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One thing that's always bugged my about progressivism and especially EA is that despite all their claims of being empathetic and humanistic they completely ignore the human. They are ironically the paperclip maximizers of philanthropy.
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers? Someone that cares about humanity would want to ask these questions. A paperclip maximizer that discounts a persons humanity entirely and just sees each life as some widget to maximize the number of would not.
The purpose of empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand their feelings. Except, to do that you have to have some level of understanding of how they function, some mental model of their mind. Else you are simply projecting. It's easy to just imagine what you'd feel like if you were in Palestine or Israel etc. Except that isn't empathy. Even just listening to what a person says isn't truly empathy. If I were an alcoholic and I said I wanted a drink, to someone that has no knowledge of me it might seem a nice thing to do, but clearly it would not be. I'm not sure what it even means to have empathy for someone you don't know. I'm not sure it's possible. What is it really that you are feeling? Do you believe people are all the same, with the same wants? same needs? some values? It's such a dim view of people and of the world.
I suppose some people do, "We're all human," is something you'll hear espoused by this ideology, but that is literally the least you can have in common with another person. Trying to apply it to any other human interaction is instantly ridiculous. You wouldn't apply that logic anywhere in life, you don't hire someone just because they're human, you don't befriend someone, care about someone, hate someone. It's basically an open admission that you have nothing convincing to say. Even if someone was forced to compliment their worst enemy they'd manage to ad lib something more convincing than, "he's human."
Anyone that has had relationships with other humans, so basically everyone, knows how complicated it is to actually know someone. You can have spent years living with a partner and still be completely caught off guard when your mental model goes awry and your attempt at empathy then completely falls flat. The idea that some ideological group is more moral or more caring because of the sheer number of lives they've saved completely discredits and belittles one of the pillars of being human, getting to know each other, socializing, learning friend and foe. It discounts their humanity itself, that it's even necessary to get to know or to understand someone before you can help them. Your wants and needs don't matter, you are a widget, you need x calories, y oxygen, to continue existing and I will supply these needs, such altruism, wow.
Looking around at social media and world events I can't help but wonder if this is some major glitch with human psychology in the digital age. Too many strangers, too much opportunity for, "selflessness." So many people caught up in an empty and self serving empathy that has no imagination for others. Meanwhile people that have normal empathy are dismissed because they aren't as "selfless" as the newer movements. Spending time with and focusing on people that share your values isn't altruistic because if they share your values than you are less selfless than the progressive who cares about the stranger. (Not to mention the bay area tech bro that managed to save 0.0345 persons per dollar spent, blowing away the nearest tech bro competitor who only saved 0.0321)
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group. If you really want to help others you need to understand them, that means spending time with others, not with concepts. If you're lucky you might eventually find a few people that you understand well enough that more often than not your actions are positive and beneficial to them. Congratulations you have now invented the family and traditional community.
That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.
What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!
I think this is a valid criticism. EA has set itself up as a bit of an inherent no true scotsman though, you could really call it 'True Altruism' if you wanted and it'd have a similar connotation, even if it isn't exactly the same (unless you're a consequentialist). There is always this, "well that's not real EA because it's not actually effective and the title says it's effective" baked in. I don't see how it's possible to demonstrate that what you are doing is effective without very abstract numbers that are too confounded and even then still very short term focused though. Add to that that my real world experience is generally more like some of the other replies down thread. Instant claims of moral superiority and righteousness with holier than thou anger at how anyone could question whether it's right to save a life or not and it's not really that much of a stretch to think that virtue signalling is often involved. I tend to prefer openly self interested ideologies for this reason, they're just more trustworthy.
I mean sure, and you'd say "well all altruism is effective, everyone is genuinely trying to help out as well as they can," I just simply don't think that's the case at all. EA as a name is an implicit insult to non-E A - and the insult is ... kinda deserved. Rationality, or rational fiction, have the same issue. As Max0r said in his DOOM Eternal review, regarding the tightly focused combat system:
A tight focus on effectiveness can assume a quality of its own - that sort of behavior can be surprisingly rare. Especially if everyone finds it too awkward to consider or admit that quality differences, possibly massive differences, exist.
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The "probably" is doing a lot of work there. It was great when they were promoting mosquito nets. But now they're buying manor houses and getting knotted up about paperclip maximisers, it's fair to ask "so what all lives are being saved, here, exactly?"
