In this episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with Bentham’s Bulldog, a philosophy student who is a stalwart advocate of Act Utilitarianism and mostly subscribes to Matt Yglesias-style center-left politics.
One of the benefits to discovering this Substack is the exposure to many ideas and subcultures I would have just glanced by otherwise. I'm so used to having to tune down any autist tendencies in offline real life that getting to listen in on such an autist conversation is a different kind of experience.
As with most quasi-utopian ideologies, EA strikes me as something well intentioned but could easily be weaponized by a self-serving elite, incorporated into a "great reset" social credit system of coerced incentives.
On longtermism in a potentially unstable ecology... Isaac Asimov's Foundation series goes into this under the fictional theory of psychohistory -- in brief, with a sufficiently large population size human behavior should revert to a predictable mean that can then be used to extrapolate the timing of future events. But holding such a plan together would require nudging and more overt social engineering.
On Foucault... his most accessible works are transcribed notes from when he gave open lectures at a university in Paris during the 1970s. His work on biopolitics and governmentality has been highly influential. Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics could be worth checking out.
I don't think EA is utopian--it just says we should try to do good effectively. It advises, for instance, giving to effective charities like the against malaria foundation. Nothing utopian about that.
Thanks for having me!
I really enjoyed this 2 hours.
One of the benefits to discovering this Substack is the exposure to many ideas and subcultures I would have just glanced by otherwise. I'm so used to having to tune down any autist tendencies in offline real life that getting to listen in on such an autist conversation is a different kind of experience.
As with most quasi-utopian ideologies, EA strikes me as something well intentioned but could easily be weaponized by a self-serving elite, incorporated into a "great reset" social credit system of coerced incentives.
On longtermism in a potentially unstable ecology... Isaac Asimov's Foundation series goes into this under the fictional theory of psychohistory -- in brief, with a sufficiently large population size human behavior should revert to a predictable mean that can then be used to extrapolate the timing of future events. But holding such a plan together would require nudging and more overt social engineering.
On Foucault... his most accessible works are transcribed notes from when he gave open lectures at a university in Paris during the 1970s. His work on biopolitics and governmentality has been highly influential. Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics could be worth checking out.
I don't think EA is utopian--it just says we should try to do good effectively. It advises, for instance, giving to effective charities like the against malaria foundation. Nothing utopian about that.