Your experience matches mine- I only ever heard "trickle down economics" used by people on the left making mocking, derisive commentary about Reagan and neocon politics.
Then someone pointed out to me that my entire affluent, privileged, comfortable life is due to trickle down economics. In the last 15 years, I've had high salaries paid by various money-losing startups, financed by rich people investing in VC funds. Now I'm a millionaire, entirely as a transfer of wealth from the rich. I haven't had a job where my salary was realistically paid by customer money/business revenue since before 2010 or where any of the VCs ever made their investment back.
I don't know if there's any lesson to learn from that or if it's just funny or ironic, but it is kinda entertaining to me to realize the entire Venture Capital backed economy can be seen as trickle-down economics "working".
Thanks for the comment, it was also my recent experience. Even though in that case I'd love the trickle-down economics to be renamed Robin Hood economics.
For what it's worth, I have never lived or worked in the Bay area.
Your point is still probably directionally accurate, just expanding "Bay area" to include all the hubs of technology- Austin, Seattle, NYC, Research Triangle... probably plenty of people have the same story as me while living in Boston, Denver, Washington DC.
Are we seeing that? I'm certainly not? I suppose "psychopaths" will attach themselves to literally anything given the right opportunities, but EA seems like a relatively poor target all things considered.
At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle. People want to do good in the world, but we're all monkey-brained and emotional, so that often manifests in ineffective use of time and resources to do things that give an immediate, visible outcome so we can feel good instead of what would actually do the most good.
EA to me is basically just shifting altruistic desires from emotional-payoff (volunteering at a soup kitchen around the holidays, donating to a local animal shelter) to things that have the best outcome (volunteering at a political action group to improve laws, donating to an NGO distributing mosquito nets in malaria zones).
There's an element of "the ends justify the means" in EA that can lead to bad outcomes. An extreme example is SBF's hypothetical "coin flip"[1], but one could see how making the world worse in the short term could be justified with EA as long as those actions might make it better in the long term. Just as crucially, the meaning of "worse" and "better" is often not left up to the communities being affected but to each EA practitioner.
> At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle
I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue isn't the idea that we want to engage in altruism in the most effective way we can, the issue is the EA movement.
I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not.
Sounds like ass-covering from people who are like 'I am ultimately rational and therefore must act with maximum effectiveness'. Ultimately rational as a perceived state within humans is a FEELING. You can take a bunch of ketamine and conclude that you possess that quality, and many people have done just that, some of 'em very wealthy and powerful.
In my experience, people are better at rationalizing their feelings than actually being rational. There's a certain lack of humility to claiming that just because you used some numerical weights to arrive at a decision it was arrived at rationally.
Indeed the more complex and complete you make your rational model, the more tunable weights there are. By just dropping in the right weights, you can get whatever result you want. Therefore complex models tend to produce worse results in practice than very simple ones.
This lesson was brought home for me by https://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Deve... explaining why the COCOMO model didn't work well in practice as an estimation technique, despite their having collected a lot of good data on what affects schedule.
This lesson is one that the EA community broadly seems to ignore.
> I don't get how effectiveness is a prerequisite. Be altruist, or not
It's not. What I meant by my comment was that pretty much everyone who engages in altruistic behavior wants that behavior to be as effective as possible. The EA movement did not invent or discover this, it's always been the case.
Even people whose altruistic behavior stops at dropping a few coins in the donation box at the supermarket wants those coins to be used in the most effective way.
If you over-simplify, stereotype and demean people who disagree with you, you're part of the problem.
Honestly if it was that simple, then maybe we should just say no more killing babies and let the hunters shoot their deer and otherwise move forward with the rest of the Democratic party's platform.
It looks like you've been misled about the US. The US welfare budget is mind-bogglingly large, over a Trillion dollars per year. Yes, Trillion with a T.
Healthcare costs can be very important for Americans working in low-wage positions, but are essentially irrelevant for tech workers.
Here's how healthcare costs impact my life on an hours-worked basis:
Monthly health insurance premium: 20 minutes of my wage per month
Office visit at a primary care doctor: 12 minutes of my wage
Office visit at a specialist: 15 minutes of my wage
Maximum amount I can possibly pay in a year (eg, if I get in a car accident and spend months in intensive care): 20 hours of my wage
To be clear, the American who is driving Uber full-time or cooking food at McDonalds would have a drastically worse situation, and their costs might be multiple hours worked to see a doctor or multiple weeks of wages to cover a catastrophic hospitalization. But on a tech salary, healthcare is trivially covered.
> Of course, mined diamonds aren’t blood diamonds, but her impression was still they were a little ickier
For all intents and purposes, they are. The voluntary processes the diamond cartels adopted to supposedly reduce diamonds coming out of "conflict areas" are a joke. Most diamonds are mined under exploitive conditions, often with severe ecological impact, and the owners are almost without exception "blood on their hands" people even if one particular mine operates more ethically.