As a person who gets knotted up about paperclip maximizers, let me just note here for future reference that we were always EA. You can find "effective charities for AI" all the way back in the early GiveWell recommendations. Mosquito nets is what we recommend to those strange people who for some reason don't see the pending apocalypse coming.
And of course, since you're giving me such a perfect setup:
Exactly. :P
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I'm not an Effective Altruist. I do not particularly care to extend my circle of moral concern to most people, let alone pigs and shrimp.
Even then, this is an argument that is nonsensical if you even care to look at the behavior or policies advocated by EAs.
If all they cared about was the number of human lives saved or extended, they'd be trying to ban birth control and trying to increase the number of people who cross the tiny threshold that is a life worth living versus one that isn't, to the extent that just slicing it at neutral isn't an option. If you think they don't care about those, then they do, they've got QALY and DALY figures to prove it.
My preferences for looking exclusively after the welfare of those I personally care about or align with are much the same as yours, but I respect EAs for living up to their goals in as robustly empirical a manner as they can.
Every altruistic act of significance saves more "mouths to feed". Certainly, while I'm not averse to the idea, most doctors pay lip service to the notion they must treat all equally, to the extent they'd give CPR to Hitler if he showed up before them. Me? I'd shoot him, but that's the nominal aim of the profession.
I won't give them any money. I won't identify with them. But I for one am glad they exist and wish that more people would give a shit about making sure about whether or not the interventions they're trying even work, let alone work the best out of the available options.
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Your post puts my pause about supporting EA into better words than I possibly can write. I've always found it... cheating, kinda?... that the entire premise of EA seems to just be brute-forcing morality and ethics by shoving as many zeroes into a number as possible. And that's how we get what you have described here, where it's easy to say that you've saved 200,000 or however many lives, but then people don't interrogate that result beyond that. People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".
I guess what I'm wondering is if there's much focus put in to long-term solutions (and I don't mean "longtermism" like figuring out how to get humans to colonize the stars or whatever to maximize the number of future lives) rather than just whatever saves the most lives in the short term. For example, I was always under the impression that you can't just brute-force solving world hunger by confiscating all the world's billionaires' wealth (ignoring the fact that much of it isn't liquid and actually kinda doesn't exist and if you confiscated it then most of the wealth would just go away) and funneling it into programs to distribute food to starving populaces (ignoring the fact that this would outcompete and devastate local markets, etc.). Sooner or later, their governments would stop you, because it turns out that the reason they're starving in the first place is because their government wants them to, and there's plenty of things the government can do to get their country in a place to feed them, but they don't for various reasons. So there's a good short-term solution by just distributing as much as you can, but an actual long-term solution requires some change to the government, and a lot of focus seems to be put on the short-term brute-force way of doing things.
Downthread, @FirmWeird posits a similar scenario where the population is way beyond carrying capacity. What do you do? Feeding them makes the line on a graph go up, if you ignore that this means you'll need even more in the future (induced demand). Not feeding them makes the line go down but it results in a more stable equilibrium. "Just shove as many zeroes in as you can" ignores plenty of side effects that may or may not be desirable, almost like a paperclip maximizer.
In theory you can fix this by counting QALYs instead of lives saved.
Of course, counting QALYs meaningfully isn't easy, but it is easy to come up with bad ways to count them and hard to prove them bad.
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I have the exact opposite intuition about "cheating." To me, regular charities seem like cheating, since all most people do is give money, get warm and fuzzy feelings, decide that that means they did good, and then profusely refuse to actually verify how much good they did. It's essentially stolen valor - getting all the personal benefits of appearing altruistic without doing any of the difficult work of helping anyone out which is normally implied by things like "charity" and "altruism." Which looks a lot like cheating. EA at least seems to make a gesture at having some referee system in place to detect cheaters.
The thing is, as we see in international sports all the time like in FIFA or Olympics, the best way to cheat is to set the entire system of judgment itself as corrupted in your favor, so one could probably make a good argument that EA is performing this "meta-cheating" by claiming to actually be setting up objective standards for effectiveness while actually setting up corrupted standards that lead to [charity I like] being [effective]. The tough thing for EA is, every single person, down to the individual, involved in the EA movement could be perfectly transparent and honest with perfectly good intentions, and overall EA could still be engaging in this "meta-cheating" due to the biases that all people are susceptible to, and so they have some responsibility to set up the structure in such a way as to counter and negate these biases. I think they may be failing to do this properly.
