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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future."

For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.

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The GiveWell Top Charities Fund directed $104M of donated funds to improve global health and fight poverty in 2022 [0]. This is effective altruism.

[0] https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund

Does "fighting poverty" mean to fight the people who profit from slave labor?

Because in my experience, "fighting poverty" is often translated to "let's educate all people and at the end no one will have to work on a cotton field". While wearing and eating slave labor products.

In German there is a quote that says "a society can't make a living by everyone giving each other a haircut". While I don't think that the answer is to subsidize manufacturing of goods (that's the context of the original quote IIRC), I think that this equally applies to what we call "skilled labor".

That said, one should be interested in the weights and convolutions of Einstein's brain, instead of ignoring them for the sake of virtue-signalling about the people in the cotton fields and sweatshops, to the extent that said convolutions may well be in fact the very thing that could have lifted people of equal talent from the very cotton fields and sweatshops they lived and died in instead.

In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.

I think that if we lifted billions of people out of childhood poverty and they had access to quality food, healthcare, and education starting at a young age, we would have 100x more people producing top-tier scientific output.

So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.

They didn't lift Einstein out of cotton fields and sweatshops. If one is interested in the contribution of weights and convolutions of brains to being lifted out of cotton fields and sweatshops, one should measure the brains of people who lifted themselves out of cotton fields and sweatshops, not someone who didn't.

Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.

The point isn't to 'think of the children' but that the only way to address these injustices is to do literally that, there is no way around ethics by way of intellect or dwelling on abstract issues. Some of the worst camps humans have been shoved in have been during modernity, using modern tools conceived of by people with very big brains.

People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau:

"Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”

I love that the narrative surrounding neuroscience has been so poisoned by AI bullshit that we're talking about weights and convolutions like those are things that actually exist in brains.

I think the "weight" here is weight as in mass and "convolutions" here is as in folds. The size/weight and folds of Einstein's brain have been the subject of studies, and the quote was from 1980.

Maybe I'm the one who is poisoned

It was not Einstein like brain that ended slavery. And it was not kind of people that complain about 'virtue signaling' either. The latter were just obstacle anyway.

Einstein was smart, did awful lot for physics, even did some active virtue signing moves toward racial equality.

But, his kind of brain had presidly zero with solving issues in question, no matter how much distasteful you find people who talk about those issues.

Agreed. Long-termism isn't real and is just an excuse to ignore currently existing problems.

I agree with your fundamental point, but I find this quote somewhat confusing when applied to this conversation. Surely there are people who would have an equally great negative impact on humanity were they not working in a sweatshop, too?

"Thomas Midgley Jr. could've been thwarted by worse labor conditions" is certainly an interesting take.

That’s a particularly hilarious way to frame it but also an interesting person to pick considering he was born into a family of inventors and had the resources to attend an ivy league. Quite literally humanity might be much better off had he not had an opportunity to innovate.

To clarify my point, it just feels odd to hear a purely utilitarian argument against slavery, which hinges on some kind of implied rule of nature that equality can only result in more altruistic geniuses benefitting the greater good -without taking into account all the very intelligent people who, with the best of intentions, have set us on our supposed course towards apocalypse. Because the argument is utilitarian, it can be dismissed with theoretically advantageous results of slavery, which is beyond the pale for me personally.

There were people at the time who pushed back against Midgley and his employer with respect to leaded gasoline. The power differential overwhelmed their criticisms for decades until years after Patterson definitely proved how bad it was.

A utilitarian argument in favor of a flatter power landscape is that such a landscape may have stopped tetraethyl lead, at least for automobiles and house paints.

Whether or not this would have caught CFCs, I don't know.

Sure but the trouble in applying that is that we need a level of precognition of people's future activities that's just not possible. Better to give everyone a path out of horrible labor conditions and deal with the bad eggs down stream of that where we actually know who they are through either structuring society so they don't have the pressures to commit crimes or through whatever version of incarceration and rehabilitation we can figure out.

Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?

This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all.

> All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)

That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches.

Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)

The difference is that normal utilitarians want to have high certainty that what they are doing is a net good while longtermists actually don't care if the outcome will be reached or not, essentially allowing a loophole for negative utility to slip in.

That certainly looks like a problem. Personally, I wouldn't go near anything like that anyway.

On one hand it seems prudent to me to consider the likely consequences of your actions, even long term, although such projections should be suitably discounted for their rapidly increasing uncertainty.

