Understanding The Morality of the Elite Technocrat

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