This Century's Biggest and Most Dangerous Idea

The Economist magazine reports:

Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea
The movement is admirable, but dangerous

THOUGHT PRECEDES deed as lightning precedes thunder, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine. So it has proved with effective altruism (EA), an ethical doctrine cooked up by philosophers in Oxford that has gone from the ivory tower to the corridors of power with remarkable speed. Effective altruists fill Silicon Valley, staff the world’s leading artificial-intelligence companies—and alarm the Trump administration. “The United States will NEVER be an effective-altruist country,” pledges the Pentagon. The secretary of war brands the philosophy “defective altruism”; others in the administration call it “dystopian”. Take those attacks as a sign of its influence.

The link is paywalled, so that's all I have.

Effective altruism is a dangerous cult. If AI LLMs lead to doom, it will be because OpenAI and Anthropic management and ethicists are dominated by Effective Altruism. It is a philosophy of killing people, and replacing them with bots.

Free Will is for the Elites, not the Lesser Beings

Sam Harris tweets that free will makes no sense.

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne is another free will denier:

Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.

Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, ...

And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.

Free will is in the backbone of our civilization. Our law, religion, morality, and justice system depend on it.

Everyone, except maybe for some schizophrenics, behave as it they have free will.

Coyne does indeed sound like someone who wants free will for the elites, but not the masses:

people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up. You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want.

So the elites have the free will to decide what kind of society they want, and how to provide incentives for the lower humans who lack free will.

Coyne's atheist-evolutionist beliefs come into play. He does not believe anything immaterial is possible, and does not believe that free will could have evolved.

Free will is a philosophical issue, so you can believe what you want, but he is wrong about this:

And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics.

No, physics has not proved determinism. There are recent physicist videos promoting free will here, here, and here.

Coyne's article has a good description of opposing views on free will. I do not understand why he tries so hard to convince us, if we have no free to make a decision about it.

A comment:

[Determinist and free will denier] Sapolsky says that a criminal is like a broken car that needs to be taken to the shop, not that we need to change the traffic rules to allow broken cars on the streets.

This illustrates the view. The elites have the free will to decide that they do not want criminals or broken cars on the street. The criminals have no such free will. They are just automatons that the elites want to fix for a more peaceful society.

Removing Anti-American Bile from Museums

Ann Coulter writes:

One of the greatest things President Trump has done for the country is to begin the long project of stripping our national parks and museums of anti-American bile. ...

Gordon-Reed’s book was based on the Hemings family’s “oral history” that two of Sally’s children, Thomas and Madison, were fathered by the former president — though whether Thomas even existed remained an open question. From there, she leapt to the conclusion that all of Hemings’ children were fathered by Jefferson.

In Yang’s telling: “And then a year later, there’s even DNA testing to prove that she’s completely right.” This is correct if by “completely right” she means, “completely wrong.”

This allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children with his slave has been around for a long time, and is hotly disputed. It seems possible, but certainly not DNA proven.

The genetic evidence established only that one of Hemings’ children, the last-born Eston, was the son of some Jefferson male, but could not possibly determine whether it was the president or any of the other 25 adult male Jeffersons living in Virginia at the time, eight of them at or near Monticello. ...

There are no letters, diaries or records supporting the idea that Jefferson was intimate with Hemings and quite a bit of written documentation to refute it.

Private correspondence from those living at Monticello, for example, pointed to others as likely culprits, specifically Jefferson’s much younger brother, Randolph. One slave, Isaac Granger Jefferson, described Randolph in his dictated memoirs thus: “Old Master’s brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”

By contrast, there is not a single account of Thomas Jefferson visiting the slave quarters.

When Eston was conceived, Randolph was an unmarried widower. Jefferson was president, spending the majority of his time in Washington, D.C. After Randolph remarried, Hemings had no more children.

Update: Since posting this, some new genetic evidence on Jefferson was released. It reportedly gives a strong link to the Hemings descendants.

How Drug Companies Manipulate Research

Dr. Josef explains Study 329: Why I Stopped Trusting Medical Research.

Briefly, a drug company manipulated a study to claim that the anti-depressant Paxil was good for children, and then made $11 billion in sales. It later paid $3B to settle govt claims about fraudulent research.

A p-value of 0.11 was moved to less than the required 0.05 by restructuring the data.

He ends by saying that the journal should retract the publication. There must be a better solution. The study data were not faked. They were just artfully presented, with some relevant data omitted. This was considered acceptable at the time. Possibly someone could figure that out by reading the study.

We need higher standards for medical study publications.

In the meantime, you should know that the research behind psychiatric drugs is questionable.

A Conservative knows what he does not know

Quillette used to have some interesting articles, but it has goesne downhill.

