The latest from Émile Torres focuses on how longtermists have effectively focused on PR and advertising. They have a truly odious philosophy, so they emphasize whatever element will get them the most money. The core of longtermism is the idea that in the far future there could hypothetically be many, many trillions of hypothetical “people” (who would mainly be artificial intelligences of some sort), and that therefore we should make any contemporary sacrifice we can to maximize the population of machines in the unimaginably distant future. There’s a lot of weebly-wobbly rationalizations to be made since nobody has any idea what strategies now will lead to conquest of the galaxy for human-made computers in some imaginary fantasy future, but somehow the current popular ones all involve sucking up to disgustingly rich people.

Ironically, it grew out of the goal of ending world poverty.

Longtermism emerged from a movement called “Effective Altruism” (EA), a male-dominated community of “super-hardcore do-gooders” (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement’s members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future.

If you asked me, I would have thought that building a stable, equitable base would have been a sound way to project human destiny into an unknowable future, but hey, what do I know? The longtermists gazed into their crystal ball and decided that the best, and probably most lucrative, way to defend the future was to pander to the elites.

Although the longtermists do not, so far as I know, describe what they’re doing this way, we might identify two phases of spreading their ideology: Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk — and this has been wildly successful. Musk himself has described longtermism as “a close match for my philosophy.” Sam Bankman-Fried has made billions from cryptocurrencies to fund longtermist efforts. And longtermism is, according to a UN Dispatch article, “increasingly gaining traction around the United Nations and in foreign policy circles.”

After all, haven’t billionaires already proven that they will do their all to spread their wealth? OK, maybe the past is a poor guide, but once they’ve perfected brain uploading and have a colony of serfs on Mars, then they’ll decide to let the rest of us have a few crumbs.

The article is largely about one guy, MacAskill, who is the current Face of the movement. His entire career is one of lying to make his philosophy palatable to the masses, but especially delicious to wealthy donors. From day one he was shaping the movement as manufactured public relations.

But buyer beware: The EA community, including its longtermist offshoot, places a huge emphasis on marketing, public relations and “brand-management,” and hence one should be very cautious about how MacAskill and his longtermist colleagues present their views to the public.

As MacAskill notes in an article posted on the EA Forum, it was around 2011 that early members of the community began “to realize the importance of good marketing, and therefore [were] willing to put more time into things like choice of name.” The name they chose was of course “Effective Altruism,” which they picked by vote over alternatives like “Effective Utilitarian Community” and “Big Visions Network.” Without a catchy name, “the brand of effective altruism,” as MacAskill puts it, could struggle to attract customers and funding.

It’s a war of words, not meaning. The meaning is icky, so let’s plaster it over with some cosmetic language.

The point is that since longtermism is based on ideas that many people would no doubt find objectionable, the marketing question arises: how should the word “longtermism” be defined to maximize the ideology’s impact? In a 2019 post on the EA Forum, MacAskill wrote that “longtermism” could be defined “imprecisely” in several ways. On the one hand, it could mean “an ethical view that is particularly concerned with ensuring long-run outcomes go well.” On the other, it could mean “the view that long-run outcomes are the thing we should be most concerned about” (emphasis added).

The first definition is much weaker than the second, so while MacAskill initially proposed adopting the second definition (which he says he’s most “sympathetic” with and believes is “probably right”), he ended up favoring the first. The reason is that, in his words, “the first concept is intuitively attractive to a significant proportion of the wider public (including key decision-makers like policymakers and business leaders),” and “it seems that we’d achieve most of what we want to achieve if the wider public came to believe that ensuring the long-run future goes well is one important priority for the world, and took action on that basis.”

Yikes. I’m suddenly remembering all the atheist community’s struggling over the meaning of atheist: does it mean a lack of belief in gods, or does it mean they deny the existence of gods? So much hot air over that, and it was all meaningless splitting of hairs. I don’t give a fuck about what definition you use, and apparently that means I’m a terrible PR person, and that’s why New Atheism failed. I accept the blame. It failed because we didn’t attract enough billionaire donors, darn it.

At least we didn’t believe in a lot of evilly absurd bullshit behind closed doors that we had to hide from the public.

