Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It doesn't seem to be, though. The article says:

> I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable.

And here's the kind of “interesting writing” it refers to:

> Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.

(from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...)

This is a pretty controversial take (one that I have some pretty major objections to – e.g., BLM isn't about everyone with dark skin, but a specific group of people who are being persecuted in a specific way), but it isn't racist.

^ It should be noted that this isn't an opinion the article author agrees with! Here is how he describes that quote:

> This is an extremely hot take! And while I would not say this paragraph is typical of SSC content, it does a good job of expressing the SSC view of most of what passes for politics in the United States of America — it doesn’t matter at all. [...] I would not endorse the SSC worldview.

To me it's a contrived argument to support racism without looking like it's supporting racism. A veneer of misdirection and logic doesn't make something less racist if the end goal is a more racist society.

I'm not sure I understand how that would be implicitly or explicitly supporting racism. You think the end goal of that proposal is a more racist society? Donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation?

"Supporting Black Lives Matter" is not equivalent to "not being racist".

The argument is an attempt to make you not care about BLM. First it makes an axiomatic assumption about what BLM is about, saving lives and only saving lives. Not long term impact of high incarceration rates, not about the perpetual fear many minorities live in, not about the non lethal abuses by police and so on. Then it tries to use emotional blackmail about dying children in Africa. In reality, people don't value things far away as much as those close by so it's inherently a false equivalence.

It's a hack job of an argument designed to make you not value BLM and I can only presume due to its hack job nature that the end goal is a more racist society.

It sounds like you disagree with their argument, which is fine, but then you go on to harshly criticize an interpretation that you've imposed on it. There are plausible alternative interpretations which are both reasonable and likely, so why not assume best intentions? That's the bedrock of productive debate.

I’m not sure I’m fully on board with GP’s conclusion, but their first paragraph is spot on. SSC’s whole shtick is thinking deeply from first principles, so it is very… let’s say curious, that his assessment of BLM would be so shallow.

Scott Alexander has a known blind spot for convenient examples. When he's found something that seems to perfectly make the point he needs, he often doesn't stop to consider “hang on, does that actually fit the point, or am I blatantly distorting the evidence?”. It's something I do a lot, so I can't really blame him; fortunately, he isn't practised at deliberate deception so it's fairly obvious when he's doing it.

Trying to follow your train of thought here: do you think his first principles are in favor of the subjugation of humans based on immutable characteristics?

And does his support of Malaria prevention based on a utilitarian calculation that it'll help save the most lives (including more black lives) therefore prove he is in favor of subjugating black people based on their race?

You’re riding this train a lot farther than I’m willing to go. All I’m saying is that his myopic description of BLM is very obviously a straw man. It may or may not have been intentional, but it’s certainly worth asking why, since setting up straw men is basically antithetical to quote unquote rationalist precepts.

He sorted BLM into the “trying to save lives”, then observed that it was inefficient at saving lives. I don't think he thought about it hard enough to realise that BLM is not just about saving lives; it's also about improving them, nor that the death toll of the things BLM fights against is higher than just direct police murders.

Judging others' goals by your own heuristics isn't a hard mistake to make, though it creates very flimsy straw arguments.

As someone who wants to maximize their time/money for impact: How should we value the impact of BLM's 'improvement' efforts, compared to the 'improvement' of black lives that stems from Malaria prevention?

Then how should we balance improvement and saving lives?

Thanks for clarifying. So it was myopic of him to assume that the core focus of BLM was to _save_ black lives (particularly from police violence)? And that understanding of BLM is a straw man?

As a minority myself, that was my mental model of BLM as well, as this movement was given fuel by deaths of African-Americans after interactions with police officers. And much of the rhetoric/protests/media coverage was around how the police are racists, and if only we could defund the police, it would save black lives.

It seems like you are poking at the idea that BLM isn't just about _saving_ black lives, but also _improving_ black lives. To be fair to Scott, he doesn't also factor in how Malaria prevention _improves_ black lives either. So it's not like he's not doing an apples-to-apples comparison along a very key factor. I would personally argue that the incremental value of being alive compared to being dead is much greater than any marginal increase in quality of life.

How would you improve and help Scott with his calculation, accounting for the value of BLM's 'improving' black lives efforts? And how would you then weight the improvement of black lives stemming from Malaria prevention?

