joie de vivre

That science is supplanting some of the space mythology had is OK. We can look at the cosmic perspective in Buddhist mythology with great time spans like mahakalpa, or imagine living lives and lives, billions of being inhabiting limitless space. So many exotic creatures. You can look at pictures of space that are coming out, and think about the Mastodon living 10,000 years ago, then going extinct. Buddhism can have garuda, science can have tartagraves and axolotls. The age of information has shown us elaborate mythologies, and elaborate wildlife, helped us gaze into each other deeply and deep deep into outer space.

The upshot is life is short and you're puny in the scheme of things, and your best shot, in the Buddhist plug is to work the program of meditation, sangha, ethics, study, community and devotion. We see other solutions. There's the Hollywood star, rock stars. They often lead tragic lives of excess. We see oddballs who bomb buildings and create manifestos. The millions of people who go to work and don't cause a problem are not newsworthy, so our information distorts how much weirdness there is in the world, but does expose our need for weirdness and challenges.

You can delve into self help and maximize your potential, live your best life. Tara can help you remove the obstacles. You can study the great western philosophers and eastern philosophers. It's no shortcut as Godel proved, but is another tool in the toolbox. Psychology is more descriptive than unlocking the mysteries, but is another tool in the toolbox. You can discuss ethics. There have been a lot of amazing articulations, the idea of justice by John Rawls, the newly articulated effective altruism, which might just be slick fund raising.

There were early vegans, Amos Alcott was one in Transcendental Concord, who ate potatoes and apple sauce on his journey to England. The uncovering of the cruelty towards animals has been well documented, and it goes beyond slaughter to practices to acquire milk that aren't so nice. Peter Singer has a new essay in the Atlantic. In the past 10 years I've seen an explosion of products and a retrenching by food industries who seem to put milk or eggs into everything. There's a certain amount of corporate gaslighting to try and shake the resolve of virtue.

The amount of novels that describe possibilities, movies, music, the explosion of art after we've taken care of the material needs.

For me it's hard to know what traditionalist Buddhist are insisting on when they embrace early Buddhist mythology, but I do love mythology and what it says about us, the reflection in the mirror. Our society is undergoing great technological change and we need resources to cope and maintain our humanity. 

I am getting intoxicated by technology. One prominent traditionalist complains that he's been banned and doesn't really have insight into how his non inclusive and judgemental writings impact others. Nobody contains all the truths, so it's natural for me to fear that I'm the asshole in the room. I'm getting more and more comfortable presenting myself as not omniscient. The desire to dominate and be dominated is gradually loosed for a more collaborative and democratic way of being. 

Politics is a great exercise in filtering out what isn't important and focusing on your vision, and accepting you can't always win. It's like following a soccer team, there is no team that always wins, no matter how dominant teams are. As the world sport, I use it to learn geography. I was just reading about the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, which has secretized with Christianity. I've been fantasizing about Buddhist mythology syncretized with American folklore. Is Paul Bunyan Maitreya with his big ax? Is the blue ox academia?

From tortoise poking their head above water to listen to chanting on the lake, to the carp that scare me as they thrash about in the reeds, underwater of unconsciousness, to the various birds fluttering by above me, I don't know. I profoundly don't know, and am not in control of myself, and seek to connect with others.

The Buddha speaks:

“Mendicants, don’t fear good deeds. For ‘good deeds’ is a term for happiness, for what is likable, desirable, and agreeable. I recall undergoing for a long time the likable, desirable, and agreeable results of good deeds performed over a long time. As a result, for seven eons of the cosmos contracting and expanding I didn’t return to this world again. As the eon contracted I went to the realm of streaming radiance. As it expanded I was reborn in an empty mansion of Brahmā."

In one of his lifetimes he spent 7 years on metta. 

Effective Altruism

Lovely profile of William MacAskill in the New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

Peter Singer and Toby Ord are mentioned as influences. "Ord’s ideal beneficiary was the Fred Hollows Foundation, which treats blindness in poor countries for as little as twenty-five dollars a person." Derek Parfit is mentioned.

"“My first big win was convincing him about deworming charities.” It may seem impossible to compare the eradication of blindness with the elimination of intestinal parasites, but health economists had developed rough methods. MacAskill estimated that the relief of intestinal parasites, when measured in “quality-adjusted life years,” or qalys, would be a hundred times more cost-effective than a sight-saving eye operation.

Quote: “He was at dinner in Oxford—some sort of practical-ethics conference—and he was just deeply shocked that almost none of the attendees were vegetarians, because he thought that was the most basic application of ethical ideas.”

"If Peter Singer’s theory—that any expenditure beyond basic survival was akin to letting someone die—was simply too taxing to gain wide adherence, it seemed modest to ask people to give ten per cent of their income. This number also had a long-standing religious precedent."

"A kind of no-hard-feelings, debate-me gladiatorialism was seen as a crucial part of good “epistemic hygiene,” and a common social overture was to tell someone that her numbers were wrong."

"We passed Queen’s Lane Coffee House. “That’s where Bentham discovered utilitarianism,”"

"Against Malaria Foundation alone estimates that its work to date will save a hundred and sixty-five thousand lives."