The importance of not putting people off the longtermist or EA brand is much-discussed among EAs — for example, on the EA Forum, which is not meant to be a public-facing platform, but rather a space where EAs can talk to each other. As mentioned above, EAs have endorsed a number of controversial ideas, such as working on Wall Street or even for petrochemical companies in order to earn more money and then give it away. Longtermism, too, is built around a controversial vision of the future in which humanity could radically enhance itself, colonize the universe and simulate unfathomable numbers of digital people in vast simulations running on planet-sized computers powered by Dyson swarms that harness most of the energy output of stars.

For most people, this vision is likely to come across as fantastical and bizarre, not to mention off-putting. In a world beset by wars, extreme weather events, mass migrations, collapsing ecosystems, species extinctions and so on, who cares how many digital people might exist a billion years from now? Longtermists have, therefore, been very careful about how much of this deep-future vision the general public sees.

The worst part of longtermist thinking is that what they’re imagining, in the long term, is a swarm of digital people — none of whom exist now, and which we don’t know how to create — is the population that our current efforts should be aimed at serving. Serving. That’s a word they avoid using, because it implies that right now, right here, we are the lesser people. Digital people is where it’s at.

According to MacAskill and his colleague, Hilary Greaves, there could be some 10⁴⁵ digital people — conscious beings like you and I living in high-resolution virtual worlds — in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The more people who could exist in the future, the stronger the case for longtermism becomes, which is why longtermists are so obsessed with calculating how many people there could be within our future light cone.

They’ve already surpassed the Christians, some of whom argue that there are more than 100 million (100,000,000) angels. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, remember, so sacrifice now to make your more numerous betters.

You will also not be surprised to learn that the current goal is to simply grab lots and lots of money by converting rich people to longtermism — this is also how Christianity succeeded, by getting a grip on the powerful and wealthy. Underdogs don’t win, except by becoming the big dogs.

So the grift here, at least in part, is to use cold-blooded strategizing, marketing ploys and manipulation to build the movement by persuading high-profile figures to sign on, controlling how EAs interact with the media, conforming to social norms so as not to draw unwanted attention, concealing potentially off-putting aspects of their worldview and ultimately “maximizing the fraction of the world’s wealth controlled by longtermists.” This last aim is especially important since money — right now EA has a staggering $46.1 billion in committed funding — is what makes everything else possible. Indeed, EAs and longtermists often conclude their pitches for why their movement is exceedingly important with exhortations for people to donate to their own organizations.

One thing not discussed in this particular article is another skeevy element of this futurist nonsense. You aren’t donating your money to a faceless mob of digital people — it’s going to benefit you directly. There are many people who promote the idea that all you have to do is make to 2050, and science and technology will enable an entire generation to live forever. You can first build and then join the choir of digital people! Eternal life is yours if you join the right club! Which, by the way, is also part of the Christian advertising campaign. They’ve learned from the best grifters of all time.

Britney Spears has declared that she is an atheist, for unfortunate reasons. I say unfortunate because her apostasy is a consequence of the horrible treatment by her family, and it’s sad that she had to go through that.

Britney Spears, to put it lightly, has been through a lot. Between her conservatorship and her current family drama with her ex-husband and her children, her faith has been tested, so much so that she now says she doesn’t “believe in God anymore.”

In a now-deleted audio recording (as transcribed by Page Six) shared on Instagram last night (September 5), Spears concludes by saying of the four-month mental health facility stay she regularly mentions, “God would not allow that to happen to me if a God existed. I don’t believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to be believe in anymore. I’m an atheist, y’all.”

K-Fed will do that to you, I guess. I’d rather that major religions recognized that abuse is not an effective recruiting tool and cracked down on their repulsive believers.

I have lost what little taste I ever had for arguing with theists. It just leaves me feeling like I’m wasting my time — I’ll let Matt Dillahunty do the debates.

I got a request to join a fellow I don’t know, William Whiting, in a “fun conversation” for a podcast, for something called BasedFaithTV. Having a conversation, I can do. Unfortunately, this was just a guy aggressively asserting his Catholicism at me, and while it did start out amusing, it degenerated into an exercise session for his bigotry. It was not fun.

