posted on May 11, 2023 05:25 PM by
u/GaiusLeviathanXV
282
u/okonom116 pointsat 1683829821.000000
Do you remember when a big part of EA was direct wealth transfers to
those experiencing the most extreme poverty ala GiveDirectly instead of
paying for the lavish apartments of AI cultists? Pepper Ridge Farms
remembers.
The Take-A-Wish foundation was among Aperture Science’s lesser-known
developments, ultimately relegated to the dustbin of history alongside
such achievements as the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver.
We can only hope they notice that having a local Batman impersonator
stop by a hospital to provide no medical care, for an extremely
unproductive person a child who will soon unburden society of
themselves, is actually the most #effective
#altruism. Turns out that cancer research is hard, and
expensive, and already being done by people who don’t have
weblogs or concerns about nanoBasilisks.
I’m no Midwest Talent Search alumni, but “hey life sucks ass for you,
here’s a movie star for a few minutes, what kind of candy do you want
served at your funeral” seems a lot better than Caribbean polycule
methbanging a 44 billion dollar tax bill from your Ponzi scheme.
Although, now that I say it out loud, shit, if that gets paid, it
probably is a actual net positive change in the world.
No no, you started out right, but you've got it all backwards.
The real galaxy-brained play was crashing FTX as the most effective way to discredit EA - a movement that had become ineffective. Sam Basedman-Fried sacrificed himself to drive people towards socialism.
> How did this Midwest Talent Search joke start? I have a feeling I missed some cringe lore that would explain this
[This tweet](https://twitter.com/davidzmorris/status/1646165748547452929) should expain it. It says
> LOL Eliezer Yudkowsky's often-repeated belief that he is a "genius" is based in part on his performance, at age 11, in something called the Midwest Talent Search.
I think I vaguely remember that Yudkowsky was part of some gifted education, so I guess it's a reference to that.
A fun fact about the MTS is that they give you giant heavy engraved gold medals at a fancy awards ceremony for doing a good job which must have been great for Yud’s development
Thanks, sneerfam.
Nonsense plus nonsense is just still nonsense, so it jives.
If only these people could find a trite bumpersticker to unite around, I think they'd see it too.
It would probably make a half decent domain name.
You know if I wanted to make charity more efficient, I would probably
start with something like “maybe all these donations to university
endowments are not doing much good” not “kids with cancer should be less
happy”. It just seems like a better PR strategy.
> It just seems like a better PR strategy.
Not if what you're trying to attract is "um, akshully" contrarians. To attract those, just write as many articles as possible about why Meth Is Good And Cancer Kids Are Bad, Actually.
This isn’t funny. The Make a Wish foundation sent my dying 8 year old
sister to Disney world with our entire family in a luxury villa for two
weeks all expenses paid. My parents had not been able to give us, three
kids, a proper vacation for years, being constantly tapped out taking
care of my terminally ill sister.
The emotional uplifting that trip gave us was actually like literal
magic.
So, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, op. You aren’t smart,
you’re a fucking idiot.
There’s a million easy targets and you decided to edge lord out and
go for shock value. There’s nothing clever about that.
Honestly, my big problem with Make-a-Wish is that it needs to be upscaled so that every kid with a terminal diagnosis gets something nice.
Compassion to ill children is like, i dunno, the baseline level of compassion for the Voight-Kampf test or something.
The whole joke is that it's absurd, but *technically* true. If they had used PETA or some other organization that no one likes, it wouldn't have been funny.
Edit: hell, the whole concept of welfare is giving money to people who aren't able to produce much. Using that for the joke also wouldn't have been funny, because a bunch of ghouls actually oppose it. The point of using Make-a-Wish is that it's borderline universally liked.
PETA has [actually done undercover investigations of abuses in the animal industries](https://www.newsweek.com/dog-brink-death-puppy-farm-makes-incredible-transformation-1735870), it's just that no one talks about that (granted, this is partly their own fault for doing dumb PR things).
The real issue isnt that the PR stuff is "dumb", its that they've said and done things that are so far beyond the pale that no one trusts them to be sane.
So even in the literal field of "hey are these baby animals cute and probably shouldn't be abused right?" no one will donate to their clearly established decades long lunacy. Same with GreenPeace, frankly, like, yeah, less ocean pollution wait what you are just harassing individual ships what?
