Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

“Isolated” is the right word for EA.

Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement when it does open its mouth as every other imagined threat, even ones with a 10^-50 probability seems to matter more for them.

But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers.

View on HN

> In the sense that matters most for effective altruism, climate change refers to large-scale shifts in weather patterns that result from emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane largely from fossil fuel consumption. Climate change has the potential to result in—and to some extent is already resulting in—increased natural disasters, increased water and food insecurity, and widespread species extinction and habitat loss.

> 80,000 Hours rates reducing extreme risks from climate change a "second-highest priority area": an unusually pressing global problem ranked slightly below their four highest priority areas.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/climate-change

You should point your climate denier accusations at someone, so readers can at least check that person's statements.

That”s denial because you will be forced into denial to defend that position (e.g. you’re always going to be caught saying it is not so bad, just turn up your AC, …)

Can you define what you mean by denial and point to a specific example? You're still being hypothetical and vague with "you will be forced into denial" - I would flat out say that's obviously false.

Saying the risk of climate change wiping out humanity is less than the risk of nuclear war doing so is not climate denial.

It may be wrong, but it's not climate denial.

All discussions of EA run into the fact that EA is a diverse movement with lots of different opinions and “wings” of the movement with different priorities. So any statement like the above is going to have dissenters.

At the same time (and to practice charity, as many in the movement recommend): it is also perfectly accurate to note that there is an opinionated wing of the EA movement that believes AI risk is the most important X-risk facing us, and influential members of that movement have certainly made statements downplaying the relative risk of climate change. They’ve also managed to get some agreement from portions of the broader community. (And it is also hard to deny that some of the latter elements of the movement seem to be gaining ground in ‘capturing’ the brand, at least as far as it’s known to the public.)

Today it comes across like somebody is holding a gun to your head (climate change and the even worse political problem it entails) and they are worried your shoes are untied.

I am very concerned about climate change, and I am somewhat EA adjacent.

But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs” (the rest of us) and can only talk to true believers.

Wow. This is just weird.

In what ways?

That person should find a copy of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...

I read the first edition circa 1989 when people still remembered the moonies. When LSD got fashionable in the 1960s parents blamed it for what seemed like sudden personality change (Straight A student athlete now smokes dope all the time, grows their hair long, gets the crabs, etc.) but after the crackdown all the psychedelic bands either went under like the Beatles or changed the way the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd did. By the 1970s the fear was much more that your kid would get ambushed at the airport and brainwashed or maybe even kidnapped like Patty Hearst and transformed into a revolutionary.

I found out about the 1995 edition circa 2005 or so and though first “gee that issue wasn’t so salient then” but no you had groups like Aum Shirikyo, Al Quadea, etc. that were not so prominent in terms of numbers but highly dangerous in behavior.

The Reaganite sirge in inequality makes EA quite different from the Scientology of old (which wanted to drain people of their money and then make them work like slaves) because back then it was worth emptying the wallets of ordinary people. An EA club at a place like Stanford on the other hand is really a potemkin village that creates the appearance of a movement, what matters in a group of 30 of them is 2 rich kid whales, the other 28 are there just to make it look like there is movement. (E.g. Scientology has moved into big ticket donations because they found ‘working people like slaves’ isn’t that profitable). What happened to Patty Hearst is close to the right idea for a cult in 2023 except you don’t want to kidnap them and encircle them, you want to encircle them in their own environment.

Neglectedness is one of the three pillars that EA uses to decide how much impact you can have on a problem. EA is generally against funding climate change because it is easily the least neglected x risk, not because they’re climate change deniers. They figure the non ea community has already picked all the low hanging fruit in the climate change area.

>But it is not accidental because isolation is one of the most important techniques of cult mind control. The point of Sequences is the same point as Dianetics it is supposed to rewrite the way you communicate so you just can’t relate to “wogs”

At the very minimum, that might have been the way it worked with previous grifter cults. You can sort of characterize those as the ones that were created for a single founder to exploit the cult for, money, sex, and adulation.

But, if these others are cults, then they're a very different sort. They do seem to want to communicate to others. That tends not to happen, as the other side seems to shut down communications one way or another (something like an immune response?).

> Everybody else concerned about the future is concerned about climate change but EA is at first silent and then reveals itself as a climate denying movement

I'm fairly sure your species is functionally extinct already. It's unclear why you're concerned about the future farther than, I dunno, 100 years out. While there are exceptions here and there, as a civilization you seem hellbent on wrecking your fertility. Any civilization that can't be bothered or otherwise refuses to create the replacements for those that will die of old age is already gone even if it doesn't know it yet.

Climate change isn't a problem, because 500 years from now there won't be anyone around to suffer it.

Cults have always had some focus on "recruiting", partially because they do recruit people that way but because it leads into despairing interactions with "wogs" that lead members to believe the outside world is corrupt.