We got mired in a discussion about “objective morality” with no attempt to define what that is. He said he had an objective morality, while I did not (there was a lot of atheist bashing going on). It developed that what he called “objective morality” could be more accurately described as an authoritarian morality — he possessed the absolute truth granted to him by a transcendent god, therefore he was always right and I was just wallowing in the world of my subjective feelings. I guess that’s one way to define it, but I don’t think he can defend the idea that he knows what the truth is. It all boiled down to the Bible (and the Church fathers and Catholic dogma) says it, therefore he believes it. Early on, he said that he thought it would be great if the Church got a zealous Pope who would lead all Catholics on a crusade to reconquer Europe and the Middle East, which tells you something about his moral compass.

I don’t accept that version of “objective morality”. I also don’t hold a different definition, that objective morality is a universal, not subject to interpretation, because, well, we don’t know what that universal truth is. Maybe there is some moral nature immanent in ourselves, bestowed upon us by a god or by natural selection, but if so, we live lives where we struggle to discern what the best way to live is. Some people seem to think they’ve found it in their holy book, but I’m pretty sure that just leads to horror when they get their way — see the idea of purifying Europe for the Catholic church as an example. I’d also agree that atheism doesn’t exempt one from that flaw. He brought up the Communist purges, and all I can do is agree. Those were horrible catastrophes led by atheists who believed in an objective morality defined by their ideology — or more likely, saw that ideology as a tool to grasp at power.

So this is an argument that objective morality is a good thing? I don’t get it.

I personally favor the idea that an objective morality is one independent of one’s personal, subjective, transient desires, and in that sense atheists can be objectively moral. Maybe I can think I’d sure like to steal that candy from that baby, but I don’t, because I think outside my immediate impulses. I can empathize with the child — they’d be distressed and unhappy if I snatched away their sweet, and I think that I wouldn’t want to live in a world where strangers could steal my candy. I can think about consequences. I don’t want to be beat up by the baby’s mother, and I don’t want a reputation as a candy thief. I can think rationally and objectively about what kind of society would be best for me and my children, and it’s one with some accepted rules of behavior.

I don’t have possession of an absolute truth, but I can try to approach it by trial and error, trying to minimize the likelihood of my personal extinction (that’s the final arbiter of morality!), by seeing beyond the gratification of my personal impulses. That’s what an objective morality is to me — I do things I don’t like right now, because I’m capable of seeing the rewards of doing what others would like, and building a culture of mutual aid and shared community. In a sense, part of that is built in and part of human nature, since we are social animals, but there are so many different ways of building that self-supporting culture that we can’t claim one absolute way to truth.

Oh, also…I mentioned to him that I once had a debate with a Jesuit priest who impressed me greatly with his humanity and his tolerance, and that he seemed to have a very different interpretation of what Catholic morality involved, and it was the antithesis of Mr Whiting’s views. So much for an “objective morality” founded on Catholicism, because ideas there seemed to be highly diverse. His answer? That guy wasn’t a true Catholic, he was a heretic.

This conversation went on way too long and way too frustratingly, but lost any appeal near the end, when he started arguing that, as an example of absolute objective morality, gay and trans people are irreparably wrong and must repent. That’s not a pleasant conversation. That’s a guy using his claims of perfect knowledge of morality to deny the right to exist to people he doesn’t like, while claiming his bigotry is not at all subjective. I could laugh at him at the beginning, but when he tried to deny the humanity of so many people, I was increasingly dismayed and angry with this asshole, and eventually just cut him off. If he posts his podcast, I’ll let you all know, but I’ll tell you now that you won’t enjoy it.

He tried to claim that America today is his vision of Hell, because of all our liberal policies and the way liberals dominate everything. I should have realized then that he was calling from an alternate universe. Imagine his version of paradise on Earth: a European Reconquista by a militant Catholic church, followed by outlawing gay and trans people, among other regressive actions. And that is his vision of an “objective morality”.

He wants to continue our conversation. I don’t think so. I don’t talk with bigots.

It’s not really about artificial intelligence — it’s so muddled I don’t think they understand what they’re talking about, except that whatever it is, they’re ag’in’ it. All the Answers in Genesis “journal” can do is publish a a vague complaint about mind-cloning.

