In my younger days, I will admit I thought everyone had the tenacity to stand up for what they believe in. Growing up in a conservative, Christian household taught me to speak up when you see bad people doing bad things i.e. reading Harry Potter, believing in evolution, or swearing. Now that I am a tad bit older, I relate much more to your side of the matter. "Quick to listen, slow to speak" I think is the general principle I would argue for, but definitely not die on a hill for. I think it is the privilege of young people to have the tenacity to care about a subject deeply. Age brings a level of disillusionment with the world. Perhaps we have just seen too many people we viewed as heroes collapse under their own hubris.
I appreciate the core argument you're presenting here, but I want to add some nuance to a throwaway aside that you made.
> This is part of the reason why the latest effective altruist demand that you spend your time saving the lives of all the shrimp, mosquitoes, and archaea that you possibly can because that will maximize something valuable is comically unreasonable.
We all live in different social bubbles, and so we will have different experiences with our interactions with different groups. I'm incorporating the (implied) anecdote you've provided into my beliefs, and I'm offering an anecdote from my experience for you to incorporate into yours.
In my experience, effective altruist don't "demand" that you spend your time saving the lives of shrimps etc. For one thing, these people tend to value consequentialist reasoning and they surely realize that using the language/tone associated with "demand" would ultimately hurt their cause.
Instead, what I tend to observe is that they think through various premises seriously, including the possibility that reducing harm to shrimps is something that has a very low cost to high benefit ratio, i.e. that it's potentially an "effective" form of "altruism". They will then write up and present their arguments for why they think this might be the case, and they invite dissenting views, because they value having "true beliefs".
Furthermore, in my observations, they don't try to drag disinterested lay people into debating these points with them, because again, this would needlessly alienate and annoy most people without providing a corresponding benefit and thus be counterproductive to their goal of doing altruism effectively.
What I *do* sometimes observes is that the EA will publish these articles and arguments (on substack and elsewhere) to debate among themselves, perhaps making a claim like "I've done some calculations regarding where we humans seem to be causing the most needless harm, and I think shrimp welfare might be an area worth looking into" and then someone-who-doesn't-identify-as-an-EA might interpret that as "EA people are saying that we are bad people unless we sacrifice everything in our lives and spend every waking moment protecting shrimp" and then via the game of broken telephone, this eventually gets interpreted as "EA demand that we give up our careers and all forms of leisure and sacrifice our loved ones in order to promote shrimp happiness" or something along those lines.
I guess I'm claiming that that last thing is a caricature and "non-central" example of what EAs believe. Perhaps there exists people who read that caricature, and actually become persuaded by it, and thus truly believe it (and perhaps also self-identify as EA), but again, I claim that such people are non-central examples of EA.
I'll also mention that I don't personally put any effort towards improving shrimp welfare, but I support people's freedom (whether they identify as EA or not) to think about and debate the issue of shrimp welfare, and if they do come up with proposals that sound effective to me (e.g. "We have a detailed and adversarially-vetted proposal that will make shrimp slaughtering more humane at only an increase cost of 2 cents per pound of shrimp"), then I'd be willing to sign the petition or whatever. That doesn't sound comically unreasonable to me.
I’ll freely admit I took a little bit of a potshot at EA. But I find the reflexive assumption of what I think is a poor moral theory to be annoying. More charitably, consequentialism is extremely contested, and EA that I have read tends to assume it as self-evident, as if moral reasoning is just a matter of getting the math right.
"EA tends to assume that consequentialism is self-evident" is fair. "I find them annoying so I took a potshot at them" is less so. :)
As a disclaimer, I do find consequentialism to be the most intuitive way for me personally to reason about morality, so I'm pretty sympathetic with the EAs on that topic. But I also believe that the three main systems--consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics--can all be implemented in terms of each other, and thus are in some sense "equivalent", and so I don't stress too much about which one is "the right one".
Well, I don’t think that the three chief moral theories you name are coextensive. There are famous cases of divergence that even their inventors drew attention to. I argue that there are evolutionary reasons for some of this divergence here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/jd-vance-vs-the-pope
I must say that with the state of Starmer's Britain right now moving to Oxford is a short sighted and dangerous move all by itself. Perhaps she'll be moving again very soon.
Are you sure you're thinking of a hero, and not like, a moral exemplar or paragon or just admirable person? To be fair I don't quibble with the inquiry 'why expect supererogatory deeds.' I also get we're speaking 21st century English, but classically being a hero is a pretty weird, almost unattainable, and probably not morally exemplary, status.
