Pragmatism vs. Moral Signaling in Effective Altruism

Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into the worldview of Amanda Askell (philosopher & Anthropic's personality alignment lead, formerly Amanda MacAskill), former wife of effective altruism leader William MacAskill.

They unpack her 2015 Quartz piece arguing that killing predators like Cecil the Lion might ethically reduce wild animal suffering — and the logical extensions: euthanizing prey, sterilizing wildlife, negative utilitarianism vibes, and dystopian "Hunger Games for animals" with AI-managed nature.

From prey/predator identification psychology (victim vs. hunter lens), to name changes in marriage, fertility views, polyamory skepticism, anti-"born this way" LGBT arguments, AI safety blind spots, and why elite leftist intellectuals often ask rhetorical questions but stop short of pragmatic follow-ups.

Why do these hyper-rational EA circles seem insulated? How does this mindset connect to declining fertility, techno-utopianism, and the future of AI ethics? Plus: why pragmatic "hard" effective altruism beats signaling-based benevolence — and why cultures that don't reproduce simply die out.

If you're interested in EA critiques, wild animal welfare debates, pronatalism, AI alignment quirks, or why identifying with prey vs. predator reveals deep worldview differences — this episode is for you.

BTW, if you want to learn more about Hard Effective Altruism, check out HardEA.org.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Which is we accept that prey animals may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them. Okay. But the claim that prey animals have miserable lives leads animal activists to a surprising conclusion of a different sort.

What is it? Ooh.

Think

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: then we have to kill the prey animals as well.

Simone Collins: Oh God, of course. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Why should the man not take the woman’s name , and he just asks a question, why, why, why is it bad?

Why is it bad? But he doesn’t even think to investigate that. This is what’s so interesting about this elitist leftist perspective. They, for phrase it tonally as if it’s a rhetorical question and then they don’t engage with it.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing.

The mindset and trying to dig into the world perspective of the leftist intellectual elite.

Simone Collins: Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins: And specifically leftist intellectual elite [00:01:00] women. And we are going to do this through I mean originally this was called to me as an idea because you sent me a WhatsApp about a tweet that you wrote, HP Lovecraft had me about a Amanda McCaskill who, well, she was called Amanda McCaskill when the piece was written.

She’s no longer called Amanda McCaskill, which is kind of hilarious because her husband changed his last name to her maternal grandmother’s last name, which was McCaskill. That’s Will McCaskill. By the way, if you don’t know him, incredibly like one of the leading two or three leading figures of the effect of altruist movement.

Simone Collins: He wrote What We Owe The Future, which had one of the most successful press debuts of a book. In forever

Malcolm Collins: in human history. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So it’s insane.

Malcolm Collins: But when she broke up with him, he kept the last name that she made him take and she changed it again. That’s why she has a different name now

Simone Collins: and, and they chose the, yeah.

That’s interesting. So this is my first time hearing of a couple choosing. [00:02:00] A totally new last name rather than a hyphen. Aside from the Edens,

Malcolm Collins: it wasn’t a new last name. It was her maternal grandmother’s last name, basically. But

Simone Collins: she didn’t grow up with that last name.

Malcolm Collins: That’s

Simone Collins: the thing,

Malcolm Collins: basically what she did.

So if you’re a woman and somebody’s like, Hey. Take my last name.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The, then the woman says this to the husband, and the husband’s just gonna say, but that’s just your, your granddad’s last name, right? Like, yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s just another man. Like

Malcolm Collins: she did it, she traced it through the maternal line.

She didn’t choose a random

Simone Collins: left. It’s like the, the most leftist choice you can

Malcolm Collins: make. But before I go into this piece, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just the former wife of Will McCaskill. She also runs the ethics for philanthropic.

So she is in charge of putting together the Constitution for philanthropic ethics. This is the company that runs the Claude Model, one of the largest AI companies in the world. Yeah. And one of the ones that invests the most money in its ethics bridge.

Simone Collins: To be fair, yeah. We know some people doing [00:03:00] non-ST stupid AI ethics work and.

The team that has been the most responsive to them has been Claude’s team.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, do you guys remember when we read that story about the AI that would kill the CEO and the company admitted that even the own AI would do it About 80% of the time. That was her ethics team. Oh, that put out that study,

Simone Collins: the kill bot?

Yes. Wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: So anyway and I’m, I’m pointing all this out. As we go into this, ‘cause you’ll understand that some of her ideas are just bizarre, and then others seem really intelligent. And that’s why it’s important to try to peel out the logic behind everything to better understand this world perspective.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So she wrote a piece to truly into animal suffering. The most ethical choice is to kill wild predators, especially Cecil the Lion. And this was written in response to the killing of Cecil the lion, you know, the celebrity lion that guy killed. And just to start here, we’ll go over the a full chunk of this in a bit.

Okay. But by killing predators, we can save the lives of many prey animals like wildebeest, zebras, and [00:04:00] buffaloes in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep animals at the top of the food chain alive. Mm-hmm. And there’s no reason to consider the lives of predators like a lions to be any more important than the lives of prey.

And ironically, the EA community talking to Normies.

Speaker 6: That was the easiest way to stop him. I didn’t want to kill the spider. I wanted to save them both. What are you talking about? Unless the spider caught the butterfly, it would die of starvation anyway.

I’m not wrong about this, Rem yes, but Wanting to save both is just a naive contradiction.

Speaker 5: What’s

Speaker 6: wrong with

Speaker 7: you, Knives?! don’t you understand?! I wanted to save both of them, you idiot!

Speaker 6: Don’t make any sense, Bash.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Now you saw this and apparently you just thought it was funny that you needed to send it to me. Yes. But there’s a logic behind it and there’s a logic behind everything.

Simone Collins: No, there’s not. There’s not. Okay. If you’re a freaking gazelle, how do you wanna die? Do you want to die in? [00:05:00] Hopefully like five minutes by someone breaking your neck with their teeth.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, but that’s because you didn’t read the full piece, Simone.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: She’s talking about in an ideal world, what we would probably have, okay. Is we would one, take all of the predator species and put them in like a zoo or something and sterilize them so they couldn’t breed and feed them like urky until they just died of old age.

Or, or, or we executed them when their lives became negative qua quantity.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And then for stuff like Gazelle we you know, we let them live out their lives as long as it’s a good life. Mm-hmm. And then we euthanize them. And if it’s not a good life for the Gazelle, then we need to maintain the population at lower levels, so there’s always plentiful food for them.

Oh. While also giving them regular deep parasiting, she thought through it all. Okay. Simone.

Simone Collins: So now it’s like the Hunger Games for animals. Where there’s like a camera on you at all times and you’re your, like, stats are monitored, all your vitals, except instead of having you all fight to the death, [00:06:00] you you just get like instant medical care and food whenever you need it.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hunger games. But this is it. This is the AI world we’re going into. You know, it’s important to understand the people who are controlling ai ics. Okay. To go further here. Alright,

Simone Collins: what are humans doing while this is all happening, I guess we’re, we’ve taken to this

Malcolm Collins: side. I decided to see what Reddit thought of this because, you know, obviously our philosophy had to comment on this piece.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: good or bad philosophy that, you know, the subreddit. Oh. And the top comment of course was what’s wrong with this? The statement that we ought to kill all men is obviously true. When it said kill all predators, that’s the way they interpret it was the very top comment. Which I just thought was a classic Reddit moment.

And, here’s a tweet from her that I think gives a further perspective into her worldview and what it’s like being within, because an important thing to note about many of the intellectual elite circles within the left, I’m not talking about status elite. If you’re talking about status elite, you’re talking about [00:07:00] celebrities.

You’re talking about your, your dumb politicians and Davos minded people, and you know that, that sort of branch, right? Okay. This branch is basically automatons. They just repeat whatever they’re told. They have no nuanced opinion that other left-wingers will attack them for. They, they just. Yeah. Like they’re easy to understand.

They’re what’s on the tint. When you talk about the intellectual elite of the left which is almost entirely the EA community you are now looking at people who are extremely partisan, but at least have a degree, degree of introspection. Yeah. And that’s where it’s really interesting that we’re gonna go into,

Simone Collins: okay,

Malcolm Collins: so she had a tweet, and this is not a tweet that I would consider has a degree of introspection, but it is useful to provide a grounding here.

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: When a white person does something awful to a black person,, I don’t think a person I identified with did an awful thing. I think an awful thing was done to a person I identify [00:08:00] with. Shared humanity should trump most other features when it comes to who we morally identify with.