The dominant view of the constitution of the human being in modern times is physicalism. This view attempts to explain mental manifestations as an epiphenomenon of the brain to the exclusion of the soul, as opposed by dualism. According to the dominant view, the mind arose at some point during evolutionary development. As such, physicalists have attempted to transfer the human mind from one substrate to another, in a process called mind cloning.

We have? This is news to me. I don’t think anyone has even tried to transfer a human mind to a different substrate. I don’t even know how you would start to do such a thing, because the mind is inextricably intertwined with the brain.

Yeah, I just searched PubMed for mind cloning, “mind cloning”, and mind-cloning. No papers anywhere on anything like it. Thanks, AiG, now the NIH is giving me an icy stare and wondering if I’m some creationist nutcase.

That project leads to multiple problems. Until now the connectome of only 100,000 mouse neurons have been mapped, thus calling the feasibility of the project into question.

Quite rightly. I think we can say that scientists, even the physicalists he’s complaining about, call the feasibility of this imaginary process of “mind cloning”, which at best exists in the pages of science fiction novels, into question. Just as we call the fictions of the Bible into question.

Ethical issues also arise: would I be held responsible for my mind clone’s criminal activities? What if I and my mind clone vote against each other? Would mind cloning lead to the devaluation of human life?

Granting the absurdity for a moment, no — they’d be separate, autonomous beings. Who cares? We let individuals, and a “mind clone” would be an individual who can vote as they choose, although if they were truly a copy of your mind, wouldn’t they think the same way you do? Why would a copy lead to the devaluation of human life? This seems to be something Christians specialize in, but us non-Christians already oppose it.

This is the best they can do, a series of silly non-issues compounded by their own misconceptions. So, you want to compare materialist and supernatural concepts of the mind? Here you go, be illuminated.

Don’t you just love meaningless graphs? I start with the axes. What is measured on the X-axis? Is it quantifying the amount of evolution and the amount of creation? The Y axis isn’t even labeled. It suggests that “evolution” proponents think there is a progressive increase in “mind” from simple organisms to humans, and that there is a discrete point where “consciousness” exists.

Meanwhile, creationists think there is a measurable undefined Y-axis something, and that cats have more of it than dogs or horses, and that god at some moment in time (should the X-axis be days of creation, from 1 to 6? And weren’t all the animals shown created on the same day?) conjured them into existence with some fixed quantity of consciousness-stuff? I do not understand any of that. It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-quantitative picture of something they don’t understand.

So, what is the goal of this paper? At least they spend a paragraph on that.

In this paper, the main area of mind cloning will be examined and its feasibility will be assessed, and relevant ethical issues discussed. It will also examine the reasons why the human soul exists as an alternative explanation of the human mind as opposed to monism.

Mind cloning is not a thing, it is not feasible, and we already know that the only ethical issues they’re going to bring up are silly and irrelevant, since we can’t clone minds. The arguments for the soul…well, you already know what they’re going to be. This is Answers in Genesis! The answer is that the Bible says so.

Once again, we get a pseudoscientific graphical illustration of the difference between a brain and a soul. Does this help?

I guess the difference is that the brain is tangible and exists, while the soul is intangible and exists. I don’t see how making some strange 3D graph and putting question marks after the axes helps, but OK, I guess someone was reassured by it. Some innumerate, fuzzy-brained someone.

Let’s see one example of how they deal with ethical issues.

Some may ask, but what about frozen embryos? What happens when the soul does not seem to manifest itself? The question is easily answered. When people are asleep or are in a coma, their bodily functions slow down, albeit they do not cease entirely (Moreland 2010; Moreland and Rae 2000, 227). When an embryo is on ice, its functions slow down dramatically, although not entirely, just as the metabolism of a hibernating bear slows down during winter but does not come to a complete stop. But arguably, putting an embryo on ice is a form of torture, and it is a logical non-sequitur that the embryo lacks a soul.

(I should mention that most of their citations show their ideas are based on the writing of JP Moreland, a philosopher and theologian, who also happens to be a heretical old earth creationist.)