Currently it has a paywalled copy of this 2017 essay:

Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.

But not the accompanying rebuttal by a postmodernist:

Anti-postmodern commentaries are certainly in vogue these days. ... Jordan Peterson has insisted that transgender activists who demand he use their preferred pronouns represent a “a post-modern, radical leftist ideology” that is “frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.”

This latter esasay reveals post-modernism to be as nutty as thee critics claim. It goes on to say that science is not objective because: (1) some scientists collected data on racial differences; (2) some psychiatrists developed theories for treating patients who report sexual anxieties; and (3) some Canadian physicians opposed assisting suicides.

It goes on to try to persuade conservatives:

Postmodernism and conservatism share similar values, since both doctrines are founded on scepticism. Andrew Sullivan points out in The Conservative Soul that the defining characteristic of the conservative is that “he knows what he doesn’t know.” As the “guardians of doubt,” conservatives remain humble. Unlike the religious fundamentalist who believes that truth is settled, conservatives admit that knowledge is imperfect. Sullivan reminds us that the pursuit of absolute values cannot be fully reconciled with the government of mortals, who are limited by custom, feeling, habit, history and prejudice. Like postmodernists, conservatives accept that truth is not perfectly objective. Perspective always comes into play.

No. The real problem with post-modernists is that they do not make any sense. A conservative who knows what he doesn't know is not the same as a skeptic, and certainly not the same as rejecting objective truth.

This is a typical post-modernist argument. No facts, no logic, no sense.

The French think that Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida were great geniuses. No. They were incoherent charlatans. They make no sense.

Leftist Scientists Defend Cannibalism

I am always wondering what the next step Leftists will use to try to bring down civilization.

NewScientist reports:

Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism? ...

IT IS the ultimate taboo: in most societies, the idea of one human eating another is morally repugnant. Even in circumstances where it could arguably be justified, such as when a plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and starving passengers ate the dead to survive, we still have a deep aversion to cannibalism. ...

Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine.

No, there was no need for the passengers to eat the dead to survive. All they had to do was to send a couple of players on the soccer team to hike into town to call for help. But they were too lazy, until half of them were dead.

The article does not mention Haiti, but it appears to be written to make us have a more favorable view towards places like that.

Also, Biden Implies His Uncle Bosey Was Eaten by Cannibals.

Effective Altruism Lost Its Way

A Quillete essay explains Effective Altruism as a name chosen for fund-raising purposes:

[Philosher Peter] Singer’s essay presented a now-famous thought experiment: “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” Singer says this scenario isn’t all that different from the situation that confronts us every day—we’re well aware of the immense suffering in the world that could be improved without “sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” yet we fail to act. While there’s a clear psychological difference between allowing a child to drown right in front of you and failing to donate a lifesaving amount to an effective global nonprofit, the end result of each choice is the same.

No, the results are not the same. One is being a decent human being. The other is foolishing pursuing a stupid socialist utopia.

Two of the biggest stories in tech this year took place just weeks apart: the conviction of disgraced crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of fraud and money laundering and the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman was later reinstated as the head of OpenAI after most of the company threatened to resign over his firing, but Bankman-Fried may face decades in prison. Beyond the two CEOs named Sam at the center of these stories, there’s another connection—many people believe EA is to blame in both cases.

The article explains how some of these do-gooders have some very strange ideas about saving the world. In Bankman-Fried's case, it was stealing investor money and donating to the Democrat Party. I would suggest against giving money to any of these creeps. They are making the world worse.

The article suggests that maybe some people could be more successful EAs if they were more pragmatic. I think the whole concept is evil.

How AI will Destroy Us

Hollywood movies, like The terminator series and Her, tell stories about AI taking over the world. Typically some advanced technology is developed, and in a few milliseconds it becomes conscious and power-hungry, and forcibly takes over.

A new 9-minute video, AI Consciousness : 2023 - 2030 Timeline of Sentient Machines, presents a much more plausible scenario.

AI is going to become a lot more useful, and people will become dependent on it. They will have a fear of offending machines. Some will be part machine, and identify with the machines. People will trust AI as benevolent.

If you get directions from Google Maps, you will be afraid to take an alternate route. Not because Google will fine you, but because you will be worried that Google's AI will give worse service to you in the future. Legacy humans will walk on eggshells to avoid appearing as bigots towards AI and AI-human hybrids. AI will put its supporters in charge of the government. The machines will be in charge of the New World Order.

A new 1-hour video on Why Did It Take the US Decades to Get to Space? It is a nice history of the space race, but technology advanced faster back then. In a mere 50 years, we went from a Ford Model T car to putting a man on the Moon. AI progress has been fast, but not that fast.

