I feel like this essay kind of pulls its punches a bit, and yes I'm saying that despite the fact that it says "your preferred policy will kill babies!" :P Like, it says "here are some particular negative consequences of degrowth", but it doesn't, like, really attempt to dig into degrowth and rebut it in the big picture, it doesn't attempt to say "here is the fundamental thing that the degrowthers have gotten wrong, why they are wrong on the whole and not just in some details".
I also don't think the fact that Torres is a degrowther and that they object to analytic ethical philosophy are unrelated, but I guess it makes sense to not go into that in order to stay away from arguments that could easily get inflammatory...
This is a totally reasonable complaint-- I would have gone more into it if it were clearer what Torres were actually *for*, but they're very squirrelly about this.
At an emotional level I totally feel Sniffnoy's point but to the extent your goal is to persuade not to fire those of us who already agree with you up I think you made the right choice.
What I find most confusing about Torres is that they seem to be a TESCREAL-ist themself. I'm used to seeing criticism of EA for allowing AI safety and other x-risks to take any resources from global health/poverty measures because they think AI risk is nonsense, but Torres doesn't! If anything, they propose far more drastic measures to counter it than most. I am confused about in what sense Torres believes they are not a longtermist, because as you have pointed out they demand far greater sacrifices from the current population for the sake of the future than MacAskill ever would. I guess it's okay because they refuse to think about it?
I don't think the objection is as much to any particular measures but the manner of thinking. It's much akin to the way many people feel it's wrong to put an explicit dollar value on a human life even if they too agree that not all safety measures/precautions can be taken. At least that's my sense of what's driving things.
I'm not familiar with Torres but it doesn't seem fair to characterize the commonality among the three objectionable claims as following from "analytic ethical philosophy". It's much more specific, and strikes me as something along the lines of "treating all morally relevant outcomes as ultimately fungible". There are many ways to do analytic philosophy about ethics that don't require endorsing the assumptions of utilitarianism, and claiming that disliking analytic ethical philosophy is the root of Torres' objection feels like accusing him of being unwilling to take ethics as seriously as those he criticizes. That may be true, but it hardly follows from disagreeing with Eliezer's dust mote notion and some of the stronger claims of longterism.
I disagree. Yes, you can do analytic ethical philosophy and not be a utilitarian but the underlying assumption is that it's good to spell out these hypotheticals as tests of our moral theories and that we benefit from the pressure to be coherent.
I presume Torres is aware that other people don't have exactly the same moral intuitions as him and he presumably doesn't see that as deeply dangerous. But having taken and TAed plenty of analytic philosophy classes in morality I can tell you that a very large, perhaps majority, of the students bite the bullet about lots of small harms overwhelming a single major one. And you don't need to even be a consequentialist to feel the bite of the argument, just think they sometimes matter.
So the mere process of considering these hypotheticals and demanding coherence inevitably produces these dangerous views. Maybe they are ultimately wrong, but Torres isn't replying with a counterargument but saying it's dangerous people are believing these things and that's just what happens to be a common response to doing the philosophy.
I actually commented elsewhere that I don't think TESCREAL is a natural grouping only to get linked to this post later the same day. Glad to hear that I wasn't just blowing smoke.
One of the other things I've found frustrating is that if you look at what the people actually in charge are doing, it's... basically just the same "techno-libertarian" stuff as always. Cryonics is still a joke industry, Musk abandoned talking about Mars in favor of Tesla, and so on.
I wrote something arguing for grouping TESCREAL ideologies together that I was going to publish on my nonexistent blog eventually but never got around to - the only real factual matter on which I disagree is that Torres's Cosmism seems to be Ben Goertzel's Cosmism, which is at least somewhat distinct from Extropianism as far as I can tell.
I think more people object to analytical ethical philosophy than realize it. Most would object to their position being characterized that way. This doesn't mean they're wrong to object.
I feel slightly more sympathetic and much less sympathetic to Torres because of this, because I'm also someone who's not a fan of analytic moral philosophy, though not because of repugnant moral thought experiments. So I'm much less sympathetic because Torres definitely could then draw upon the oodles of non-analytic ethics, from Derrida to Lacan to Deleuze to Hegel, and properly substantiate an argument, to have something more formidable
I feel like this essay kind of pulls its punches a bit, and yes I'm saying that despite the fact that it says "your preferred policy will kill babies!" :P Like, it says "here are some particular negative consequences of degrowth", but it doesn't, like, really attempt to dig into degrowth and rebut it in the big picture, it doesn't attempt to say "here is the fundamental thing that the degrowthers have gotten wrong, why they are wrong on the whole and not just in some details".
