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@cash saw your comment about political debate. I tried doing a bunch of 'convince me' markets a while ago. This one resolved to 1% because I didn't get pushback, but I would like to have my mind changed, so I'm curious if you have any comments on this?

hilariously, two days later I finally come across arguments to the contrary

Specifically, that high school debate was always like this - critical theory stile arguments ala Kritiks ala Ks existed in the early 2000s and were just as annoying, and that high school debate is fundamentally about playing talmud-commentary with political concepts and trying to make all sorts of stupid arguments to score points, and Ks are just one of many similarly pointless and asinine ways this is done

I don't really believe this matters, but also only read it in the form of a few 280-character posts

nobody actually convinced me so this resolves 1% unless someone happens to come up with new evidence in the next few minutes..

Seems a bit overstated to me, but not entirely false. My own biases predispose me to disagree with him, but he does bring up some examples of what I'd consider "defending good ideas in counterproductive ways" and doesn't go off the deep end with his arguments (the Substack, on the other hand...I was unable to take that seriously at all.) I feel like this will resolve somewhere in the 10-20% range; I'd personally resolve it around 50-75% knowing what I know, but as I said, I'm strongly biased.

; I'd personally resolve it around 50-75% knowing what I know, but as I said, I'm strongly biased.

I'd love to hear what you know then!

@jacksonpolack Roughly the same as you, likely a bit less; I'm just inclined to be skeptical of these arguments, after having heard a lot of bad-faith "free speech" arguments that were actually "let me say slurs" arguments in (poorly-constructed) disguise.

one of many components for me is that matthew is an EA, and as such believes eg direct financial aid to poor africans is very morally good. so the usual secret hitler accusations are significantly less convincing

like even if he was secretly hitler, if you have a hitler who donates a lot of money to the against malaria foundation, vs a committed antiracist advocate who calls out the hitler and doesn't donate money to the against malaria foundation, it's probably time to, analogous to the scott's alternate history post, halt and catch fire. offending a black person is clearly less important than saving the life of a black person from malaria?

Matthew Adelstein: I don't think that you know anything about me. I donate all of my spare money to effective altruist charities and I am vegan. Also arguments from hypocrisy are not good arguments against the position being espoused.

@jacksonpolack That proves too much. It's entirely possible to donate money to EA causes to remediate the suffering of those you consider subhuman - consider all the animal welfare charities! Worse, if you dream of one day reinstating racial chattel slavery, then it only makes sense to help make sure your future product will be healthy.

... Sure, and maybe Elon is secretly an ancom and Joe Biden is secretly transgender and repressing because he's too old. Can you really disprove those?

Matthew, and probably 99.9%+ of AMF donors aren't nazis!

@jacksonpolack Uh... you wanna bet on that last? 186,445 donations in FY2022, so that's <186 people with some flavor of ethnonationalist ideology. (I'd very much count Hindutva and Ultrazionism here, f/ex.) I very much like those odds; how about you?

I didn't say ethnonationalist, I said nazis. Various forms of non-western ethnonationalism are much more socially compatible with progressive ideas than naziism, and I agree the claim would be more tenuous if we included them.

I do think that p>50% 99.9%+ of AMF donors aren't 'nazis'. There aren't that many nazis on an absolute sense (i mean, there are a lot more explicitly positive-associations-with-hitler people in the US than you'd expect, really, but still <1% probably), and nazis really don't like giving money to foreign black people so that's a factor of 10.

Notably, matthew is being accused of various forms of white supremacy/for-white anti-black racism, not zionism / hindu nationalism.

I could see it being <99.99% though becuase people and circumstances are just weird and idiosyncratic sometimes (and initially typed four nines before deleting one).

@jacksonpolack You're asking me to think about base rates and I reject that "Nazi" is a particularly meaningful natural category any longer. I particularly strongly reject the idea that non-western ethnonationalisms are significantly friendlier to progressive ideas, just as national socialism was socialism for Der Volk.

note: this is almost all off-topic to the market

You're asking me to think about base rates and I reject that "Nazi" is a particularly meaningful natural category any longer.

I mean you can just search various far-right buzzwords on twitter and find a bunch of literal nazis who actually support hitler. More generally white nationalism is even bigger on twitter, with a number of around 100k follower white nationalist accounts (many of them have been suspended, but many have not). Nazis means more that and less 'republicans who are white supremacist becauase they support the cops' or whatever.

I reject that "Nazi" is a particularly meaningful natural category any longer

I guess I was mixing together the literal accusations of fascism with the more broad accusations of racism. I do think 'nazi' is a meaningful 'natural category', but racist is kinda not (see scott's against murderism), and how many 'racists' there are in the US could easily vary by a factor of a hundred.

I do believe >99.9% of AMF donors aren't nazis, but the more relevant question was more "are they racists", and the term 'nazis' may not have been the right one (I was thinking of the debaters who accused adelstein of white supremacy/fascism/etc, but it's a weakman). I would still strongly argue that if you find yourself in a situation where you see a 'racist who donates 10% of their income to the Against Malaria Foundation' as worse than 'the non-racist calling them out who doesn't donate', you've probably made a mistake. It's obviously theoretically possible, but lots of improbable things are theoretically possible.

I said socially friendly (which probably wasn't clear enough - I meant that progressives are friends/allies to non-white ethnonationalists more than white ethnonationalists for various reasons), not ideologically friendly! Consider Radical Chic, or the many instances of american progressives supporting third-world ethnonationalist dictators who were also communist, etc.

Note that this isn't a strike against progressives really, parts of your movement will always suck, alliances of convenience are everywhere in politics, and people of all stripes have endorsed / committed horrific acts. Consider the political valence of islam 20 years ago, vs its valence today among eg redpillers. Plenty of right-wingers have supported dictators when it was convenient. But for various practical reasons some groups will be more likely to ally with other specific groups!

@jacksonpolack Wait, sorry, what's the evidence that I'm a Nazi? I think I'm a pretty milquetost utilitarian progressive. I think we have ample evidence that I'm not.

1) Priors: Most people aren't Nazis.

2) I'm Jewish, and Jewish Nazis would have to be weird.

3) I'm left of center.

4) I'm in print supporting open borders.

5) I donate most of my excess money to the against malaria foundation.

6) Basically all of my political writings have been about making people of color better off. I've, for example, opposed Saudi Arms sales, arguing that they're a horrifying atrocity, immigration restrictions, and a war against Mexican cartels.

Basically all of my writings that are not about moral philosophy are about expanding the moral circle to include more sentient beings. If I'm some secret crypto-Nazi, then I'm the worst crypto-Nazi ever.

I agree with all of that, from above:

Matthew, and probably 99.9%+ of AMF donors aren't nazis!

Oh you might be replying to lorxus, the manifold reply system is weird like that

If so, I think he was just raising an issue with my hypothetical ("proves too much"), not suggesting you are a nazi

Also this market resolves NO if I agree with your account so you probably don't want to buy YES

I edited the description to clarify some potentially unclear sentences

@jacksonpolack Oops. Out of curiosity, is there some part of the account that you're specific skeptical of?

Nothing whatsoever beyond 'controversial issue relying on anecdotes' which is very general, I just like making this type of market. I have a bunch

Second time today Acc has profited off of someone misunderstanding a market of mine