> "There’s a suspicious correlation between the problems such people care about and the ones they get credit for caring about."
I think this is true for almost everyone, actually. But that's why something like the Effective Altruism movement is so strongly needed. It is, as far as I can tell, literally the *only* social movement in the world that seriously tries to make social credit match up with objective moral warrant and importance. Nobody else even tries. (Or else they have transparently absurd notions of objective warrant and importance!)
I wanted to drop a thank you for your dedication to writing about these topics. I don't always agree with you, but our views align more often than not. However, I'm not, for example, vegan or even vegetarian, despite agreeing that factory farming is horrific. I have a tendency towards empty virtue signaling with my lefty friends (I don't fit the left-right spectrum personally). I'm not as dedicated to EA causes in general as I'd like to be. Etc.
Reading your Substack is one factor in making me examine where my actions and values in these areas are misaligned. This post hit me like a ton of bricks and I did not like that.
Keep it up. You're influencing minds for the better. 🙏
Meg, don’t forget that all reduction in animal product consumption helps. Even if you’re not ready to be vegetarian or vegan, cutting out more chicken and eggs, for example, can still have an impact.
Those pedophiles who might want a child sex robot, if such a thing existed, can clearly get their jollies based on the huge amount of child-based manga pornography content online.
Providing them with this freedom seems like enough. If they had hypothesized child sex doll/robots to have sex with, I think they might encourage them to rape children, since repeated fantasies tend to lead to an attempt at reality.
There’s no direct human contact with child-based manga pornography.
As to whether it would encourage actual child rape, it’s very much an open question, considering that AFAIK rape fantasy roleplaying between consenting adults does not appear to encourage actual rape. The fantasy is good enough for them.
On the issue of caring more about dispossessed slave holders than slaves, slavery was often abolished with negotiated compensation to slaveholders, like in Jamaica or Cuba. Today, it’s fashionable to find this compensation offensive. But if you compare it to how slavery was abolished in the supposedly pure United States, it doesn’t look so bad. The civil war (1) razed the South, (2) killed millions of Americans and (3) led to the deaths by starvation of about 20% of slaves.
Even the loyalist slave states, in the midst of the Civil War, were unwilling to accept compensated emancipation when Lincoln proposed it. It is easy to see Confederates as merely self-interested economic actors, but in fact they were inveterate racists terrified of servile rebellion and deeply ideologically attached to their "peculiar institution."
This all seems... kind of made up? Where is the evidence that woke people don't do these things?
It obviously must be true of some people, because there are more people who are at least somewhat woke than there are vegans, or effective altruists. But in my experience, people who I'd describe as woke, and who fit your stated criteria, are *much* more likely to be vegan, and are also more likely to care about the global poor, and think carefully about their consumption choices in general. The only part that remotely lines up with my experience is that they do tend to be irrationally opposed to EA, probably because it's now vaguely associated with people like Musk, Altman, SBF etc.
Maybe there's a cultural difference between the UK and the US at play? But you hear the stereotype of the blue-haired vegan pretty often on the internet, including on American-dominated spaces such as reddit.
I am not aware of any non-anecdotal evidence about this, but I would genuinely be quite surprised if it supported your anecdotes rather than mine. In any case, though, without such evidence, where are these confident assertions about the values and behaviour of woke people coming from, given that they at least seem non-obvious?
Reminds me of the scene in "Am I Racist?" where Matt Walsh gives five bucks to the black guy in the room as "reparations" and all of a sudden Robin DiAngelo is visibly upset at the prospect of doing the same thing herself.
Ummm.. That was kind of justified. She can't exactly normalize asking her for reparations. Let's assume she has $10 million in liquid assets, a pretty high number for a career academic. There are enough Black people in the US that it's impossible for her to give them all any meaningful sum of money. The amount of money she could give each of them is as empty as the usual woke language games are.
The difference between wokeness and EA is that EA has organizations that allow tiny individual donations to translate into meaningful achievements.
So if you can't give every deserving person in existence some certain amount, an amount which you haven't even specified, then you shouldn't bother giving any charity to anyone at all? What sort of insane troll logic is this?
The wokes might be wrong, but I don't think it's insane.
