Newsletter January 2023

Elliot Temple -

I wrote Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies, which I consider particularly important. It’s about something new I learned and changed my mind about. It explains that large corporations commit lots of fraud that a minarchist government would stop. Our current government is too big and powerful in various ways, but it also fails to do some things that even a minimal government should do.

I talked with and wrote about Effective Altruism (EA). I think they’re irrational (not really open to debate, discussion or criticism), that the majority of their efforts are counter-productive, and that they hurt and exploit young, gullible idealists (some of whom donate a lot of their time and income). I’ll summarize some of my conclusions about EA, and I’ve given EA its own section with links below.

EA is guided by anti-liberal political philosophy which they don’t explain or discuss. They get into tribalist fights with people about controversial issues like environmentalism and animal welfare. They’re bad at planning, have some anti-intellectual attitudes, and often pursue local optima. They expect conflict between interest groups instead of seeking social harmony. AI Alignment (one of their major causes) is also an error – part of its goal is to enslave AGIs (bad political philosophy) and partly it’s based on (false) inductivist epistemology.

EA says they want, like, appreciate and value criticism, but actually they ignore most criticism. Getting their attention requires social climbing and pandering; they don’t have rational methods of engaging with ideas independent of social status or popularity. The first thing I asked them was whether they have any organized way of having rational debates on their forum; the answer was no. The second thing I asked is if they had any alternative, besides debate, to rationally resolve disagreements; the answer was again no. They didn’t see the problem with that even after I pointed out the meaning of the two answers taken together.

Newsletters are irregular updates where I share things I’ve been creating elsewhere. You can find my Critical Fallibilism articles on the homepage as usual.

Critical Fallibilism Videos

Curiosity Blog Posts

Curiosity Videos

Criticism of Effective Altruism

Most of these articles involve philosophical themes of general interest, such as rational discussion methods, epistemology, harmony of interests, win/win solutions, the rule of law, bias, fallibility, rationality policies and “small” errors.

Critical Fallibilism articles:

Curiosity Blog articles:

Videos:

Only a single person from Effective Altruism (EA) was willing to discuss at significant length. Here are parts 1 and 2 of that discussion. It’s split in two places because EA changed their forum rules so that all posters must give up their property rights for their writing, which I refused to do.

I also made a CF forum topic where I put copies of my substantive posts from EA’s forum.

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