But in terms of their attempt at brute-forcing morality, this seems to me the correct way to counter the massive "cheating" that's happening in basically all realms of altruism in our lives, even down to individual relationships, where most people don't bother checking and just get the beneficial warm and fuzzy feelings through "cheating" without doing any of the work that is supposed to make someone actually deserving of those warm and fuzzy feelings.
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I fail to see how supplying basic needs is worse than leaving someone to die.
Is that not the definition of completely ignoring the human?
Because it means that a decade down the line, some Saudi policeman is going to be tempted to drink because his job involves shooting at 'wretched refuse' to prevent it from crossing the border and milling around in Saudi Arabia and asking for handouts. Don't even ask what Europe is going to end up like.
It’s all part of Big Alcohol’s plan to break into the Muslim market.
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People are social, people interact, helping a person live might increase the happiness of those around them or end up causing the suffering of those around them, they will probably do both simultaneously in varying amounts. The problem is you are trying to apply a value to an unknown quantity. Sometimes it feels progressives and by extension EA are so universalist in their beliefs that they can't even imagine a person having values that are negative, all people are inherently good but they are influenced by evil outside forces. Trump voters are mislead by Trump, religious people are misled by religion etc. People are capable of everything within the human experience from great altruism to great malice. Just saving a life without taking into account what you are saving is ignoring the human, it's ignoring what makes people human i.e. the content of their character, beliefs and culture. In a way I think it's even rejecting your own humanity as participating in the war of culture, having groups you favor over others, is part of being human. EAs come off as trying to stand apart from all that, like zoo keepers looking after the health of foolish animals.
Are you suggesting that empathy or humanity requires assessing whether the recipient is…worthy? Part of those groups you favor? Because that doesn’t square with any reasonable definition of empathy. Not Christian charity, not secular humanism, whatever.
Another way to put it. Let’s say your neighbor falls ill and you have the money to save him. He’s someone you know well, so you have a good sense of his beliefs and his relationships, even if they don’t always agree with yours. Is it more or less altruistic to save his life?
It requires assessing something. It's up to you whether or not you support people you find worthy or not, but to empathize there has to be something there to empathize with, otherwise you are just creating something fictional.
Saving the neighbor is traditional altruism. You know them you've interacted with them so you can empathize with them.
Saving x from y shouldn't be altruism, you don't know anything about them, you can't empathize with them without projecting, and not just some minimally necessary projection, you're basically inventing them whole cloth.
As to whether it's more or less altruistic, it seems it would be more altruistic to save the neighbor who shared none of your values than it would be to save a neighbor that shared your values and therefore helped to further you / your groups interests. This seems nonsensical to me though and basically just pointless virtue signalling.
edit: Another poster argued basically exactly this that the definition i'm using reduces to virtue maximizing and that actual EA would donate to people that shared their cause (the neighbor they liked) because they are about maximizing positive outcomes. I do feel like it stretches the definition of altruism though. Say some extreme narcissist that took an iq test as a kid and got into mensa or something felt that they were likely to be more capable than anyone else and therefore had the potential to benefit the world more than anyone else. Would they create an organization that aimed to funnel all resources to themselves and call it effective altruism? Maybe EA people believe this? Seems like the economy and wealth agrees with this. Are there EA groups funneling all their resources into ai to create god? Idk, maybe!
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Imagine a country where the people have overexploited their environment, and there are now more people living there than the country's ecological base can support. Once they see all the starving children, famous westerners come in and throw big rock concerts to raise funds to ease their pain, and they succeed - the food gets distributed and the people stop starving. They then have children, and the population becomes even more unsustainable, which creates an even more dramatic famine 10 years later.
Is feeding those starving people the correct thing to do when enabling their population to increase more is just going to make the problem worse in the future? You have a choice between a bunch of people starving to death, or twice that many people starving to death a generation from now. Which choice is more humane?
This is a legitimate argument, though my personal beliefs lean closer to @self_made_human’s.
