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Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, and the Eternal Return of Eugenics (https://www.truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics/)
74

lol, so Bostrom released the email to get ahead of Torres

Clear from the very beginning. Torres is the only one with a strong enough grudge and good enough inside knowledge to find these things.
enough of one to do the legwork to actually dredge the fucking Extropians list like, i haven't even gathered up enough ire to attempt the SL4 list archive as yet
I suspect that “former insider with knowledge and a serious grudge” has been a key part of any cult exposé since ever.
Who is Torres? (Obviously the author of the piece and a former long-termist, but is there something else?)
A former EA who for some reason turned against their colleagues and started fighting them constantly online, and has been accused of many lies and banned from the EA forum. See [this thread](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-torres-the-case-against-longtermism?commentId=4mjkWG7YgABo8xtoi) for example.
> for some reason this is a remarkable phrasing given the link is right there
I don't think so? It always looked like a personal conflict to me, rather than the explicit ideological one.
you mean, someone who had a huge chunk of their life and money taken away by a ripoff cult might be *angry* about it? well, better discount what he says then! wtaf

This is a pretty good rundown and successfully convinced me that the rot runs even deeper than I suspected

Which is impressive, because my expectations were low.

In a footnote:

As it happens, Hanson is the same guy who literally once argued that “’the main problem’ with the Holocaust was that there weren’t enough Nazis! After all, if there had been 6 trillion Nazis willing to pay each to make the Holocaust happen, and a mere 6 million Jews willing to pay 00,000 each to prevent it, the Holocaust would have generated .4 trillion worth of consumers surplus.”

The linked video is 80 minutes long and I’m not watching it. Is this for real? Did Hanson seriously say that shit? What the fuck?

I watched (half of) it so you don't have to. The quote is from 14:40, it's spoken by Caplan paraphrasing what Hanson said to him over lunch. I'm guessing Caplan brought the topic up as a counterexample to Hanson's idiotic beliefs: Basically Hanson wanted to advise society leaders to single-mindedly follow the rule "do whatever is Pareto efficient". In a telling exchange at 32:00, he says he would be okay with the government banning atheism as part of the efficiency policy. He dismisses the trillion nazi example and other hypotheticals because there aren't a trillion nazis, and claims to be only interested in what an economist should advise in the present day, arguing that they need to be consistent in order to be trusted. I don't think the context very much improves the statement.
You are a saint for watching that, thank you
[deleted]
correct, which, looking it up, is even worse.

It always just comes back to fucking racism doesn’t it.

The whole lot of them are wignat tier behind closed doors.

“Harris even wrote a glowing blurb for MacAskill’s recent book “What We Owe the Future,” in which he says that “no living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will MacAskill.” ”

Quality selfsneer.

So this is why Harris started pushing scientific rascism. He is such a simpleton and dupe.

Alexander goes on to say that there’s “some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell the people who claim it isn’t have no good refutation for the common sense argument it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense.”

Literally “feels before reals”. I’ve said this before, but whatever happened to steelmanning the opposing argument?

You're only supposed to steelman when it's a fascist no one else will listen to, because that's how you can show how Truly Epistemically Virtuous you are.

Would have been nice to have dropped the matter of the Epstein funding in there too.

Woah what? Bostrom got Epstein money?
No no, the MIRI gang.