I kind of addressed the flaw in the woke discomfort with individual action.
The great thing about EA organizations and charities is that they allow individual actions to have a meaningful impact. The woke person sees racism writ large as the problem they're addressing and correctly realizes that they can't do anything about it. So they resort to empty gestures and word games despite the emptiness of those gestures.
An effective altruist frames their donation as saving a life or directly alleviating suffering. This makes small actions and donations a lot more meaningful.
I like your comparison of the woke to the Pharisees. Modern-day Pharisees is a comparison I haven't seen before but would probably be extremely effective as a critique of them.
I think the single fundamental difference that covers all the ones you list (though your list is good, and highlights some of the specific distinguishing aspects that people who say "can you even DEFINE woke?" rhetorically ask) is this:
- "woke" is about acquiring power, and incidentally they discovered "awake" (as you label them) theories were convenient justifications for that, whereas "awake" is about figuring out what good things might be, (perhaps erroneously) and then incidentally perhaps acquiring power to accomplish that, but if someone else wants to accomplish it with their power, that works too.
At least for me, this has worked as a litmus test to differentiate the two groups, with the added benefit that (with different labels) it works on the right-wing version of purity (both implications of the term) politics too.
"the hundreds of millions of people living on less than two dollars a day never seem to cross the mind of the typical woke person."
Not only do they not care, they're actively working to make more people live in absolute poverty by virtue of promoting socialism since it's fashionable nonsense. But most people on the far left are even more anti-science and anti-knowledge (empirical) than the average person.
Woke originally meant something more specific that awareness of social injustice. It later broadened to a *general* awareness of social injustice and then to a hyperawareness of social injustice (microaggressions). This happened because the sociocultural environment in which being woke was beneficial and adaptive changed to one where it was not. It probably would have faded out but then we got the CPP (see link 2) and that injected steroids into it and here we are. I'm still optimistic that that this too shall pass.
I don't know whether the problem has been illuminated here in a way that sheds more light than heat. All I know is, we live in an extraordinarily brutal and violent civilization, and most of us are grasping at straws for some sense of humanity and emotional wellbeing most of the time, even in so called "rich countries".
Even in the United States, the "richest" country of all, the streets are war zones, you take your life in your hands just crossing them, and if your lifeless body does get scooped up in the nick of time after being hit and you do manage to survive, you might be left homeless and penniless trying to pay the ambulance and hospital bills. So much for the supposedly soft and cushy life of "first world problems". And I'm not convinced that the advocates of "effective altruism" have found any silver bullets for our problems.
Because not only are there no "silver bullets", but the very idea of hyper individualist problem solving could be more harmful than helpful. Who's to say what constitutes "effective altruism" at all?? Obsession with "self optimization," metastasized into the realm of philanthropy, can easily become just another form of masturbatory self congratulation. You might be better served by LITERALLY gazing at your own navel, or taking hallucinogens, at least for long enough to realize that your own ego is an illusion, and that our problems are all collective, and no amount of self aggrandizing activity will do much good against them, compared to a more basic shift in our consciousness towards seeing ourselves as part of a collective whole.
But the key feature is, what % of leftists (across the spectrum) will attack you for being insufficiently concerned about some injustice (to which they are demanding your compliance), with logic that would ALSO demand that they themselves be vegan, but aren't. That's the category of person we're talking about.
Well, I'm not demanding virtue at all, because I am pretty sure I would actually disagree with this kind of hypothetical person's claims of injustice, and I also disagree with the arguments for (obligatory) veganism. I have no problem with pushing for good, I am critiquing the act of condemning others for not focusing on (what you say) is the greatest good, when not doing that yourself. Which is only a subset of people, leftists or those pushing for good.
I'm trying to identify the category of person we're talking about - and point out that they are trying to acquiring *power*, not achieve virtue (isolated or otherwise), which is why they will denounce you as evil for not focusing on the thing-that-grants-them-power while ignoring that (even by the logic they used to justify why That Thing is important) a vegan is doing more good.
> I am critiquing the act of condemning others for not focusing on (what you say) is the greatest good, when not doing that yourself.
I'm pretty sure that absolute majority of woke people who are not vegans do not consider veganism to be greater good. When they oppose oppression they implicitly mean "oppression of humans", because they do not consider animals to be morally relevant.