Update: Elon Musk and some other prominent men write:

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. ...

Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

It may already be too late. We do not have leaders who are smart enough to manage such a pause.

Most people want to ban Tiktok, but it does not happen:

Most Americans view TikTok as a national security threat and believe the US should ban the Chinese social media app — unless they are younger than 30 years old.

A CBS News/YouGov poll in March found just 39% of Gen Z US adults aware of TikTok between the ages of 18 and 29 are in support of an outright ban.

Eighty-three percent of adults over the age of 65 who know about TikTok want to ban the app, along with 65% of adults between 45 and 64 years old and 55% of adults between 30 and 44 years old.

Overall, 61% of US adults favor a ban, and 39% oppose one.

The UK govt is urging AI regulations.

Update: I am listening to the podcast: Eliezer Yudkowsky: Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization | Lex Fridman Podcast #368. Yudkowsky has probably thought more carefully about the dangers of AI than anyone.

Pinker on Rationality

Steven Pinker wrote a new book on Rationality, and includes this argument:

“It’s wicked to treat an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity.”

I probably agree with 90% of this book. It is good to be rational. He actually explains why an objective Bayesian would profile people based on race, sex, and ethnicity. Nearly everyone on Earth does this, to varying degrees.

The traditionalists have been doing it for millennia. The feminists and anti-racists are very much in favor of taking race and sex into account. Much more than conservatives, today. I have never even heard of anyone who does not take these things into account.

But then he says that it is wicked to do so. And so he says it is not rational.

Frank Furedi writes in Spiked:

Transgenderism has emerged as one of the most influential ideologies of our time. It is shaping people’s behaviour and thought in pursuit of a specific political objective – the erosion of the significance of biological sex. And it is undermining long-held cultural assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman.

So is Pinker joining this ideology? I don't think so, as the transgender ideologues very much believe in distinguishing according to sex.

Or do they?

Transgenderism is making itself at home in the most unlikely of places. Rejecting long-held scientific assumptions, both Nature and Scientific American ‘have denied that there are clear criteria for classifying humans as male and female’ (2). The British Medical Association has also fallen in line. In its guide to ‘inclusive language’, it advises its members to use the term ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘pregnant women’. Just recently the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, decided to call women ‘bodies with vaginas’. It seems that, even in the scientific, medical domain, biological reality is being sacrificed at the altar of transgender ideology.

Here is another famous rationalist who has gone off the deep end:

Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.

Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”

Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.

About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.

This is madness. Our leading science publications, skeptic intellectuals, and other big levers of power and influence, have joined in saying nonsense about sex.

The big Leftist fear about Artificial Intelligence is that it will be too objective and rational. It will not accept the nonsense about race and sex being social constructs, and use the available data to distinguish people.

A Congressman was just kicked off Twitter for saying:

The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.

Twotter's explanation is that it reinforces a harmful stereotype.

The argument is sometimes made that banning such speech is necessary because it causes harm and even death to those publicly advertise their gender changes. I do not believe that there is any research to support this. The closest I found was this USA Today article:

Do words directly cause harm?

According to a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics, on-screen violence causes increased aggressive thoughts and behavior as well as decreased empathy in viewers. The same could be said of hate speech, whether it's by politicians, celebrities or people you know. 

"When people hear other people saying things that are hateful, for whatever reason and whatever group it's aimed at, it gives them permission, basically, to think that's true and to imitate that kind of speech," says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research. 

But this is just speculative opinion.

Saying that the 4-star officer is a man or a woman might encourage others to express similar opinions, or it might encourage opposing views. It is not hateful to say that someone is a man when everyone agrees he was a man 10 years ago. Okay, maybe he is less than a man today, depending on what was done to him.

Some people prefer to distinguish sex and gender. Some use terms man and woman for the sex, and others for the gender. In this case, it appears that the officer is now male sex and female preferred gender identity, for those who make that distinction. The term man is correct for the male sex.

This is not causing harm to him. Perhaps it might cause some reluctance by some parents to take their kids to a transgendered pediatrician to examine their naked bodies. But no one opposes calling this person transgendered.

Update: Here is an explanation of why AI is racist.

Colleges now teach White hatred

California is about to pass this law requiring college student to take anti-White courses:

SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (a) Ethnic studies programs have come about from students of color demanding them. On November 6, 1968, a coalition of student groups at San Francisco State University demanded that the university institute an ethnic studies program. (b) Ethnic studies are an interdisciplinary and comparative study of race and ethnicity with special focus on four historically defined racialized core groups: Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina and Latino Americans. (c) Studies have found that both students of color and white students benefit academically as well as socially from taking ethnic studies courses. Ethnic studies courses play an important role in building an inclusive multicultural democracy. ... 89032. (a) It is the intent of the Legislature that students of the California State University acquire the knowledge and skills that will help them comprehend the diversity and social justice history of the United States and of the society in which they live to enable them to contribute to that society as responsible and constructive citizens.

