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What is EA in this context?
I had to ask AI (ironically), it means Effective Altruism in this context. I'm not really sure what the parent's hate for EA comes from, but I don't hang out in those circles
The Whispering Earring
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: The Whispering Earring
#22This reminds me of another story that I saw posted on HN and has provided lots of fodder for idle conversations: Manna[1]. It's a less mystical version of the whispering earring.
Re: The Whispering Earring
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity. In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally end…
Absolutely anger is sometimes justified. But people are also angry when e.g. someone cuts them off in traffic. The initial feeling of anger may not be appropriate. A cue to help you avoid reacting immediately from hostility isn't so much deciding whether anger is appropriate but giving you the space to make that judgement reflectively rather than impulsively. Even if anger is appropriate, the action you want to take…
It is strictly necessary not to have supportive tools in order to develop these skills. Sentience and the ability to learn from experience are all that is essentially required. Past that there are no crutches and no shortcuts, because you have mistaken for disability the refusal to grow.
Re: The Whispering Earring
#24"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself." https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...
As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago: "any parable that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also about technology, because it's technology that allows the average person to get that power"
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Re: The Whispering Earring
#25[flagged]
He has some great essays and research pieces and has fostered a generally nice community of people who grew out of LessWrong. There aren't many places online to talk about those things in a certain way without it devolving rapidly.
Strangely, a popular formulation of utilitarian ethics attracts utilitarian ethicists, some of whom were eugenicists and the like already by inclination, the rest merely having become so under the suasion of this fringe theory's false axioms.
When your scheme of rules for how human societies should run does nothing to exclude or even discourage the worst atrocities of human history - when that scheme is fairly evaluable on its own terms as declaring those atrocities insufficient! - you've already made a catastrophically terrible mistake. To advocate it thereafter through persuasion rhetorical and otherwise is contemptible, but unsurprising.
Re: The Whispering Earring
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is EA in this context?
I had to ask AI (ironically), it means Effective Altruism in this context. I'm not really sure what the parent's hate for EA comes from, but I don't hang out in those circles
The social scene has an extremely vindictive vibe, very much suited to such soi-disant prophets. If you need anything from these people, my sense has always been, it isn't really safe to even let them think you might someday harbor the desire to cross them.
Of course butter wouldn't melt in their mouths to hear them tell it, but when ever in a case like this isn't that true?
Re: The Whispering Earring
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity. In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally end…
Absolutely anger is sometimes justified. But people are also angry when e.g. someone cuts them off in traffic. The initial feeling of anger may not be appropriate. A cue to help you avoid reacting immediately from hostility isn't so much deciding whether anger is appropriate but giving you the space to make that judgement reflectively rather than impulsively. Even if anger is appropriate, the action you want to take…
> the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
I would posit that the only faculty developed in wielding such supportive tooling, is skill at using those tools; when the real goal is the cultivation of character, the construction of a "virtual engine" [0] that governs action. Consider analogously that brain training apps' claims to improve general intelligence are specious at best, and don't seem to develop anything other than the ability to use the app.
Since, in the case of the earring, this virtual governor has already been outsourced to an external entity, there is no need to cultivate one for one's self. Not only does this miss out on the personal development attained in said process, it also risks enthralling you to a construct of someone else's design; and one should choose carefully at which pantheon they pour libations, for its value systems might not always align with one's own.
[0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-ev...
Re: The Whispering Earring
#28I think this ignores the internal conflict in most people’s psyche. The simplest form of this is long term vs short term thinking, but certainly our desires pull us in competing, sometimes opposite, directions. Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book? These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function, they are dif…
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Re: The Whispering Earring
#29Re: The Whispering Earring
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is EA in this context?
I had to ask AI (ironically), it means Effective Altruism in this context. I'm not really sure what the parent's hate for EA comes from, but I don't hang out in those circles
The hate for EA comes from a bug in it.
If you put your time horizon out far enough, you can calculate an almost infinite positive value as the end result of your actions today. From an infinite positive value, you can justify doing almost infinite amounts of damage now in order to reach that golden future.
But like most "ends justify the means" philosophies, we never seem to actually get the claimed ends, but we do get the damage from the means. If you do terrible things to create a wonderful future, your theoretical wonderful future never seems to show up, but you still do the terrible things.
I'm not the one you were asking, but I think this summarizes most peoples' objection to EA.
The problem is that EA isn't true to its label. If you really wanted to do effective altruism, you'd make sure that it actually works. I could get behind that.