All of it is one logical non sequitur after another. How do we know that an embryo has a soul, an entity that has not been demonstrated to exist? Because it would be illogical to think it lacks one. I think the author mistakes his Christian assumptions for logic.

Speaking of illogic, I’ll leave you with the author’s predictable final conclusion, a little lump of evangelical glurge.

However, humans can live forever, but not in a way fashioned by men in an attempt to escape God’s rule. They must humbly repent of their sins and submit to God’s will. That explains the death of Christ: he died for us that we may have eternal life (John 3:16; 17:3). If we trust in Christ, then all diseases, all our sorrows and death itself will one day pass away (Revelation 21:4). This is the true way of salvation and eternal life, not a futile materialistic fantasy that equates a human with his mind, and tries to achieve immortality by perpetuating it.

Logical non-sequitur.

Michael Shermer <ick, spit> put out a call for an article for his worthless magazine defending CRT, and complained that no one would defend the theory (he didn’t look very hard, I guess). Aaron Rabinowitz answered the call and volunteered.

CRT, and what I believe is the moral panic surrounding it, is something I’ve written about in the past, so I reached out to Mr. Shermer, who told me he already had a CRT overview article “that mostly summarizes the history of the movement going back to its postmodernism roots (and before)”, which he described as “mostly neutral, albeit slightly critical on the consequences of accepting fully the belief in system racism by POC.”

Would you like to read this “mostly neutral” article? Don’t bother.

I later found out that that “article” is actually the CRT chapter from James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories, two individuals who played a significant role in developing and mainstreaming the CRT moral panic.

You all remember James Lindsay, right? There’s a man descending into oblivion, recently banned on Twitter. Here’s all you need to know about Lindsay.

At the time, in 2018, Lindsay insisted he was a “left-leaning liberal,” a fellow traveler of the erstwhile anti-woke collective that once called it itself the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and he was praised and promoted by some of its leading figures as an important and brave public intellectual.

But in 2022, he’s a Trump-supporting, Big Lie-espousing, vaccine-denying, far-right bigot who thinks Sen. Joe McCarthy “had it right” and “didn’t go nearly far enough” during his infamous (and near-universally repudiated) witch hunts of suspected communists during the 1950s.

And, perhaps most notably, he helped popularize the “Ok Groomer” epithet (and hashtag) on Twitter, feeding the right wing’s moral panic about LGBTQ teachers.

Right. That’s the guy Shermer believed to be a credible and objective source. Sort of says it all, I think.

Rabinowitz was working on the piece, communicating with Shermer on the content as it progressed. He’s a stronger man than I am, because if I got a message like the one below where Shermer brags about being a “social liberal” and promoting his own crappy book, I would have noped right out of there, even before I found out where his sympathies actually lie.

Then, predictably, Shermer abruptly pulled the plug on the article. You won’t find it in Skeptic magazine.

But good news! Rabinowitz got it published in The Skeptic, a UK magazine which isn’t a Shermer vanity rag. You definitely should read that rather than our corrupted American version. Rabinowitz is quite clear in naming some of the most rabid of the CRT opponents, and curiously, they’re all people who have have been prominently featured in Shermer’s magazine and podcasts.

While Rufo has received the lion’s share of credit for inciting the CRT moral panic, Lindsay et al’s anti-woke activism served as the social and ideological springboard for the CRT moral panic, because it gave the impression that the movement grew out of concerns expressed by self-identifying heterodox liberals. Shermer even personally promoted Lindsay and Boghossian’s grievance studies appearance on Joe Rogan, an episode full of easily debunked misinformation.

Given these facts, CRT activists might reasonably conclude that it would be harmful to lend credibility to an outlet that could use it to offset further unsupported attacks. That was certainly my largest concern in deciding whether to write this piece, which was originally commissioned by Skeptic Magazine in response to my conversation with Shermer. Ultimately, I lean towards engagement, even when the chance of persuasion is likely to be low, but we don’t have remotely enough evidence to decide on the best approach to engaging with individuals and organisations that appear caught up in a moral panic.

