Robin Hanson Canceled from EA

Robin Hanson is one of the central people in this entire rationality/effective altruism network, along with Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

For him to be canceled, by a vote of 6 vs. 1 out of eight at that, for a set of modestly controversial thought experiments – that is, the basis of all philosophy – conclusively relegate EA to yet another boring leftist idpol organization.

It’s interesting to recollect how quickly this worm turned. Back in summer 2016, I openly handed out brochures arguing against open borders on EA grounds citing data on national IQs and even posed in a MAGA hat at their summit in Berkeley, without being accosted.

I was at EA Global 2016 and my impression was that a good 90% of them supported Clinton over Trump; most of the rest were libertarians, neoreactionaries, Thiel’s boys, or some conjunction thereof. I made a temporary alliance with a libertarian proponent of seasteading to defend Trump at Alexander Kustov’s stand devoted to immigration, where we gathered a small throng at the same time curious and bewildered by our political unorthodoxy. The ensuing debate, however, was very civil and pleasant.

But as early as 2017, there were posts on LessWrong recommending charities that explicitly shifted focus from utilitarian considerations to racial justice, in contravention of EA’s entire raison d’être.

As I pointed out at around that time, when Peter Singer was canceled by SJWs at a TED talk on effective altruism:

Whereas EA supports many “social justice” ideals, perhaps naively – as I pointed out, they tend to be avid pronents of open borders, even though its very doubtful that #WelcomeRefugees is ideal even from a strictly utilitarian, anti-national position – at heart they are high IQ liberals who tend to understand nuance and respect freedom of speech, whereas SJWs are average IQ authoritarian leftists who have no time for “freeze peach” or the smallest acts of deviationism.

As such, further collisions – or coalescence – are inevitable.

Indeed, coalescence was the future.

As a friend wrote to me in an email at that time: “I think this is how movements like EA die – not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with a sloshing sound from all the cash and normie status being poured into the feeding trough. Still, it makes for entertaining reading.”

And so we come to 2020.

https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1293181852107194374

Look at me I’m the effective altruist now.

Incidentally, that guy is the inventor of the eponymous Basilisk. And yes, he’s been canceled from EA too, along with many of the more interesting and “powerful” personalities.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

  2. Kent Nationalist says

    Incidentally, that guy is the inventor of the eponymous Basilisk

    That place must be swarming with trannies now

  3. Haruto Rat says

    Most of these intellectual fads are simply attempts at inventing a non-stupid brand of leftism, and have so been from the day one.

    Even if they succeeded, it’d be as good as non-alcoholic vodka.

  4. Only leftists try to be intellectuals now. The future lies in the Goon movements.

  5. EA was always the most cucked rationalist community with their obsession with saving africans. The fact that they also have some money and connections made them a more interesting target for entrysm then the rest.

  6. I might say Conquest’s Second Law strikes again.

    But I guess we need a corollary to Conquest’s Second Law: any left-wing organization that is not entirely orthodox on account of some higher principle is already in the process of abandoning that principle.

    See also: ACLU.

  7. Thorfinnsson says

    I’m not particularly surprised.

    EA is a fundamentally fake and gay creed to begin with.

    Take it from their official website’s stated creed:

    Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?

    Implicit in this statement are several fundamentally incorrect values:

    • That our resources should be used to help “others”
    • That the appropriate criteria for assistance is how much “others” are helped
    • Most critically “others” in turn means all other human beings, period, implicitly assuming that all human beings not only have value (empirically false) but are of equal worth (false) and that our relationships to these “others” do not impact our obligations to them in any direction

    All of these values are wrong and, carried to their logical conclusion, lead to the extinction of any group professing them.

    So the EAs themselves are now going extinct.

    Good riddance.

    That said, Hanson is a frequently interesting and insightful thinker so I’m not inclined to chuckle at his woes.

  8. The Rationalist community is filled with retards only.

  9. Interesting. I was just thinking that the new sexual economy is probably impacting social phenomenon in ways the MSM won’t touch. While a small percentage of young men (Alpha Chads) are banging a large percentage of the attractive ladies of their generation, older divorced Alphas are also poaching younger women, leaving a bunch of unhappily unlaid young men. While the “right wing” “Incel” movement is largely an MSM creation, I think this new sexual marketplace reality does help explain who so many of these Antifa losers are. Look at them–men who could never get laid these days, fat women who could never get laid these days, and so many trannies. I would argue that many of these Antifa men who identify as trans women are actually engaging in what the dating gurus used to call “peacocking”–they are desperately trying to sprinkle magic sexy dust on the doughy, chinless, pencil-necked, virginal vessels they are trapped in.

