Journeyman

• Journeyman 28 Jul 2015 3:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.

  European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:

  • Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).

  • Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.

  • Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).

  And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?

  Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.

  • The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)

  • Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/​humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.

  Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.

  There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.

  Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.

• Journeyman 26 Jul 2015 19:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Good_Burning_Plastic’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn’t just about a delta, it’s also about the end state: assimilation isn’t complete until Muslims adopt Western values.

  Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France’s Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.

• Journeyman 26 Jul 2015 2:51 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.

  In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/​act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.

  Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.

  What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?

  My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural /​ community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.

  It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.

  Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.

  Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.

  Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.

  Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.

  If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.

• Journeyman 25 Jul 2015 6:15 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Username’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty’s position “repugnant” and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty’s position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.

  I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else’s. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.

  Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if “welcoming” results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it’s going too far… I guess it depends on your goals.

• Journeyman 25 Jul 2015 4:25 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  Redistributing the world’s rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you’re suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.

  Factually, it’s unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like “whores” and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered “rapable.” Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won’t actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn’t keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it’s really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.

  Even if spreading around the world’s rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it’s still morally repugnant. I’m trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world’s rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:

  • From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/​act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn’t seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don’t want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don’t have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren’t on board with your plans?

  • Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren’t. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people’s rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don’t have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.

  • Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say “well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists” but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/​act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.

  • Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don’t think it’s utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture’s B crime problems. If you take the world’s biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.

  If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it’s considered unpopular.

  If you are going to say that it’s The White Man’s Burden to fix other nation’s problems, then at least go whole hog.

  If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it’s possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.

  I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I’m interpreting you wrong then please tell me.

• Journeyman 25 Jul 2015 2:05 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  I’ll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.

  As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.

  But for now, let’s pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?

  In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?

  Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It’s supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It’s not enough to say “that’s wrong” after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It’s also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.

  Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard. When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as “racist” by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam’s infringement of women’s rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.

  After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.

  • Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?

  • Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women’s rights?

  • Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women’s safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women’s rights?

  • If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?

• Journeyman 22 Jul 2015 7:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn’t encountered. I don’t think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.

  With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.

  It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it’s quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 23:48 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  That’s correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 23:21 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it’s clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?

  We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it’s clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.

  Here’s another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:

  Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.

  So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It’s not just politicians, it’s not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it’s obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.

  In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 21:38 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  (trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)

  The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it’s not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.

  What we know:

  • Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls

  • Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved

  • The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out

  To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham’s council website:

  By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so. …

  The issue of race, regardless of ethnic group, should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is known to be a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised abuse in any local community. There was little evidence of such action being taken in Rotherham in the earlier years. Councillors can play an effective role in this, especially those representing the communities in question, but only if they act as facilitators of communication rather than barriers to it. One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers...

  In her 2006 report, she stated that ‘it is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators’.

  She also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry, but was not supported by specific examples.

  Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, rather than in individual cases. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators...

  Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to ‘downplay’ the ethnic dimensions_ of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as ‘racist’. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.

  And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.

  When a story is true, but it doesn’t “make sense,” that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can’t be true. I think that’s a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.

  Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 7:15 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.

  Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don’t like each other; they aren’t going to like supporting each other’s members through welfare. As another example, imagine that multiple populations in a country have very different economic productivity. The people who are higher in productivity aren’t going to enjoy their taxes being siphoned off to support other groups who aren’t pulling their weight economically. These situations are a recipe for ethnic conflict.

  Icelanders may be happy with their socialized policies now, but imagine if you created a new nation with a combination of Icelanders and Greeks called Icegreekland. The Icelanders would probably be a lot more productive than the Greeks and unhappy about needing to support them through welfare. Icelanders might be more motivated to work and pay taxes if it’s creating a social safety net for their own community, but less excited about working to pay taxes to support Greeks. And who can blame them?

  There is plenty of valid debate about the likely consequences of socialized policies for populations other than homogenous NW European populations. Whoever told you these issues were a matter of scientific fact was misleading you. This is an excellent example of how the siren’s call of politically attractive answers leads people to cut corners during their analysis so it goes in the desired direction, whether they are aware they are doing it or not.

  Generalizing what works for one group as appropriate for another is a really common failure mode through history which hurts real people. See the whole “democracy in Iraq” thing as another example.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 1:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn’t mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.

  The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it’s quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that are still problematic.

  As you point out, many interventions to change the world risk going wrong and making things worse, but it would be a shame to completely give on making the world a better place. So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 1:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  To some degree, the idea of a “Friendship and Science Party” has already been tried. The Mugwumps wanted to get scholars, scientists and learned people more involved in politics to improve its corrupt state. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but this is what happened:

  So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.

  When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this “marketplace,” because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.

  Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.

  ...

  In particular, when the power loop includes science itself, science itself becomes corrupt. The crown jewel of European civilization is dragged in the gutter for another hundred million in grants, while journalism, our peeking impostor of the scales, averts her open eyes.