On the other hand I find the idea that you can quantify utility and do calculations with it to compare societal outcomes philosophically wrong, even naive. Should the outcomes of these calculations then be used to justify overriding the personal life choices of others, for the greater good™, it becomes outright evil.

My personal ethics is more of a deontological one.

Sounds like an argument against utilitarianism in general. If you're forcing people to make train trolley kind of choices, then every ethical position is going to sound unappealing. I still don't see where effective altruists and longtermists are advocating for more sweat shops and slaving away in cotton fields.

Some of them have said that we should ignore poor countries and only focus on people in rich countries.

>> As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present.

The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects.

I see this philosophy more as "I am so self important that I think I can positively influence the course of humanity over the timescale of the universe". The irony of thinking like that while talking about the insignificance of things like WWII is telling. Like dude, you and your philosophy are damn near irrelevant like the rest of us - get some therapy for your existential angst.

See, the idea of exploring and colonizing Mars is not a bad one.

But from everything Elon has said on the subject, it's very clear that what he means when he talks about it and what I mean when I talk about it are not the same thing.

What I mean when I say "exploring and colonizing Mars":

- Do basic scientific research to understand Mars better

- Learn how to better survive in environments that are hostile to human life

- Work toward being able to create fully self-sustaining colonies of humans offworld, as an (eventual) hedge against problems on Earth (eg, massive meteor strike, nuclear winter, etc)

What Elon Musk means when he says "exploring and colonizing Mars":

- Setting up in a place where no human laws reach

- Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own

- Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum

> But from everything Elon has said on the subject, it's very clear that what he means when he talks about it and what I mean when I talk about it are not the same thing.

Not my recollection. This article is a good summary:

https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex

The article went back to some of his presentations far back.

Er...did you read that?

> People interested in moving to Mars could pay for their flight with a loan. Once there, people would be able to pay off the loan by working in anything from iron foundries to pizzerias.

Indentured servitude.

> This city would be free to govern itself on its own terms, as indicated by the Starlink internet service terms and conditions released in October 2020. This appears to stand in contradiction to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that the launch origin country is responsible for subsequent space activities.

Avoiding all current human laws.

Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?

How do you suggest the people who move there to pay for the tickets? Corporations who pay in exchange for labor? Or governments who pay in exchange for services? If anything that would make them beholden to their employers.

> Avoiding all current human laws

That is an uncharitable take. He said they should govern in their own terms, not that they should “avoiding all current human laws”. American laws are very similar to British ones, even if Americans refused to be governed by the British ones.

If you want to judge his intention according to your bias, be my guest, but nothing he said clearly indicates whatever ideas you think he has, according to this article.

>> Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?

But those people would be on Mars, entirely dependent even for the air they breathe on the same institutions controlling their debt and making the laws. What kind of protections against abuse would those people have?

You might quibble about the terminology of "indentured servitude" but what is described really sounds like a situation that nobody who wouldn't want to be the property of someone else would like to put themselves in.

> Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?

I didn't say they wouldn't be getting any money. I said they'd be indentured servants.

Which they would.

Indentured servants aren't slaves. They are beholden to the people or corporation who hold their debt, though—and I have absolutely zero faith that a Mars colony run by Elon Musk would make the life of an indentured servant in his colony look like anything close to the life of someone who paid full price to come.

> That is an uncharitable take.

You're damn right it's an uncharitable take. I do not believe Elon Musk deserves the benefit of any doubt at this point. He has demonstrated himself to be a despicable human being on a number of accounts—even before he started actively allying himself with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Let me reiterate, just to be 100% clear: I believe that because of his demonstrated behavior, Elon Musk, unlike nearly anyone else one could name, deserves his statements in articles like this to be treated with the maximum skepticism and interpreted in the least charitable way.

Is there a succinct source that backs this assertion up?

For my edification as someone who has no idea who you are and has paid almost no attention to Elon Musk and his delusions of someday living on Mars but is going "If this is true: light bulb moment!"

Sadly, no—this is based on a relatively distant observation of various tweets and other statements by and about Musk over the course of the past few years.

Thank you.

> What Elon Musk means when he says "exploring and colonizing Mars":

> - Setting up in a place where no human laws reach

> - Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own

> - Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum

This is probably some variety of horrible -ism but I gotta say that the more exposure I have to expat white South Africans the more I think they shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of... anything. Like you start talking and it's just a matter of time before certain things start to come out.

So... Because someone else who clearly doesn't like the guy put words in his mouth sans any citation, you think that

"expat white South Africans the more I think they shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of... anything."

How is any of this thread reasonable?

> and his effort seems to have positive side effects.