> wait what you are just harassing individual ships what?
Gosh, how *could* they. That's so beyond the pale no one can trust them to be sane, how could they harass \*checks notes\* oil drilling and whaling ships!
I can't find it, I'll Google more later off mobile, but ya, I was referencing a quote Iraq War Era where they combined their insanity with anti-war sentiments to make a statement to the effect of:
"We're would not devote resources to helping wounded soldiers if the situation arose"
When it was patently unclear how such a situation would occur, thus reading as, well, insane.
May the universe grant you a long, healthy life in which you never get cancer and where government assistance is there to provide you support and care, so that you never have to feel the sharp end of dismissive, juvenile bullshit like you decided to post today. And if you *do* ever wind up with cancer, or on government assistance, I hope you remember this moment. For fuck’s sake.
It is a horrid joke
Remember what voltaire said: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
Kids with cancer rule over us. It is like you have not read Omelas.
Bro if you’re gonna make a joke about kids dying of cancer being
worthless to society then you have zero recourse to complain if people
start making mean spirited jokes about your neurodivergence. Like come
on.
I was going to engage this up there, but then I remembered where I was.
Its like a functioning adult with their shoelaces untied: they're either that way on purpose or permanently fucked anyway.
Make a wish is kinda performative charity though. I want real
political change that improves the material conditions of people. Not ea
or boomer performance.
Not really. None of the activities it does are the face value because people are sympathetic to kids dying. Celebrities donate their time. Disney doesn’t charge for the trips because of either altruistic or PR reasons. etc
Lebron could charge for an appearance fee for some
rich guy and then donate that money for malaria nets, but that’s probably not as rewarding for him.
Is this not the least-sneerworthy part of EA? Make-A-Wish is probably
one of the least “effective” charities if you are trying to make the
world a better place. You could actually save the life of a child with
the cost of providing the average wish I would guess.
The AI doomerism stuff is sneerworthy but this point, from the
traditional global public health EA angle, seems rather reasonable?
MAW is still infinitely more effective than MIRI, and EA still pours money into MIRI.
You could certainly come up with a hypothetical far better EA that doesn't do that, but it isn't this one.
I guess I just don't really see things that way. I mean, if people didn't spend their money on gambling, junk food, addictive drugs, professional sports, pornography, sex workers, video games, ponzi schemes, religious institutions, etc. they'd have more money for charities too. I don't really think make-a-wish or other "ineffective" charities are really doing so bad in the grand scheme of things (assuming they aren't literally fraudulent or riddled with embezzlement or covering up sexual assault or whatever).
What sticks out to me is that something like Make-A-Wish primarily deals with people's emotional well-being rather than material well being - and I suspect this is why some people don't see the merit of such a charity. I get the impression that Rationalists and EAs try to compensate for a lack of empathy by doubling down on intellect [but I don't think it works](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhubTLlUcAAuYZI.png)
I think this kind of strikes at the heart of what is lacking in utilitarianism. We don't discount the life experience of a sick or dying kid because they're gonna die anyway. Maybe that money could go to feeding some starving child somewhere out there, but that's not really the point?
The problem with utilitarianism is that it doesn't properly address how a utility function is not reducible to a natural property.
We should be advocating structural change, and that means engaging in politics, which none of these pseudo intellectuals claiming the title of utilitarian have the spine to do.
Well, even if they did engage in politics, what I'm getting at is that it's very difficult to boil down utility to a number based on certain factors without becoming rather ghoulish. Someone who reasons that a kid with terminal cancer is a dead end and so their happiness is of a lesser quality than a replacement-level child probably should not be making ethical decisions at any level of importance for society.
Even if you did discount the dying kid's utility, MAW has a very positive effect on all of the people who care about the dying kid. The kid isn't going to "contribute to society" either way, but their parents are less likely to go into a depressive spiral and their siblings are more likely to grow up into well-adjusted adults. MAW almost certainly isn't a winner for the most cost-efficient charity out there, but I think you can make a utilitarian argument for it as long as you recognize that _other_ people have empathy.
Imagine you are the starving child though: "sorry kiddo, the exigencies of capitalism and limited allocation of resources therein means little Johnny is going to disnlaynd and you are going to starve, you can meet up at the pearly gates and hash it out with god."