1) It is not logically possible for him to have moved to Toronto to "flee" Trump because he moved last year before the election.
2) While living in Canada, he continued to campaign against Trump in America during the election. Not only public appearances giving speeches about fascism, but actually knocking on doors in red districts (hi there Kalamazoo!) How many of his critics can claim the same?
3) He has never said anyone needs to be a hero; his formulation is that you ought to be as brave as you can be. He himself does not claim any notable personal courage. On the other hand, he has several times visited Ukraine in the past year and spent time in areas under fire. Over to you, o brave keyboard warriors.
4) One of his motivations for moving to Toronto was to teach in a public school and thereby reach more students than is possible teaching at HYP or similar, making accusations of elitism particularly bone-headed. One of his regrets in leaving Yale is giving up their prison teaching program. I guess you can't have everything. To be fair, from remarks he has dropped in the past, many prisoners make better students than those of our host.*
5) His view is that the only people to whom he actually owes an explanation are his children. And you know what? He is absolutely goddamn right.
* So why not teach at an American public university? Well he doesn't say, but obviously there's the money; Toronto had a rich guy willing to fund his recruitment, making it painless to leave an endowed chair at Yale. Rich guys in America fund the football team or HYP etc. Think he should have taken a pay cut? Sure, you first.
ETA: I suppose I should spell this out. I agree completely with the substance of what you have written, but I am particularly annoyed by the case of Snyder within the general phenomenon that you are considering and reckon that it merits more detail. Do you think this is otiose? Well then thank goodness we have finally found a point on which we can disagree!
Please provide evidence that even one of the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 showed up in Confederate regalia, let alone, Nazi regalia. It's possible that it happened, but I paid a lot of attention to National Public Radio that day, and am rather certain one of the reporters would have mentioned it. Until you can provide such evidence, which I would ask to be vetted against the strong possibility that it's a deep fake, I don't believe it.
And stop lying that it was an attempted coup. Insurrectionists don't show up unarmed at The Coup. It was a huge crowd which surged into a riot, bearing comparison to the preposterous 10¢ per beer night promotion which the Cleveland Indians hosted disastrously one evening in the mid 1970s, but no federal worker was injured and no federal property was damaged.
Not only were the insurrectionists unarmed, they were unmasked, in striking contrast to the masked, helmeted, nightstick wielding Antifa scum brigands of six months earlier.
"Then there’s the faux heroism of anonymous keyboard warriors who think that issuing arrogant challenges to others is a sign of bravery. That comment was in response to an earlier piece of mine on the problems faced by colleges and demonstrates a sadly common failure to grasp what a collective action problem is."
Since when is it "arrogant" to suggest that academia isn't responsible for failing students who deserve it?
I may be wrong, but didn't you write about how substandard writing and reasoning skills are these days? As I recall, you mentioned students not showing up for class for an average of two weeks, and even longer when they had legitimate excuses. Didn't you say that cheating was epidemic in that essay? I fail to see what your problem with his response is.
Let me guess what you mean by "failure to grasp." Are you referring to professors who want to keep their jobs and know they must conform to departmental agendas to do so? What about passing students for the sake of maintaining the department's legitimacy—an appearance necessary to secure tens of thousands of dollars per student, who, in turn, end up saddled with lifelong debt? In my opinion, it would be best to fail them after the first semester so they don’t wind up paying into the system indefinitely. Or better yet, figure out why they want a higher education in the first place.
The stultifying effects of the economic matrix, in other words.
I would assume that the person you referred to earlier is well aware of such issues—things most of us come to understand by the time we reach thirty, after the honeymoon of college and its cosplay version of "adult" reality are behind us.
Then again - and let me be the first to admit this - maybe I'm "failing to grasp" the same thing?
If so, please explain. I really would like to know what I'm missing.
I am somewhat sympathetic that most people in teaching are simply trying to earn a living, pay a mortgage or rent, and perhaps carve out a career path—which often requires looking the other way to avoid jeopardizing their future prospects. In the career sense, the best we can hope for is to be heroic at times. But what about faithful spouses and full-time caring parents?" That's full time heroism, my friend. What about people who volunteer at the Food Bank, around their jobs?