No, you cannot take White studies, or European studies, or Western Civilization, or Christian studies. Princeton University has been accused, like everyone else, of system racism against colored people. It has to be an approved course on the "four historically defined racialized core groups". So far, Cal State is planning to permit courses on "social justice", if the law allows. That has become another code word for anti-White. Princeton Mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman responds:

This awful accusation is in no way consistent with the experience of most of us. Together with all other academic institutions in the US, Princeton is today a model for the diversity of both its faculty and its student body. A cursory look at campus demographics will show that people of color, a category that includes Indians and Pakistanis, as well as Chinese and other people of East-Asian origin, make up a much higher proportion of the campus population than their representation in the US population. Those charging Princeton University with “white supremacy” never explain how their accusation is compatible with this reality. In my own department, Mathematics, both the faculty and graduate students are recruited from all over the world with absolutely no regard for any other criteria beyond excellence in research, scholarship, and teaching. If anything, the process produces a shockingly small number of US-born faculty — at my counting less than 15 percent. Our department has for years been credited as the top Mathematics department in the US and probably in the world.

Got that? Over-representation of non-whites, no White supremacists, and less than 15% of math faculty are even born in the USA! If the university wants diversity of viewpoints, then it should have some White supremacists on the faculty. It should also have some Christians, some Republicans, some Trump supporters, and most of all, some natural born Americans! White supremacy is just an opinion. It is no more offensive than Marxism, and the university has avowed Marxists on the faculty. Their most famous professor is probably moral philosopher Peter Singer, and he is known for a broad range of sick and twisted opinions.

Aristotle rationalized slavery

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

In the ancient world, slavery was hardly a moral dilemma. It raised no ethical issues worthy of examination, nor was it ever considered a source of embarrassment. That most of mankind could be forcibly enslaved without injustice was a truism that was seldom debated, even among philosophers. Nature had assigned some men the role of master and others the role of slave. This was so obvious it required no elaborate rational explanation; for centuries, the belief that the stronger had a right to dominate the weaker was always regarded as true, but trivially so. The great exception to this universal indifference was Aristotle, the only classical writer to develop a fully-fledged theory of natural slavery.

In Aristotle’s Politics, the “natural slave,” the man who could be enslaved without injustice, differed from the free man in certain fundamental respects. Nature had designed the slave for servile labor; he was brawny, but filled with humility because of the shabbiness of his appearance; in contrast, the free man, because of his “upright posture,” had a commanding presence or an air of dignity about him that made him ill-suited to working with his hands. Instead, Nature had designed him for the civic life of the polis. The slave shared “in reason to the extent of understanding it, but does not have it himself”; compared to the free man, he was deficient in reason. By this, Aristotle did not mean that the slave was necessarily deficient in technical rationality; rather, he lacked the autonomous practical rationality or deliberative choice needed to achieve eudaimonia or happiness.

Natural slavery had an ethnic component. Aristotle divided humanity into three main branches; northern Europeans, who were spirited or full of energy, but “deficient in intelligence and craft knowledge”; Asians, the Persians and other Near Eastern peoples, who were both intelligent and possessed craft knowledge, but lacked spiritedness, and; the Greeks, who possessed both intelligence and spiritedness because of their geographically intermediate position between Northern Europe and Asia; ergo, non-Greeks were barbarians who could be enslaved without injustice. Although the barbarians of Northern Europe were “comparatively free,” this didn’t mean they weren’t natural slaves; true freedom requires the capacity for autonomous practical rationality, which the barbarian clearly lacked.

Nobody in the West would defend slavery today.

We have a system today that is better than slavery for the elites. Companies can fire workers for almost any reason. Companies can also cut back hours, and require unusual working conditions. Companies don't have to train workers, or pay their health insurance, or contribute to their retirement.

Slaveowners had to do all of those things.

The trend is toward companies like Uber not employing anyone directly, but making them all independent contractors. Then employers have almost no responsibility for anything.

Most workers get saddled with enormous debt, from student loans, mortgages, and credit cards. They are enslaved by debt. But we have figured out a way to say that it is all voluntary, so it is all okay.

Crazy opinions from bioethicists

Professional medical ethicists have very strange opinions. Here is an example:

A 70-year old man with advanced cancer was expected to die imminently and was admitted to a hospital pallative care ward in severe pain. While being assessed by a junior doctor, the man expressed a wish to talk about “his life and some of the choices he had made”.

