the effectively altruistic AI's fans are gonna pipe bomb a Planned Parenthood

There is a good case that abortion is morally impermissible – or at least there is significant moral uncertainty.

it’s actually kind of rare that one of these loses me in the first sentence (cause TESCREALs don’t know about brevity so usually their point is buried under an avalanche of words) but here we are. the only people who can’t imagine a morally permissible abortion just don’t give a fuck about women

Moral uncertainty is reason to become pro-life? We do morally uncertain things every day. That's no reason to legislate.
- "Put another way, even if one believes abortion is permissible, it likely remains a comparable problem to any problem of infant mortality – but with even more lost life-years, and occurring on a much larger scale than infant mortality".
  Well, it isn't comparable, because abortion prevents forced birth, and forced birth is a form of torture. As indeed is being forced to care for a child in poverty.
  "Other responses to Thomson highlight various other disanalogies between pregnancy and the violinist situation: In most cases of abortion, the woman is responsible for both the child’s neediness and their intimate biological relationship with the woman – unlike the violinist case. Other responses to Thomson highlight various other disanalogies between pregnancy and the violinist situation: In most cases of abortion, the woman is responsible for both the child’s neediness and their intimate biological relationship with the woman – unlike the violinist case."
  Bit of a bold statement, and likely untrue. It is impossible for a woman to know even when having unprotected sex if it will result in a pregnancy. Contraceptive technologies fail. And what about the responsibility of the father? It takes two.
  "n the case of abortion, the woman is the mother of the child[6] – unlike the violinist case.[7]"
  Ok, this is meaningless.
  "The violinist is in an unnatural situation and being hooked up to the stranger is an unnatural position – by contrast, the fetus is exactly where she is supposed to be in her ‘natural habitat’."
  Not in my womb, it isn't, motherfucker!
  Quite a lot of pregnancies end early in miscarriage.

I see the former evangelical Christians who were converted into EAs are busy redpilling themselves back into their original beliefs

@lobotomy42 @dgerard Well eventually, because of roko's basilisk and on a long enough timeline I am bored of this argument let's just do awful things and justify them later like we used to.
Such lovely people. Ugh.
@lobotomy42 @cstross boosted even though I never really understood the red pill blue pill idiocy.
- @MikeStok @lobotomy42 It's a reference to a scene in "The Matrix".

On one hand it's encouraging that the comments are mostly pushing back.

On the other hand a lot of them do so on the basis of a disagreement over the moral calculus of how many chickens a first trimester fetus should be worth, and whether that makes pushing for abortion bans inefficient compared to efforts to reduce the killing of farm animals for food.

Which, while pants-on-head bizarre in any other context, seems fairly normal by EA standards.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but reporting an instance admin’s post for a joke you didn’t understand is incredibly bannable

power trip unit testing PASSED
thank you for flying Awfulflot
- "babe wake up, new mod format just dropped"
EA plus 'nothing to do with AI' lol. And then only adding pipe bombs as an afterthought/sidenote.

Gee, one might almost think that EA was hostile to women.

EA is just logocentrics trying to shoehorn their 8-bit thinking on to an analog world. The whole endeavor is word-games because the defining "effective" is critical, while doing altruism is incidental.

suppose "effective" means maximizing the freedom, contributions, and life outcomes of women. All of a sudden, the facts&logic point to the opposite conclusion. Funny that.

I was elected to sneer not to read so I'm not spending 23 minutes on that. But I do wonder if you could refurbish large parts of this blog post to argue that masturbation is murder (when cismen do it). One counter argument against this is denying the full moral status of the semen.

Please forgive me if I fail to address it in a sufficiently sensitive way, and know that this was not my intention. There is, of course, so much more to say about this, but I wanted to try and keep the post relatively short.

(Proceeds to write 5000 word insensitive essay anyway)

This is the push/pull abusive dynamic: feign sensitivity, deny negative implications as not their intention, but demand positive feedback for dangerous takes. EA believes that not being wrong or held accountable is the most important optimization, so all their positions come from having absolutely no stake in the real world consequences.

