I have. You know what, you’re perfectly right, there are better ways to help people, and that’s even if you’re selfish and wish to help groups in which you’re likely to find yourself, for instance setting a precedent of people helping needy, terminally ill cryonics patients because “someday I could be in her shoes”.
Why did you have to? Do you feel like the strength of your arguments alone wouldn’t suffice?
That’s exactly it. This page is stuffed with identity politics, prewritten bottom lines, base-rate neglect, likely sexism, sheer abandonment of optimal charity, scope insensitivity, equivocation & abuse of fuzzies vs utilons, and so on.
This is all LW orthodoxy to the extent there is such a thing, yet even so, the pull of ‘dying cute girl wants cryonics! MUST HELP!’ is so strong that LW orthodoxy + good rhetoric* still earns me a mix of heavy down and upvotes with the flow of donations apparently unabated.
* I don’t think I’m very good at rhetoric, but I’ll take your word for it.
Do you think your strategy is channeling more money to efficient charities, as opposed to random personal consumption (such as a nice computer, movies, video games, or a personal cryonics policy)?
A more positive approach might work well: donate for fuzzies, but please extrapolate those feelings to many more utilons. I just used this technique to secure far more utilons than I have seen mentioned in this thread, and it seems like it might be the most effective among the LW crowd.
I have. You know what, you’re perfectly right, there are better ways to help people, and that’s even if you’re selfish and wish to help groups in which you’re likely to find yourself, for instance setting a precedent of people helping needy, terminally ill cryonics patients because “someday I could be in her shoes”.
You’re also too good at rhetoric for your own good. I wouldn’t have been so distracted from the content of your message if you hadn’t been acting so aggressive, indignant and grandiloquent in the comments from the beginning on. Why did you have to? Do you feel like the strength of your arguments alone wouldn’t suffice? Or were you too engrossed in the game of putting your ideas forward and destroying those on the other side?
That’s exactly it. This page is stuffed with identity politics, prewritten bottom lines, base-rate neglect, likely sexism, sheer abandonment of optimal charity, scope insensitivity, equivocation & abuse of fuzzies vs utilons, and so on.
This is all LW orthodoxy to the extent there is such a thing, yet even so, the pull of ‘dying cute girl wants cryonics! MUST HELP!’ is so strong that LW orthodoxy + good rhetoric* still earns me a mix of heavy down and upvotes with the flow of donations apparently unabated.
* I don’t think I’m very good at rhetoric, but I’ll take your word for it.
Do you think your strategy is channeling more money to efficient charities, as opposed to random personal consumption (such as a nice computer, movies, video games, or a personal cryonics policy)?
A more positive approach might work well: donate for fuzzies, but please extrapolate those feelings to many more utilons. I just used this technique to secure far more utilons than I have seen mentioned in this thread, and it seems like it might be the most effective among the LW crowd.