I also understand academia's self-serving nature, those inside games that few people like to openly admit to. The result is too often unimaginative soul-crushing stagnation, and a steady lowering of standards in order to accomodate ever-increasing budgets. Any "collective action plan" is going to require higher education owing its role in the self-serving stuff I'm getting at, from Harvard Ph.D peer review committees on down to community colleges.
And beyond.
Hearing about San Francisco lowering the passing rate to 40 percent the other day seems entirely in line with the points I’ve raised. Eventually some jurisdictions may drop passing altogether. What better way for "educators" to avoid all accountability and keep the paychecks coming in.
Look how far we have fallen since the 19th century. Back when I went to school, most masters degree finals weren't nearly as challenging as this exam, for 14-year olds.
The error is in confusing me (an individual) with academia (a complex system containing many people). Groundlessly asserting that I lack the courage to fail students (something hilariously uninformed and false) and telling me that as a result I am part of the problem, shows a failure to grasp this distinction. There is literally nothing that I could do as an individual professor that will affect “academia.” Therefore blaming individuals when you are mad at the system is to direct anger at the wrong target. Individuals cannot solve collective action problems. Only collectives can.
Fair enough. And I agree, as you probably grokked from the last part of my reply.
Going the other way, as a seasoned adult, I get where the guy was coming from. Unless he wrote more, he has a valid point. Academics looking the other way en masse is definitely a ‘thing’ in academia and an individual choice in each case.
And good on you for the latest grading stuff. Depressing, but the right thing to do. Well done. Seriously.
I think anyone who can get a position of Oxford right now should take it :). However I think peoples' objections to Yale professors who left for Canada was not that they weren't willing to stay and "be heroes" but that they presented their flight as a type of fight - ie as heroic. Leaving may well be the best decision, but it comes from a place of privilege and had they acknowledged that I think the response might have been more positiive. There is no shame in leaving for a freer, or even simply better environment. Many of us here in the US were born because our parents, or grandparents, etc., knew when it was time to pick up and move.
In my younger days, I will admit I thought everyone had the tenacity to stand up for what they believe in. Growing up in a conservative, Christian household taught me to speak up when you see bad people doing bad things i.e. reading Harry Potter, believing in evolution, or swearing. Now that I am a tad bit older, I relate much more to your side of the matter. "Quick to listen, slow to speak" I think is the general principle I would argue for, but definitely not die on a hill for. I think it is the privilege of young people to have the tenacity to care about a subject deeply. Age brings a level of disillusionment with the world. Perhaps we have just seen too many people we viewed as heroes collapse under their own hubris.
I appreciate the core argument you're presenting here, but I want to add some nuance to a throwaway aside that you made.
> This is part of the reason why the latest effective altruist demand that you spend your time saving the lives of all the shrimp, mosquitoes, and archaea that you possibly can because that will maximize something valuable is comically unreasonable.
We all live in different social bubbles, and so we will have different experiences with our interactions with different groups. I'm incorporating the (implied) anecdote you've provided into my beliefs, and I'm offering an anecdote from my experience for you to incorporate into yours.
In my experience, effective altruist don't "demand" that you spend your time saving the lives of shrimps etc. For one thing, these people tend to value consequentialist reasoning and they surely realize that using the language/tone associated with "demand" would ultimately hurt their cause.
Instead, what I tend to observe is that they think through various premises seriously, including the possibility that reducing harm to shrimps is something that has a very low cost to high benefit ratio, i.e. that it's potentially an "effective" form of "altruism". They will then write up and present their arguments for why they think this might be the case, and they invite dissenting views, because they value having "true beliefs".
Furthermore, in my observations, they don't try to drag disinterested lay people into debating these points with them, because again, this would needlessly alienate and annoy most people without providing a corresponding benefit and thus be counterproductive to their goal of doing altruism effectively.
What I *do* sometimes observes is that the EA will publish these articles and arguments (on substack and elsewhere) to debate among themselves, perhaps making a claim like "I've done some calculations regarding where we humans seem to be causing the most needless harm, and I think shrimp welfare might be an area worth looking into" and then someone-who-doesn't-identify-as-an-EA might interpret that as "EA people are saying that we are bad people unless we sacrifice everything in our lives and spend every waking moment protecting shrimp" and then via the game of broken telephone, this eventually gets interpreted as "EA demand that we give up our careers and all forms of leisure and sacrifice our loved ones in order to promote shrimp happiness" or something along those lines.