  Science also expands to cover all areas of government policy, a task for which it is blatantly unfit. There are few controlled experiments in government. Thus, scientistic public policy, from economics (“queen of the social sciences”) on down, consists of experiments that would not meet any standard of relevance in a truly scientific field.

  Bad science is a device for laundering thoughts of unknown provenance without the conscious complicity of the experimenter.

  According to this account, the more contact science has with politics, the more corrupted it becomes.

• Journeyman 21 Jul 2015 0:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it’s important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.

  The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution /​ Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.

  These events were all horrible disasters from a humanitarian perspective. Yet I doubt that the original French Revolutionaries planned from the start to execute the aristocracy, and then execute many of their own factions for supposedly being counter-revolutionaries. I don’t think Marx ever intended for the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union to have a high death toll. I don’t think the original abolitionists ever expected the bloody Civil War followed by 25% of the former slaves dying.

  Perhaps, once a movement for egalitarianism and altruism got started, an ideological death spiral caused so much polarization that it was impossible to stop people from going overboard and extending the movement’s mandate in a violent direction. Perhaps at first, they tried to persuade their opponents to help them towards the better new world. When persuasion failed, they tried suppression. And when suppression failed, someone proposed violence, and nobody could stop them in such a polarized environment.

  Somehow, altruism can turn pathological, and well-intentioned interventions have historically resulted in disastrous side-effects or externalities. That’s why some people are cynical about altruistic political attitudes.

• Journeyman 18 Jul 2015 9:33 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  I agree that Japan has its own problems. No solutions are particularly good if they can’t get their birth rates up. Singapore also has low birth rates. What problems are preventing high-IQ people from reproducing might be something that EAs should look into.

  “How much immigration to allow” and “precisely what kind of people should we allow in” can be related, because the more immigration you allow, the less selective you are probably being, unless you have a long line of qualified applicants. Skepticism of open borders doesn’t require being against immigration in general.

  As you say, a filtered immigration population could be very valuable. For example, you could have “open borders” for educated professionals from low-crime, low-corruption areas countries with compatible value systems and who are encouraged to assimilate. I’m pretty sure this isn’t what most open borders advocates mean by “open borders,” though.

  The left doesn’t “want” a responsible immigration policy either. For their political goals, they want a large and dissatisfied voting block. And for their signaling goals, it’s much more holy to invite poor, unskilled people rather than skilled professionals who want to assimilate.

• Journeyman 17 Jul 2015 19:44 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: TomStocker’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  There are other countries with sound institutions, like Singapore and Japan, but I’m not so worried about them as I am about the West, because they have an eye towards self-preservation. For instance, both those countries have declining birth rates, but they protect their own rule of law (unlike the West), and have more cautious immigration policies that help avoid their population from being replaced by a foreign one (unlike the West). The West, unlike sensible Asian countries, is playing a dangerous game by treating its institutions in a cavalier way for ill-thought-out redistributionist projects and importing leftist voting blocs.

  EAs should also be more worried about decline in the West, because Westerners (particularly NW Europeans) are more into charity than other populations (e.g. Eastern Europeans are super-low in charity). My previous post documents this. A Chinese- or Russian- dominated future is really, really bad for EA, for existential risk prevention, and for AI safety.

• Journeyman 17 Jul 2015 19:12 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: TomStocker’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  To be clear, when I speak of defending the West, I am mostly thinking of defending the West against self-inflicted problems. Nobody is talking about “beating” the global south /​ east. If the West declines, then it won’t be in a very good position to share anything with anyone.

• Journeyman 17 Jul 2015 19:01 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: TomStocker’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  It’s not the preferences of the West that are inherently more valuable, it’s the integrity of its institutions, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, etc… If the West declines, then it’s going to have negative flow-through effects for the rest of the world.

• Journeyman 17 Jul 2015 9:10 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  No need for you to address any particular political point I’m making. For now, it is sufficient for me to suggest that reigning progressive ideas about politics are flawed and holding EAs back, without you committing to any particular alternative view.

  I’m glad to hear that EAs are focusing more on movement-building and collaboration. I think there is a lot of value in eigenaltruism: being altruistic only towards other eigenaltruistic people who “pay it forward” (see Scott Aaronson’s eigenmorality). Civilizations have been built with reciprocal altruism. The problem with most EA thinking is that is one-way, so the altruism is consumed immediately. This post argues that morality evolved as a system of mutual obligation, and that EAs misunderstand this.

  Although there is some political heterogeneity in EA, it is overwhelmed by progressives, and the main public recommendations are all progressive causes. Moral progress is a tricky concept: for example, the French Revolution is often considered moral progress, but the pictures paint another story.

  On open borders, economic analyses like Roodman’s are just too narrow. They do not take into account all of the externalities, such as crime and changes to cultural institutions. OpenBorders.info addresses many of the objections, sometimes; it does a good job of summarizing some of the anti-open borders arguments, but often fails to refute them, yet this lack of refutation doesn’t translate into them updating their general stance on immigration.

