An opposition between altruism and selfishness seems important to Yud. 23-year-old Yud said “I was pretty much entirely altruistic in terms of raw motivations” and his Pathfinder fic has a whole theology of selfishness. His protagonists have a deep longing to be world-historical figures and be admired by the world. Dreams of controlling and manipulating people to get what you want are woven into his community like mould spores in a condemned building.
Has anyone unpicked this? Is talking about selfishness and altrusm common in LessWrong like pretending to use Bayesian statistics?
there is a common criticism of charities in general: these give some random unelected unaccountable Specialest Billionaire Boy, along with army of weirdos willing to catch a bullet for him, outsized influence over what might be millions of people. there’s also magic of money in that that big donors will be able to steer charities to serve their own goals, under threat of withdrawing funding
want to distribute resources from people who don’t need them to people who do? at scale? in a way that works? it’s called “welfare state with progressive taxation” but EAs don’t like taxing billionaires out of existence, because it takes away their control, and also takes away funding for machine god cult and ultimately makes them unimportant. my point is, some meanings of altruism don’t collide head on with being a libertarian control freak