Criticism: "Rob Reich wrote, “Plato identified the best city as that in which philosophers were the rulers. Effective altruists see the best state of affairs, I think, as that in which good-maximizing technocrats are in charge. Perhaps it is possible to call this a politics: technocracy. But this politics is suspicious of, or rejects, the form of politics to which most people attach enormous value: democracy.” The Ethiopian American A.I. scientist Timnit Gebru has condemned E.A.s for acting as though they are above such structural issues as racism and colonialism." 

Also, "Bernard Williams, who noted that utilitarianism might, in certain historical moments, look like “the only coherent alternative to a dilapidated set of values,” but that it was ultimately bloodless and simpleminded. Williams held that the philosophy alienated a person “from the source of his actions in his own convictions”—from what we think of as moral integrity." Someone who seeks justification for the impulse to save the life of a spouse instead of that of a stranger, Williams famously wrote, has had “one thought too many.”"

"Some E.A.s felt that one of the best features of their movement—that, in the context of near-total political sclerosis, they had found a way to do something—had been recast as a bug."

I found the very thought provoking, and like all lovely New Yorker articles, it pushed the subject further and further, while circling around the original questions. Loved it. Reminded me of intro to ethics that I took with Claudia Card at UW. And it feels like what it says, so vital and somehow a little something not quite right.

My impression was that it was kind of Prayer for Jabez. Permission to earn a lot of money, albeit set in Oxford, and then spread to Silicon Valley and financial markets, for the elite. My grandfather, who was a minister, thought it was about increasing his ministry, seemed harmless. Wanting to do the most good. But people use it for other purposes. I think about the ministers in Texas who wouldn't open up their mansions when there were floods and people lost their housing.

I'm also thinking of the evil guy in Don't Look Up. This all could just be another grift.

"Carla Zoe Cremer and Luke Kemp published a paper called “Democratising Risk,” which criticized the “techno-utopian approach” of longtermists."

"Last year, the Centre for Effective Altruism bought Wytham Abbey, a palatial estate near Oxford, built in 1480. Money, which no longer seemed an object, was increasingly being reinvested in the community itself. The math could work out: it was a canny investment to spend thousands of dollars to recruit the next Sam Bankman-Fried. But the logic of the exponential downstream had some kinship with a multilevel-marketing ploy. Similarly, if you assigned an arbitrarily high value to an E.A.’s hourly output, it was easy to justify luxuries such as laundry services for undergraduate groups, or, as one person put it to me, wincing, “retreats to teach people how to run retreats.” Josh Morrison, a kidney donor and the founder of a pandemic-response organization, commented on the forum, “The Ponzi-ishness of the whole thing doesn’t quite sit well.”"

"In “What We Owe the Future,” he is careful to sidestep the notion that efforts on behalf of trillions of theoretical future humans might be fundamentally irreconcilable with the neartermist world-on-fire agenda."

In the end it feels like highly sophisticated fund raising. It feels a little Andrew Yang: Candidate who never served in government. Wants to hang out with the bigwigs, be in the room. But being headed by a philosophy professor is slightly more impressive, though he clearly wants out and doesn't want to be the intellectual face of the organizations. 

The conflict between longtermism and concrete nows isn't really, we can do both.

"Open Philanthropy has embraced an ethic of “worldview diversification,” whereby we might give up on perfect commensurability and acknowledge it is O.K. that some money be reserved to address the suffering of chickens, some for the suffering of the poor, and some for a computational eschatology. After almost a decade of first-principles reasoning, E.A.s had effectively reinvented the mixed-portfolio model of many philanthropic foundations."

Links:

“Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” by Peter Singer

GiveWell (Wikipedia) "Since its inception, GiveWell has directed the donation of more than a billion dollars." (New Yorker

Give What We Can (Wikipedia)

Open Philanthropy (Wikipedia)

Give Directly (direct link)

Democratising Risk

Lead Exposure Elimination Project

The Case for Longtermism by William MacAskill in NY Times. I'm not convinced. If you knew for sure an asteroid wasn't going to hit earth in 5 years and wipe us out, then maybe, but I don't think you can know some catastrophic event won't happen. The galaxy is big, who knows if a rogue sun comes into our solar system and smashes everything up. I mean I think you should think about the future but there is a possibility of nuclear war that kills most of humanity, so there's just too many questions about the future. And knowing something would pay dividends 500 years from now seems dodgy. Taking care of things in the moment seems more likely to keep things better for the future. But I take his point, and I think it mostly applies to global warming and doing things to stop global warming.

I think Buddhism is a kind of longtermism. 

Further discussion:

Freddie deBoer Is Wrong About Effective Altruism

Solon article by Emile Torres

12/10/22 update: I went to effective altruism’s first post-Sam Bankman-Fried conference. Here’s what I saw. (Vox)

11/22/23 How a Fervent Belief Split Silicon Valley—and Fueled the Blowup at OpenAI

Sam Altman’s firing showed the influence of effective altruism and its view that AI development must slow down; his return marked its limits (Wall Street Journal)