I don't know if you've had the experience of having a friend get into Amway and then giving you a long rambling nonsensical lecture about how they plan to make money at Amway that makes no sense at all... but you should because it's an education in how discourses with that structure play a role in mind control. You see them in Scientology, you see them in scam supplement ads on YouTube (it's genius that they ramble for 45 minutes before revealing what they are selling), and you see them in EA.

As for risks the cultural risks you are talking about are very real and not taken seriously enough although sometimes I wonder if the largest urban areas are just full and people who are living in a place that is full have an instinct to stop reproducing. If that's the case and there is a significant population drop it may turn around.

You provide some insight. I agree that these patterns exist and are meaningful.

But I see them in the climate change people too.

Yeah, the pattern that bothers me the most in people's behavior in social media in 2023 is the rise of "parareligious" movements which are about people finding meaning in (frequently politicized) beliefs.

The following pair of examples seems to piss everybody off. In one corner we have the person with conservative views who was just an ordinary person working, eating, sleeping and watching TV until some point in 2021 when they discovered purpose in their life because they would wake up each morning and read a lot about how everything the government about COVID-19 has done (vaccines, masks, closures, etc.) and not just wrong because people made a mistake but because of some deeply seated moral flaws in the political class.

In the other corner is a person who believes they have long COVID or who believes they are exceptionally vulnerable to COVID so when they see someone isn't wearing a mask they put on two masks. On their Mastodon profile they say they'll ban you if you ever post a selfie of yourself not wearing a mask. (I had a friend who used to be into all sorts of things like music festivals and Martin Scorsese movies but now all she wants to talk about is fashion face masks.)

The thing both of these people have in common, though they'll deny it, was their life was empty and meaningless doing ordinary things but now that they're suffering under fascist oppression or are under mortal threat by a virus every moment of their life is elevated. Either one will have a hard time accepting a "return to normal".

Everything I have ever learned about EA and it's followers has led me to conclude it is perhaps the largest and most complex internal belief system to justify stressful amounts of motivated reasoning, so people who have amassed unconscionable wealth can use that wealth to do basically whatever it is that they wanted to do anyway, but with an ideological overhead to shield them from inevitable criticism. It's the peak of this "good billionaire" nonsense where people can aspire to a level of wealth that is, to be clear, unable to be attained without exploitation of other people on an industrial scale, but justify it internally as "well if I do that I can do the most good."

It's utter nonsense. It positions the person in question as some sort of arbiter of humanity's future, someone so intelligent and so well rounded as to see the folly of mankind itself as an obstacle to be overcome, not as a collective where we move forward together, but as a personal barrier to what you already know needs to be accomplished. It is arrogance without limit to assume that you personally know better what needs to happen than the total summed knowledge of billions of your fellow man and I cannot take anyone who self-identifies as an EA seriously as a result. You, singularly, are not qualified to "fix" the fucking world, you are not ABLE, let alone currently, to be qualified for that.

To be clear: There are TONS of problems that the resources of one of these jackoffs could solve basically overnight. Flint's inability to have clean water is a great example, but just buying a shit ton of pipe and having it installed in a struggling city isn't flashy, it isn't exciting, it isn't paving the way for the future: it's just fixing a problem we know how to fix and that should be fixed, but that isn't enough. You can't put your name on it, you can't get famous off doing it (outside of Flint anyway) and therefore it doesn't get brought up.

I mean I don't really care either way, but isn't that for the government to solve? They print whatever money they want at will, sometimes I think that a policy of forcing 1% of any money printing into this type of project would fix most of the world.

Oh totally agreed. I'm just saying, if you, as this theoretical rich or soon-to-be-rich EA believer, are committed to improving the world by attaining and using wealth, there are problems out there than can indeed be solved with just... a big ass check. Those exist. But most of them are also pretty boring. People need things, and you can provide them things. But because they're boring, they never end up on an EA's radar. No, instead let's dump shit tons of cash into a nonprofit that will create AI and also create tools to stop the AI they created from killing us all with nukes.

Sources on it being “climate denying”?

Talk about a pitch right across home base…

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xJhtrAxd5QpXi2CdA/...

Here is the Google query that came from

https://www.google.com/search?q=effective+altruism+climate+c...

This is a forum post from a student with 18 total karma

so… it is typical. Find me an article on lesswrong that says climate change should be taken as seriously as AI, it might exist (probably with trigger warnings all over it) but let’s see what the comments are like.

Here's the second result of your google search, which has 34 upvotes vs. 14:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pcDAvaXBxTjRYMdEo/...

… which also supports my point.

Someone arguing on the forums that EA cares too much about climate change supports your point, and someone arguing on the forums that EA doesn't care enough about climate change also supports your point? What exactly would they have to say to damage your point?

Leadership making climate change a priority and not making excuses for why it isn't.

Someone in the movement said "maybe we're NOT all gonna die in the next 1° C increase in average temp" = Everyone in the movement are climate change deniers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com