It’s also completely absent from the OP and from his response. He is very clear that acting on an “unknown quantity” is despicable not because one might cause more total suffering, but because it’s “discounting their humanity.” Somehow, providing basic needs for people you don’t know implies less empathy than deciding they don’t deserve your attention, or worse, that they have “values that are negative.” This is fucking incoherent.
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I will consider that thought experiment to be isomorphic to this one:
Imagine you're a doctor who has a patient about to die young before having kids.
Why save them? After all, they're going to die anyway, and more importantly, they'll have kids, who are also going to die, young or old.
So it's a choice between having one person die now, versus two people die in the future.
What I can only hope is obvious is that most people value life, especially a quality life, and consider it worth extending, even if the terminal prognosis for everyone is fatal, even if they're only going to reproduce and have more people who have a bounded lifespan. Let's leave aside that I expect lifespans to become unbounded shortly, it's not relevant when we haven't solved Heat Death.
Presumably, by revealed preferences, these people you discuss consider their lives worth living, and the reason they're about to die is because they have no choice in the matter. Further, so too will their offspring,
More importantly, it buys time for more durable solutions.
Since this line of thinking would have consigned all previously starving populations in history to a shared grave with Malthus, I'm not paying it any heed.
HOLD IT! You've committed a rhetorical sleight of hand here - it isn't the fact that people die at all that's the problem. We're talking about starving to death, which is a humiliating, painful and degrading way to die. "Death" and "Death by starvation" are different things and not really equivalent. But that's just a minor problem - you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the argument being made here, because your isomorphism is false.
Have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? The salient quality of this "thought experiment" (if you're paying attention this isn't a hypothetical but real world history) is that the ability of the environment to support life is part of the equation. You have a choice between supercharging a given population, taking them beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, or letting some portion of the population starve/die. When you pick the first option the commons gets destroyed, and the ecosystems that can support a larger community get damaged (the natural equivalent to the seed corn being eaten). When you actually take the specifics of the scenario into account, you're advocating for the destruction of the environment and mass starvation as opposed to letting a population return to a level that's sustainable in the long term. I don't think that's actually a position that you'd support - though I may be wrong.
I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, or Malthusian population limits.
Neither applies here.
For one, we're not Malthusian, given that there is food to feed them with. If every locale was restricted to having to feed itself, goodbye Singapore I guess?
Secondly, the behavior they're engaging in, namely having more kids or mouths than they can feed, such that they end up being naturally culled, is one that just about every population in history has been guilty of.
When I think "population sustainable in the long term", I'm contemplating Dyson Swarms and the Heat Death of the Universe. It has little relevance to the denizens of Sub-Saharan Africa, no matter how dysfunctional it might be right now.
And I don't even like them, I happen to think that the problems that they suffer from can be fixed, be it immediate calorific concerns, or the poor quality of human capital, be it by genetic engineering or otherwise. Hence why I'd rather they'd not starve to death, at least not when it's random philanthropic movements footing the bill for feeding them.
What exactly do you envision when I propose a doctor "who has a patient about to die young before having kids"?
Do you think the people who die at that age are choosing a particularly dignified way to go? Severe appendicitis? A road traffic accident? Bullet to the gut?
I'll tell you that I'd certainly find shitting my guts out in front of a hundred strangers to be "humiliating" if nothing else.
So I think my isomorphism works just fine, since we're talking a cause of death that can be relatively cheaply mitigated, ensuring a longer life and time to churn out the next generation.
Yes, they very explicitly do! I'm the person who came up with this "hypothetical" and I can very flatly state that it is not taking place in a science-fiction universe with AGI and dyson spheres. Instead, it takes place in the real world - human beings need to eat, and that food has to come from somewhere. You don't get to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Overfarming can damage environments, and if you overfish a lake to the point that the fish can't recover, you've permanently reduced the population your environment can support.
The world has a certain amount of overhead - but not an infinite amount. You're proposing that we spend the entirety of the world's excess on feeding more and more Ethiopians, without any care for the consequences of doing so. Why is it worth making sure that Ethiopia has more Ethiopians than it can comfortably support? Remember that we're pushing their population above the carrying capacity of their local environment - they are going to become a permanent drain on global resources and food, and the problem is going to immediately become much worse (and the total number of Ethiopians lower) the moment that access gets cut off. What happens when there's a crop failure somewhere else in the world, or a different plague/famine/war that leaves other nations reliant on charity as well?