He’s right that one core goal is saving Black lives. But there’s also a more primal aspect, whereby many people in the US simply won’t acknowledge that Black lives matter. Which plays out in a lot of ways, but it also defies the sort of utilitarian calculus Scott seems to want to do here.

The reason I’m saying it’s myopic is that yes, it’s also about systemic racism and the prison-industrial complex and a ton of other things that probably even vary person-to-person. And even if Scott doesn’t realize that from the jump, surely he realizes that it deserves more than a single paragraph comparing it to fighting malaria… right?

Anyway, if you’re committed to looking at this through this strictly utilitarian lens, let me save us both some time and say we probably won’t be able to agree.

Thanks for responding in kind. As someone frequently faced with tough trade-off decisions, I tend to try to take a utilitarian view (or simple pros vs cons) of the issues at hand. It feels very natural to me to try to compare the value of each of the choices before me (for decisions that matter), in order to maximize the efficacy of my time/money. So I find the disagreeing on using a utilitarian approach here interesting.

I may be reading into this wrong, so do pushback if I'm off here, but I'm picking up the sense that you feel that whatever value BLM provides to society cannot (and perhaps should not?) be measured/quantified? Since BLM is targeting nebulous goals ('systemic racism') that vary from person-to-person, then any attempts to compare the efficacy of its efforts to other initiatives should be duly questioned?

I accept that some things are hard to quantify. But I'm not sure I fully comprehend why we shouldn't _try_, if that's a held view (if it's not, ignore this sentence).

I also think Scott deserves some grace here. That paragraph in question wasn't meant to be the sole point of his post. It was merely an anecdote to suggest that it's important to think about the impact/efficacy of your actions if you're trying to improve the world. Not all actions have equal impacts. A point I very much agree with.

With the caveat that I am but one very insignificant person with regard to all this, here’s my take:

I broadly agree with the utilitarian goal of maximizing the efficacy of one’s aid. But the reason I can’t fully co-sign is that I feel there are some things that aren’t really quantifiable. Example: a classic response to BLM is that police commit relatively few murders compared to murders overall. My feeling is that the people entrusted to protect and serve have an additional responsibility; that violence + abuse of power is somehow “worse” than violence on its own. But how do you quantify that? How many “normal” murders are equal to one “police” murder? I don’t even know how to begin answering that question.

And I don’t think BLM should be immune from pushback because some of its goals can’t be objectively measured! But I do think a lot, if not most, criticism has been from a place of prejudice. That we’re going to look back on this in 50 years the way we look back on the Civil Rights Movement now, where some of the goals will have been achieved and basically everyone pretends they would have supported it all along (even though they oppose the contemporary version because they’re not protesting nicely or whatever). So when people see shallow dismissals, I think their guards (justifiably!) go up, because they know where it’s coming from more often than not.

I’m not trying to deny Scott the grace you’re talking about. I know it was a mostly throwaway paragraph in a longer essay. I’m just noting that his whole thing is supposed to be about digging into the strongest versions of uncomfortable arguments to get at the truth. Straw manning is supposed to be anathema — so when he does it, I think it’s worth questioning why.

One of Scott Alexander's goals is to end world poverty. He's focusing on international inequality more than national inequality, because he thinks that'll be more effective. If a lot of activists did what he recommends, that would effectively create a more racist society in the US, but it would also reduce the impact of racism (specifically, colonialism) in other countries.

I maintain that this isn't racism; it's just him having different priorities. I'm not even confident enough to say his priorities are wrong; only that I have good reasons to disagree with some of them (e.g. attacking problems that can be solved short-term frees up resources for solving long-term problems later, and your investments into solving a problem go further when there's public support, so BLM advocacy right now might be a time-sensitive problem (above and beyond the deaths it causes; I don't know how to weigh deaths v.s. deaths, and I'm suspicious of people who do)).

What does it mean to 'support racism' to you?

If I'm reading your comments correctly (please do correct me if I'm wrong here), it seems like you are suggesting any commentary that would suggest that the BLM movement isn't most optimally trying to improve black lives, is therefore racist?

Is BLM unquestionable? To question it, or to suggest other pathways to improve black lives would be misdirection from BLM, and therefore is racist?

From a high-level perspective, this style of thinking seems like it's the most racist of all (and a very popular take!). Suggesting that we shouldn't be thinking through how to most optimally improve black lives, and that we should constrain our thinking to whatever the current popular incarnation of a solution is (BLM!), isn't a recipe for progress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com