I also don't think the fact that Torres is a degrowther and that they object to analytic ethical philosophy are unrelated, but I guess it makes sense to not go into that in order to stay away from arguments that could easily get inflammatory...
This is a totally reasonable complaint-- I would have gone more into it if it were clearer what Torres were actually *for*, but they're very squirrelly about this.
At an emotional level I totally feel Sniffnoy's point but to the extent your goal is to persuade not to fire those of us who already agree with you up I think you made the right choice.
What I find most confusing about Torres is that they seem to be a TESCREAL-ist themself. I'm used to seeing criticism of EA for allowing AI safety and other x-risks to take any resources from global health/poverty measures because they think AI risk is nonsense, but Torres doesn't! If anything, they propose far more drastic measures to counter it than most. I am confused about in what sense Torres believes they are not a longtermist, because as you have pointed out they demand far greater sacrifices from the current population for the sake of the future than MacAskill ever would. I guess it's okay because they refuse to think about it?
I don't think the objection is as much to any particular measures but the manner of thinking. It's much akin to the way many people feel it's wrong to put an explicit dollar value on a human life even if they too agree that not all safety measures/precautions can be taken. At least that's my sense of what's driving things.
I'm not familiar with Torres but it doesn't seem fair to characterize the commonality among the three objectionable claims as following from "analytic ethical philosophy". It's much more specific, and strikes me as something along the lines of "treating all morally relevant outcomes as ultimately fungible". There are many ways to do analytic philosophy about ethics that don't require endorsing the assumptions of utilitarianism, and claiming that disliking analytic ethical philosophy is the root of Torres' objection feels like accusing him of being unwilling to take ethics as seriously as those he criticizes. That may be true, but it hardly follows from disagreeing with Eliezer's dust mote notion and some of the stronger claims of longterism.
I disagree. Yes, you can do analytic ethical philosophy and not be a utilitarian but the underlying assumption is that it's good to spell out these hypotheticals as tests of our moral theories and that we benefit from the pressure to be coherent.
I presume Torres is aware that other people don't have exactly the same moral intuitions as him and he presumably doesn't see that as deeply dangerous. But having taken and TAed plenty of analytic philosophy classes in morality I can tell you that a very large, perhaps majority, of the students bite the bullet about lots of small harms overwhelming a single major one. And you don't need to even be a consequentialist to feel the bite of the argument, just think they sometimes matter.
So the mere process of considering these hypotheticals and demanding coherence inevitably produces these dangerous views. Maybe they are ultimately wrong, but Torres isn't replying with a counterargument but saying it's dangerous people are believing these things and that's just what happens to be a common response to doing the philosophy.
I actually commented elsewhere that I don't think TESCREAL is a natural grouping only to get linked to this post later the same day. Glad to hear that I wasn't just blowing smoke.
One of the other things I've found frustrating is that if you look at what the people actually in charge are doing, it's... basically just the same "techno-libertarian" stuff as always. Cryonics is still a joke industry, Musk abandoned talking about Mars in favor of Tesla, and so on.
I wrote something arguing for grouping TESCREAL ideologies together that I was going to publish on my nonexistent blog eventually but never got around to - the only real factual matter on which I disagree is that Torres's Cosmism seems to be Ben Goertzel's Cosmism, which is at least somewhat distinct from Extropianism as far as I can tell.
I think more people object to analytical ethical philosophy than realize it. Most would object to their position being characterized that way. This doesn't mean they're wrong to object.
I've created an ElevenLabs powered AI narration of that article for easy listening, if that's OK:
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/the-tescreal-bungle-by-ozy-brennan
Totally fine!
I feel slightly more sympathetic and much less sympathetic to Torres because of this, because I'm also someone who's not a fan of analytic moral philosophy, though not because of repugnant moral thought experiments. So I'm much less sympathetic because Torres definitely could then draw upon the oodles of non-analytic ethics, from Derrida to Lacan to Deleuze to Hegel, and properly substantiate an argument, to have something more formidable