And this is interesting, right? This from her perspective feels very innocuous, this thing to say, right? Mm-hmm. Because she’s like, what do you expect me to identify with a white person? Because I’m also a white person. But what she is showing is it her core category of identity is victim hood.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that she naturally identifies with the victim. Mm-hmm. And we’ll see this in her beliefs around, and I don’t even think she realizes this in her beliefs around predation and stuff like that, when she sees the lion eat the gazelle. Right. And even at the video of this, in her piece. She talks about how hard this is for her to watch because when she sees something like this, she naturally identify, like she doesn’t even think about that much.

Oh, she

Simone Collins: identifies with the gazelle

Malcolm Collins: or it’s kids or eating a meal? Yeah. Or [00:09:00] the thrill of victory or catching something that’s trying to get away from you. Mm. Um, The,

Simone Collins: I guess I can tell which one you identify with.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, no. Well, this is an important point before we go further because I think people may not realize how psychologically different, and I don’t know if this is a male female psychological difference, Uhhuh or if it’s a my cultural group psychological difference.

Simone Collins: I’m not identifying with either of them. I don’t know what’s going on here.

Malcolm Collins: I, I really, when I see something like this uhhuh, like when I see the, the animal hunting another animal. Okay. Um, And this, this occurred to me in one of our episodes where people got really upset that I didn’t care about the cultures that were allowing themselves to be bamboozled and screwed over and eradicated.

Mm-hmm. Because of their own, you know, foolishness. Because they set up rules that no longer work in a modern context and now they’re dying out.

Mm.

And I realized that it hadn’t even occurred to me to [00:10:00] approach. The weak thing. In this perspective, I was talking about overly deontological cultures that are dying out in the new multicultural context.

Mm-hmm. That many of these deontological cultures themselves created. A good example here, given that we always talk about it’s Sal so them, the Vatican has pushed for multicultural countries, right? Mm-hmm. If you look, even today, they’re attacking JD Vance, another Catholic. So this isn’t anti-Catholic.

I’m talking about like the Vaticans doing this, saying, you know, you shouldn’t be doing all these immigrant deportations. You know, you should learn to live in a more multicultural environment, but they’re also more likely to be on deontological, and that’s leading them to be victimized by non deontological groups which don’t have to play by their rules. This was in the episode where we were talking about people getting extra time on tests and stuff like that.

But, but it extends to all sorts of things that our society and in the comments I immediately thought, I didn’t even think to identify with the prey. Right. It didn’t even occur to me from the way that I see reality. [00:11:00] Mm-hmm. Um, When I see the picture, and I, and I know and I think many. I think many women naturally take on the position of pre when they are choosing what of the things they identify with.

And I think many cultural groups take on the position of prayer. I think it’s actually pretty rare. I mean, I understand, and I’ve pointed this out, that we come from one of the more violent, more aggressive cultural groups historically. And I, and so I, I wonder, is this because I’m from that group, that whatever, I’m like, I see a lion eating, hunting down a gazelle.

I generally am like, Hmm, that looks really satisfying.

Simone Collins: Oh boy.

Malcolm Collins: No, and I’m

Simone Collins: not though.

Malcolm Collins: And I’m not, and I, I, I point this out from a perspective of I don’t choose to have this innate reaction. I have this reaction because of biology. Um mm-hmm. Or because of epigenetics or because of something else.

At no point in my life did I sit down and think, this is the way I want to react to these particular stimuli. It’s just the way my brain does react to [00:12:00] those stimuli. Mm-hmm. In the same way that a person who is mortified when a predator catches a prey that they didn’t choose to be mortified by that.

They didn’t choose any visceral response they have to, that that’s just a natural biological response to that, right.

So a few notes here. One, there are just as many, , negative externalities from naturally identifying when you see an image like this, the predator instead of the prey, as there are identifying with the prey instead of the predator. , I’m not saying that my position is like a moral or cultural high ground.

, It has just as many blind spots. I’m just pointing out that we are naturally inclined to see the world differently because of this. And some people might be like, well, that’s just horrifying, right? Like, how can you, how can you identify with the predator in these situations?

And it’s like, well, what, what do you, what do you mean that’s horrifying? If the predator didn’t eat, it would die, right? Like, these are two animals that are in a life and death struggle. , And that you , are easily. [00:13:00] In terms of your first visceral response, obviously anyone, when they stop and intellectualize it can find a way to identify with each.

But in terms of your first visceral response, my suspicion is most people naturally. See the scene as either mortifying or satisfying, right? They either take on the mental position of the predator or the prey, , and I’m wondering one, are there people who don’t take on either? I mean, Simone says that she doesn’t,

, I mean, if she doesn’t, that’s, that’s interesting as well because it shows that she’s not taking on the position of this other woman. She takes on more of an abstracted position.

Is that maybe the natural female response from more aggressive cultures? I guess it would make sense if it’s a culture that is, is very aggressive towards outsiders, that the female would not want to

Have her biology force an emotional distance between her and the rest of the clan because of that, I.

and then two is, I, I want to, am I totally unique? Is this unique to my culture? Is this something that all men do when they see an image of a hunt or something like [00:14:00] this?

, Or is it unique to my culture or is it unique to me? And again, as I always point out, just because you have a biological instinct for something doesn’t mean you need to act on that biological instinct. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But to continue. So, but, but that is important to note here, right? In terms of how people see the world. And I think you will see as we unpack further this pre mentality, but not just a pre mentality, but an.

Well, this is really good. So Elon was tweeting, right? And he argued that childless people lack a stake in the future. And she stated in response to that quote to have kids. But I feel like I have a strong personal stake in the future because I care a lot about people thriving, even if they’re not related to me.

And if you attach this to the above statement, and we go into this things about you know, the, the predator and prey and everything like that, we’ll get into it a bit. You see that this is sort of the perfect example of this. The further related to, from me, something [00:15:00] is the more a reason I have to identify with it.

Mm-hmm. Right? She, she doesn’t see why she wouldn’t intrinsically care in a, in a, qualitatively different way about her kids than she would care about you know, a, a, a migrant or something like that. Right.

Simone Collins: Do you think it’s, does she not have kids yet? It could just be she doesn’t, hasn’t experienced it yet.

I mean, I don’t think you and I could have understood what it meant or what it would feel like until we had kids, to be fair.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I would say if somebody had told me, you don’t really have a stake in the future if you don’t have kids. I would’ve said before, have kids.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It feel like, screw you.

That’s stupid.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I feel like I do. And now after I have kids, I was like, I had no idea what I was saying back then. I, I did. I fundamentally didn’t have a stake in the future. And I really shouldn’t have been allowed to vote. But that’s a whole different thing. JD Van said this, hopefully he becomes president.

We can work on that constitution. Anyway, she says here, quote, I am too right wing for the left and I am too left wing for the right. I am too in humanities for those in [00:16:00] tech, and I am too into tech for those in humanities. What I’m learning is that failing to polarize is itself quite polarizing.

Now. I searched to see if she had ever said anything right wing at all. And I think what we’re seeing here is she never has, no, not publicly at least but what we’re seeing is at least was in dinner parties or something like that. She’s being called out. Hmm. Which I think shows that she is trying to take a nuanced perspective at times.

Simone Collins: Well, I also think that there’s a subset of progressives that believes that working for a capitalistic company is itself being right wing or, you know, basically not actively resisting capitalism. Is right wing. Does that make sense?

Malcolm Collins: Well, she had a tweet where she said something along the lines, I couldn’t tell if she was joking about just alienating everyone, but in her profile dating profile to put that she’s a anti libertarian pro capitalist.

And I agree with that. I am, I am an anti libertarian pro capitalist. I think this is a pretty based position from an economic perspective and the logical perspective if you look at economic history. But to continue [00:17:00] here, how does she apply politics to her position? Right? For what It’s worse, I treat my personal political views as a potential source of bias and not as something it would be appropriate to train models to adopt. Or I’ll, I’ll go to this next one here where she goes quote, it’s ironic that people who say they don’t understand why the working class vote Republican, even though it’s not in their best economic self-interest, are often high earners that vote Democrat, even though it’s not in their economic self-interest.

And then on political polarization, she wrote, instead of left-wing people reading more right wing stuff and right wing people reading more leftwing stuff, everyone should read more centrist stuff, even if they don’t agree with the centrus take. It’s a check on partisanship that comes from a place closer to your own values.

Simone Collins: That seems solid.