Do you walk into conversations about cars and talk about how discussing fuel economy is useless because we're going to have spaceships soon? If you want to talk about cool sci-fi novels, that's great! I mean, I like talking about them too - but a conversation about the hard ecological limits to human existence in the present isn't the place.
Either they starve to death now, or you have an even larger famine in the future with even more people starving to death, and causing further damage to the environment to boot. "We feed them now, and then when this problem returns in the future I'll just plug in my Mr Fusion and 3d print an infinite supply of burgers for all the starving people" isn't an option that's on the table! You're advocating for more suffering and a lower total population over time due to ecological destruction.
The last time something like this happened in my social circle, it was cancer. If I was going to die at a young age, I would greatly prefer the last moments that they went through as opposed to starving to death with the rest of my family in Africa as I watch them eat the seed corn that could have helped a smaller family survive and thrive.
Well you can see I don't find myself beholden to your strict interpretation of the hypothetical.
And leaving aside futuristic things like Dyson Spheres, we're thankfully living in the !science fiction setting where we had the Green Revolution and have industrialized agriculture. There is no shortage of cheap calories on a global level.
Sure. All well and good. But there are plenty of billions on the table yet, even trillions or quadrillions just on Earth if it was truly optimized as an ecumenopolis. Fuck the environment as far as I'm concerned. If it has to give so we can have more humans around, all the worse for it.
Once again, I stress that humans have existed in Malthusian conditions for most of history, and only recently broken out of it, even if that is "temporary" compared to the limits of exponential population growth. I see no reason to think that hypothetical carrying capacity will be breached before it keeps getting raised, as has been the case for about a century or so, and for a good while to go.
Does maybe a few hundred million extra Africans in a century change much? A billion or two? Not really, and I don't expect the conditions that make them be non-self-sufficient in the same manner as most other nations to cease before they balloon and outnumber all of us.
What on Earth gave you that impression?
I never advocated for the largesse of the globe heading to them. At most, to the extent that Effective Utilitarians are choosing to help feed them, I don't object to them using their funds in that manner.
They get shafted, and I don't care. At that point the EAs may well decide that they're not the cheapest population to prioritize, and everyone else gets a handout. Or more likely, the EAs don't have money to spare at all.
Fuel economy concerns matter a great deal less when we can reasonably expect energy to get much cheaper. I support it to the extent it pays for itself, and pricing in externalities.
As for the "ecological limits", they're likely in the tens of billions with minimal change to the condition of the average human and not much in the way of major change in terms of agricultural technologies. Given that I think those are inevitable, trillions or billions.
We can worry about it when we get there, or improvements stall before population growth does.
Why not? I invite you to show me we're near nominal capacity with even current agriculture. We are clearly not optimizing for calories over all else, as we would if we had reason to.
I have seen a great more youthful deaths from cancer than you have. As would be expected, I work in an Oncology ward.
Let me tell you that the modal passage is not something I'd call dignified.
In other words, you're arguing with a position I don't hold, and I think you utterly underestimate the nominal carrying capacity of this globe without even going into non-existent technologies.
Are you familiar with the way this conversation started? This is an unsustainable practice and is only possible because we are drawing down on the accumulated energy savings of millions of years. We are inflating a population bubble that will cause immense damage to the environment and its ability to support human life when it bursts. The same industrialised agriculture you're talking about, with its incredibly lopsided EROEI compared to previous farming methods, is a big part of the problem.
This, on the other hand, is just immensely stupid. Where does the food required to sustain you come from? Where does the oxygen you need to breathe come from? Where does the water you need to live come from? If you're working in medicine then I'm sure you know how many compounds and discoveries are either sourced from or inspired by nature. A human being is utterly inseparable from the environment, and maintaining a healthy environment is a requirement to actually be healthy yourself.
If the environment has to give, you don't get any more humans! Humans need the environment to survive and cannot be removed from it without killing them. "Fuck this dude's body. If it has to give so I can have more tumour mass, all the worse for it." - given where you work, I'm sure you know what happens when some part of a greater system decides to grow out of control and stop giving a shit about the environment that supports it.
You're not advocating for transhumanism, you're arguing for human extinction. A human being removed from his environment is a corpse.
