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This article makes for a fun guessing-game to determine what the ideological background of the author is. Effective Altruism definitely seems like one of those

This article makes for a fun guessing-game to determine what the ideological background of the author is. Effective Altruism definitely seems like one of those heavily-blogged about fads that's in vogue now with the tech-adjacent Rationalist set, so always curious to see who ends up opposing it. > Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader. As fun as it is to re-litigate the culture wars of yesterdecade, I don't really think the post-Bush administration diminishment of public Christianity in the U.S. is creating the society that the New Atheists want(ed). Conspiracy theories and irrational memeplexes have completely run rampant in the public sphere in the U.S. and the western world. Superstition and magical thinking is all over the place, the objects of devotion just happen to center around modern politics and items from the news, rather than figures from ancient history. If anything, many people are less firm atheists and more like apatheists - people just sort of believe whatever their social circle and social media reinforces.

WanderPanda 4y ago
I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology especially among well-educated people. When I frame it as just another religion I received confusion in return because apparently they see it as a rational thing to believe in. This was just a personal anecdote from my experience using Bumble and Tinder in a middle eastern country and in the US until I actually checked it on google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0h6434d https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    And I should add that it gives people a convenient language to talk about personalities and human characteristics. Clearly people find it (and other things, like ennegrams, tarot, palmistry, Myers Briggs, etc) useful as a way of structuring the vast complexity of humans in a society. I would love to have something equivalently helpful and engaging that isn't based on superstitions. But something like the Big 5 model is a mouthful of sawdust compared with the other things I mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
    - mst 4y ago
      I find the Big 5 useful for self awareness in the large. For self awareness in the small (i.e. surfacing my subconscious view of a specific situation) I've always been fond of rune casting, or in a pinch a dice roll or coin flip. In the sense that if I'm faced with a choice between two options, I flip a coin for it, and immediately upon seeing the results can tell if that's the 'right' answer or not.
  - cole-k 4y ago
    > There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years Must be because of a comet that passes by on that cadence.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  The interesting thing about astrology is that there probably ARE personality differences between, say, a cohort who were the youngest at school versus the oldest, or who just made the cutoff point for a sports team for the year versus those who were almost a year older. Those small differences can become magnified (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell's essay on why most Hockey players were born in December - they are older, so they look like they are more competent, so they get more training, so they become more competent). Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
  - robbiep 4y ago
    That’s not really an interesting thing about astrology though, is it? That’s an interesting hypothesis about if or why or how people’s personalities may vary. Which is easily searchable - for example, results for ‘MBTI distribution by birth month’ show no correlation, which I would think would be a reasonable way of getting to the start of this answer. I also tried searching for distribution of astrological signs by birth month and it was weird but there was a 1:1 distribution (… I joke) But the fact you didn’t investigate this and jumped straight to support of astrology clearly pegs you as a Virgo
- wpietri 4y ago
  > I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-agnostic https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-... Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions. Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/
  - astrange 4y ago
    > Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/ Ironically (or not), Buddhism definitely involves meditating about death, but it might be harder to encounter it in the modern world where you don't have nine children six of whom died of consumption. It sounds a bit boring though. They should start a fight club, or throw themselves off cliffs, or something.
  - mst 4y ago
    Being agnostic and having grown up in England, I regard myself as Secular Anglican and I think so do many of my countrymen (many people I've discussed it with wouldn't use those exact words in self-description but immediately recognise and understand the thing and agree that we share it.) i.e. we have it as a sort of cultural and moral framework but faith (or lack thereof) is effectively orthogonal to that.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
I think it was Leslie Newbigin in the 80s who predicted that as less people identified as Christian in the West that more people would begin to deify politics and that this would lead us to a very bad place. Edit: Found a quote from one of Newbigin's books: “The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashed demonic powers.” From his book Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986.
onos 4y ago
Also curious about who would oppose EA. My first thought is people who would be threatened by expectation that we measure the actual impact of social efforts.
- astrange 4y ago
  Since EA is a kind of philosophy-from-scratch attempt by STEM types, actual trained philosophers would be the "loyal opposition". https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philosophy/article/better-vaguely-right-than-precisely-wrong-in-effective-altruism-the-problem-of-marginalism/3FE3A694EEAF686194AB22A941691205 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philos... The unloyal opposition being people who want to donate to local charities, people who hate charities because they're billionaire conspiracies, people who want to keep their money, and humanities types who don't like STEM types and want to do radical poetry reading meetings instead[0]. And people who've noticed the "longtermists" don't actually have positions that involve being "long term"[1]. [0] https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1469254670862495748 https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/146925467086249574... [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermism?r=av61o&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermi...
  - mst 4y ago
    My view tends towards not finding the philosophy of EA particularly convincing in and of itself, but the money raised for causes I appreciate highly laudable. (yes, some of that money goes to thinks I consider complete kookery, but that's always going to happen because humans, and EA seems to me to be less lossy than average in that regard)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    EA is adjacent to Yudkowsky LessWrong Rationality-as-a-Lifestyle/Asimov's Second Foundation LARPing, which leads to some weird places like Roko's Basilisk and expensive places like the Center for Applied Rationality [0]; and it's also a fad among Silicon Valley VC/founder types [1], so it does have a rather specific techno-psuedo-intellectual sheen to it that can be suspect to those who aren't into such subcultures or scenes. [0] $3,900 for four nights https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-co... [1] https://haseebq.com/why-i-became-an-effective-altruist/ https://haseebq.com/why-i-became-an-effective-altruist/
kerblang 4y ago
I'm not sure if you're actually reading this (mess) right: > The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values. I know Bush himself was elected as "religious right", but the author seems to view the neocons as atheist ("moralogian"), and Bush himself was kind of a well-meaning puppet puppy... I always thought "atheism for the masses" got rolling much earlier in '92 (I think of Clinton as "nihilist pseudo-liberal conservative" but that's just me). I don't even know what to call the current moment - batshit delusionalism? That kinda works...
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I wasn't really referencing the article directly when I mentioned the Bush administration, but that's a good point. I just brought up the Bush era because that was the New Atheist's heyday and the last time when the existence of God was a hot button public discussion topic, as it was also the heyday of Islamic terrorism and Christian evangelicals. Nowadays when people try to push atheism too hard they just get called cringe Redditors, even though public religiosity in traditional religions have declined. Neocons are pretty secular so the moralogian reference isn't inaccurate. But it's probably more compatible with Bush's evangelical Christian worldview than the distinction between moralogian and theologian makes it to be.