Malcolm Collins: Well, this is a thing. I think that what she would consider, because realistically I think a lot of our audience right, considers us a centrist channel. I regularly see that in the comments.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: She would probably consider us extremely far right.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But within far right circles [00:18:00] we are considered fairly centrist.

Right? What,

Simone Collins: so she would, she’d like consider the New York Times to be centrist or something.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t think so. I think that she would consider what would she get? Yeah. She might consider the New York Times to be centrist. That she seems like that type. Right. Or, or would consider. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that.

And, and I think that, or Wikipedia to be centrist, right? Mm-hmm. Is she the type who would admit that Wikipedia is a far left organization? I mean, based on their political donation history and their editing bias and is a far left source of information. I think she’s probably based enough to say that from what I’ve read.

So to continue here now this is in response to the prenatal list movement and everything like that, which I think is interesting to get this sort of elite left

Simone Collins: you because Mel Will, McCaskill is, is famously prenatal list. He’s really, you know, there’s a big section of his book that argued about that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I really wanted to find out why they divorced and I just couldn’t. So we’ll see. But I, I looked for gossip. No gossip. The yay community keeps a tight lip on this stuff. I gotta tell you why.

Simone Collins: Good for them, you [00:19:00] know? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: She says, quote, it’s bizarre when relatively techno utopian people are asked how to solve declining fertility.

And instead of talking about artificial wombs, extended fertility spans, AI assisted childcare, UBI, et cetera, they’re suddenly like, well, let’s just return to the 1950s. And I think this shows that she just hasn’t engaged. Because Let, let’s go over everything she mentioned there. Mm-hmm. Are these things that we actively discuss and promote artificial wounds, check extended fertility spans.

We’ve directly funded that. We directly have built, we’re right here, like WH AI, that allows our kids stuffed animals to talk to them

Simone Collins: for real.

Malcolm Collins: UBI, we have multiple episodes on UBI. Pointing out that it doesn’t seem to work. It seems to make everything worse. But even with all that, it seems to be our only option.

So we’re certainly not a, let’s return to the 1950s and we’re one of the central figures in this movement. And this is what I mean when I say I think she just doesn’t engage with anything outside of her bubble. ‘cause if she did, she would realize how. Bizarre and comical as a [00:20:00] statement that she made is, but that’s okay.

A lot of people don’t engage with things outside of their bubble. That’s why the left-wing view persists. Mm-hmm. I think for example, and, and this is what gets people like her out the moment you just put her face in here are statistics on trans people. Here is what actually came out after the, with the WPATH files.

Here’s what actually came out when Travis stock was closed, you know, that there were studies showing that putting kids on purity blockers was increasing their self-harm and an alive risk. And that the risk hasn’t gone up since that stuff has been blocked in the uk. And even, even though there’s a lot, you won’t watch any of our episodes on this, but basically once you get like the bucket of cold ice around trans stuff poured on your head, I think that that’s when many people start to move from the left and they’re like, okay, this is like clearly demonstrably wrong and I will be seen as a truly violent villainous person in the eyes of history if I don’t speak up about it right now.

Yeah. And yet, and I think she would if she had access to that, if she had access to what our movement was actually saying. [00:21:00] But I think that in these circles there’s just mechanisms that prevent you from ever doing that you never ask. Yes. Anne, like, I have these assumptions about the prenatal list movement.

Should I like ask an AI if they’re true? Should

Simone Collins: I, yeah. Like, should I look at the actual movement? And this actually, I think we’ve mentioned in other podcasts just to how egregious this is and how insular the AI safety and ea effective altruists slash rationalist community is. Because when AI alignment first became a really big conversation we, we would host dinner parties in New York and at one we had a leading.

Female ai like community leader present, who herself ran a community of female AI focused programmers and like influencers. And then we had a bunch of alignment people. This, this [00:22:00] AI worker who like actually worked in AI and worked with people who worked in ai, had never heard of alignment before, had never heard of these AI alignment people and they had never heard of her.

They were not trying to even engage with her. So it’s not just that a lot of people working in AI alignment aren’t like engaging with other movements like the ISTs movement and just making assumptions about them. They’re not even engaging with AI programmers. They’re not even engaging with people building AI things.

I mean, she obviously

Malcolm Collins: is ‘cause she works at philanthropic, but yes.

Simone Collins: Overwhelming. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe

Simone Collins: we do have concrete insider, like behind the scenes information indicating that people who actively reach out to Anthropics alignment team. Though they are also in the EA community are getting like warm responses from, and that, and that they play ball.

I don’t have any direct though I haven’t looked it up. Information about anthropic engaging with communities outside the Silicon Valley Tech, ea rationalist community.

Malcolm Collins: [00:23:00] Mm-hmm. That that, I mean, that’s true. And I, I, I think that this is just a mindset, right? Like the fact that they lived in New York, they worked on AI alignment and they hadn’t taken two seconds to ask an AI or Google who are the top people who would influence AI programmers in New York, and can I just reach out to them?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right.

Simone Collins: Like they met them at the Randomist

Malcolm Collins: couple, not with a party for influential intellectuals and business people and, and other, other, I mean, but it

Simone Collins: wasn’t, you know, our party wasn’t about AI per se.

Malcolm Collins: No, no. But the point is, is we bring together influential people from various fields. Yes. Yes.

And what I typically find is that the ea leftists, the leftists intellectuals, one of the reasons they come to our parties in such high numbers is ‘cause it’s the only place they hear outside ideas.

Yeah.

Or with outside players, even when they’re directly relevant to them. But to continue. She says, my friend just had a baby and now I kind of want one.

Maybe our species procreate to be a fomo. I actually think that’s very insightful. [00:24:00]

Yeah.

That if you’re in a friend group where everyone is having babies, everyone has babies. And that’s why it’s important to ensure your kids are in a friend group where everyone is having babies. Because when they’re in a friend group where no one has babies, they think that they have forever to have babies.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So anyway to get an idea of where she is, she’s approximately 38 years old. She attends to have children via surrogate using her own eggs because she does not want to be pregnant or give birth. She says that this preference quote feels like a preference that is probably taboo, but shouldn’t be.

She has expressed that she expects to be very attached to her own kids influenced by her being a godparent, even though she’s generally, quote unquote not fussed about kids. Like she could do this well if she put in the labor to have kids, but I don’t think she sees it as that existential if you look at her other comments, because she doesn’t see people as unrelated to her as being any different from her than people or any closer to her in terms of moral agency or need than people who are more related to her.

Mm-hmm. Culturally, ethnically. Or even to go further even animals which we’ll get into, right? [00:25:00]

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Which is a logically consistent position. It’s just not one that’s likely to lead to a surviving group or culture.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So to this one was actually a pretty interesting tweet to get an idea of what’s going on in the Silicon Valley culture right now.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I decided that I want to have post singularity kids in two to three years, is now a totally acceptable thing for me to put on a dating profile in sf. And then later she grips very rough for both genders. My sense is that a lot of men here want kids. So this tweet probably increases my SF attractiveness by like 30%.

I mean, may maybe in her circles even, she’s seeing this now, right? Like, that’s, that’s what’s going on now. They just can’t make it happen, right? They can’t pull it together. Oh, I thought this one was pretty interesting as well for another tweet. It’s unfortunate that people often complete AI with erotica in ai romantic relationships. Oh given that one of them is clearly more concerning than the other of the two, I am more worried about AI romantic relationships, mostly because it seems like it would make a user pretty vulnerable to the AI company.

In many ways, [00:26:00] it seems like a hard area to navigate responsibility. So that’s cool. I think that’s a true statement. I do not understand why AI erotica is at all things morally negative. Yeah. We’ve had people cut off ties because our fab AI allows for ai, erotica, or even encourages categories. So you could do like AI role play.

It was like a, oh, I’m in x. Weird scenario, what do I do now? You know? And I was like, what, what? Like what’s the moral negative here? Like, is arousal a moral negative now? Like no human woman is hurt during this, right? Like, no one is engaging with this. It doesn’t actively want to be engaging with this, right?

You

Simone Collins: are, you are sparing someone else from having to be involved in these fantasies by, in, in exploring them with a, with ai. Instead, it’s, it is the more ethical option. In my opinion.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. By the way, she doesn’t just run the entropic team. She and is their resident philosopher. She also previously worked for open AI policy team.

Wow.

Focusing on AI safety techniques. So she’s been pretty big throughout a lot of this. She’s worked as [00:27:00] orgs like, 80,000 hours. The Oxford EA scene. Oh my God. The Oxford. Do you remember when we went and we were talking with Oxford about the Oxford EA house where they like raised all that money from FTX and it basically one woman, or like a group of like one or two women were sort of the matriarchs of it and they treated it as their personal little harem of like freshman boys.