Yeah but you frame it like that if you're interested in pitting the recipients of charity against each other for some reason. I'd probably tell the starving kid they're dying because a bunch of rich folks would rather own yachts or pay thousands for a burger with gold flakes in it.
The recipients of charity are defacto pitted against each other. There are X charity dollars out there in the world, and if 0.01 X is going to Disneyland trips for sick kids, that 0.01 isn't going to anything else.
We live under capitalism; refusing keep that in mind isn't praxis.
That said, sometimes that 0.01 isn't fungible. Some people (me) care more about preserving wetlands than feeding the homeless. I will always donate to eg. the nature conservancy before anything else; which kinda defeats the whole argument.
I mean... I think everyone understands its a "joke" but its made in earnest. My EA obsessed friends sent this tweet to our gm because its "funny" but the reason they find it funny is because they think its true. One of them in particular constantly sneers at make a wish and anyone involved. Like yea obviously its not the most effective use of money but like... relax?
Man, I grew up in rural Mississippi in the '80s. You can't tell me that sometimes "it's just a joke" covers a whole helluva a lot of mean-spiritedness. There are such things as racist jokes, and I wouldn't believe a one of these yo-yos if they said they didn't know a couple.
It was, it was one of his livejournal posts attacking feminsts, the sixth superpower? The meta message on jokes and how they can be used to dehumanize people was a good one however. So they (including Scott) have since ignored this and just carried on.
Edit: [Here it is fresh from archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20180224100329/https://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html) It certainly is a blog post that goes places.
Do you remember when a big part of EA was direct wealth transfers to those experiencing the most extreme poverty ala GiveDirectly instead of paying for the lavish apartments of AI cultists? Pepper Ridge Farms remembers.
The Take-A-Wish foundation was among Aperture Science’s lesser-known developments, ultimately relegated to the dustbin of history alongside such achievements as the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver.
Wait, no this is good.
Nature is healing.
We can only hope they notice that having a local Batman impersonator stop by a hospital to provide no medical care, for
an extremely unproductive persona child who will soon unburden society of themselves, is actually the most #effective #altruism. Turns out that cancer research is hard, and expensive, and already being done by people who don’t have weblogs or concerns about nanoBasilisks.I’m no Midwest Talent Search alumni, but “hey life sucks ass for you, here’s a movie star for a few minutes, what kind of candy do you want served at your funeral” seems a lot better than Caribbean polycule methbanging a 44 billion dollar tax bill from your Ponzi scheme. Although, now that I say it out loud, shit, if that gets paid, it probably is a actual net positive change in the world.
You know if I wanted to make charity more efficient, I would probably start with something like “maybe all these donations to university endowments are not doing much good” not “kids with cancer should be less happy”. It just seems like a better PR strategy.
This isn’t funny. The Make a Wish foundation sent my dying 8 year old sister to Disney world with our entire family in a luxury villa for two weeks all expenses paid. My parents had not been able to give us, three kids, a proper vacation for years, being constantly tapped out taking care of my terminally ill sister.
The emotional uplifting that trip gave us was actually like literal magic.
So, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, op. You aren’t smart, you’re a fucking idiot.
There’s a million easy targets and you decided to edge lord out and go for shock value. There’s nothing clever about that.
Wow that’s horrid
Bro if you’re gonna make a joke about kids dying of cancer being worthless to society then you have zero recourse to complain if people start making mean spirited jokes about your neurodivergence. Like come on.
Fuck these people
the correct definition of charity is precisely that. But EAs wouldn’t know it because 2000 years of philosophy is worthless to them
Make a wish is kinda performative charity though. I want real political change that improves the material conditions of people. Not ea or boomer performance.
How long until these people go completely mask-off and plainly admit they’re eugenicists
Is this not the least-sneerworthy part of EA? Make-A-Wish is probably one of the least “effective” charities if you are trying to make the world a better place. You could actually save the life of a child with the cost of providing the average wish I would guess.
The AI doomerism stuff is sneerworthy but this point, from the traditional global public health EA angle, seems rather reasonable?
Sorry child with leukaemia, this money is for the Stop the Basilisk Foundation 😎😎😎
This is fucking hilarious
This is a joke
it’s called Sand Hill Road.