What woke people say is good and demand other people to focus on, they with most likelihood also do. The norm against hypocrisy among woke is quite strong, maybe even to a counterproductive degree.
If not doing X automatically disqualify you from agitating for doing X, we may get less X being done in expectation.
> I'm trying to identify the category of person we're talking about - and point out that they are trying to acquiring *power*, not achieve virtue (isolated or otherwise), which is why they will denounce you as evil for not focusing on the thing-that-grants-them-power while ignoring that (even by the logic they used to justify why That Thing is important) a vegan is doing more good.
How do you know that? And how do you classify people on trying to acquire power, while using doing good as a justification and trying to do good, and acquiring power as a means to the end?
It would be easier to be vegan (or at least *more* vegan relative to right now) if it was more easily affordable. Vegan cornbread costs twice as much as regular cornbread at the store where I work, for instance. For a low-income person, that's extraordinarily difficult. Especially if this low-income person wants to save up a lot of money for cryonic preservation and family formation. It gradually adds up.
It's true. Being vegan is a luxury that's much easier to afford when one is rich. If one wants more people to eat vegan, then maybe vegan foods should be aggressively subsidized.
I mean, I'd certainly vote to end factory farming in a referendum and would gladly be willing to eat more vegetarian and vegan foods, but money is a huge issue for me.
> "There’s a suspicious correlation between the problems such people care about and the ones they get credit for caring about."
I think this is true for almost everyone, actually. But that's why something like the Effective Altruism movement is so strongly needed. It is, as far as I can tell, literally the *only* social movement in the world that seriously tries to make social credit match up with objective moral warrant and importance. Nobody else even tries. (Or else they have transparently absurd notions of objective warrant and importance!)
Very true!
I wanted to drop a thank you for your dedication to writing about these topics. I don't always agree with you, but our views align more often than not. However, I'm not, for example, vegan or even vegetarian, despite agreeing that factory farming is horrific. I have a tendency towards empty virtue signaling with my lefty friends (I don't fit the left-right spectrum personally). I'm not as dedicated to EA causes in general as I'd like to be. Etc.
Reading your Substack is one factor in making me examine where my actions and values in these areas are misaligned. This post hit me like a ton of bricks and I did not like that.
Keep it up. You're influencing minds for the better. 🙏
That's nice to hear, thanks
Meg, don’t forget that all reduction in animal product consumption helps. Even if you’re not ready to be vegetarian or vegan, cutting out more chicken and eggs, for example, can still have an impact.
I wish you the best :)
Thanks for that. :) I suppose I am more vegetarian than not, and am taking steps to further reduce animal product consumption.
If you're against oppression if and ONLY IF it somehow concerns you, then you're not against oppression.
I hope that you are similarly opposed to banning child sex dolls/robots, because that's also a form of oppression. Seriously.
Not sure about the externalities of that hypothesized technology. I would like a group to try that somewhere far away from where I live.
Wouldn't that mean that you'd oppose having any minor-attracted persons live near you, though?
Those pedophiles who might want a child sex robot, if such a thing existed, can clearly get their jollies based on the huge amount of child-based manga pornography content online.
Providing them with this freedom seems like enough. If they had hypothesized child sex doll/robots to have sex with, I think they might encourage them to rape children, since repeated fantasies tend to lead to an attempt at reality.
Externalities matter.
There’s no direct human contact with child-based manga pornography.
As to whether it would encourage actual child rape, it’s very much an open question, considering that AFAIK rape fantasy roleplaying between consenting adults does not appear to encourage actual rape. The fantasy is good enough for them.
On the issue of caring more about dispossessed slave holders than slaves, slavery was often abolished with negotiated compensation to slaveholders, like in Jamaica or Cuba. Today, it’s fashionable to find this compensation offensive. But if you compare it to how slavery was abolished in the supposedly pure United States, it doesn’t look so bad. The civil war (1) razed the South, (2) killed millions of Americans and (3) led to the deaths by starvation of about 20% of slaves.