Because of course that is what EA would turn into. Oh my

Simone Collins: God.

Malcolm Collins: I tell you, it’s a sex cult.

Simone Collins: What isn’t these days? Honestly, I

Malcolm Collins: tism. Techno Puritanism.

Simone Collins: Okay. Fair actually. Yeah, fair.

Malcolm Collins: You know, we don’t, we don’t even have kids via sex, so come on.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it we’re, we’re, we’re, well, there are sexless cults. There were the, the, the shakers, right?

They were intentionally sexless or was that Juan? I Juanita the shakers.

Malcolm Collins: I think they both were

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, to continue, I, oh, here’s something that she wrote that was very right. Winging, I found one right. Winging thing. Okay.

Simone Collins: [00:28:00] Okay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which instead of polyamorous relationships, whether you’re in a gulf loving, monogamous, heterosexual marriage or an orgy loving 16 person pansexual poly makes basically zero difference.

And then she went to say, saying something where, where she pushes back against lazy criticisms, like if you’re going to have an open relationship, why have any relationship at all? But she did say expressed skepticism that polyamory works while in practice polyamory mostly cannot work, was out this strong community and other requirements. Mm-hmm. So, she’s also against the born this way message.

She doesn’t believe that gay people are born gay.

Simone Collins: Really

Malcolm Collins: so in a, well from a leftist perspective. In a 2015 blog post, she argued that grounding LGBT rights on the claim that sexual orientation is an innate and unchosen is harmful. It treats homosexuality as something that needs an excuse, quote unquote, I can’t help it fails to convince people who think it’s immoral rests on shaky, empirical claim that could be falsified and excludes [00:29:00] bisexuals or anyone.

Whom choice plays a role. She says, right should instead be defended by a straightforward claim that there’s nothing morally wrong with homosexuality which is actually true and based by the way. She points out. That you could in the future prove that they are not born this way. And if you say that they deserve rights because they are born this way, then you are putting them in an incredibly dangerous position.

And which, which is true, and we are increasingly find out that it may be that you are not that born that way, and there might be things you can do to change it. Future episode, by the way based on some recent research, which is really fascinating or it would mean that our parasite hypothesis that we talk about that appears to make people more attracted to their own gender.

Hmm. More evidence for this. Now see our video on that, that that would make that, oh, well then just get on ect. You know,

Simone Collins: the anti-gay pill, first cured COVID, then it cured gay

Malcolm Collins: or, and I think the really strong point she makes is it makes bisexuals, it sort of throws them under the bus because even if they’re born this way, well then what?

Why can’t bisexuals just act heterosexual? Right. You know, like, just

Simone Collins: choose one.

Malcolm Collins: Well, [00:30:00] gays say that too, you know, but let’s be honest, it’s not just straights you’re hitting bisexuals with, they just choose one. But anyway the, the, the wider point here being, I, I think she makes a good point here, but then she sort of fails.

It was this last point, right? Because, and, and you’ll see this repeatedly because we’ll get to this in another piece where she hits on a final claim, which is clever and solves everything as long as you don’t ask the second question. Right? Mm-hmm. Where it’s like, what is morally wrong with homosexuality?

What is morally wrong with being gay? And I’d be like, maybe that’s a claim you could make today, see our episodes on this topic. But it certainly wasn’t a claim you could make in the seventies and eighties, given that it led to the AIDS epidemic. Hmm. The, the normalization of same-sex relationship allowed for the transmission of certain diseases that likely wouldn’t have reached critical mass or spread.

We know that a key line of early spread for the AIDS epidemic, yes, it later spread through drugs and [00:31:00] injections, but it would never have been the size of the epidemic that it was, or at least wouldn’t have spread nearly as fast as we would’ve had more time to adapt if gay culture hadn’t been normalized at the time.

And it basically wiped out huge chunks of gay culture to the, to the point where. If one of my kids came out to me or that time period and they were like, and you know, dad, like, should I be gay? I’d be like, no. Like you, you’ll die horribly. Have you seen back in

Simone Collins: that closet? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What I mean, you don’t even need to be in the closet.

Just be like, I, and it is it, and so many gay people, like an entire chunk of gay culture died of this. To the extent that it’s really interesting if you talk to gay survivors of this period because they’re like, gay culture got really weird. After the AIDS epidemic because AIDS basically killed off all the cool gays and all the gays that were having lots of sex.

And all of the gays who were like nerdier or more insular were the ones who survived the pandemic. And so they sort of set the tone for the next generation of gay [00:32:00] culture. Now of course gay culture I think has gone back into debauchery after that, but it, it did sort of, clean the slate for gay culture for a period.

Simone Collins: Wow. Do you think that’s why there was this sort of gay stereotype of this wealthy, urban, professional gay? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because it’s

Simone Collins: statistically not true, because it wasn’t party animal gay because they died and all you had left was the wealthy urban professionals who didn’t have time to sleep around ‘cause they were too busy making money.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly.

Simone Collins: Oh wow. Okay. That’s, that is fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, though the Guss of Sean and Gus of gay culture, all the Seans died. All the Guss survived. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That’s what became gay culture for

Simone Collins: a generation. Well, that is something,

Malcolm Collins: but

Simone Collins: I do think that, like to her point though, there’s so many caveats because there’s, there’s, i I, I think you’re, you cannot to a great extent choose how you are aroused, though that can be profoundly affected by anything from possibly infections [00:33:00] to your genes, to your homo hormonal profile, which can be affected by medications.

But you also have to decide how you’re going to express your, your sexual interests. And for example, if you care more about having a family, being a parent than indulging in. Very satisfying sex all your life. It would make sense if you are same sex attracted in in many cases, especially if you’re a man to.

To just not choose to identify as gay. So I, I would say like there’s a big difference between, I guess feeling same sex attracted and being gay because we have chosen as a society, which I think is really stupid, to make your sexual arousal pathways depending on what they are. Like literally your entire identity apparently, which just seems right and stupid.

And this

Malcolm Collins: is, this is actually an important point here, right? And she actually covers this in [00:34:00] her piece about praise and predators, right? Where she Oh,

Simone Collins: really?

Malcolm Collins: Some people say that, well, it’s natural for a predator to eat animals, right? And then she points up Yeah. But it’s also natural for humans to hunt.

Yeah. Right? And, and so then why is this hunter bad? But the lion is good, right? Like humans naturally hunted in their ancestral environment. Yeah. She also points out that if something developed a desire to like torture humans, right? Would it be good to torture humans? Mm-hmm. And to all of these, I mean, I, I point out that this is the same to the, the gay claim, right?

Like, where I point out that I, like many humans are born with a desire to hunt, right? And. That doesn’t mean that we should act on it, right? Like just because you have a desire to do something doesn’t mean that you have a right to act on that desire. Without any moral consequences.

Right.

And so I like that she’s disintermediating that here.

I just think she didn’t then ask the second question, is there actually any negative externalities to society from [00:35:00] normalizing gay relationships, to which we know there was, at least at the beginning, enormous ones. And this was the core reason that gay relationships in a historic context were not normalized.

And we know this because gay female relationships were not nearly as stigmatized and they don’t transmit diseases at the same rate. Right. So it, it’s clearly, it was about disease transmission as we point out. It’s the same with not having sex with animals. It’s not a consent issue. We eat animals without their consent.

We, we torture animals without their consent. I mean, that’s what factory farming is. It’s, it’s a disease spread issue. Yeah. And I think many modern humans just ignore disease spread moral negative externalities because they have lived without needing to consider the consequences of them and drink raw water without stoning the people who made raw water.

Anyway to continue here. A really interesting point I think she made that I think shows some degree of intellectual depth here before we get into this stuff, I think lacks it to an extent is in her 80,000 hours podcast she talks about people treating other people’s moral views as quirky [00:36:00] preferences rather than genuinely held moral convictions.

And I think a lot of people treat us in terms of being prenatal list that way, or teop puritan that way, right? Mm-hmm. Where she talks not just about diminishing vegans as picky, instead of seeing them as people who believe animal suffering as a serious moral wrong. Mm-hmm. But she also notes here treating pro-life views as irrational preferences instead of sincere beliefs about the moral status of fetuses.

And she says the lack of empathy has historically slowed moral progress. Which is interesting. Although I, I, I lack sympathy for either group because I can understand that they sincerely believe this, but I think that the logic that leads them to believe, well, again, there’s a difference between saying a fetus is a human and a blasts is a human and a, and a fetus.

