Journeyman

Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it's easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.

European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:

• Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here's a video of a lar

I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn't just about a delta, it's also about the end state: assimilation isn't complete until Muslims adopt Western values.

Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France's Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.

I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.

In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how ... (read more)

My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty's position "repugnant" and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty's position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.

I think Acty is a fundamen... (read more)

Redistributing the world's rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you're suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.

Factually, it's unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like "whores" and... (read more)

I'll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.

As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepti... (read more)

Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn't encountered. I don't think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.

With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn't seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is ... (read more)

That's correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.

If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it's clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It's clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?

We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it's clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my... (read more)

(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)

The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it's not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.

What we know:

• Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
• Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it se

Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.

Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don't like each other; they aren't going to like supporting each othe... (read more)

You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn't mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.

The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it's quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that... (read more)

To some degree, the idea of a "Friendship and Science Party" has already been tried. The Mugwumps wanted to get scholars, scientists and learned people more involved in politics to improve its corrupt state. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but this is what happened:

So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the Ame

There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it's important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.

The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution / Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.

These events were ... (read more)

I agree that Japan has its own problems. No solutions are particularly good if they can't get their birth rates up. Singapore also has low birth rates. What problems are preventing high-IQ people from reproducing might be something that EAs should look into.

"How much immigration to allow" and "precisely what kind of people should we allow in" can be related, because the more immigration you allow, the less selective you are probably being, unless you have a long line of qualified applicants. Skepticism of open borders doesn't require b... (read more)

There are other countries with sound institutions, like Singapore and Japan, but I'm not so worried about them as I am about the West, because they have an eye towards self-preservation. For instance, both those countries have declining birth rates, but they protect their own rule of law (unlike the West), and have more cautious immigration policies that help avoid their population from being replaced by a foreign one (unlike the West). The West, unlike sensible Asian countries, is playing a dangerous game by treating its institutions in a cavalier way for... (read more)

To be clear, when I speak of defending the West, I am mostly thinking of defending the West against self-inflicted problems. Nobody is talking about "beating" the global south / east. If the West declines, then it won't be in a very good position to share anything with anyone.

It's not the preferences of the West that are inherently more valuable, it's the integrity of its institutions, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, etc... If the West declines, then it's going to have negative flow-through effects for the rest of the world.

No need for you to address any particular political point I'm making. For now, it is sufficient for me to suggest that reigning progressive ideas about politics are flawed and holding EAs back, without you committing to any particular alternative view.

I'm glad to hear that EAs are focusing more on movement-building and collaboration. I think there is a lot of value in eigenaltruism: being altruistic only towards other eigenaltruistic people who "pay it forward" (see Scott Aaronson's eigenmorality). Civilizations have been built with reciprocal al... (read more)

Part of the reason I wrote my critique is that I know that at least some EAs will learn something from it and update their thinking.

VoiceOfRa put very concisely what I think is a median EA view here, but the comment is so deeply nested that I’m afraid it might get buried: “Even if he values human lives terminally, a utilitarian should assign unequal instrumental value to different human lives and make decision based on the combination of both.”

I'll take your word that many EAs also think this way, but I don't really see it effecting the main charitable... (read more)