WanderPanda 4y ago

I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology especially among well-educated people. When I frame it as just another religion I received confusion in return because apparently they see it as a rational thing to believe in. This was just a personal anecdote from my experience using Bumble and Tinder in a middle eastern country and in the US until I actually checked it on google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0h6434d https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

UncleOxidant 4y ago
> One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
- wpietri 4y ago
  And I should add that it gives people a convenient language to talk about personalities and human characteristics. Clearly people find it (and other things, like ennegrams, tarot, palmistry, Myers Briggs, etc) useful as a way of structuring the vast complexity of humans in a society. I would love to have something equivalently helpful and engaging that isn't based on superstitions. But something like the Big 5 model is a mouthful of sawdust compared with the other things I mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
  - mst 4y ago
    I find the Big 5 useful for self awareness in the large. For self awareness in the small (i.e. surfacing my subconscious view of a specific situation) I've always been fond of rune casting, or in a pinch a dice roll or coin flip. In the sense that if I'm faced with a choice between two options, I flip a coin for it, and immediately upon seeing the results can tell if that's the 'right' answer or not.
- cole-k 4y ago
  > There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years Must be because of a comet that passes by on that cadence.
alasdair_ 4y ago
The interesting thing about astrology is that there probably ARE personality differences between, say, a cohort who were the youngest at school versus the oldest, or who just made the cutoff point for a sports team for the year versus those who were almost a year older. Those small differences can become magnified (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell's essay on why most Hockey players were born in December - they are older, so they look like they are more competent, so they get more training, so they become more competent). Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
- robbiep 4y ago
  That’s not really an interesting thing about astrology though, is it? That’s an interesting hypothesis about if or why or how people’s personalities may vary. Which is easily searchable - for example, results for ‘MBTI distribution by birth month’ show no correlation, which I would think would be a reasonable way of getting to the start of this answer. I also tried searching for distribution of astrological signs by birth month and it was weird but there was a 1:1 distribution (… I joke) But the fact you didn’t investigate this and jumped straight to support of astrology clearly pegs you as a Virgo
wpietri 4y ago
> I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-agnostic https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-... Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions. Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/
- astrange 4y ago
  > Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/ Ironically (or not), Buddhism definitely involves meditating about death, but it might be harder to encounter it in the modern world where you don't have nine children six of whom died of consumption. It sounds a bit boring though. They should start a fight club, or throw themselves off cliffs, or something.
- mst 4y ago
  Being agnostic and having grown up in England, I regard myself as Secular Anglican and I think so do many of my countrymen (many people I've discussed it with wouldn't use those exact words in self-description but immediately recognise and understand the thing and agree that we share it.) i.e. we have it as a sort of cultural and moral framework but faith (or lack thereof) is effectively orthogonal to that.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

