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27chaos comments on Taking Effective Altruism Seriously - Less Wrong
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I think that it's worth being more explicit in your critique here.
The OP suggests that colonization is in fact a proven way to turn poor countries into productive ones. But in fact, it does the opposite. Several parts of Africa were at or above average productivity before colonization¹, and well below after; and this pattern has happened at varied enough places and times to be considered a general rule. The examples of successful transitions from poor countries to rich ones—such as South Korea—do not involve colonization.
¹Note that I'm considering the triangular trade as a form of colonization; even if it didn't involve proconsuls, it involved an external actor explicitly fomenting a hierarchical and extractive social order.
Also, it's reprehensible. I would probably be willing to accept reprehensible policies, very reluctantly, if they actually did result in productive countries. But when neither means nor ends are good, and the results of past failed attempts still cause massive suffering today, giving even passing credit to colonialist ideas is an enormous red flag. It's in the same realm as Holocaust denial imo. I don't think OP was seriously endorsing colonialism, but I'm also not highly confident he wasn't; neoreactionaries frequent this site, after all.
Just so the intensity of my position is clear, the hopefully-not-an-endorsement of colonialism alone wouldn't have motivated me to downvote, I'm usually pretty good at avoiding that armchair online-activist failure mode, but I found the main argument pretty weak as well. Had either one of those flaws not been present, I'd have been willing to overlook the other.