  10. A scant two years ago (18 Sep 2018), and in a universe now far, far away:

    Biotech leaders call for free press (!)
    http://blogs.nature.com/tradesecrets/

    To the Editor: We, the undersigned, are biotechnology executives, entrepreneurs, academic leaders and investors. We are gravely concerned about trends in the United States that are undermining our news media, such that more than 300 news publications across the country recently found it necessary to run coordinated editorials in defense of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

    Why do we, in particular, feel compelled to speak out? We dedicate our lives to discovering and developing new medicines. In recent years, we have witnessed astonishing advances in medicine, including treating diseases at the level of genes and cells. These modern miracles rely, more than anything else, on the free and public exchange of ideas. This encompasses the ability to collaborate, debate, and test one another’s ideas and findings, and to publish data regardless of political, religious or other external pressures or considerations. This is foundational to the scientific method, without which we all might still be living in caves and have an average life expectancy of 30.

    The Framers of the US Constitution understood this well; in 1774, the First Continental Congress wrote, in the Appeal to the Inhabitants of Quebec:

    The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in … its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honorable and just modes of conducting affairs.

    We believe it is critical to recognize that a free press is not equivalent to a perfect press. Reporters, just like scientists and every other variety of human being, at times make mistakes, can be biased, or may be just plain wrong. We see no compelling evidence to indicate that this is more prevalent now than it was 250 years ago at the time of our country’s founding, or any time thereafter.

  11. Looks like Hanson waded into female Will to Power quest. This is bigger than mere SJWs. You are not supposed to talk about dual mating strategy and all that stuff. Even conservatives will boo you, though you will be quite on point.

  12. Not Only Wrathful says

    The narcisst can only measure themselves in others’ eyes. EA is perfect narcisissism packaged as deceptively as possible.

  13. Not Only Wrathful says

    men who could never get laid these days, fat women who could never get laid these days,

    This seems like a problem that is also a solution.

  14. Sher Singh says

    FAT KARLIN FKN BYDLO WHERE THE FUCK IS THE ESSAY 2 WEEKS OVERDUE!

    GET PEOPLE HERE TO HELP EDIT LONG FORM ESSAYS

    ALSO GREATER MONGOLIA IS THE PAN SLAVIC STATE

  15. They should redo the basilisk but it’s a Black AI who will punish you if you haven’t done enough for racial justice to be bring about the existence of a Black AI. Start donating to change racist algorithms lest you endure an AI stealing your simulated shoes for eternity.

  16. ImmortalRationalist says

    Since Effective Altruism is cucked now, what Effective Altruist-type charities, if any, are still worth donating to?

  17. Golden Boy says

    That our resources should be used to help “others”

    I.e. what most people believe, if not act on.

    That the appropriate criteria for assistance is how much “others” are helped

    This seems tautologically true.

    Most critically “others” in turn means all other human beings, period, implicitly assuming that all human beings not only have value (empirically false)

    Not an empirical question.

    All of these values are wrong and, carried to their logical conclusion, lead to the extinction of any group professing them.

    Maybe. Nietzschean supermen don’t tend to have many kids. Both universalist liberalism and the glorification of selfishness are ideologies which argue people into beliefs that strike ordinary people as crazy.

  18. Shut the fuck up you tedious faglet. Go cuck somewhere else.

  19. Sher Singh says
  20. [our resources should be used to help others is] what most people believe, if not act on

    Assumption here is that people are not stupid about who they help. Do you think it okay to give money to ISIS?

    And resources are limited. Helping Φ by five units may leave you six units poorer.

  21. I don’t know who is this guy nor what is “Effective Altruism”. Seems a stupid idea, like all utilitarianism.

    The author of that Slate article is a (gay?) Jew. Who uses “creepy” in an article about economics? Only a woman, a gay or a Jewish dude.

    Do people in the general audience (i.e. normies) ever notice that 90% of these types of articles are written by Jewish journo-lists? Or they can’t even recognize the obvious surnames?

  22. The author of that Slate article is a (gay?) Jew. Who uses “creepy” in an article about economics? Only a woman, a gay or a Jewish dude.

    The authors could also be a 16-year old girl.

  23. Abelard Lindsey says

    I never even heard of EA until I read this. I guess its not that significant.

  24. That’s (1) amazing, considering your transhumanist interests, and (2) wrong IMO.

    There is huge overlap between EA and rational community, and (more weakly) the transhumanist one, which can be visualized as one giant cluster. There are some more minor subclusters (“health extension”, seasteading, etc.) but those three are the big ones.

  25. You would think.

  26. ImmortalRationalist says

    Why do you consider all utilitarianism to be stupid?