posted on August 10, 2022 08:41 PM by
u/DevestatingAttack
43
u/antichain66 pointsat 1660165574.000000
and acting as though you and your friends alone are the first to hit
upon the idea of trying to do it is the kind of galactic hubris that
only subcultures that have metastasized on the internet can really
achieve.
I have to say, this one of the most succinctly crisp take-downs of
the rationalist community I’ve seen in a while.
This is what the radical left can’t understand, is bent on not
understanding: if you’re only into it when it’s exciting, if you can
only get the energy to participate when you’re rioting in the streets,
you’re not really into it at all.
Man who has only heard about leftwingers protesting, ‘this has a very
leftwingers protesting energy’.
Everybody knows the real radical left activism is meetings, a lot of
boring very long lasting meetings about tiny things.
E: bonus, angry
ssc scott in the comments. somebody with a substack account should
find his 70% of sjws/feminists are crazy comment and reply with that
(with ea being the sjw replacement) see if he bites. (E: not a super
good idea vtw, i was mostly kidding, it will just make him feel
sneertacked, or he will lack the selfawareness (and there are better
arguments against his post anyway like how with regular charities a
complaint is that a large percentage of money doesnt end up in the right
place, .5 mil on fishnets doesnt matter if the rest of the org still
wastes a similar to normal % of the cash compared to other non ea
charities. Their goal is to be better, not similar tonother charities.
Ergo nice motte/bailey scott))
It is funny the boer is going ‘you are not special and weird, do less
weird stuff’ and scott is basically reacting with ‘we are not weird and
we ARE special’
That ssc comment is very interesting, in that people who are very fond of fdb's critical examinations of the left, recoil a bit when that same examination comes to their politics.
I'm not sure if this is the same as what you meant, but quite a few times I've felt like I'm the one in the parking lot getting hit, because I happened to not agree with a lot of his takes on mental health based on my own personal experiences.
I had never heard of Freddie de Boer before Scoot ranted in his blog
about him, and in fact I still never hear about de Boer other
than tangentially to the rationalist subculture
I envy you so much. I've known about him since he threw a tantrum at Jude Doyle back when he was blogging at Tiger Beatdown, and he has ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS.
What did he do to Jude Doyle? I read Freddie's blog for a very short time because one of my friends had liked some of his Marxist critiques of online social justice (although I don't know enough about Marxism to know how Marxist he really is). I lost my interest in him really fast when he became obsessed with watching huge amounts of videos by teenagers on TikTok and ranting and raving and screaming at them that they think they're special for having a mental illness and they're not.
There are so many criticisms I could make here, as someone who has been in and out of the mental health system for most of my life, and has experienced a LOT of nuances to my many mental health and disability issues where Freddie claims only absolute black and white exist, but I'm so tired. But for starters... teenagers? TikTok? Why is a man in his 40s watching huge amounts of this content so he can scream at children for not evaluating their situations in exactly the way he wants?
His commentors/fans are also frequently horrible. Every time he posts anything mentioning trans people, his comments section explodes with transphobia. When he posts about disability and mental health, the comments are always full of self-loathing people puffing themselves up about "Well, *I* have X disability, but *I* don't consider myself disabled." (Okay... why not? I have never been in a community of disabled people that actively kicked people out for being not disabled enough. But seriously, I think a lot of them are just fans of the other "IDW" blogs on Substack who see him as one of their own, and they think disabled people are all just a bunch of lazy failures who need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. He calls himself a Marxist and leftist but he sure seems to find the IDW right useful.)
This article has a lot of good points but I don’t like this article’s
implications that caring about any animals besides humans is just being
“provocative” and “immature”, pretty much all of the “bad EA” examples
are always about animals and contrasted with the “sane” people who only
care about human issues. Well yeah getting rid of all predators is kind
of ridiculous because nature is a lot more complicated than “herbivores
would live great positive utility lives if it wasn’t for the predators
eating them”, but I think the basic idea that the current state of the
natural environment causes a lot more harm and suffering than necessary,
to a horrifying extent, and if/when we ever get to a point where our
scientific understanding of it is enough that we can make smarter and
more thought-out changes to it than “just kill all the predators” or
whatever, then we shouldn’t oppose any intervention in nature for the
welfare of animals on principle just because of naturalistic fallacy or
certain parts of nature being aesthetically pleasing. Too bad some of
these EAs are making even discussion of animals, even, say farm animals,
look like some kind of insane distraction from the “real” issues even
though non-human animals are morally important.
The lengths people go to to defend carnivores is funny.
Like oh if you kill lions, deer would start eating each other or
whatever.
Philosophers have been pondering on the predation
problem in ethics. This isn’t exactly a new arena.
I think pondering over this can have some positive utility, as it
shows you really take animal ethics seriously (vegans often give
unsatisfactory answers to the consumption habits of pets and wild
animals).
I have to say, this one of the most succinctly crisp take-downs of the rationalist community I’ve seen in a while.
Man who has only heard about leftwingers protesting, ‘this has a very leftwingers protesting energy’.
Everybody knows the real radical left activism is meetings, a lot of boring very long lasting meetings about tiny things.
E: bonus, angry ssc scott in the comments. somebody with a substack account should find his 70% of sjws/feminists are crazy comment and reply with that (with ea being the sjw replacement) see if he bites. (E: not a super good idea vtw, i was mostly kidding, it will just make him feel sneertacked, or he will lack the selfawareness (and there are better arguments against his post anyway like how with regular charities a complaint is that a large percentage of money doesnt end up in the right place, .5 mil on fishnets doesnt matter if the rest of the org still wastes a similar to normal % of the cash compared to other non ea charities. Their goal is to be better, not similar tonother charities. Ergo nice motte/bailey scott))
It is funny the boer is going ‘you are not special and weird, do less weird stuff’ and scott is basically reacting with ‘we are not weird and we ARE special’
I’ve gone back and forth on my opinion of Freddy but this is an excellent piece.
FdB: “Towards both cultures [rationalism & EA], I’m more sympathetic than critical.”
me: shocked i tell you
I had never heard of Freddie de Boer before Scoot ranted in his blog about him, and in fact I still never hear about de Boer other than tangentially to the rationalist subculture
This article has a lot of good points but I don’t like this article’s implications that caring about any animals besides humans is just being “provocative” and “immature”, pretty much all of the “bad EA” examples are always about animals and contrasted with the “sane” people who only care about human issues. Well yeah getting rid of all predators is kind of ridiculous because nature is a lot more complicated than “herbivores would live great positive utility lives if it wasn’t for the predators eating them”, but I think the basic idea that the current state of the natural environment causes a lot more harm and suffering than necessary, to a horrifying extent, and if/when we ever get to a point where our scientific understanding of it is enough that we can make smarter and more thought-out changes to it than “just kill all the predators” or whatever, then we shouldn’t oppose any intervention in nature for the welfare of animals on principle just because of naturalistic fallacy or certain parts of nature being aesthetically pleasing. Too bad some of these EAs are making even discussion of animals, even, say farm animals, look like some kind of insane distraction from the “real” issues even though non-human animals are morally important.
The lengths people go to to defend carnivores is funny.
Like oh if you kill lions, deer would start eating each other or whatever.
Philosophers have been pondering on the predation problem in ethics. This isn’t exactly a new arena.
I think pondering over this can have some positive utility, as it shows you really take animal ethics seriously (vegans often give unsatisfactory answers to the consumption habits of pets and wild animals).