I guess I'm claiming that that last thing is a caricature and "non-central" example of what EAs believe. Perhaps there exists people who read that caricature, and actually become persuaded by it, and thus truly believe it (and perhaps also self-identify as EA), but again, I claim that such people are non-central examples of EA.
I'll also mention that I don't personally put any effort towards improving shrimp welfare, but I support people's freedom (whether they identify as EA or not) to think about and debate the issue of shrimp welfare, and if they do come up with proposals that sound effective to me (e.g. "We have a detailed and adversarially-vetted proposal that will make shrimp slaughtering more humane at only an increase cost of 2 cents per pound of shrimp"), then I'd be willing to sign the petition or whatever. That doesn't sound comically unreasonable to me.
I’ll freely admit I took a little bit of a potshot at EA. But I find the reflexive assumption of what I think is a poor moral theory to be annoying. More charitably, consequentialism is extremely contested, and EA that I have read tends to assume it as self-evident, as if moral reasoning is just a matter of getting the math right.
"EA tends to assume that consequentialism is self-evident" is fair. "I find them annoying so I took a potshot at them" is less so. :)
As a disclaimer, I do find consequentialism to be the most intuitive way for me personally to reason about morality, so I'm pretty sympathetic with the EAs on that topic. But I also believe that the three main systems--consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics--can all be implemented in terms of each other, and thus are in some sense "equivalent", and so I don't stress too much about which one is "the right one".
Well, I don’t think that the three chief moral theories you name are coextensive. There are famous cases of divergence that even their inventors drew attention to. I argue that there are evolutionary reasons for some of this divergence here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/jd-vance-vs-the-pope
I must say that with the state of Starmer's Britain right now moving to Oxford is a short sighted and dangerous move all by itself. Perhaps she'll be moving again very soon.
Are you sure you're thinking of a hero, and not like, a moral exemplar or paragon or just admirable person? To be fair I don't quibble with the inquiry 'why expect supererogatory deeds.' I also get we're speaking 21st century English, but classically being a hero is a pretty weird, almost unattainable, and probably not morally exemplary, status.
Yes, I meant hero in the modern supererogatory sense, not the Achilles “aristos achaion” sense.
thank you, and sorry to be a pedant!
I’m an academic. Pedantry is our law.
As it happens, Snyder recently posted a video (https://snyder.substack.com/p/last-years-move-to-toronto) explaining why he and Shore moved to Toronto, in which he made the following points:
1) It is not logically possible for him to have moved to Toronto to "flee" Trump because he moved last year before the election.
2) While living in Canada, he continued to campaign against Trump in America during the election. Not only public appearances giving speeches about fascism, but actually knocking on doors in red districts (hi there Kalamazoo!) How many of his critics can claim the same?
3) He has never said anyone needs to be a hero; his formulation is that you ought to be as brave as you can be. He himself does not claim any notable personal courage. On the other hand, he has several times visited Ukraine in the past year and spent time in areas under fire. Over to you, o brave keyboard warriors.
4) One of his motivations for moving to Toronto was to teach in a public school and thereby reach more students than is possible teaching at HYP or similar, making accusations of elitism particularly bone-headed. One of his regrets in leaving Yale is giving up their prison teaching program. I guess you can't have everything. To be fair, from remarks he has dropped in the past, many prisoners make better students than those of our host.*
5) His view is that the only people to whom he actually owes an explanation are his children. And you know what? He is absolutely goddamn right.
* So why not teach at an American public university? Well he doesn't say, but obviously there's the money; Toronto had a rich guy willing to fund his recruitment, making it painless to leave an endowed chair at Yale. Rich guys in America fund the football team or HYP etc. Think he should have taken a pay cut? Sure, you first.
I'm not sure of your target. I know neither Shore nor Snyder, and if I understand your remarks correctly, that's what I was defending!
I never said you weren't!
ETA: I suppose I should spell this out. I agree completely with the substance of what you have written, but I am particularly annoyed by the case of Snyder within the general phenomenon that you are considering and reckon that it merits more detail. Do you think this is otiose? Well then thank goodness we have finally found a point on which we can disagree!
Please provide evidence that even one of the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 showed up in Confederate regalia, let alone, Nazi regalia. It's possible that it happened, but I paid a lot of attention to National Public Radio that day, and am rather certain one of the reporters would have mentioned it. Until you can provide such evidence, which I would ask to be vetted against the strong possibility that it's a deep fake, I don't believe it.
