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the effectively altruistic AI's fans are gonna pipe bomb a Planned Parenthood
(forum.effectivealtruism.org)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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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.
Ah just like the prolife campaigner I argued with recently who said that in his* ideal world, abortion, contraception, and the morning-after pill would all be illegal. Apparently having an abortion is "irresponsible" because you're acting as if it's "someone else's problem". That really threw me for a loop. I mean, it's not like you can get someone else to have the abortion for you! He justified a contraception ban along the same lines - that people needed to accept the consequences of having sex, or something. I suggested to him that contraception was actually very effective at preventing abortions, and he frowned as if he couldn't understand what I was saying.
*Yes, he was a cis man who has never been pregnant or made anyone else pregnant. Sure, what else would you expect?
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.