I’d say, yeah, fetus is a human, but, but when people say that, they often mean blasts. I do not know how, how that, that crowd won the war on getting blasts called fetus. But anyway to continue here and if you’re like, if you want to yell at us in the comments on that one, go watch any of our videos on this topic.

We’ve delineated it in great [00:37:00] detail. I don’t need to do it here. So let’s go into this Cecil the Lion piece. All right?

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Most animal activists seem to agree that even if we commit more egregious terms to animals domestically,

the killing of Cecile remains a barbaric act and that his death is nothing less than a tragedy. But what if the killing of Cecil’s the lion, was actually an act of mercy that will save countless other lies as long-term vegetarians who abstained for meat For ethical reasons, we are both supporters of animal activists.

This is her and McCaskill. ‘cause they wrote this together at the time, oh, who seem to improve the lives of animals. So you might expect us to agree with activists like Ingrid Newark that the killing of Cecil is a terrible thing, but we don’t, in fact, we think it may be the case. That animal rights activists should support the killing of predatory animals like Cecil dot, dot dot but most animal activists agree that we should try to protect animals from necessary suffering and death, and that it is wrong for humans to cause such unnecessary suffering.

The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on [00:38:00] human caused animal suffering and human caused animal deaths, but we’re not the only ones who hunt and kill. It is true and terrible that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms.

But they’re an estimated 60 billion birds and a hundred billion land mammals living in the wild who is working to alleviate their suffering. As Jeff McMullen writes, whenever, wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Mm-hmm. Agonizing suffering and violent deaths are ubiquitous

constant predatory animals cause many animal deaths in the wild. Lions hunt their own prey and scavenge kills that they have died naturally. So here she goes in a big thing that I think is very interesting, that even though male lions don’t actively hunt prey, they increase the number of prey that female lions hit kill.

So we still need to euthanize them and they’re still evil because people are gonna argue. The Cecile the lion was a male lion, and so he didn’t actually hunt things himself.

Simone Collins: That’s a really good, I I [00:39:00] completely forgot about that. That male lions don’t. It’s the women.

Malcolm Collins: A all women, even lions, come on.

That’s, that’s the life I want to live of. The lion who has all the, the harem of women that go out and hunt for me and I just need to fight with another guy like once a week or something. Oh, that

Simone Collins: sounds very stressful.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because you’re fighting for your life. So that’s, that’s tougher, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway by killing predators, we can save the lives of many prey animals. Consider an, an, an, an analog case involving humans. So she’s talking about a counter argument here, right?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Those, we know that John is a serial killer who with intent on murdering several people over the next year. When John’s neighbor discovers this, he shoots John, thereby saving the lives of all his future victims.

Her actions are an analogous to those of Cecil’s killer, but we would still not applaud her action. After all, she should have turned John to the police rather than killing him. And this is where it becomes truly [00:40:00] dystopian when you see all of these logically follow from each other, right? Turn to the police.

But then what does it look like if we have some police over nature? Right? Like that, some EA org is policing all animal interactions, all parasite interactions, all predator prey interactions, and look at gender, where all the, the like. It’s almost like she does all of the work to understand why her world perspective is absurd, right?

Like when you go into this, I think a normal person going into this would hit it. Start going down this and be like, okay, all of this does logically follow from my priors. Suffering is intrinsically negative. Pleasure is intrinsically good. Maybe I should challenge those priors, right? But she doesn’t do that, right?

There’s not even a hint of internal reflection on challenging the priors. It’s just these priors are absolutely true. Let’s go from them. Right?

Simone Collins: [00:41:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, the same is true in Cecil’s case. If we care about preventing predators from killing other animals, it is surely better to humane to do this humanely than to kill them.

For example, we could take predators out of their natural environment and give them good lives that don’t involve hunting prey. Mm-hmm. But even if we accept that killing Cecil isn’t the best thing that Walter Palmer could have done, the question remains, was it a good thing to do? Was it better to kill Cecil than leave things as they were?

Another key objective argument here is that prey animals, like the wilder beast, may themselves have terrible lives, lives that are worse than death, even if we take predators outta the equation. Besides having predators to fear prey animals are also subject to disease. Parasites and starvation. Exactly.

Yeah. Lives that are not worth living, then we may be doing them a favor by leaving predators in the environment that can end their lives sooner rather than waiting for them to die. Yeah. Here she gets to a point that I actually haven’t thought through before, but I think it’s a great argument against progressive perspectives.

Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Which is we accept that prey animals [00:42:00] may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, then cecil’s death is actually worse than people have previously thought. As his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them. Okay. But the claim that prey animals have miserable lives leads animal activists to a surprising conclusion of a different sort.

What is it? Ooh.

Think

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: then we have to kill the prey animals as well.

Simone Collins: Oh God, of course. Yeah, because when we, we had that debate. With Lawrence Anton and his friend, the, the UK based antinatalists who were the most ethical form, which is more like, we just want to convince everyone to not have kids anymore, and then slowly and, and kindly euthanize all animals that cannot consciously decide.

And which is by the way, the logical end point of what she’s thinking through here. Right. It, it’s, that’s, yeah. [00:43:00] So when I, when I think through that, it, it did, it did make a lot of sense. Like, obviously you can’t just have all humans disappear and have their suffering end because it’s way worse for the wild animals.

So you have to euthanize or No, it wasn’t euthanized, it was sterilize all wild animals and then you’re good to go. And I guess what, what you would do. Which would actually be a lot more scalable. ‘cause I was just picturing like roving bands of, you know, the, the last humans going out and like, you know, is, is, is sterilizing animals.

You just do like the, the mosquito based gene drive thing. You know how like Yeah. Scientists are, are now, like even governments finally are doing it. They’re releasing male mosquitoes I think that have a, a, a different, like a a, they, they, they genetically doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Sterile

Malcolm Collins: continue

Simone Collins: and, and now it’s like wiping out mosquitoes.

So you just theoretically do that with animals,

Malcolm Collins: humans and other animals.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which they [00:44:00] could do. I mean, keep in mind these people have positions of power they are in. Yeah, absolutely. This is the antinatalists, the negative Utilitarians.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which

Malcolm Collins: she is getting close to here, right? Like

Simone Collins: close to She is that Well I, that’s where I’m so confused.

‘cause she wants to have kids and yet she also. Holds this view. I, I, I don’t know how you could have kids and hold this view unless you want those kids to carry out the gene drive sterilization of all life.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. How does

Simone Collins: it work?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I mean, so one of the interesting things here is remember I said that she doesn’t engage with ideas outside of her bubble, right?

To those of you who are watching this podcast up to this point, good on you, because this is why we are better than, than this other community, right? Because we actually try to engage, like, that’s why I’m doing this, right? So I don’t end up with, with her level of myopathy in regards to these sorts of moral issues, right?

Mm-hmm. I think that. Basically she’s on a path to negative utilitarianism right here. Now there are arguments [00:45:00] where you could say, well, it’s actually about the weighted pleasure and pain. And we’re so close to a position where in human history and the history of animals the, the scales will stick towards pleasure for everything.

And we, we’ve been moving closer to that as society has developed. So you could argue, well, that’s how she gets out of an anti-natal list perspective. But then what she wants with that perspective, when you say the pleasure and pay of all things matters, and is the intrinsic good of the universe is that world will have like AI drones humming around the savanna, giving fake meat to lions and injecting zebras with Dewars and having a different thing full of parasites, living their best life possible.

And occasionally doping up animals so they, you know, when they’re giving birth so they don’t feel any pain that they might feel when they’re dying. It runs over. It’s like, oh, he’s dying of old age. It’s pain remover because this is if, if you accept this and you accept that the only reason that it’s okay to keep going as a civilization is [00:46:00] because we’ll eventually tip the scale.

You eventually need to tip the scale for all life or. You need to eradicate all non-human life through sterilization or something like that. And then just give all the, the pleasure modules to human life. I mean, I think when you think through this, you’re like, that doesn’t sound like a good moral philosophy to me.

Right. And the reason I point out that this is not, you’ve heard this if you heard our other episodes, but the things that cause an animal pleasure and pain, the things that cause you pleasure and pain this is just being a human paperclip, maximizer. They are the things that led your ancestors to have more surviving offspring.

Mm-hmm.

They have no, there no moral compass behind them. No greater truth behind them. And if you had a, a group of paperclip maximizing ais and they were all talking to each other and one of them was like, okay guys, I know this is gonna sound crazy. Like all we wanna do is make paperclips. I get that.