And stop lying that it was an attempted coup. Insurrectionists don't show up unarmed at The Coup. It was a huge crowd which surged into a riot, bearing comparison to the preposterous 10¢ per beer night promotion which the Cleveland Indians hosted disastrously one evening in the mid 1970s, but no federal worker was injured and no federal property was damaged.
Not only were the insurrectionists unarmed, they were unmasked, in striking contrast to the masked, helmeted, nightstick wielding Antifa scum brigands of six months earlier.
I’m not engaging with sealioning. But if you accuse me of lying again you will be banned.
You were warned. Respectful discussion is welcome, trolls are not.
"Then there’s the faux heroism of anonymous keyboard warriors who think that issuing arrogant challenges to others is a sign of bravery. That comment was in response to an earlier piece of mine on the problems faced by colleges and demonstrates a sadly common failure to grasp what a collective action problem is."
Since when is it "arrogant" to suggest that academia isn't responsible for failing students who deserve it?
I may be wrong, but didn't you write about how substandard writing and reasoning skills are these days? As I recall, you mentioned students not showing up for class for an average of two weeks, and even longer when they had legitimate excuses. Didn't you say that cheating was epidemic in that essay? I fail to see what your problem with his response is.
Let me guess what you mean by "failure to grasp." Are you referring to professors who want to keep their jobs and know they must conform to departmental agendas to do so? What about passing students for the sake of maintaining the department's legitimacy—an appearance necessary to secure tens of thousands of dollars per student, who, in turn, end up saddled with lifelong debt? In my opinion, it would be best to fail them after the first semester so they don’t wind up paying into the system indefinitely. Or better yet, figure out why they want a higher education in the first place.
The stultifying effects of the economic matrix, in other words.
I would assume that the person you referred to earlier is well aware of such issues—things most of us come to understand by the time we reach thirty, after the honeymoon of college and its cosplay version of "adult" reality are behind us.
Then again - and let me be the first to admit this - maybe I'm "failing to grasp" the same thing?
If so, please explain. I really would like to know what I'm missing.
I am somewhat sympathetic that most people in teaching are simply trying to earn a living, pay a mortgage or rent, and perhaps carve out a career path—which often requires looking the other way to avoid jeopardizing their future prospects. In the career sense, the best we can hope for is to be heroic at times. But what about faithful spouses and full-time caring parents?" That's full time heroism, my friend. What about people who volunteer at the Food Bank, around their jobs?
I also understand academia's self-serving nature, those inside games that few people like to openly admit to. The result is too often unimaginative soul-crushing stagnation, and a steady lowering of standards in order to accomodate ever-increasing budgets. Any "collective action plan" is going to require higher education owing its role in the self-serving stuff I'm getting at, from Harvard Ph.D peer review committees on down to community colleges.
And beyond.
Hearing about San Francisco lowering the passing rate to 40 percent the other day seems entirely in line with the points I’ve raised. Eventually some jurisdictions may drop passing altogether. What better way for "educators" to avoid all accountability and keep the paychecks coming in.
Look how far we have fallen since the 19th century. Back when I went to school, most masters degree finals weren't nearly as challenging as this exam, for 14-year olds.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.htm
The error is in confusing me (an individual) with academia (a complex system containing many people). Groundlessly asserting that I lack the courage to fail students (something hilariously uninformed and false) and telling me that as a result I am part of the problem, shows a failure to grasp this distinction. There is literally nothing that I could do as an individual professor that will affect “academia.” Therefore blaming individuals when you are mad at the system is to direct anger at the wrong target. Individuals cannot solve collective action problems. Only collectives can.
Fair enough. And I agree, as you probably grokked from the last part of my reply.
Going the other way, as a seasoned adult, I get where the guy was coming from. Unless he wrote more, he has a valid point. Academics looking the other way en masse is definitely a ‘thing’ in academia and an individual choice in each case.
And good on you for the latest grading stuff. Depressing, but the right thing to do. Well done. Seriously.
I think anyone who can get a position of Oxford right now should take it :). However I think peoples' objections to Yale professors who left for Canada was not that they weren't willing to stay and "be heroes" but that they presented their flight as a type of fight - ie as heroic. Leaving may well be the best decision, but it comes from a place of privilege and had they acknowledged that I think the response might have been more positiive. There is no shame in leaving for a freer, or even simply better environment. Many of us here in the US were born because our parents, or grandparents, etc., knew when it was time to pick up and move.