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’

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).