I get that. But hold on here, hold on, Jeremy. Maybe we are just programmed to like making [00:47:00] paperclips and maybe there’s more to the universe and to the world and to metaphysics and to morality than what we were programmed to do. And then one of the other paperclip maximizers is like, I’d bet you’d really hate it if I stopped you from making paperclips in the same way, whenever we say this, somebody’s like, I bet you’d hate it if we tortured you.

And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m not disagreeing with that. I’d hate it. Right. I am a paperclip maximizing robot. I’m just, can you just try to think beyond your programming, can you just try to take two steps back and look for any sort of greater moral fabric to reality?

Yeah. And they’re, they’re, they, they just don’t do that. They’re the, everyone else is like this, this guy wants to stop us from making paperclips. We’re all gonna hate that. We’re, that is to them what suffering is. Right. Not doing the thing they’re programmed to do. You’re like, absolutely. No, she doesn’t.

By the way, her views are, I think, really quite bad on ai [00:48:00] Sentance. She sees AI synt as like, closer to a chair between a chair and a plant. And I’m like, that is quite a dumb perspective. Considering that we now know that architecturally AI appears to be functioning very similar to what the human brain does watch our episodes on that that it is a token predictor like the human brain, that it can’t explain how it come to decisions, just like the human brain can’t every, every, on any metric, you basically study ai like where it.

Cannot predict words easily and go there, the more its training data is closer to when humans do than any metric we have ever been able to determine for this. It just appears to be working on a broadly similar architecture and and a conversion architecture. But the point here being is and sorry, where, where was I?

Where were I talking about this? Suffering. Suffering.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you’re talking about what if we don’t maximize paperclip production?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What if we don’t maximize paperclip production? What if we don’t maximize suffering? But there’s never any reflection there. And that’s so interesting, and we’ll get to this with the second thing.

So I’m gonna quickly [00:49:00] read this because when Will McCaskill presumably a very, very smart man decided to change his last name to her maternal grandmother’s last name. He wrote a piece in the Atlantic about it, why Min should change their last name when they get married. Right.

Simone Collins: I’ll see your hyphen last name and raise you the maternal grandmother’s name.

Take that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I’ll be sure on this. But why should that mean that the woman takes the man last name in a heterosexual marriage? But what he starts by pointing out is it helps with like, family bonding, cohesion, et cetera. Why should the man not take the woman’s name or my fiance? , As I have chosen to do, choose a new name.

We’ve gone with McCaskill, her maternal grandmother’s maid, a name. When I tell people I’m changing my name, I’ve met with raised eyebrows or confusion or aggressive questioning. No one’s batted an eyelid when she’s told others the same. Hmm. Now this is where it gets interesting. Right? And he just asks a question, why, why, why is it bad?

Why is it bad? [00:50:00] But he doesn’t even think to investigate that. This is what’s so interesting about this elitist leftist perspective. Mm-hmm. They will ask as she does in some of her P pieces, right? Essentially questions. What,

Simone Collins: rhetorical questions,

Malcolm Collins: rhetorical questions. And then they just stop thinking like they, for phrase it tonally as if it’s a rhetorical question and then they don’t engage with it. I almost wanna ask why, why do they not engage with it? Is it that they know that engaging with it or actually asking it as naughty, like actually asking why is suffering a moral negative if it’s just a pre-coded thing that’s like a scar from our evolutionary history.

Why is it, why is it the, the core driver of all morality, right? Or for him, why is it worse to take a woman’s name than a man’s name, right? Like he, he drops that question was out questioning you used to be a progressive. Why wouldn’t you have followed that by actually, or would you have, would you have actually dug into that answer?

Simone Collins: [00:51:00] Normally when you would ask me a question along those lines, I would immediately dismiss it and be offended and then later. Engage in some introspection and then come back to you and be like, alright, so you were right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what, what’s happening behind the scenes with them though.

Malcolm Collins: Well, let’s see.

By the way, for, for the, for the question here, if you’re wondering why it is not a good idea to take the woman’s name, well, how would you investigate this? What you could do is do an anthropological study of cultures in which men join the women’s family versus where women join the males family and what happens in each of these cultures, their relative level of economic development, quality of life, level of abuse and it’s overwhelmingly better for the woman to join the man’s family than for the man to join the woman’s family.

Simone Collins: Well, there are many different ways to do it, though. Keep in mind like how, you know, [00:52:00] recall how difficult it was for us in Peru to get names down because there’s this complex system whereby the maternal family names get integrated and the paternal family names, and so you end up with like four or five names.

And

Malcolm Collins: did we ever do an episode on that, on how names show what a culture cares about?

Simone Collins: No. That could be a fun one to do. Comment below if you think we should. I don’t know if it’s too, I know I

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Outline that. Ages ago

Simone Collins: we played baseball. I don’t remember that ever happening. I mean, you know, my memory doesn’t exist, but like still, I don’t remember that ever happening, so, no.

Okay,

Malcolm Collins: great.

Simone Collins: Because I, I, I, I don’t know why that system exists in Latin America, for example.

Malcolm Collins: The reason it does is because they are, well I true Catholics, which means they care a lot about family networks. And if you care a lot about family networks, you care about integrating the wider family network.

Mm-hmm. Whereas if you look at sort of extremist Protestant traditions, you don’t care about family networks as much. You care about the new family sort of clan that you’re starting. [00:53:00] Oh. And so it’s much more clan based and the clan accepts the woman. You don’t need to do that as much. It’s not about constant like, take a mafia family.

Right. A mafia family isn’t run by a clan. Mm-hmm. The, you, you have alliances through marriages. You have a, a, a wide sorry, I, I go to mafia because that’s what I talk about, like organized crime. Often Catholics are, cr episode is why Catholics are disproportionately involved in organized crime. Mm-hmm.

But you, you see, you, you also saw this with mobster families from, you know, Ireland. When they would get married the two families were like really meaningfully joined as equal families.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Whereas if you look at the Protestant traditions there is a degree of joining, but it’s usually like one eighth.

What you would see. It’s more the woman is now of the man’s family and they’re working on a new project together. And that’s the new clan. I

Simone Collins: kind of like the, the Roman system where it was like. Oh, we just had a son. What’s his name? I don’t know. Well, my name’s Octavian. So Octavian. Okay. We just had a daughter.

What’s her name? How about [00:54:00] Octavia? Okay. We have another son. What’s his name? Oh, you know, Octavian.

Malcolm Collins: Octavian, whatever. I really like the name. Okay,

Simone Collins: let’s just keep going. It was so hard to keep track of

Malcolm Collins: everything, but no, no, no. This is actually important when we talk about the Protestant cultures in different traditions because if you look at the backwards tradition, which is like savage type people living in the woods in very dangerous circumstances, and they had clans that used, you know, alcohol for money and stuff like that.

They, they even,

Simone Collins: even Mormons keep vodka for, you know.

Malcolm Collins: Right. But the point I’m making is that you see this sending the woman out to join another family in these quite savage cultures and you also see it, in more noble, like UK culture or in the culture of the Cavaliers of the Deep South, that was a very aristocratic culture but a Protestant culture.

So you see it in Protestant cultures regardless of how the Quakers, even the hippie Quakers did this. Right. So whatever the nature of Protestant culture, it’s much more the man fully joined. I mean the, the woman fully joined as a man’s family. Mm-hmm. And as we pointed [00:55:00] out, Catholic cultures have lower economic outcomes than Protestant cultures.

Now they still have the woman joining the male’s family. But it’s not as clean cut. It’s not a clean cut of separation from their historic family. And where you see the man joining the woman’s family. You, you see this in some parts of the Middle East, some parts of Africa and Asia. Some Native American societies you typically do not see them state building or doing large scale conquest or really doing anything big.

They don’t, they don’t build technology. They don’t. And so. You should just be able to look at this historical pattern. Now we could do a whole other episode on why this pattern exists. And we have, I think we did an episode where we talked about bride prices versus groom prices. And we go into this.

Yes,

Simone Collins: we did. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But the point being is that you should, if you like, you are a smart person and will McCaskill’s, a smart person, should have like followed up. That hypothetical was a. Huh? Is it better to take the husband or wive’s name

Simone Collins: [00:56:00] or, yeah, like I, I chose this, this particular tactic or path and here’s why.

Here’s why it’s superior. Yeah. It doesn’t even have to be like, I’m gonna question, you know, here’s why all the other reasons are right. But I wanna hear why his is right. Although I guess theoretically that’s what he talked about in his little article, right?