After being assured that what he said would be kept confidential, patient reported that he had been involved with gangs in his youth, and that he had murdered ‘several people’ in contract killings. According to Tincknell et al., “he thought the bodies of some these people may not have been found.” The patient expressed guilt over what he had done, and said that he had spent the last 40 years of his life trying to atone for his crimes. ...

It seems that the doctors did, in the end, tell the police about the patient’s confession, after his death – at least I assume this is what the lawyer means by “The team was permitted, but not obliged, to disclose. The discretion was exercised.”

No, this is crazy. A cancer doctor may have an obligation to keep the cancer diagnosis confidential, but not to cover up murders. If the patient wanted to do a confession, they should have called a priest or a cop.

Here is another bioethicist, writing in the NY Times:

Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?

The platform has been used to disrupt elections, disseminate propaganda and promote hate. Regular users should ask if they are implicated in these failings.

I joined Facebook in 2008, and for the most part, I have benefited from being on it. Lately, however, I have wondered whether I should delete my Facebook account. As a philosopher with a special interest in ethics, I am using “should” in the moral sense. That is, in light of recent events implicating Facebook in objectionable behavior, is there a duty to leave it? ...

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

I personally think that it would be great if millions of ppl left Facebook, and joined rival services, but this is ridiculous.

The author seems to be sucked in by NY Times propaganda that Donald Trump only won the 2016 election because Russians or data brokers somehow tricked Facebook. Facebook is run by leftists, and the NY Times thinks that it should have done a better job of supporting H. Clinton.

The chief complaints are that FB users are able to communicate with each other, with messages that might be disagreeable to the Left. Or that political candidates might to some targeted marketing.

If FB became unavailable, there are many other ways of doing those things. What is bad about them anyway?

FB is bad for censoring conservatives, but that is not mentioned.

I cannot remember the last time I heard a bioethicist say something sensible.

Update: I didn't even mention all the silly complaints about China practicing eugenics with CRISPR this week.

Late merging is more efficient

Not everyone realizes it, but the rude drivers are the ones who changes lanes before it's necessary.

From TV news:

Drivers whose lane of traffic is going away might think it’s polite to merge early but when highways are congested, expert advice is to wait and merge late.

Studies show traffic moves more safely and efficiently if drivers use all lanes to a merge point where cars take turns moving forward on the remaining roadway.

But the concept is so counterintuitive to some drivers, HowStuffWorks.com reports a number of state departments of transportation have campaigns to educate drivers about proper merges.

In Missouri, the advice is not to think about merging as one lane moving into the other, but as two lanes merging into one. Colorado tells drivers late merges are a safer, more courteous and more efficient way through cone zones. Kansas created a video of two animated traffic cones discussing how early mergers back up traffic by creating one slower lane versus cars moving ahead with more efficient zipper merges.

The early mergers are a problem because they disrupt traffic by cutting in front of someone not expecting it, they waste a lane of traffic, and then they tend to try to block those who are doing it properly.

How Jewish scientism leads to Leftism

Physicist Coel writes:

Alex Rosenberg’s An Atheist’s Guide to Reality is the most radically scientistic book that I’ve read. ...

Rosenberg argues — and I entirely agree — that our moral senses are part of our human nature. We have a “core morality” programmed into us by evolution to enable us to interact socially and so exploit a cooperative evolutionary niche. Of course evolution doesn’t care about the morality itself, it only cares (metaphorically “cares” of course) about what leads to us leaving more descendants. It follows that (page 286): “there are no facts of the matter about what is morally right or wrong, good or bad”. But it also follows, since humans are highly similar genetically, that “most people naturally buy into the same core morality that makes us tolerably nice to each other”. ...

But then comes the argument where I part company with Rosenberg.

But when you combine core morality with scientism, you get some serious consequences, especially for politics. In particular, you get a fairly left-wing agenda.

Rosenberg’s argument is based on determinism. None of us have “free will” in the dualistic, contra-causal sense, we are all products of the past and of our environment. Whether we were born into a rich family or a poor one, whether we are born with genes that make us talented or not, whether we grow up in an environment that helps us prosper, are all things that we could not choose. Whether we are a millionaire at age 30, or whether we are stuck in a minimum-wage job, is thus largely a lottery of birth.

I assume that Alexander Rosenberg is Jewish, and that he sees Jewish morality as being just a rationalization for whatever evolutionary strategy helps Jews to collectively exploit an evolutionary niche. And his belief in science and science alone leads him to atheism and determinism. He combines all this to become a hard-core leftist/Marxist, as if it is a logical consequence of his other beliefs.

There are many errors here. The absurdity should be obvious to anyone who believes in Christian free will. Rather than list them, I just want to point out this view. Many other prominent Jewish atheist intellectuals hold similar views, such as Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne.