MORE POSTS LIKE THIS
What I thought about child marriage as a cause area, and how I've changed my mind

lol

The opening line is... certainly a phrase.
I have been working on a research project into the scale, tractability and neglectedness of child marriage.
Later:
Some studies even showed that child marriage was associated with more positive outcomes, such as higher contraceptive use
Ummmmmmmmmm
- The fucking table really got me, like, what an absolutely mad idiot.
  And then I see this reply.
  I notice you have a table collecting and assessing possible harms from the practice but no similar table collecting and assessing possible benefits. In deciding whether to fight against some practice shouldn't we want to figure out the net effect - benefits minus costs - rather than just costs?
  Given how widespread the social phenomenon is, surely there must be some benefits?
  ( Something something Chesterton's fence...)
  Near as I can tell, the people who think it's terrible are in large part motivated by largely-false quasi-Mathusian claims related to "overpopulation". If we set those aside, younger brides tend to have more kids; all else being equal we should assume those kids have lots of extra QALYs (that wouldn't otherwise exist) and also presumably make their parents happy. Are those married as children happier adults on average than those not? How do we balance a claimed higher risk of physical abuse against, say, a lower risk of ending up childless or alone or financially insecure?
  Food for thought.
Lmao I thought this was satire
A long time ago somebody sneeringly called themotte an 'empathy removal centre', and it is good to see EA is picking up the torch.

Not a huge distance to travel from Bayesian reasoning to Stochastic terrorism

Every ends-justify-the-means worldview has a defense for terrorism readily baked in.

The only acceptable response. My body, my life, my right to decide. No surprise that someone in the "women are dumb" cult doesn't understand that women have bodily autonomy, and even thinks that "mother" is "someone who has no bodily autonomy".
oops read the comments under that clip of yours. Mistake (in 2 comments it is 'women should not be teachers')

@dgerard looks like Dr Miller here is completely rationally and altruistically examining the issues despite being one of the go-to “sciencey words” providers of various fundamentalist organisations in the UK.

I remember when LW at least tried to prevent this by doing the 'epistemic status' thing (which was a bit silly as it depended on the honesty of the author but at least they tried, and I am annoyed they gave up on that).
Edit: I was looking up a source for what you said (and discovered Miller has deleted his twitter) and came across this: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpk3gZqLkQ1/ "Ever wondered what it's like to be pro-life and in the medical sphere? Look no further and join Alexandra as she speaks to the UK's most prolife-ic (see what we did there) doctor against abortion, Calum Miller." yeah really something he should have disclosed.
Edit 2: lol ow god he didn't delete his twitter he actually renamed it from cdoggmiller to DrCalumMiller but forgot to update his own blog. 'cdogg' ow god. He is also a pretty vocal anti leftwinger (at least in his student days). Edit 3 No wait, he still is
- @Soyweiser He's also oddly reluctant to disclose in his polemic that his ongoing association with Oxford is as a research fellow at the tiny Blackfriars Hall, which is a combination Dominican friary and heavily Catholic college. Not wholly out of the question that the post is funded by, you know, "a group of concerned individuals".
- Ah, shameless propaganda.

Is it just me or does the author just… not really spend any time trying to defend forced birth? Like, other than quoting counterarguments to abortion defences. It’s like he’s sort of assuming everyone already has ideas about why abortion itself is bad, but find it permissible for whatever reason. Is this a correct characterisation of the EA community? That they all harbour anti-abortion sentiment but for whatever reason permit abortion?

Overall it reads like a business proposal. Is this how you’re supposed to talk to an EA person? Instead of saying “here is why you should care about x”, you have to pitch them on the potential ROI of caring about something? If so, that’s a fucking frustrating way to think about the world, and this was a fucking awful article to read, just like every other treacles-y long form logorrhoea you get from these people.

He says like "well actually having access to abortion doesn't make women happier" , as if abortion isn't pretty essential to the happiness of SOME women. But he thinks if women are forced to have babies they'll realize that they really like it actually, because he's a wretched dog.
- Bonus points for the part where he rails against contraception and sex education in the appendix, because we all know what this is really about.
Is this a correct characterisation of the EA community? That they all harbour anti-abortion sentiment but for whatever reason permit abortion?
I actually wouldn't be surprised if this were the case -- the whole schtick of a lot of these people is "worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans", so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?
Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go "well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it's obviously bad and I don't really need to justify it." (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you're Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See also the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.
- I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case – the whole schtick of a lot of these people is “worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans”, so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?
  Same energy as those score-maximising Tetris AIs that taught themselves to stack blocks to the kill line and pause.
  Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go “well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it’s obviously bad and I don’t really need to justify it.” (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you’re Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.
  Ughhh yeah that sounds about right.
- being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?
  Yep: https://awful.systems/archives/thread/zqyv6x

How to write an article that appears balanced, but is secretly one-sided...

But what's their opinion on pornography/masturbation?

increases existential risk, obviously
now, child brides