  If humans are interchangeable homo economicus then open borders would be a economic and perhaps moral imperative. If indeed human groups are significantly different, such as in crime rates, then it throws a substantial wrench into open borders. If the safety of open borders is in question, then it is a risky experiment.

  Some of early indicators are scary, like the Rotherham Scandal. There are reports of similar coverups in other areas, and economic analyses do not capture the harms to these thousands of children. High-crime areas where the police have trouble enforcing rule of law are well documented in Europe: they are called “no-go zones” or “sensitive urban zones” (“no-go zone” is controversial because technically you can go there, but would you want to go to this zone, especially if you were Jewish?). Britain literally has Sharia Patrols harassing gay people and women.

  These are just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening with current levels of immigration. Just imagine what happens with fully open borders. I really don’t think its advocates have grappled with this graph, and what it means for Europe under open borders. No matter how generous Europe was, its institutions would never be able to handle the wave of immigrants, and open borders advocates are seriously kidding themselves if they don’t see that Europe would turn into South Africa mixed with Syria, and the US would turn into Brazil. And then who would send aid to Africa?

  Rule of law is slowly breaking down in the West, and elite Westerners are sitting in their filter bubbles fiddling while Rome burns. I’m not telling you to accept this scenario as likely; you would need to go do your own research at the object-level. But with even a small risk that this scenario is possible, it’s very significant for future human welfare.

  Do you have ideas for people or professions the movement would benefit from and strategies for drawing them in and making them feel welcome?

  I’ll think about it. I think some of the sources I’ve cited start answering that question: finding people who are knowledgeable about the giant space of stuff that the media and academia is sweeping under the carpet for political reasons.

• Journeyman 12 Jul 2015 23:01 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism from XYZ perspective

  Part of the reason I wrote my critique is that I know that at least some EAs will learn something from it and update their thinking.

  VoiceOfRa put very concisely what I think is a median EA view here, but the comment is so deeply nested that I’m afraid it might get buried: “Even if he values human lives terminally, a utilitarian should assign unequal instrumental value to different human lives and make decision based on the combination of both.”

  I’ll take your word that many EAs also think this way, but I don’t really see it effecting the main charitable recommendations. Followed to its logical conclusion, this outlook would result in a lot more concern about the West.

  Even if this is not a median EA view, I would argue that most EAs act in accordance with it just out of concern for the cost-effectiveness of their movement-building work. It is not cost-effective to try to convince everyone of the most unintuitive inferences from ones own moral system.

  Well, there is a question about what EA is. Is EA about being effectively altruistic within your existing value system? Or is it also about improving your value system to more effectively embody your terminal values? Is it about questioning even your terminal values to make sure they are effective and altruistic?

  Regardless of whether you are an antirealist, not all value systems are created equal. Many people’s value systems are hopelessly contradictory, or corrupted by politics. For example, some people claim to support gay people, but they also support unselective immigration from countries with anti-gay attitudes, which will inevitably cause negative externalities for gay people. That’s a contradiction.

  I just don’t think a lot of EAs have thought their value systems through very thoroughly, and their knowledge of history, politics, and object-level social science is low. I think there are a lot of object-level facts about humanity, and events in history or going on right now which EAs don’t know about, and which would cause them to update their approach if they knew about it and thought seriously about it.

  Look at the argument that EAs make towards ineffective altruists: they know so little about charity and the world that they are hopelessly unable to achieve significant results in their charity. When EAs talk to non-EAs, they advocate that (a) people reflect on their value system and priorities, and (b) they learn about the likely consequences of charities at an object-level. I’m doing the same thing: encouraging EAs to reflect on their value systems, and attain a broader geopolitical and historical context to evaluate their interventions.

  However, among the things that are important to the individual EA, there are likely many that are very uncontroversial in most of society and focusing on those views in one’s “evangelical” EA work is much more cost-effective.

  What is or isn’t controversial in society is more a function of politics than of ethics. Progressive politics is memetically dominant, potentially religiously-descended, and falsely presents itself as universal. Imagine what an EA would do in Nazi Germany under the influence of propaganda. How about Soviet Effective Altruists, would they actually do good, or would they say “collectivize faster, comrade?” How do we know we aren’t also deluded by present-day politics?

  It seems like there should be some basic moral requirement that EAs give their value a system a sanity-check instead of just accepting whatever the respectable politics of the time tell them. If indeed politics has a very pervasive influence on people’s knowledge and ethics, then giving your value system a sanity-check would require separating out the political component of your worldview. This would require deep knowledge of politics, history, and social science, and I just don’t see most EAs or rationalists operating at this level (I’m certainly not: the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know).

  The fact that the major EA interventions are so palatable to progressivism suggests that EA is operating with very bounded rationality. If indeed EA is bounded by progressivism, and progressivism is a flawed value system, then there are lots of EA missed opportunities lying around waiting for someone to pick them up.