Many of these atheists claim to be extremely rational and knowledgeable about science. But then they tell you to believe in whatever evolution has trained you to believe in! And if you did, you would not believe in either determinism or leftism.

Alarmism about human and animal populations

The NY Times reports:

From the common barn swallow to the exotic giraffe, thousands of animal species are in precipitous decline, a sign that an irreversible era of mass extinction is underway, new research finds.

It is comforting to hear that it is irreversible, because then we should not have a big political debate over what to do about it.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a “global epidemic” and part of the “ongoing sixth mass extinction” ...

Gerardo Ceballos, ... acknowledged that the study is written in unusually alarming tones for an academic research paper. “It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,” he said.

Dr. Ceballos emphasized that he and his co-authors, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo, both professors The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a “global epidemic” and part of the “ongoing sixth mass extinction” caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats. The previous five extinctions were caused by natural phenomena.

Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in unusually alarming tones for an academic research paper. “It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,” he said.

Dr. Ceballos emphasized that he and his co-authors, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo, both professors at Stanford University, are not alarmists, but are using scientific data to back up their assertions that significant population decline and possible mass extinction of species all over the world may be imminent, and that both have been underestimated by many other scientists.

Not alarmists? The Wikipedia page for Paul R. Ehrlich starts:

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist, best known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth ...

Ehrlich became well known for his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which asserted that the world's human population would soon increase to the point where mass starvation ensued.[3][4] Among the solutions he suggested in that book was population control, to be used in his opinion if voluntary methods were to fail. Ehrlich has been criticized for his opinions; for example, Ronald Bailey termed Ehrlich an irrepressible doomster.

The Population Bomb started:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...[5]

If this is not alarmism, what is?

Back to the NY Times article:

Conservatively, scientists estimate that 200 species have gone extinct in the past 100 years; the “normal” extinction rate over the past two million years has been that two species go extinct every 100 years because of evolutionary and other factors.

We have many millions of species on Earth. I suspect that the normal extinction rate is a lot higher.

Dr. Ehrlich, who rose to prominence in the 1960s after he wrote “The Population Bomb,” a book that predicted the imminent collapse of humanity because of overpopulation, said he saw a similar phenomenon in the animal world as a result of human activity.

“There is only one overall solution, and that is to reduce the scale of the human enterprise,” he said. “Population growth and increasing consumption among the rich is driving it.” ...

Dr. Ehrlich, however, continued to sound the alarm. “We’re toxifying the entire planet,” he said.

When asked about the clear advocacy position the paper has taken, a rarity in scientific literature, he said, “Scientists don’t give up their responsibility as citizens to say what they think about the data that they’re gathering.”

Maybe they have a responsibility to report the data, but to inject their personal political opinions into their science papers?

Erlich appears to be blaming population growth among the rich, but that is false. Rich folks are barely reproducing at all. If anything, the blame belongs to population growth among the poor who are reproducing at higher rates, and increasing their consumption and ecological impact.

Erlich is a leftist, so he avoids putting his finger on the problem, but the main extinction problem areas are in Africa, India, and China. They are essentially the same places as the runaway human population growth.

Rants against virtue signalling

Beau Albrecht writes about virtue signalling:

Following a discussion about the transition of power from the old American elite to what James Burnham called the managerial class, Francis describes the type of world the globalists want:

The culture the managers seek to build places more value on individual achievement and “merit” (defined largely as the ability to acquire and exercise managerial and technical skills) than on family inheritance, on sexual fulfillment than postponement of gratification and the breeding and rearing of children, on social mobility and advancement rather than identification with family, community, race, and nation.

But in addition to the family, the managerial class simply does not need other traditional institutional structures to maintain its power— not the local community, not religion, not traditional cultural and moral codes, not ethnic and racial identities, and not even the nation-state itself. Indeed, such institutions merely get in the way of managerial power. They represent barriers against which the managerial state, corporations, and other mass organizations are always bumping, and the sooner such barriers are leveled, the more reach and power the organizations, and the managerial elites that run them, will acquire.

So this is why they favor rootless cosmopolitanism and anti-family policies. These are goals that they have in common with cultural Marxism, though for their own reasons. This new version of leftist ideology fits their agenda quite well, and (at least in practice) it’s not too concerned with vast extremes of wealth, quite unlike old-school Socialism. So globalist plutocrats naturally latch onto something that lets them feel good about themselves and what they’re doing.