We have already most likely breached it - current population levels are only really sustainable while burning fossil fuels, which we have a limited supply of. Even assuming alternative energy sources come online in time to save us, the soil degradation and erosion caused by petroleum-based agriculture combined with shifting weather patterns are going to be a big problem for the future. We're actually tracking the World3 Business-as-Usual model alarmingly well, and that's predicting a peak in global population in the not-so-distant future.
The point where you entered the discussion.
I don't think we can reasonably expect that. Based on historical trends we can expect the price of energy to get more expensive to the point that it causes demand destruction, which then drives prices back down again.
If there's no major change in agricultural technologies caloric availability falls off a cliff as petroleum gets substantially more expensive and climate change shifts weather patterns in ways that are inconvenient for current farming/river systems, rendering our current farming techniques unviable.
Congratulations! You can start worrying about it now.
I suppose it might be different in , but for me the biggest contributor to whether or not I'd consider my death "dignified" would be what I leave behind for others. Dying in agony of cancer would be more dignified to me than dying peacefully in my sleep if the latter meant that I'd caused irreparable harm to the world that my descendants would have to live in.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your posts. But, sadly, I don't think your position here holds water regardless.
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Once again for those who might just be joining us. Utilitarianism is an inhuman (and dare I say it, Evil) ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing. Utilitarians deciding to ignore the human cost of a policy to maximize some abstract value be it "utility" or "paperclips" is not ironic, unfortunate, or unintentional. It is by design.
"Effective altruism" has never been about altruism.
I will admit I consider my self a 'skeptical utilitarian'(I made this term up, or, if I didn't, I am unfamiliar with the other usage) in that I have utilitarian leanings in terms of how to reason about morality but reject unpalatable extreme extrapolations thereof, on 'eulering' and 'epistemic learned helplessness' grounds. Still I have always found casual swipes at utilitarianism of the form, 'see, it actually leads to bad things' to be weak. Clearly the goal is to lead to good things, broadly, and if it seems to lead to a bad thing then that probably means you should try again and fully considerer the externalities, etc. I don't see a good reason why 'utility' can't be a proxy measure for human flourishing, and I would personally prefer a form of utilitarianism organized in just such a way.
I can declare that the "goal" of a live grenade is to be delicious candy for children, but that won't make it so. The argument against Utilitarianism is 1) that it can't actually do what it aims to do, because "utilitarian calculus" is about as valid as "turnip plus potato equals squash", and 2) when it inevitably fails, it tends to fail very, very badly.
"Fully considering the externalities" is straightforwardly impossible, the output it generates is unfalsifiable, and it is tailor-made to justify one's own biases.
Because "utility" can't be rigorously measured, quantified, or verified in any way, even theoretically, and the whole system is built on the premise that it can be.
I should have known better than to comment on this topic here, I am not very rigorous or deep in my metaphysical beliefs.
Let me try and clarify my internal view, and if you have the time, you can explain what I am doing wrong.
So, I view my own morality and the morality of my society through a largely consequentialist lens, understanding that my ability to fully understand consequences decays rapidly with time, and is never perfect. I view morality as a changing thing that adapts and morphs with new technology, both social and physical. I find the 'concept' of 'utilitarianism' a useful jumping off point for thinking about morality. Obviously this interacts with my own biases, I am not really sure what it would even mean for a person to think about something and not have that problem honestly. I do not view 'utilitarianism' as a solved, or solvable problem, rather as a never ending corrective process.
For example, I am not currently vegan or vegetarian, but I also do not like animal suffering, and I think a lot about this disconnect. Ideally I would like a world that allows me to enjoy all the perks of animal husbandry while reducing as much animal suffering as possible. I think the effort of trying to reduce the amount of suffering in factory farming, reflects a 'utilitarian' effort, but that does not mean I would agree with any particular reality those intuitions suggest. If for example, reducing animal suffering, made it impossible for a lot of people to afford meat or eggs, then that also seems bad, and is another part of the problem to keep working on or striving for solutions to.
My biases manifest in a number of ways, for example, I lean towards observational data in terms of what a better or worse world would look like, so for example, if a particular religion espoused the idea that animals enjoy animal husbandry and or they can only go to heaven if eaten by humans, I would not factor that into my considerations. I also tend to think suffering is bad and happiness and a fulfilment/satisfaction are good, etc.
