Addressing My Critics
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
The Prince
13 min read
The author opens by referencing Machiavelli's famous work about being loved vs feared. Understanding this Renaissance political treatise and its historical context enriches the article's framing.
-
Effective altruism
14 min read
Multiple references to EA community ('EAish ppl'), debates about optimal charitable giving, wild animal suffering, and utilitarian ethics. The philosophical movement underlying most of the article's debates.
A little-known fact is that my primary aim in life is to be universally loved on the internet. I read Machiavelli, and concluded that I should either be loved or feared, but I’m not a very scary guy, and fear lowers utils, so I settled for being loved. Tragically, by all accounts, I’m not doing a good job at it. Lots of people on the internet seem to not like me very much! What? For example:
Noooooooooo! The finest mind of our generation deeply dislikes me! Why could this be? I set out to investigate. My sophisticated investigative methods involved asking people who didn’t like me why they don’t like me.
Sadly, the people who disliked me generally didn’t really answer. Instead, most of the answers were along the lines of “I like your blog a lot, but if I had to explain why people don’t like you…” I thought it would be worth discussing some of the answers and explaining my views.
says:
I guess I don’t really dislike you, but there are 2 things you do that kinda bother me:
1) Distributing charitable donations in a way that doesn’t seem like it has strong theoretical grounding (why not just donate to 1?). I know you’ve talked about why you do this on your blog before, but your response was very unimpressive.
2) Writing posts that aren’t worth reading. These are posts that won’t update the beliefs of the people who agree with them and probably won’t be read by the people who disagree with them. As far as I can tell, the value of these posts is to allow fans to go “look at those other people I dislike! They’re so silly!” and I think this is a pretty useless mission. Here are a list of posts I would consider to be a part of this category:
benthams.substack.com/p… (I like this topic, but I don’t think your argument would persuade a real critic)
I think there’s a not crazy case for giving to multiple places if you’re a public figure. Part of why I donate is to encourage others to do the same. But I agree that if you’re a private individual, the best thing to do in expectation is give to only one charity. Sadly, I’m not a perfect utilitarian robot, nor are most people. I don’t always do what’s best. I
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.