I believe the original question was actually something of a dog whistle, aimed largely at other critics of wokeness. It served to signal that CRT advocates can’t defend the theory, and that they are too ideologically captured to admit defeat, so they instead avoid debate entirely. Douglas Murray made this accusation explicitly in his recent interview on Shermer’s podcast, around 40 minutes in. He claims it is a major red flag that CRT advocates like Kendi and DiAngelo are unwilling to engage in public debate. In the interview both men credulously repeat one of Rufo and Lindsay’s most absurd accusations: that the woke are too fragile and fanatical to risk open debate.

I don’t consider it a red flag to refuse to debate, since there is good reason to question the efficacy of such debates. However, if you do consider it such a warning sign, it’s disingenuous not to highlight that Rufo and Lindsay also routinely deride and avoid debate, to the extent of actively blocking people who attempt to engage them in good faith. Lindsay and Boghossian have claimed that social justice advocates are such “uniformly such dreadful conversationalists” that it’s pointless to engage with them, beyond learning how to counter their tactics. How could such well-poisoning be worthy of praise when it’s coming from the architects of the CRT moral panic, yet serve as a red flag when assessing CRT advocates? I think the most plausible answer is the existence of an ‘anti-woke’ in-group bias.

I don’t entirely agree with Rabinowitz, though: I lean away from direct engagement when the opposition is actively harming people, and is already being fed at the trough of right-wing media. I would think articles, like the one in The Skeptic, that are strongly criticizing the colossally malicious agents of far-right disinformation are OK, and are the kind of engagement I would consider productive, but I would never want to promote Rufo or Lindsay or Murray (or Michael Fucking Shermer) with a face-to-face event, or one where some scumbag is using my words to promote an illusion of balance when they’re actually promoting lies and fear.

This is one of the outcomes of Skepticon.

I did not take anywhere near enough photos, but I can't express how healing it was to be around my old blogging family again after a decade away

Am I… Feeling a glimmer of hope for organized skepticism/atheism again? How strange#sk14 #skepticon #skepticon14 pic.twitter.com/OoBpG3Sqd3

— Dr. Jey McCreight 🧬🏳️‍⚧️ (@jeymccreight) July 31, 2022

Optimism? Am I ready to be optimistic again?

If you’ve been out of touch with the secular movement for a while, you may not be aware that we—the politically correct, SJWs, Outrage Brigade, the wokist scolds, or whatever other term of derision you might have heard for those of us wanting a more inclusive movement—won the secular culture wars. Movement humanism is working on being actively humanist. Secular activism recognizes issues far beyond public crosses and prayers. New leadership is clear that they’re shaking things up.

I am not sure. What I see is an incoming tide of hateful religious scumbuggery, and atheism managed to splinter itself between the people who oppose that, and the people who see an opportunity for grift and are willing to align themselves with fundamentalism in the name of hating LGBTQ people and Muslims and anyone with a different color skin or a vagina. They’re all atheists. Some of them are just more interested in pretending they’re superior and sneering at foolish people while promoting a regressive agenda.

It drove me away, and I think it alienated the good people in that photo. Maybe they’re more resilient than I am, because sheesh, I feel burned. But then, as Nathan Robinson explains, we still NEED atheism to counter the villainy of evangelical fundamentalism.

And yet: even though I have spent much less of my time arguing about God in the last ten years, and I think that is healthy, I increasingly feel as if—and I am not alone in this—atheism needs to make a comeback. The religious right in the United States was not, in fact, defeated. In fact, religious conservatives now dominate the Supreme Court, and have recently successfully revoked one of women’s core constitutional rights. Their movement is on the march, and they have a very clear, terrifying agenda that Democrats have proven themselves totally incapable of effectively countering. As journalist Elle Hardy has documented, while young Americans may not be especially religiously faithful, around the world, evangelical Pentecostalism is attracting astonishing numbers of converts, and with it pushing a toxic and often apocalyptic brand of hard-right politics.

Maybe, just maybe, I can stoke up the ol’ fire in my belly for a more positive, humanist atheism. I’ll have to try, but somebody pissed on the coals and has hidden my matches, so it might be a bit of a struggle. But yeah, let’s bring back a positive atheism, and I’m ready to at least follow other people’s inspiration.