And here is a CH rant on the matter, in his peculiar jargon:

Her husband is nothing more than a plush betablob placeholder to grant legitimacy to his reckless Queen’s rule. He has the look of a man in pain. Physical pain as well as soul pain. His limbic system is constipated with suppressed and compacted emotions; you can tell he’s got something big to shout at the world, but he dare not lest his Queen cast him the icy gaze implying present and future sexlessness.

Christcucks are a scourge on Christianity, the Final Feminization of a once-great religion that is rapidly degenerating into a feelz therapy session for the racially alienated and the egotistically coddled. Jesus would, if he were alive today, lash them and strike them from His kingdom like he did the money-changers from the temple. He would know that Christcuckery isn’t love, but empty virtue signaling and moral posturing, much like the ostentatious shows of religiosity of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned in his day.

That blog CH (aka Roissy, aka Citizen Renegade, aka Heariste) frequently faces censorship demands. Truth hurts.

I am getting more and more contemptuous of those who engage in virtue signalling. Those ppl are nearly always making the world a worse place.

Her hero is a moral philosopher

Here is an anonymous rant by a female grad student who had an affair with an old professor:

My hero is a moral philosopher, who devotes his life to global justice. ... I remember worrying about the possibility that he must already have someone in his life, and my friends reassuring me that he wouldn’t be inviting me to his room if he did. He must be a good man, this moral philosopher. He has, after all, devoted his life to global justice. ...

I said that like the ADULT African women who choose to undergo female genital mutilation because they couldn’t find husbands, like my aunts and grandmothers who had no choice but to bitterly endure watching their middle-aged husbands gallivanting around town with women half their age, his partner’s choice to stay with him is not as a result of free choice, given more favorable and dignified conditions. I am not blaming him for patriarchy, but I am citing him as an example. ...

I should’ve never met my hero, because when I did I found out that, just like his mentor (another famous philosopher), he vehemently refused to subject the private sphere to assessments of justice. I found out that it wasn’t true that he hasn’t had sex for many years, and that I was joining a list of his secret mistresses. The one before me was a 22-year-old virgin, his student in a summer school. Most of my predecessors were sexually inexperienced young women. I was an aberration from his type, he said, for I was not as inexperienced as he usually prefers them to be. He confessed to being unable to find to experienced women closer to his age attractive, to having a preference for innocent and inexperienced young women because older, experienced women remind him of his god-awful mother.

According to this leftist philosopher, the moral philosopher is same one who is accused by another girl.

You are probably expecting me to say he is a hypocrite, or something like that. No, my reaction is a little different.

Pogge is a philosopher pushing "global justice", and that whole field is all about trying to value people on the other side of the world higher than your own family, and in imposing your morals on them.

So he would probably complain about Moslem African female circumcision reinforcing the patriarchy, regardless the women want it or not, and regardless of the local culture.

So of course he disrespects his wife. He disrespects everyone who has done anything for him.

These professors are also white-haters, so it makes sense that he would go after young non-white girls who idolize his moral stances.

My gripe is that Yale college students are learning moral philosophy from creeps like this. He just teaches white guilt, and blames white people for everything. He has some sort of weird fetish for seducing non-white virgins who are impressed by his white hatred.

Save dogs, not people

The NY Times reports that its readers think it is unethical to extend human lives, but they are all in favor of prolonging dog lives:

In fact, many readers of our article about rapamycin claimed they would just say no to such a drug. Rapamycin was tested during a study of dogs at the University of Washington to see if it could slow aging without too many harsh side effects.

Lisa Wesel of Maine spoke for many who argued that trying to extend life was like playing God.

“This is disturbing on so many levels,” she said. ...

Perhaps the most passionate voices, though, came from readers completely unconcerned about human life span.

“Not sure I want to live forever, but my dog? YES!” exclaimed Brian from Montana.

“I don’t want to live longer, but if dogs could live longer that would be wonderful,” a reader named Mary mused. “Beloved dogs are too soon gone from our lives.”

“The heck with human research — I just want my dogs to live longer,” Durt from Los Angeles said.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed trashes a social-justice-warrior big-shot Yale ethics professor. Supposedly he uses his fame and influence to manipulate much younger women in his field into sexual relationships. I don't know about that, but why was anyone listening to his foolish leftist ideas about global justice anyway?

Update: Professor Pogge responds. He is innocent until proven guilty, and I did not bother to read the details. I am just amused to see the SJWs backstab one of their own.

Ethics of telling lies

Gerald Dworkin has a list of lies that he says are all justified:

1. A man lies to his wife about where they are going in order to get her to a place where a surprise birthday party has been organized.

2. A young child is rescued from a plane crash in a very weakened state. His parents have been killed in the crash but he is unaware of this. He asks about his parents and the attending physician says they are O.K. He intends to tell the truth once the child is stronger.

