was, its institutions would never be able to handle the wave of immigrants, and open borders advocates are seriously kidding themselves if they don’t see that Europe would turn into South Africa mixed with Syria, and the US would turn into Brazil. And then who would send aid to Africa?
Rule of law is slowly breaking down in the West, and elite Westerners are sitting in their filter bubbles fiddling while Rome burns. I’m not telling you to accept this scenario as likely; you would need to go do your own research at the object-level. But with even a small risk that this scenario is possible, it’s very significant for future human welfare.
I’ll think about it. I think some of the sources I’ve cited start answering that question: finding people who are knowledgeable about the giant space of stuff that the media and academia is sweeping under the carpet for political reasons.
Before I delay my reply until I’ve read everything you’ve linked, I’ll rather post a WIP reply.
Thanks for all the data! I hope I’ll have time to look into Open Borders some more in August.
Error theorists would say that the blog post “Effective Altruists are Cute but Wrong” is cute but wrong, but more generally the idea of using PageRank for morality is beautifully elegant (but beautifully elegant things have often turned out imperfect in practice in my experience). I still have to read the rest of the blog post though.
Eigendemocracy reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s whuffie idea.
An interesting case for eigenmorality is when you have distinct groups that cooperate amongst themselves and defect against others. Especially interesting is the case where there are two large, competing groups that are about the same size.