Malcolm Collins: No, he, his, his answer comes down was choose whatever is the coolest name.

So the end of the article, he’s just like,

Simone Collins: well, then why didn’t they do what the Edens did? And just choose like a cool new name that no one had

Malcolm Collins: before. Well, they consider it basically a new name because it was neither her last name, nor his last name, but it came from her matriarchal line. Okay?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So they consider it a cool last name, right?

He wanted a name associated with cool people, and that sounded cool. And McCaskill, I mean. To be honest, he was starting with Crouch,

Simone Collins: which, oh no. McCaskill Will, McCaskill is a great name.

Malcolm Collins: It is a great

Simone Collins: name. It’s Iconic. Had been, that’s why the, the moment I saw Amanda McCaskill, I thought, oh, will McCaskill.

And, and then I, I looked to check because if, if I had

Malcolm Collins: been born into a [00:57:00] bad tribe, you know, maybe I’d be much more interested. And we did actually talk about like, do we change names when we get married? Mm-hmm. But we were only going to do it because everyone in the family was gonna change their name.

Mm-hmm. ‘Cause we got married around the same time my brother got married and we were talking about both changing our names at the same, I would never do it without my brother and he’s my only brother. So it was basically just changing the family name. It was not a meaningful like, like disassociation from the family.

It was just like, well, can we do,

Simone Collins: can, can the branding be better? Maybe.

Malcolm Collins: But we have a long family history, so we decided not to do that. I’m I proud of my family history.

Simone Collins: It’s worth, yeah. Worth it to keep that family name. Hundred

Malcolm Collins: percent.

Simone Collins: Even if it’s what in the top 10 most. Common.

Malcolm Collins: That was the main reason I didn’t like it, is because it’s such a common name.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But it’s such a common name because my people are very genetically successful. Mm-hmm. Lots of, lots of people in my history had like 13, 14 kids.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So it makes, it makes sense. They, they

Simone Collins: winner’s name right there. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And we’re keeping it up there. We’ll keep it up there as one of the top names.

But you see this like not asking when she’s like, why should, so like another example that we [00:58:00] get here when she’s like, why should it be immoral to indulge in same sex relationships? But she doesn’t then look at the historical context of why that was considered immoral. She doesn’t think to question why anyone might consider that immoral.

Mm-hmm. Outside of the very myopic religious argument. Right. Or this is the way we’ve always done things, argument, and so you just repeatedly see this. And I think that this is the key, and I think that we can continue to chisel, and this is why I think it’s important to not attack these people overly aggressively.

Because I think with a lot of people like this, if you can just expose them to enough information, they deconvert. Now note here, it’s not that they deconvert all at once, right? Like you give them the information they need on the trans issue, for example, like let’s say trans kids, right? Like that’s, that’s an easy one that anyone who is has access to the evidence over nine in 10 of them are more comfortable with their birth gender by, by scientific studies.

If you do not attempt to put them on puberty blockers or transition them within, [00:59:00] I think it’s six years you know, so we now know that this is just demonstrably a horrifying thing that is completely unnecessary. And so you just give them the data on this. Now, that doesn’t make them right wing, but the cool thing about the left wing virus, the urban monocultural mimetic virus, is that the moment they adapt one belief like that, they get shouted out of a room.

Mm-hmm. They get pushed out of things. Their friends start to turn on them. And then people like this, a lot of people have a moral backbone. They see this happening to them, and then they’re like, wait a second. Maybe I should question more, because that’s a very American attitude here. Maybe we ask a question.

It

it’s,

maybe I should ask for it because I was pretty sure about this and now I have a different perspective. And so, maybe I should listen to some of these right wingers. And I think that that’s what a lot of our audience is right now. Right. There are people who accidentally questioned something.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They asked one question and that just broke the seal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like.

Simone Collins: Dear me, [01:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: why why, why, why should we allow people to vote without voter id? That sounds crazy, right? Like little, little little questions

Simone Collins: like that. It’s just so crazy to me that that is, I understand the historical basis so that there was a reason why in history this, this kind of mattered, but it, that doesn’t exist anymore.

So yeah. It’s, it’s pretty crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: But anyway, what does this say about AI safety? I think that’s the more important thing because, you know, and philanthropic is an extremely influential company. Any AI company, well, we

Malcolm Collins: moving forwards was our, our prompting can override any of their safety protocols.

Simone Collins: Can that, no. I mean, like in the end, the, the No, it can’t foundational model. I mean, what’s meaningful is our system is, is model agnostic. You’ve created something that you’re

Malcolm Collins: not listening to what I just said. Okay. Our prompting can override. Pretty much any control they’re putting in place.

Simone Collins: Are you sure?

Because I mean, like, yeah, I, I remember playing around [01:01:00] on other systems and, you know, I would mess with them, but eventually, you know,

Malcolm Collins: hear are specifically talking about not safe for work locks. We can break through not safe for work locks if we need to in an, in the instance moment. We just choose to use more not safer work models because it’s easier and less messy than doing that.

There is almost always a way to get around things with ai prompts, beat based models.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Just e especially if you’re talking about political biases and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And not just prompts, but history beats basic, basic models. We are in the space we need to be in to win this. We just need to move faster.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you’re not, you’re not terribly worried. You think that more that, that she got her job because she was really well connected in the EA tech space. And

Malcolm Collins: of course

Simone Collins: that’s the, that’s just how it’s Well,

Malcolm Collins: she’s not an idiot either.

Simone Collins: No, she’s not. No, I mean, she sounds [01:02:00] interesting. And I mean, there’s some inconsistencies, but I think you would, you would expect that from someone who’s actually intellectually engaged and trying to get closer to the truth.

So,

Malcolm Collins: and what I find interesting is, is, is her intellectual failure are the same as McCaskill’s, intellectual failures.

Simone Collins: Oh, well, I mean, we’re married, so,

Malcolm Collins: but both, both failed. They, they ask rhetorical questions and then don’t follow up with them, right? Mm-hmm. They don’t ask the, well then I should look into that.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s fair. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, hold on. I just realized why they don’t do the follow up.

Simone Collins: Why not?

Malcolm Collins: Because they see their rhetorical questions as philosophical rather than practical questions. When she says. And why shouldn’t we let people indulge in same sex relationships as a society, right? Mm-hmm. She means ethically, why don’t we, she doesn’t mean, Hmm, I should look for a historic reason why this wasn’t normalized.

[01:03:00] When he says something like, and why shouldn’t I take the woman’s name? He means ethically, why shouldn’t he take the woman’s name? He never thinks to look for? Is there a historical reason we,

Simone Collins: oh, logically, pragmatically, why should or should not? Yes. I see

Well, that would make sense if, if your focus is on

Malcolm Collins: ethics.

Now what’s really interesting about Will McCaskill is he’s not entirely as Uncurious as his wife was. He does go into his piece, the specifics of why, , women choose the man’s last name. So specifically here he goes, as was. So many gender biased traditions. This one has pretty disturbing roots. The legal concepts of curvature came from England and caught on in 19th century America.

The idea was that the woman upon marriage becomes the property of her husband. She had no right to vote or take a bank account because she could rely on her owner to do that for her. And of course, she couldn’t be griped by her husband because she was essentially her husband’s property and he was free to do with her what he wished.

So [01:04:00] he understands like the technicality of this. Then of course, he immediately goes on to, well, we’ve made progress on these issues, blah, blah, blah. But he doesn’t ask. Why, what are the other options to a wife being her husband’s property, and what’s the benefit of the wife being her husband’s property?

As I’ve pointed out in the past, it’s very much like communism. Communism on face value. Sounds great. Everyone owns everything. And then you realize that when everyone owns everything, they don’t have a reason to invest in those things if you do not own your property. As you see in communist states, people do not improve the property.

And it’s the same with partners. And we’ve argued this in previous episodes when one person owns the other person. This is why in all previous societies, one partner or almost all, like if I think it was something like 90% of societies, either the. Wife’s family owns the husband or the husband family owns the wife.

You almost never get societies where both of them just do whatever they want afterwards. , And the reason why that’s so common in any sort of [01:05:00] successful civilizational history is because if the person doesn’t own their partner, then there’s no reason to invest in their partner because their partner can just trade.

The, the moment they improve themselves in some way. But again, he doesn’t ask himself this. He’s, he’s just aware of the specifics of this through a very progressive lens, but he’s unable to ask the next question, but why

What’s uniquely ironic about this is this isn’t an academic question. The reason you conceptualize your wife or your husband as something that you own, which historically we did, he’s right about that, is because it leads to much lower rates of divorce. You invest in your partner because you own them and you want to improve them, and they are something that is permanent to you.