I guess I view 'morality' as a system or framework that I use to try and evaluate my own actions and the actions of others. I am reliant on the persuasiveness of my arguments in favor of my preferred outcomes to drive other people (and sometimes myself) to respect or adopt a 'morality' similar to my ideals.
Well said.
For what it's worth, I largely agree, to be more blunt than you, I'm both a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I make no claims that my sense of morality is objective, and go so far as to say that there's no such thing, not a single good reason to imagine it can be so, that morality can be disentangled from the structure of an individual observer and forced to fit all others. The closest you can get is the evolutionarily/game theoretically conserved core, such as a preference for fairness and so on, which can be seen in just about any animal smart enough to hold those concepts. That's still not "objective". That doesn't stop me from thinking that mine is superior and ought to be promulgated. It's sometimes tempting to claim otherwise, but I largely refrain from doing so. I don't deny the rights of others to make such a claim about theirs, to the extent that I approve of free speech.
Of course, I personally find that I can decompose my value judgements and then derive simpler underlying laws/heuristics that explain them, which often explain new and complicated situations, but I'm lucky enough that I have yet to find one I can't resolve in that manner, and I can see that I have principles instead of a lookup table because it can often involve me grudgingly accepting things I dislike because to do otherwise would conflict with more fundamental principles I prefer to hold over mere dislike. That's why I'm OK with people I despise speaking after all, leaving aside I have no way to stop them.
As for animal welfare, I simply do not care. It's a fundamental values difference. I don't get anything out of torturing or killing subhuman animals, but I also have nothing against those who do, to the extent that cultural pressures imply that that those who shirk them have other things wrong with them, like psychopathy. As discussed in an older comment, at a point in time, most people enjoyed watching dog fights or throwing rocks at cats, there was nothing/little in the act that was inherently psychopathic in terms of harming others.
To illustrate, imagine a society that declares shaving one's head to be a clear sign of Nazi affiliation. There are plenty of normal people who have some level of desire to do so, be it for stylistic preferences or because they're balding. But since such an urge is overpowered by a desire not to be mistakenly labeled as a Nazi, they refrain, while actual Nazis don't.
Congratulations, you managed to establish that shaving one's head is is 99% sensitive and specific for National Socialist tendencies.
You can see this kind of social dynamic and purity spiraling all over the place, and I think animal welfare is one of them, so is not calling people fags or retarded.
I do not value the elimination of factory farming for its own sake, or that of animals, but I will happily accept something like vegetarian meat or, better yet, labgrown meat, over it, but if, and only if it's superior to factory farmed or slaughtered meat in terms of taste or price, ideally both. That's what it means to be truly neutral between them.
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Only if you assume "utility" is decoupled from human flourishing. Which it shouldn't be.
Oh? What's it about, then? Bonus points if your criticism applies specifically to EA, and not just to any action that might vaguely leave room for self-interest.
And yet, It very obviously is.
Grift. Silicon Valley sociopaths trying to rebrand slacktivism (that is, "earning to give" and "raising awareness") as a public good rather than what it actually is. Funneling funds into their own pet projects. *cough* AI Research *
As I've discussed before, back in late 2013/early 2014 timeframe I approached a few of the more prominent EA types and offered my services. I had contacts in the DoD, MSF, and multiple eastern African Governments. I could have actually helped with the nitty-gritty of getting bed-nets and water-filters distributed to people. The response I got was that they weren't really interested in logistics so much as they were interested in raising money.
This might not be a failing unique to Effective altruism, but I do think it's enough to condemn them.
The whole vegan menu fiasco later that year only confirmed it.
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Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".
The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.
and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?
Of course I wouldn't expect a stranger to help me. I'm arguing that it's not possible after all. In retrospect even people that do know and care about me have had some pretty spectacular failures on that front, though I don't blame them as long as they forgive me my own.
Death is necessary. We live in a world with physical limits, without death the resources eventually run out. Most of life from the realm of the microscopic to the complex workings of human society is just the process of determining what is worthy of those limited resources. When the determination is subjective we call it morality or justice and when it's objective we call it nature.