One hour weapon delivery anywhere on earth is not exactly a positive side-effect.

https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-spacex-partners-us-mil...

Starlink providing internet service everywhere on the planet is a positive side effect.

Drastically low cost of getting things to orbit is a more direct effect.

One hour weapon delivery has been around for decades - see ICBM

> The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects.

"Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck,

Boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias:

Ozymandias

By Percy Byesshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I met a traveller from way the hell off

who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs

be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere

right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face

looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot

all damn covered in words

“yo ozymandias here, this my shit”

“better than your shit, get fucked buddy”

not much else tho, just sand

shitloads of sand all over the place

> Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects

Everything can, to some extent, have some positive side effects. But keep in mind what is the real reason why Elon (and other libertarians) are so interested in colonising Mars - as opposed to exploring other, and much closer, "undiscovered countries", like Antarctica or the ocean floor: the existing legal systems do not reach there, or if they do it's very difficult to enforce them. Their idea is to create a "libertarian paradise" where they would define the rules of the society.

I mean, it has zero chance of working the way they envision it, but they envision it nonetheless.

As a life-long space buff, no that's not the reason at all.

The solar system can support a vastly greater civilization than our little planet, with millions of times the resources available and no existing ecosystems to screw up (that we know of so far). Antarctica does not compare.

Earth's ecosystem can only absorb the side-effect of so many spaceflights per year. It's one thing to advance the state-of-the-art of space travel vehicles, it's another thing to plan on colonizing the solar system with the equivalent of coal-burning, soot-emitting, 19th century locomotives.

Billions of people could live in habitats in orbit around Earth, while mining local asteroids or the moon. Targeting one of the deepest gravity wells in the inner solar system doesn't seem like a good first step.

Starship's exhaust is CO2 and water. At scale, make the fuel from ambient CO2 and you're net-zero carbon. Water vapor in the stratosphere is a potential problem but only at extreme volume, since most of the exhaust is at lower altitude.

Definitely we should do the moon and orbitals too, and Starship's launch costs would make that a lot easier. Mars does have things to recommend it though: lots of local resources, gravity only 1/3 of Earth's so you can get to orbit with just the Starship upper stage, only place in the solar system besides Earth where you can grow crops on natural sunlight, close to the asteroid belt.

> Starship's exhaust is CO2 and water.

And fast moving, directional heat.

That's a very transient, localized effect. I have a hard time imagining it making a real impact, though if you can reference a study showing otherwise I'd be interested.

I don't follow rocket studies.

I thought the interest revolved largely around space mines and industry. Helium, solid gold asteroids, etc.

Or they just think space is cool.

Starship isn't the ticket to colonizing Mars despite the hype. They're just not big enough to bring the people and the goods they would need to even tenuously subsist for a few months at least not the 100 per ship Musk claims would be possible.

As I understand the plan, Starship is the ticket to launching incredible numbers of Starlink satellites very cheaply, which will lead to enormous profits, which will fund the development of an even larger successor rocket, which will allow colonization.

If that's the plan no one told SpaceX's PR team to use a different rocket design on their pages or Musk himself as recently as 2020. AFAIK he's never said anything about a successor rocket to BFR/Starship being the actual colonization vehicle.

https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217990326867988480

https://www.space.com/elon-musk-starship-spacex-flights-mars...

Perhaps I am reading too much into it - I'm no insider! - but the original 100-tons-to-Mars "ITS" proposal called for a rocket 12 meters in diameter, quite a bit larger than the current 9-meter Starship; then Elon Musk made some tweet back in 2019 after the Starhopper test suggesting that the "next gen system" would actually be 18 meters wide.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1166856662336102401

I can't find anything about any of this on spacex.com. Maybe they've changed the plan or maybe they're just not thinking so much about Mars colonization lately, who knows.

He's been much more consistent about "Starship" to Mars than a single tweet about a "next-gen". Maybe they are but Starship is what they're currently saying will take people to Mars and he's said that for a while.

At 10$/kg to LEO it most definitely is, despite the thuderfoot videos.

Cost to orbit isn't the only issue, maybe as part of building something else but actually shipping 100 people to Mars on Starship is wildly impractical. First big hurdle is actually getting the Eyes Wide Shut refueling to work and you have to do it multiple times for each Starship you're sending. Then there's not that much space in the upper stage of Starships to pack that many people and several months worth of food. It's approaching possible but you'd be jammed in like cordwood not having the time of your life in a big open atrium.

If anything, Musk activities are exercise in being negative influence while getting all the praise.

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