Even the loyalist slave states, in the midst of the Civil War, were unwilling to accept compensated emancipation when Lincoln proposed it. It is easy to see Confederates as merely self-interested economic actors, but in fact they were inveterate racists terrified of servile rebellion and deeply ideologically attached to their "peculiar institution."
This all seems... kind of made up? Where is the evidence that woke people don't do these things?
It obviously must be true of some people, because there are more people who are at least somewhat woke than there are vegans, or effective altruists. But in my experience, people who I'd describe as woke, and who fit your stated criteria, are *much* more likely to be vegan, and are also more likely to care about the global poor, and think carefully about their consumption choices in general. The only part that remotely lines up with my experience is that they do tend to be irrationally opposed to EA, probably because it's now vaguely associated with people like Musk, Altman, SBF etc.
Maybe there's a cultural difference between the UK and the US at play? But you hear the stereotype of the blue-haired vegan pretty often on the internet, including on American-dominated spaces such as reddit.
I am not aware of any non-anecdotal evidence about this, but I would genuinely be quite surprised if it supported your anecdotes rather than mine. In any case, though, without such evidence, where are these confident assertions about the values and behaviour of woke people coming from, given that they at least seem non-obvious?
I think you might just be noticing that the masses in any given popular movement aren't actually clear on what the movement is for.
I think there's a Slate Star Codex post about that. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
Reminds me of the scene in "Am I Racist?" where Matt Walsh gives five bucks to the black guy in the room as "reparations" and all of a sudden Robin DiAngelo is visibly upset at the prospect of doing the same thing herself.
So true!
Ummm.. That was kind of justified. She can't exactly normalize asking her for reparations. Let's assume she has $10 million in liquid assets, a pretty high number for a career academic. There are enough Black people in the US that it's impossible for her to give them all any meaningful sum of money. The amount of money she could give each of them is as empty as the usual woke language games are.
The difference between wokeness and EA is that EA has organizations that allow tiny individual donations to translate into meaningful achievements.
So if you can't give every deserving person in existence some certain amount, an amount which you haven't even specified, then you shouldn't bother giving any charity to anyone at all? What sort of insane troll logic is this?
The wokes might be wrong, but I don't think it's insane.
I kind of addressed the flaw in the woke discomfort with individual action.
The great thing about EA organizations and charities is that they allow individual actions to have a meaningful impact. The woke person sees racism writ large as the problem they're addressing and correctly realizes that they can't do anything about it. So they resort to empty gestures and word games despite the emptiness of those gestures.
An effective altruist frames their donation as saving a life or directly alleviating suffering. This makes small actions and donations a lot more meaningful.
I like your comparison of the woke to the Pharisees. Modern-day Pharisees is a comparison I haven't seen before but would probably be extremely effective as a critique of them.
I think the single fundamental difference that covers all the ones you list (though your list is good, and highlights some of the specific distinguishing aspects that people who say "can you even DEFINE woke?" rhetorically ask) is this:
- "woke" is about acquiring power, and incidentally they discovered "awake" (as you label them) theories were convenient justifications for that, whereas "awake" is about figuring out what good things might be, (perhaps erroneously) and then incidentally perhaps acquiring power to accomplish that, but if someone else wants to accomplish it with their power, that works too.
At least for me, this has worked as a litmus test to differentiate the two groups, with the added benefit that (with different labels) it works on the right-wing version of purity (both implications of the term) politics too.
"the hundreds of millions of people living on less than two dollars a day never seem to cross the mind of the typical woke person."
Not only do they not care, they're actively working to make more people live in absolute poverty by virtue of promoting socialism since it's fashionable nonsense. But most people on the far left are even more anti-science and anti-knowledge (empirical) than the average person.
Woke originally meant something more specific that awareness of social injustice. It later broadened to a *general* awareness of social injustice and then to a hyperawareness of social injustice (microaggressions). This happened because the sociocultural environment in which being woke was beneficial and adaptive changed to one where it was not. It probably would have faded out but then we got the CPP (see link 2) and that injected steroids into it and here we are. I'm still optimistic that that this too shall pass.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution#:~:text=An%20excellent%20example,get%20you%20killed.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
I don't know whether the problem has been illuminated here in a way that sheds more light than heat. All I know is, we live in an extraordinarily brutal and violent civilization, and most of us are grasping at straws for some sense of humanity and emotional wellbeing most of the time, even in so called "rich countries".
