David Mathersđ¸
Posts 10
Comments525
"The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general." Not sure I'd go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don't really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad ("dysgenic"), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.
(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I'm under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1/5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)
*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.
It's relevant because if people's opposition to woke is driven by racism or dislike of leftist-coded things or groups, that will currently also drive opposition to foreign aid, which is meant to help Black people and is broadly (centre) left coded*. (There are of course old-style Bush II type conservatives who both hate the left and like foreign aid, so this sort of polarization is not inevitable at the individual level, but it does happen.)
*Obviously there are lots of aid critics as you go further left who think it is just a instrument of US imperialism etc. And some centrists and centre-left people are aid critics too of course.
"And fundamentally opposition to wokism is motivated by wanting to treat all people equally regardless of race or sex"
I think this true of a lot of public opposition to wokeism: plenty liberals, socialist and libertarians with very universalist cosmopolitan moral views find a lot of woke stuff annoying, plenty working class people of colour are not that woke on race, and lots of moderate conservatives believe in equality of this sort. Many people in all these groups genuinely express opposition to various woke ideas based on a genuine belief in colourblindness and its gender equivalent, and even if that sort of views is somehow mistaken it is very annoying and unfair when very woke people pretend that it is always just a mask for bigotry.
But it absolutely is not true of all opposition to woke stuff, or all but a tiny minority:
Some people are genuinely openly racist, sexist and homophobic, in the sense that they will admit to being these things. If you go and actually read the infamous "neoreactionnaries" you will find them very openly attacking the very idea of "equality". They are a tiny group, but they do have the ear of some powerful people: definitely Peter Thiel, probably J.D. Vance (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html).
But in addition very many ordinary American Christians believe that men in some sense have authority/leadership over women, but would sincerely (and sometimes accurately) deny feeling hostile to women. For example the largest Protestant denomination in the United States is Southern Baptism, and here's the NYT reporting on them making women even more banned from leadership with the organization than they already were, all of 2 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/us/southern-baptist-women-pastors-ouster.html There are 13 million Southern Baptists, which isn't a huge share of the US population, but many other conservative Protestant denominations also forbid women to serve in leadership positions and there are a lot of conservative Protestants overall, and some Catholics, and officially the Catholic Church itself share this view. Of course, unlike the previous group, almost all of these people will claim that men and women in some sense have equal value. But almost all woke people who openly hate on white men will also claim to believe everyone has equal value, and develop elaborate theory about why their seemingly anti-white male views are actually totally compatible with that. If you don't believe the latter, I wouldn't believe this group either that men being "the head of the household" is somehow compatible with the good, proper kind of equality. (Note that it's not primarily the sincerity of that belief I am skeptical of, just it's accuracy.)
As for sexuality, around 29% of Americans still oppose same-sex marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Around a quarter think having gay sex/being gay is immoral: https://www.statista.com/statistics/225968/americans-moral-stance-towards-gay-or-lesbian-relations/
More generally, outgroup bias is a ubiquitous feature of human cognition. People can have various groups that wokeness presents itself as protecting as their outgroup, and because of outgroup bias some of those people will then oppose wokeness as a result of that bias. This is actually a pretty weak claim, compatible with the idea that woke or liberal people have equal or even greater levels of outgroup bias as conservatives. And it means that even a lot of people who sincerely claim to hold egalitarian views are motivated to oppose wokeness at least partially because of outgroup bias. (Just as some Americans liberals who are not white men and claim to be in some sense egalitarian in fact have dislike of white men as a significant motivation behind their political views: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534 There are obviously people like Jeong on the right. Not a random sample, but go on twitter and you'll see dozens of them.)
Literally all of these factions/types of person on the right have reason to oppose wokeness that are not a preference for colourblindness and equality of opportunity (the last group may of course also genuinely be aggravated by open woke attacks on those things yes, it's not an either or.) Since there are lots of these people, and they are generally interested enough in politics to care about wokeness in the first place, there is no reason whatsoever to think they are not well represented in the population of "people who oppose wokeness". The idea that no one really opposes wokeness except because they believe in a particular centre-right version of colourblind equality of opportunity both fails to take account of what the offficial, publicly stated beliefs of many people on the right actually are, and also fails to apply very normal levels of everyday skepticism to the stated motivations of (other) anti-woke people who endorse colourblindness.
Have you checked it was uniquely strong? Just off the top of my head Taiwan and (especially) South Korea both grew very rapidly too, under "right-wing" dictatorships and then (at least with SK, less sure about when Taiwan stopped growing rapidly) under democracy as well. I don't dispute the general point that the CCPs developmental record is very impressive, but that's still importantly different from "their system achieved things no one has ever achieved under another system".
Well, at a technical level the first is a conditional probability and the second is an unconditional probability of a conjunction. So the first is to be read as "the probability that alignment is achieved, conditional on humanity creating a spacefaring civilization" whilst the second is "the probability that the following is happens: alignment is solved and humanity creates a spacefaring civilization". If you think of probability as a space, where the likelihood of an outcome=the proportion of the space it takes up, then:
-the first is the proportion of the region of probability space taken up humanity creating a space-faring civilization in which alignment occurs.
-the second is the proportion of the whole of probability space in in which both alignment occurs and humanity creates a space-faring civilization.
But yes, knowing that does not automatically bring real understanding of what's going on. Or at least for me it doesn't. Probably the whole idea being expressed would better written up much more informally, focusing on a concrete story of how particular actions taken by people concerned with alignment might surprisingly be bad our suboptimal.
Unfair: he/she did not propose speaking in vibes ourselves he/she merely argued that this is how many other people will process things.
Condoms are a classic public health measure because they prevent STDs, apart from the benefits of giving people control over their fertility.
Obviously rationalists have contributed a lot to EA, and of the early adopters probably started with views closest to where the big orgs are now (i.e. AI risk as the number one problem). But there have always been non-rationalist EAs. When I first took the GWWC pledge in 2012, I was only vaguely aware that rationalism/LW existed. As far as I can tell none of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky or Elie Hassenfeld identified as rationalists when EA was first being set up, and they seem the best candidates for "founders of EA", especially Toby (since he was working on GWWC before he met Will if I recall what I've read about the history correctly.) Not that there weren't strong connections to the rationalist community right from the beginning-Bostrom was always a big influence and he had known Eliezer Yudkowksy for years before even the embyronic period of EA. But it's definitely wrong in my view to see EA as just an offshoot of rationalism. (I am a bit biased about this I admit, because I am an Oxford philosophy PhD, and although I wasn't involved, I was in grad school when a lot of the EA stuff was starting up.)