I don’t mean to be harsh, but if everyone in this community followed your advice, then the world would likely end. And you can call that the rational outcome if you want, but if that’s the outcome, what value is rationality?
I don’t like pressuring people, so in my AI Safety Movement Building, I try to only encourage people to do things if it’s in line with their values and, while there is some advice I can offer here, I mostly just leave it to people to figure out their own values.
But we need people to choose to be prosocial and for that to happen, a community needs a norm that prosociality is considered better than anti-sociality and pro-social people should be esteemed more than those who are anti-social. A community that loses sight of this is bound to fail. I humbly submit that we should decide NOT to destroy our community.
I can see why you might find it frustrating, and why you might want your choices to be considered the equal of those who are making significant sacrifices to save the world, but unfortunately, according to my values (and I suspect the values of most people here) it’s absolutely vital that we do not do that.
For this reason, I down-voted this post. I expect this will be controversial, so I’ll explain my reasoning:
While I’m generally against downvoting a post based on values, I feel it’s valid in these circumstances. If this post was a piece of analytical philosophy making an argument that given certain assumptions we can conclude a particular thing about morality, then I think the post should be evaluated by how well the conclusions follow from the premises and how plausible the premises are, even if it were arguing for something that I hate.
Whilst this post does gesture at some of these arguments, it is best characterized as more an exhortation than a philosophical argument. It’s not trying to make detailed and rigorous arguments, so I can’t judge the post on this basis and indeed imposing this standard would be unfair to the author.
This forces me to find another basis on which to judge the post. Given this, I think it’s fine to just upvote or downvote based on whether I think we should adopt or oppose this exhortation[1] and I believe this exhortation is negative, so I’m downvoting it. Telling people that they probably really, truly want to be selfish is bad. I’m not saying that we should bully people into being pro-social, but the OP is encouraging people who would be pro-social by default not to be.
I’d encourage other people to consider the post on the same basis and upvote or downvote accordingly. I’ll admit that I’m not neutral here: I’m worried that people might disagree with this post, but feel it’d be wrong for them to downvote it, and so not do so. I’m here to say that it’s not wrong; but also, if you think that these are the values we should adopt, then you should feel free to upvote it instead.
One point I want to emphasize: you don’t need to be able to identify a specific wrong argument in order to downvote a post. The problem with this principle is that then a post could be mostly immune to down-voting by vaguely gesturing to some dubious assumptions instead of explicitly stating them where they might be subject to criticism. And I claim that if you pay attention, you’ll notice that something in the implicit framing of this post is off, even if you can’t quite put it into words.
If this post was a comment with separate upvote/downvote and agree vote/disagree vote, then I’d probably just disagree vote instead. However, it isn’t, so I’ve got to work with what I’ve got.
Do I want to encourage the author and others to write more posts like this.
And I favour this post for both of those reasons.
I agree that this post doesn’t make philosophical argument for it’s position, but I don’t require that for every post. I value it as an observation of how the EA movement has affected this particular person, and as criticism.
A couple of strongly Anti-EA friends of mine became so due to a similar moral burnout, so it’s particularly apparent to me how little emphasis is put on mental health.
I agree that this post doesn’t make philosophical argument for it’s position, but I don’t require that for every post. I value it as an observation of how the EA movement has affected this particular person, and as criticism.
Just to make my position really clear: I never said this post needed to make a philosophical argument for its position, rather that if a post wasn’t a philosophical argument we shouldn’t judge it by the standards we apply to a philosophical argument.
Then I tried to figure out an alternative standard by which to judge this post.
In Defense of Values
I don’t mean to be harsh, but if everyone in this community followed your advice, then the world would likely end. And you can call that the rational outcome if you want, but if that’s the outcome, what value is rationality?
I don’t like pressuring people, so in my AI Safety Movement Building, I try to only encourage people to do things if it’s in line with their values and, while there is some advice I can offer here, I mostly just leave it to people to figure out their own values.
But we need people to choose to be prosocial and for that to happen, a community needs a norm that prosociality is considered better than anti-sociality and pro-social people should be esteemed more than those who are anti-social. A community that loses sight of this is bound to fail. I humbly submit that we should decide NOT to destroy our community.
I can see why you might find it frustrating, and why you might want your choices to be considered the equal of those who are making significant sacrifices to save the world, but unfortunately, according to my values (and I suspect the values of most people here) it’s absolutely vital that we do not do that.
For this reason, I down-voted this post. I expect this will be controversial, so I’ll explain my reasoning:
While I’m generally against downvoting a post based on values, I feel it’s valid in these circumstances. If this post was a piece of analytical philosophy making an argument that given certain assumptions we can conclude a particular thing about morality, then I think the post should be evaluated by how well the conclusions follow from the premises and how plausible the premises are, even if it were arguing for something that I hate.
Whilst this post does gesture at some of these arguments, it is best characterized as more an exhortation than a philosophical argument. It’s not trying to make detailed and rigorous arguments, so I can’t judge the post on this basis and indeed imposing this standard would be unfair to the author.
This forces me to find another basis on which to judge the post. Given this, I think it’s fine to just upvote or downvote based on whether I think we should adopt or oppose this exhortation[1] and I believe this exhortation is negative, so I’m downvoting it. Telling people that they probably really, truly want to be selfish is bad. I’m not saying that we should bully people into being pro-social, but the OP is encouraging people who would be pro-social by default not to be.
I’d encourage other people to consider the post on the same basis and upvote or downvote accordingly. I’ll admit that I’m not neutral here: I’m worried that people might disagree with this post, but feel it’d be wrong for them to downvote it, and so not do so. I’m here to say that it’s not wrong; but also, if you think that these are the values we should adopt, then you should feel free to upvote it instead.
One point I want to emphasize: you don’t need to be able to identify a specific wrong argument in order to downvote a post. The problem with this principle is that then a post could be mostly immune to down-voting by vaguely gesturing to some dubious assumptions instead of explicitly stating them where they might be subject to criticism. And I claim that if you pay attention, you’ll notice that something in the implicit framing of this post is off, even if you can’t quite put it into words.
If this post was a comment with separate upvote/downvote and agree vote/disagree vote, then I’d probably just disagree vote instead. However, it isn’t, so I’ve got to work with what I’ve got.
I interpret upvotes/downvote as
Do I want other people to read this post
Do I want to encourage the author and others to write more posts like this.
And I favour this post for both of those reasons.
I agree that this post doesn’t make philosophical argument for it’s position, but I don’t require that for every post. I value it as an observation of how the EA movement has affected this particular person, and as criticism.
A couple of strongly Anti-EA friends of mine became so due to a similar moral burnout, so it’s particularly apparent to me how little emphasis is put on mental health.
Just to make my position really clear: I never said this post needed to make a philosophical argument for its position, rather that if a post wasn’t a philosophical argument we shouldn’t judge it by the standards we apply to a philosophical argument.
Then I tried to figure out an alternative standard by which to judge this post.