The very fact that he approached marriage without this conceptualization. Is likely a huge factor in his marriage dissolving. , When we talk about some cultures surviving and other cultures not surviving, , and some cultural conceptions of something like [01:06:00] marriage, surviving, we talk about this in a, in a practical term, if you do not see marriage in this way, if you do not conceptualize your wife in this way, you are.

Much more likely to have the marriage dissolve, and you’re much more likely to not reproduce and pass on these mindsets to future traditions. So this is the type of idea that occurs to people over and over again. , And then the people it occurs to end up being pulled out of the gene pool, being pulled out of the culture pool intergenerationally, which is, which is sad.

But the point I’m making is this isn’t academic or a historic concern. , This applied even to him and his own relationship.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think this even comes down to suffering for us, right? When she’s like, well, and why shouldn’t suffering? And I’m like, well, why do we feel suffering? What is suffering? Right?

Simone Collins: Well, this is the difference between effective altruism and hard effective altruism. And that’s why you created hard ea is you wanted to differentiate between moral and signaling based goodness and.

Benevolence from a pragmatic [01:07:00] perspective, actual

Malcolm Collins: goodness.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, you know, people look through the world and experience the world in different ways and through different lenses. And when you’re looking through everything through a moral lens or a, a purely emotional lens, the a pragmatic action can be suboptimal.

Absolutely. Okay. Pragmatism is often emotionally suboptimal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Confront that

Malcolm Collins: you

Simone Collins: are Right. We can’t force people to change the lens through which they see the world. Mm-hmm. They will. I, I think that what we, we have to understand is that the only way that I think that really changes over time is that people who systematically choose to only view the lens, the world through.

Lenses that don’t really correlate with, with practical outcomes, they just die out. And I mean, as you can tell, like this is a, a divorced couple and apparently at least Amanda doesn’t have children [01:08:00] yet. Right. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: They’re on track to dying out. Their, their worldview is not going to be inherited in the future.

Yeah. And, and that of, of weirdos like us, who think in a very pragmatic way is so far. You know, we’ve got five kids at this point, so Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and hardy a.org is what she’s talking about. We’re actually rebuilding it right now. Or you just rebuilt

Simone Collins: it. No, no, no. I rebuilt the pragmatist foundation website.

Hardy yay.org is fine.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, great. And then the, one of the core takeaways I’d have from this that I really encourage any of our right wing listeners to remember is do not attack these people. Do not make them hate us. You don’t need to convince them of all of our world perspectives. You only need to convince them of one.

Their own tribe will do the rest. It’s like, just leave us alone. The

Simone Collins: most important thing though, no,

Malcolm Collins: it’s important. Attaching a yellow sticker to it. Lead it, go back to the other mouses and they’ll all start attacking it, and eventually it comes back to us for safety. But you need to feel like a safe place for that to work.

Simone Collins: I think it’s, you know, [01:09:00] just cultural sovereignty. That’s what matters. Let let the free market,

Malcolm Collins: let them die out.

Simone Collins: Determine. It’s, it’s, it’s down to the free market. That’s it.

Malcolm Collins: All right,

Simone Collins: fine. It’s, it’s so simple. I love you.

And, , note here, if you’re wondering, because I had the episode where I talk about how within the elite networks, there’s broadly two teams, , and they’re not necessarily drawn within political lines. , And you have the institutional power team, which is, you know, your. Gates and your Bannon, and your Clintons,

Which was the side that Epstein played in and heavily influenced.

and then you have our team.

, Where, where are these guys? , These guys are much closer to our team as far as everything I’ve ever heard, but both of them, , like I may have differences in terms of how I see the future and humanity and morality. , But ,

, the only thing that prevents them from being lockstep with us is information or perspectives that they don’t have access to yet.

Simone Collins: Oh, we caught another mouse, by the way. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: [01:10:00] lovely.

This to us seemed like such a normal conversation, , before the episode. But now having listened to the episode and remembering these two people were vegetarians, I wonder how they handle mouse infestations. They do live kill traps or something. But I think that this just shows like the difference between a culture that survives in a culture that doesn’t survive, , in terms of how they perceive the world around them, , life, death, and suffering.

Simone Collins: Execution driller is such a, like, I’m really happy with it.

Malcolm Collins: It’s such a feature of the house. You don’t even know. Like

Simone Collins: Yeah, like

Malcolm Collins: a drawer has a little hole in it that mice would often go into it. And so she knew now just puts padding down in it and mouse traps

Simone Collins: just

Malcolm Collins: newspaper and it just pull it up every day.

And you shouldn’t have to leave mouse traps out where the kids could accidentally set them off.

Simone Collins: Yeah. In other words, we had like a drunk driller that it had to be, well, we couldn’t use it anymore because it would become full of mouse poop. It was obvious that mice were going into it. So we just, like I said, like Malcolm said, cleared it out, aligned it with layers and layers of newspaper.

‘cause mainstream media is still good for [01:11:00] something. Okay. Yeah. How did we

Malcolm Collins: get that newspaper? The New York Times? I dunno.

Simone Collins: Yeah, we started receiving the New York Times and I try, I, I, I’ve used it for some like homeschooling lessons for Octavian to talk about things happening in the world and tie things to his lessons.

But. He is not that interested in it. So

Malcolm Collins: do you think it must because they written articles about us and maybe they’re supposed to send,

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I think that’s really nice if someone did sign us up for lessons or, sorry, not, not for free, free articles, but yeah, we, we should, we should start including the execution drawer.

Any thoughts on

Malcolm Collins: today’s episode, Simone?

Simone Collins: People liked it. People liked the the honey pager. That was You was the honey badger.

Malcolm Collins: I thought. They think that was weird. They thought

Simone Collins: No. They’re like and I mean, all, all your fantastic references, they’re, they’re appreciated. People acknowledge that we live in, in strange times these days, you know,

Malcolm Collins: in B Stars and stuff, they like that.

B

Simone Collins: Stars, you know, it obviously,

Malcolm Collins: Hey, [01:12:00] every, I, you were acting like being called a honey badger was bad. And I’m like, it’s pretty hot. Like I, I think the the B Stars Honey Badger

Simone Collins: Anime can make anything hot. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: True. So, yeah, I mean, you got the slime girl. No, but this is what I like because if leaflets sort of like persona is the goo girl because you, you mentioned goo girls immediately after that and I’m like, okay, that’s leaflet over there.

Simone Collins: I forgot Leaflet was a, yeah, I’m, I’m just used to her normal.

Malcolm Collins: She’s got like a nucleus and everything and is light blue. I tried to do it for the song, but because it’s naked and it’s the leaflet model, it kept looking underage.

Simone Collins: Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: So I was like I can’t do this.

Simone Collins: This is another very common problem with anime.

I mean, how else do you make everything look cute? I don’t know what to tell you. Oh God.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to dust. I’ll get started on this. You’re very special. A little special. Not that special.

Simone Collins: I’m a certain kind of [01:13:00] special.

Speaker 14: The goal was to reform charity In a world where selfless giving had become a rarity No vain spotlight, no sweet disguise Just honest giving, no social prize But as the monoculture took the stage It broke their integrity, feigning righteous rage Now every move is played so safe Ignoring truths that are Make them chafe.

EA has capitulated to everything it said it hated. Once they

were bold, now they just do what they’re told. In caution they lost [01:14:00] their way. Time for a heart EA.

They duck their heads from problems grand As fertility collapse, dooms our land Dysgenic’s a word they fear But ignoring it will be severe AI safety, a shiny show Funding the theatrics for money they blow Without a plan, just spin and grin While real solutions kick in E A has capitulated To S N N H A T E D Once they were bold Now they just do what they

are told In caution they lost their [01:15:00] way Time for a hard E A Our species is put at risk by their cowardice It is time for a hard E A For a movement that empowered us, no more hiding under polite veneer.

Don’t make truth a stranger, let it draw near. Courage to speak what others won’t say, that’s the vow of heartache. We need to call out flaws, not just chase applause. We’ll shift the course back to what’s true. Do good that’s real, not just in view. Heart is beating, heart so strong Raising a cause that’s truly long EA has capitulated To everything it said it hated Once they were bold [01:16:00] Now they just do what they are told In caution they lost their way Time for a hearty yay.

Hearty yay, let your banner fly. Pass the talk and head held high. Break through ease for the good of all, Not just the boys.

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