Cross-posted from my blog here.
One of the greatest successes of mankind over the last few centuries has been the enormous amount of wealth that has been created. Once upon a time virtually everyone lived in grinding poverty; now, thanks to the forces of science, capitalism and total factor productivity, we produce enough to support a much larger population at a much higher standard of living.
EAs being a highly intellectual lot, our preferred form of ritual celebration is charts. The ordained chart for celebrating this triumph of our people is the Declining Share of People Living in Extreme Poverty Chart.
(Source)
However, as a heretic, I think this chart is a mistake. What is so great about reducing the share? We could achieve that by killing all the poor people, but that would not be a good thing! Life is good, and poverty is not death; it is simply better for it to be rich.
As such, I think this is a much better chart. Here we show the world population. Those in extreme poverty are in purple – not red, for their existence is not bad. Those who the wheels of progress have lifted into wealth unbeknownst to our ancestors, on the other hand, are depicted in blue, rising triumphantly.
Long may their rise continue.
See, the issue is that you think the downvotes were because of your views. I can't speak for other people, but I downvoted you because you were engaging in behaviors I prefer to discourage; namely, ignoring the substantive thrust of a post to nitpick at a relatively insignificant comment made in the middle whose absence wouldn't affect the post as a whole. And, as we see here, you made that comment not because it was substantive or seriously detracted from the post, but because it was an ideological matter with which you disagreed with the author. Hence my comment to you: "I found it concern-trolling at worst, and irrelevant at best".
Because, as Dagon pointed out, using your criteria, the progress is -still- a positive thing. That's the point of this post. Taking it as an opportunity to try to start an ideological fight is just bad manners.
See, downvotes here don't mean Less Wrong disagrees with you (although that's how some people use it, it's not the cultural standard). Downvotes mean people want to see less of the kind of post/comment that was downvoted.
I honestly don't give a tinker's cuss about the intra-movement arguments within EA, and if this is how EA behaves, I'd like to see less of it as a whole. You're not representing your movement very well.
I generally dislike it when people talk about moral views that way, even if they mention views I support. I might be less inclined to call it out in a case where I intuitively strongly agree, but I still do it some of the time. I agree it wasn't the main point of his post, I never denied that. In fact I wrote that I agree the developments are impressive. By that, I meant the graphs. S... (read more)