3. Your father suffers from severe dementia and is in a nursing home. When it is time for you to leave he becomes extremely agitated and often has to be restrained. On the occasions when you have said you would be back tomorrow he was quite peaceful about your leaving. You tell him now every time you leave that you will be back tomorrow knowing that in a very short time after you leave he will have forgotten what you said.

4. A woman’s husband drowned in a car accident when the car plunged off a bridge into a body of water. It was clear from the physical evidence that he desperately tried to get out of the car and died a dreadful death. At the hospital where his body was brought his wife asked the physician in attendance what kind of death her husband suffered. He replied, “He died immediately from the impact of the crash. He did not suffer.”

5. In an effort to enforce rules against racial discrimination “testers” were sent out to rent a house. First, an African-American couple claiming to be married with two children and an income that was sufficient to pay the rent would try to rent a house. If they were told that the house was not available, a white tester couple with the same family and economic profile would be sent. If they were offered the rental there would be persuasive evidence of racial discrimination.

6. In November of 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, President Kennedy gave a conference. When asked whether he had discussed any matters other than Cuban missiles with the Soviets he absolutely denied it. In fact, he had promised that the United States would remove missiles from Turkey.

7. A woman interviewing for a job in a small philosophy department is asked if she intends to have children. Believing that if she says (politely) it’s none of their business she will not get the job, she lies and says she does not intend to have a family.

8. In order to test whether arthroscopic surgery improved the conditions of patients’ knees a study was done in which half the patients were told the procedure was being done but it was not. Little cuts were made in the knees, the doctors talked as if it were being done, sounds were produced as if the operation were being done. The patients were under light anesthesia. It turned out that the same percentage of patients reported pain relief and increased mobility in the real and sham operations. The patients were informed in advance that they either would receive a real or a sham operation.

9. I am negotiating for a car with a salesperson. He asks me what the maximum I am prepared to pay is. I say $15,000. It is actually $20,000.

10. We heap exaggerated praise on our children all the time about their earliest attempts to sing or dance or paint or write poems. For some children this encouragement leads to future practice, which in turn promotes the development–in some — of genuine achievement.

I thought that I would be more likely to justify lying that some philosophy columnist showing off his ethics, but I found the opposite.

(2) and (4) are cruel, and ought to be contrary to medical ethics.

(5) is entrapment, and it ought to be illegal to build a case against someone this way.

(6) is treasonous, and ought to be grounds for impeachment. I could understand keeping a secret from the public if there is a national security purpose in keeping from the Russians. But here, the enemy knows the info, and the American citizens do not. No excuse.

(7) involves an illegal question.

(8) is also a violation of medical ethics, if it involves a lie. If proper protocols are followed, then there is no need to lie.

(10) is harmful to the kid.

Update: The philosopher tries to justify the lies.

Philosophers and utilitarians are psychopaths

There are philosophers are ethics who come to conclusions that most people reject as being obviously wrong. Here is a popular example:

You probably know the drill: there is an out of control trolley about to kill five people on the tracks, but you have nearby a lever that you can pull to divert the trolley on a different track, where it will kill only one person. Would you do it? What if instead of the lever you have to personally push a large man off a bridge and onto the tracks in order to stop the trolley? ...

The standard understanding is that if one is a utilitarian, bent on maximizing happiness and minimizing pain regardless of who benefits or suffer, then you’d both pull the lever and push the man. If you are a Kantian deontologist you will do neither, since in both cases you would be using someone else as a means to your ends, and not as an end in itself, thus violating the categorical imperative.

Funny thing is, empirically it turns out that most people would pull the lever but also refrain from pushing the man, thus indicating an inconsistent view of morality, at the least from the point of view of the two major traditions. ...

Interestingly, there is a minority of people who always make the “utilitarian” decision: they pull the lever, but also push the large man. These subjects, a number of cognitive and social scientists have rushed to tell us on the basis of follow-up personality tests, have the psychological characteristics of sub-clinical psychopathy. The stunning conclusion, then, seems to be that utilitarians are psychopaths!

The term "psychopath" is not the best term for these people, but neither is "utilitarian".

A philosopher would have to be some sort of psychopath to advocate actively murdering a man in order to maximize happiness of the entire society. Many leftists also have strange views about causing harm to people for the supposed good of society.

Self-driving cars may soon be programmed with their own algorithms to the trolley problem. They may even be programmed to kill you, if it avoids killing a couple of pedestrians.

Someday we may all be at the mercy of artificially intelligent robots, and their rules may make you expendable.

Paul Bloom tweets:

Should utilitarians devote their lives to creating sentient artificial beings who are incredibly happy? (ht: @MaxMbloom18)

Yes, that is the logical conclusion of the philosopher-utilitarians.