I think it was Leslie Newbigin in the 80s who predicted that as less people identified as Christian in the West that more people would begin to deify politics and that this would lead us to a very bad place. Edit: Found a quote from one of Newbigin's books: “The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashed demonic powers.” From his book Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986.

onos 4y ago

Also curious about who would oppose EA. My first thought is people who would be threatened by expectation that we measure the actual impact of social efforts.

astrange 4y ago
Since EA is a kind of philosophy-from-scratch attempt by STEM types, actual trained philosophers would be the "loyal opposition". https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philosophy/article/better-vaguely-right-than-precisely-wrong-in-effective-altruism-the-problem-of-marginalism/3FE3A694EEAF686194AB22A941691205 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philos... The unloyal opposition being people who want to donate to local charities, people who hate charities because they're billionaire conspiracies, people who want to keep their money, and humanities types who don't like STEM types and want to do radical poetry reading meetings instead[0]. And people who've noticed the "longtermists" don't actually have positions that involve being "long term"[1]. [0] https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1469254670862495748 https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/146925467086249574... [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermism?r=av61o&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermi...
- mst 4y ago
  My view tends towards not finding the philosophy of EA particularly convincing in and of itself, but the money raised for causes I appreciate highly laudable. (yes, some of that money goes to thinks I consider complete kookery, but that's always going to happen because humans, and EA seems to me to be less lossy than average in that regard)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  EA is adjacent to Yudkowsky LessWrong Rationality-as-a-Lifestyle/Asimov's Second Foundation LARPing, which leads to some weird places like Roko's Basilisk and expensive places like the Center for Applied Rationality [0]; and it's also a fad among Silicon Valley VC/founder types [1], so it does have a rather specific techno-psuedo-intellectual sheen to it that can be suspect to those who aren't into such subcultures or scenes. [0] $3,900 for four nights https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-co... [1] https://haseebq.com/why-i-became-an-effective-altruist/ https://haseebq.com/why-i-became-an-effective-altruist/

kerblang 4y ago

I'm not sure if you're actually reading this (mess) right: > The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values. I know Bush himself was elected as "religious right", but the author seems to view the neocons as atheist ("moralogian"), and Bush himself was kind of a well-meaning puppet puppy... I always thought "atheism for the masses" got rolling much earlier in '92 (I think of Clinton as "nihilist pseudo-liberal conservative" but that's just me). I don't even know what to call the current moment - batshit delusionalism? That kinda works...

Apocryphon 4y ago
I wasn't really referencing the article directly when I mentioned the Bush administration, but that's a good point. I just brought up the Bush era because that was the New Atheist's heyday and the last time when the existence of God was a hot button public discussion topic, as it was also the heyday of Islamic terrorism and Christian evangelicals. Nowadays when people try to push atheism too hard they just get called cringe Redditors, even though public religiosity in traditional religions have declined. Neocons are pretty secular so the moralogian reference isn't inaccurate. But it's probably more compatible with Bush's evangelical Christian worldview than the distinction between moralogian and theologian makes it to be.