If you object to the mine owners (rio tinto) "blood on their hands" (from > 2,000 years of mining since Roman occupied Spain) then get rid of all your steel products as they're a major supplier of raw high grade iron ore (and copper, and ...)
Sources to any of these wild (and grossly outdated) claims?
> Most diamonds are mined under exploitative conditions
You’ve clearly never been to a diamond mine. More than 70% of diamonds come out of “modern” countries like Australia, Canada, Russia, and South Africa. Botswana used their diamond bounty to teach hundreds of their citizens to grade/cut/polish the very stones mined in the country, ensuring tons of high skill jobs.
> the owners are almost without exception "blood on their hands" people
Well you’re only right on a loophole on this one - the Russian government owns the company that produces 40% of the world’s diamonds and it would be tough to argue Putin is blood-free.
That's just ridiculous. May as well ask you why you never cited his comment when you commented?
You can Google this. Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Botswana.(the contentious one would be DRC). These are regulated countries with labour rights and human rights. If they operate in these countries they are subject to those laws. May as well say you won't buy anything imported if you still feel there's ambiguity.
These are industries in these countries. Without these exports these people don't have jobs which feed them.
Ironically, the narrative of "right wing rabbit hole leads people to <whatever scary bad thing>" is itself far more concerning to me for the stability and functioning of the US.
I frequently talk to people across the full spectrum of political beliefs, and something that's become very clear to me is that there is almost no overlap between "what Republican-voters want" and "what liberals think Republican-voters want".
I read online that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi full of hate for everyone different from them. Then I talk to Trump voters in real life and they're generally decent people worried about their jobs and the safety of their kids who just have different ideas of how to solve problems and different priorities for which problems are most important than I (a purely Democrat voter) do.
The "rabbit hole" might be a problem, but the "shining a magnifying glass on the 0.0001% of people at the bottom of the hole" problem is bigger.
> The reason local newspapers are failing is because nobody reads them
I don't believe that's true. The subscription cost for most newspapers barely covered the printing and distribution costs. Small, local-focused newspapers were surprisingly largely kept alive by the massive margins on printing classified ads.
The person who used to spend $1-per-word at their local paper to advertise they were selling a car or having an estate sale can now list that for free on craigslist or facebook. And the local business can buy more targeted advertisements on facebook, google or twitter.
As odd as it seems, Craigslist probably did more to kill the local newspaper than social media, search engines or private equity firms.
We could trivially fix the "80 hour weeks" piece by increasing the number of places available in medical schools and residencies, but the AMA intentionally keeps that number small to maintain the status quo of intern hazing and high salaries.
It takes similar effort and abilities to get a STEM phD, but the researchers working on drug discovery or mitigating the climate crisis or whatever other socially-beneficial thing make 1/3rd what an MD makes. The power of the AMA in guiding the entire healthcare system to the benefit of MDs shouldn't be underestimated.
This seems like a concerning level of charity being given to cops who ruin people's lives.
Would you accept a world in which "1 in 1000" planes crashed because the pilot was on 3 hours of sleep?
There should be a media storm every time a police officer abuses someone, we should all collectively be outraged. A functioning society has to start with the front-line enforcers being responsible and trustworthy.
He’s not being charitable to cops who abuse their power, he’s pointing out that good cops receive backlash due to the actions of bad cops.
Being outraged at cases of abuse doesn’t mean you have to stop empathising with the difficult job that most cops have.
Reminds me of this quote: “almost everything in the world is broken and almost no one is evil.” Don’t let your anger at evil people make you reflexively think badly of their colleagues. Focus on your love of humanity rather than your hatred of authority.
Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me.
> Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters.
The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.
The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.
> But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement.
What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?
Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases.
"Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement."
Why was their skin color and sex relevant?
If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense:
"Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters."
That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.
I'm so used to it I read right past it, but yeah, on closer inspection if any other race was used in this context or the source material I suspect it'd get cut real quick. And the author doesn't even bother to mince in some quotation marks to baffle the connotations.
> The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.
No, there's nothing like that in the article. You imposed this strange interpretation on it. After all, Bernie himself is a white man, so why would someone who thinks white men are inherently evil support him, especially when some of the other candidates (e.g., Clinton) were women?
The "Bernie bros" meme was a cynical ploy to undermine the Sanders campaign by trying to show that only sexists would support him over his female opponents (Clinton or Warren).
Then someone pointed out to me that my entire affluent, privileged, comfortable life is due to trickle down economics. In the last 15 years, I've had high salaries paid by various money-losing startups, financed by rich people investing in VC funds. Now I'm a millionaire, entirely as a transfer of wealth from the rich. I haven't had a job where my salary was realistically paid by customer money/business revenue since before 2010 or where any of the VCs ever made their investment back.
I don't know if there's any lesson to learn from that or if it's just funny or ironic, but it is kinda entertaining to me to realize the entire Venture Capital backed economy can be seen as trickle-down economics "working".