It seems trivial to me that human lives aren't worth saving per se. It's the content of those lives that matters, and if you don't know the content than you can't prove that you've done anything of value let alone something "effective." I mean if you had the choice between saving 1000 lives of people in a persistent vegetative state, or a dozen lives of people you know to be good and functioning people you choose the functioning people right? It's not the lives that matter it's the person, the content. If you could have more people living by putting everyone in a low energy state in some kind of feeding pod, where they undergo minimal activity to reduce calorie expenditure and just enough calories are provided to keep them alive is that good because more people are living? It seems cartoonishly evil.
and those are just overly simple demonstrations, in reality the world is more complex than that. Value is a human thing and though nature occasionally forces our hand the more advanced we get the more leeway we have to be subjective. There really isn't even a way to maximize value because people have different values and therefore competing interests.
That's the problem I have with EA. The whole, "we're saving more people than anyone" thing. Stopping needless suffering. Why is their suffering needless? Suffering can be important, it teaches us things. It leads to improvement. When you are saving them what are you saving? Do you know any of them? It's so surface level and such a philosophically empty paperclip maximizing type ethos.
I do agree that it hasn't been very effective PR for the tech bros so far. I think it worked better for progressives (though people are growing resistant to it) and EA seems to be a silicon valley version that has made the whole process too efficient and made it's contradictions too apparent. It feels too inhuman for most.
This is a retarded standard that nobody who has to work with more than a handful of people at a time holds. Do you think doctors look up new arrivals to the ER to ascertain whether they're accidentally treating murderers and rapists?
It's the net impact that matters, and unless you're exclusively attempting to save the denizens of a prison, or maybe Hamas, you will find almost no population where they predominate, such that by saving the entire lot you've done something worse.
Great. An accusation that of all the people in the world, EAs don't know the concept of disability adjusted life years (DALY) and quality adjusted life years (QALY).
I will go with the "good things are good, and bad things are bad, actually" over this galaxy-brained advocacy for letting people starve to death or die of malaria.
I'm sure those are all laudable, character building exercises.
I'm not an EA, I just think that of all the people I strongly disagree with, they're doing what they believe to be right thing with the right amount of rigor, as opposed to nothing but vibes.
Which is a lazy dismissive assumption. You have faith that lives are good or that they are in aggregate good and therefore maximizing them is positive, you don't know that. As far as I can tell you can't know that.
I'm not arguing against helping people, just that helping people you actually know is better, especially en masse (what if everyone logged off social media and did that?), than industrial philanthropy or w/e.
You are welcome to demonstrate your conviction that lives are terrible and worth terminating on average, as they must be if the aggregate is, but I suspect you can't, for the same odd reason most antinatalists or misanthropes don't start with themselves.
Faith? Why? I can clearly see that most people have lives worth living and extending, at least if it comes to the expenditure of funds I can't repurpose for things I personally care about more. To the extent that governments and charities spend their money on that, I'd prefer they save as many lives as cheaply as effectively as possible, and EAs do that. Would be even better if they handed all the cash to me, but since there's no advocacy group for the same, I'll take it.
Go ahead and help whoever you like, if you care to. By the same process where you don't care about most people, I don't particularly care about you and yours, and thus EA beats you in terms of net people I minimally consider worth existing saved. Sure, sucks that a large number of them are Sub-Saharan Africans with low IQs I suppose, but that's hardly all of them, there is a non-zero tradeoff for the same with Westerners or any other kind of human really.
ah yes, "KYS" nice to see the motte's standard of petty insults in as many words as possible is still around.
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
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Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question? "Some people in a group might become rapists, or might even be rapists, and thus most of the people in that group should get malaria and maybe die of it" is the sort of position a children's cartoon villain would hold. If that's your sincere considered position based on the things you have seen online, I suggest touching grass.
Most EAs are sympathetic to progressives, but most progressives are vehemently opposed to EA ideas like "you can put a dollar value on life" and "first world injustice doesn't matter much compared to [third world disease / global extinction risk / animal suffering, depending on exactly which EA you ask]".
I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.
Still fits with my theory. EA like the progressive model but are a bit robotic and misunderstand it. Progressive recognize that EA is pulling a lot from their PR scheme but doing it poorly and spoiling the effect.
There's more of a trade off than that though. That money and effort could be spent elsewhere, making family or people you know about happier. I mean if they don't have anyone like that they could at least look towards their local communities? From what I've seen of the bay area it could use it.
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