The calculus GiveWell uses is necessarily focused on short-term tangible benefits. For example, there's no way their method could or would result in donating to an organization or political movement trying to bring about large-scale systemic change.

This isn't a full-throated attack on effective altruism, I actually think Singer and GiveWell are brilliant, but it definitely is something to keep in mind.

Social security saved more people from poverty than private charity ever did or ever will. The federal government's actually pretty good at it.

X-risk analysis and prevention is the biggest cause area in effective altruism other than global health. How anyone could claim that ea is too quick to rush to the immediate aid of people is beyond me when they’re actually far too quick to rush to the aid of people who do not yet exist.

[removed]

Yes? this is known

Bill Gates literally got taken to court by the US government for actively monopolizing Microsoft and lost.

Yeah kind of funny that this is coming from a dead white man Nazi and getting attention when there's so many other sources to get this kind of info from. Like Indigenous peoples the world over who are still actively being genocided.

Caveat emptor

The complicated part is that he did foundational and important work in the field of ontology and other areas of Philosophy, while being a morally viscous person. No one here is arguing his moral and political choices are complicated, they are simply and directly abhorrent - and we should acknowledge them as such.

Lets say a mathematician is a horrible person, a nazi even in this case. Yet they make a discovery of an equation that is highly valuable and even ground braking. The acknowledgment of the significance of the math they discovered shouldn't be thrown away because of their horrific moral and personal life. The two can be divorced as long as their moral character is remembered. The discovery in itself can be celebrated and praised for its own use, while simultaneously condemning the person who discovered it. The same here is being said of Heidegger.

To think he didn't live to see the the catastrophe that is social media. The platform it gives to idiots and the echo chamber of contracting world views and the abandonment of truth in favour of opinion. He must be spinning in his grave.

Just as a side story, I once saw someone say that Uber was terrible and exploitative and wouldn't exist under socialism. So I asked if any form of taxis would exist under socialism. They said: of course not! I asked why that would be, and they said: well because there would be no cars of course!

So anyways, according to that guy, I'm guessing there wouldn't be any airplanes under socialism as well, lol

To support what OP says - although I am not a historian and can't confirm larger sentiment - if you read Chief Seattle's letter to the government you get that perspective.

Wholeheartedly agree with that perspective in the sense that we are ..ants crawling around and buying and selling land is kinda like buying and selling planets - we actually never OWN shit in the first place. Pretty sure nature is going to be fine, been around for billions of years, we nurse from it for a bit and it graciously allows us to not die for a bit.

I disagree. A plane is still just a plane, a physical object in the physical world. It's not a "blur" of potential. This might be coming from the fact that people are "living" more of their lives in the "digital world" which isn't really the "digital world" it's the normal world while using the internet.

The technological adaptations for population inflation have precedent in a lot of our history. The application of the potato as a food crop boosted the population of a lot of European countries due to the amount of calories one could grow on relatively poor soil and in Ireland and Britain that population later collapsed when viruses wiped out the crop and aid in the form of utilizing stores of imported foods were witheld. Spirituality is fairly key in shaping how we perceive our place in the world and while Heidegger has his "hold on a minute the world is finite" moment it is good to acknowledge that that philosophy is a lot older than he is through the lens of certain religion.

The river's value in a prior example is not limited to human's rather narrow concept of use. It is also an ecosystem that benefits other species, is a channel for delivering water and nutrients to plants and evaporation for weather patterns and if abused can become a vector for poisons. One could look at ghe preservativion of natural resources as not in the terms of commodity but of intergenerational wealth. If a system of artificial population support collapses much like the humble potato, it takes a swath of humanity with it.

You have stated that 1. Capitalists funded Nazi Germany, 2. that the USSR was disappointed Germany did not have a Bolshevik revolution, and 3. that Nazi Germany was in practice a capitalist regime. While these premises all may be true, these do not lead to, and you have not proven, or even spoken to, the possibility (or impossibility) that there could be a critique of capitalism under the framework of Nazi ideology.

Not really, it’s normally changed by a powerful select few

I don’t know, but it’s probably easier than setting up a socialist utopia. Poverty, disease, war etc is decreasing year on year.

I just find it silly to criticise someone who has actually massively changed the world, because they didn’t make it perfect overnight

Is not every change in society made by random individuals? Sometimes working together?

Big if! How are you going to get everyone to be charitable?

Jesus, super famous, with the Bible, super famous, has a an entire religion, said that we should help the poor, his ideas have been around 2000 years. Still, we have poverty.

You're telling me that Peter Singer is going to do a better job of getting everyone on board? He's going to be more influential than Jesus?

[deleted]

[deleted]

I mean there's a ton of nonsense ideologies out there, and the fact that the Nazis were calling themselves "national socialists" in opposition to the "international socialists" (who were the actual socialists the Nazis purged after coming into power) is certainly going to aid in that confusion.

Western capitalists very specifically funded the Nazis to fight against the communists / socialists to the East. It wasn't until the Nazis invaded to the West that this changed. Fascism is the attack dog of capitalism, not a capitalist led transition into socialism (which makes no sense at all).

The communists didn't want Nazis to be capitalists, either. In fact, after the Soviet Revolution, it was hoped that Germany would have a socialist revolution. It went the opposite way, and this spelled disaster for socialism in Russia. It was one of the reasons for the disorder in the USSR; they had to rely on their own feudal lords to run a presumably socialist economy.

As for the article, it's very long and I'll have to check it out later. Keep in mind, though, that capitalism and socialism both can appear in many various forms, not just one. Nazi Germany was certainly one example of a capitalist society. We haven't had any real examples of a socialist society as of yet because it's a rather new ideology and attempts at it have either been sabotaged from the outside or collapsed from internal forces. Not all that different from any historical period of transition where old forms are struggling to maintain control as new forms begin to emerge. So we can speak rather authoritatively on capitalism as it has a few centuries (~350 years or so) of data we can look back on. For socialism we only really have some experimentation at best, and false promises at worst. I'm sure the end of the feudal period looked similarly as new mercantile systems were appearing and being put down by feudal lords who felt threatened by a shift in power structures. We're not really to the point where we have a "third position" because we haven't properly seen the alternative to capitalism, but given enough time it too will come along and replace whatever comes after capitalism whether it's socialism or something else.

> the idea that we either live on in a separate disconnected realm or cease to be entirely doesn't capture that sense of responsibility one might have to previous generations

The part your missing is that whether or not the idea is TRUE is infinitely more important than how it can be contextualized with respect to some kind of responsibility to past or future generations, and it IS true. We are currently using all kinds of technology to support a population that's many orders of magnitude higher than would be possible if we all lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, or subsistence farming communities.

One can be anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist at the same time. Communists do not hold a monopoly over criticism of capitalism.

Ever heard of Strasserism? Just because they were pushed out for practical reasons does not mean Nazi ideology and criticism of capitalism are incompatible. Also, I understand that capitalists want Nazis to have been socialists, and communists want them to have been capitalists, Ludwig von Mises in this essay (https://mises.org/library/planned-chaos) lays out their system in a way that does not seem entirely capitalist or socialistic, almost like a “third position”.