Even in the United States, the "richest" country of all, the streets are war zones, you take your life in your hands just crossing them, and if your lifeless body does get scooped up in the nick of time after being hit and you do manage to survive, you might be left homeless and penniless trying to pay the ambulance and hospital bills. So much for the supposedly soft and cushy life of "first world problems". And I'm not convinced that the advocates of "effective altruism" have found any silver bullets for our problems.
Because not only are there no "silver bullets", but the very idea of hyper individualist problem solving could be more harmful than helpful. Who's to say what constitutes "effective altruism" at all?? Obsession with "self optimization," metastasized into the realm of philanthropy, can easily become just another form of masturbatory self congratulation. You might be better served by LITERALLY gazing at your own navel, or taking hallucinogens, at least for long enough to realize that your own ego is an illusion, and that our problems are all collective, and no amount of self aggrandizing activity will do much good against them, compared to a more basic shift in our consciousness towards seeing ourselves as part of a collective whole.
I know plenty of people who would most likely be classified as "woke" who are also vegan.
But most aren't.
I would actually expect that percentage of vegans is highter among leftists than on average.
But the key feature is, what % of leftists (across the spectrum) will attack you for being insufficiently concerned about some injustice (to which they are demanding your compliance), with logic that would ALSO demand that they themselves be vegan, but aren't. That's the category of person we're talking about.
This sounds like an isolated demand for virtue, leading to less total virtue in the world in expectation.
People should be allowed to push for good even if they do not represent all the possible aspects of goodness.
Well, I'm not demanding virtue at all, because I am pretty sure I would actually disagree with this kind of hypothetical person's claims of injustice, and I also disagree with the arguments for (obligatory) veganism. I have no problem with pushing for good, I am critiquing the act of condemning others for not focusing on (what you say) is the greatest good, when not doing that yourself. Which is only a subset of people, leftists or those pushing for good.
I'm trying to identify the category of person we're talking about - and point out that they are trying to acquiring *power*, not achieve virtue (isolated or otherwise), which is why they will denounce you as evil for not focusing on the thing-that-grants-them-power while ignoring that (even by the logic they used to justify why That Thing is important) a vegan is doing more good.
> I am critiquing the act of condemning others for not focusing on (what you say) is the greatest good, when not doing that yourself.
I'm pretty sure that absolute majority of woke people who are not vegans do not consider veganism to be greater good. When they oppose oppression they implicitly mean "oppression of humans", because they do not consider animals to be morally relevant.
What woke people say is good and demand other people to focus on, they with most likelihood also do. The norm against hypocrisy among woke is quite strong, maybe even to a counterproductive degree.
If not doing X automatically disqualify you from agitating for doing X, we may get less X being done in expectation.
> I'm trying to identify the category of person we're talking about - and point out that they are trying to acquiring *power*, not achieve virtue (isolated or otherwise), which is why they will denounce you as evil for not focusing on the thing-that-grants-them-power while ignoring that (even by the logic they used to justify why That Thing is important) a vegan is doing more good.
How do you know that? And how do you classify people on trying to acquire power, while using doing good as a justification and trying to do good, and acquiring power as a means to the end?
It would be easier to be vegan (or at least *more* vegan relative to right now) if it was more easily affordable. Vegan cornbread costs twice as much as regular cornbread at the store where I work, for instance. For a low-income person, that's extraordinarily difficult. Especially if this low-income person wants to save up a lot of money for cryonic preservation and family formation. It gradually adds up.
subtle, well done - I like it.
It's true. Being vegan is a luxury that's much easier to afford when one is rich. If one wants more people to eat vegan, then maybe vegan foods should be aggressively subsidized.
I mean, I'd certainly vote to end factory farming in a referendum and would gladly be willing to eat more vegetarian and vegan foods, but money is a huge issue for me.
I'm truly and sincerely curious if you believe this post has any persuasive power.
https://www.mattball.org/2024/03/the-end-of-veganism-from-losing-my.html
Wow, this article was good, and seems pretty accurate.
People like Bentham are not considered cool among their pears for not being woke enough,so the first step is to point their hypocrisy