I love that you point out that EA becomes its own social status system - a competition for the highest expected value. All the while, those EAs believe they are "rational" and without cognitive illusions, “Reason and evidence” aren’t magic words that exempt any of us from bias. EV becomes its own "religion."
Thank you for bringing this up. I know it doesn't apply to all EAs.
My own framing is slightly different. Primarily, I care about preventing the most severe suffering. Suffering doesn't simply “sum” across individuals. That's where EV goes off the rails.
But we are still left with the same question: given limited time and money, at the margin, how can we actually prevent the worst experiences? I thank the EA community (and the pre-EA folk like Peter Singer and Jason Gaverick Matheny) for this.
"Social cohesion was a matter of life and death, and relied on members of the group not randomly getting some idea in their heads that seemed logical and right but didn’t fit what the group needed from them."
That is *exactly* what kept humanity in starvation, famine, constant war, and appalling levels of infant mortality and primitive ignorance for virtually the entirety of human existence. Until around the 18th century. The problem, the massive mountainous elephant taking a dump in the room and screaming fire level of emergency problem, with EA is it -alongside most other ethical systems- pays basically zero attention to the problem of human, individual liberty and its relationship to production, without which we go back to starving tribes of savages murdering each other.
Ethics, properly, is about the human requirements of both living and living well. Loved ones, neighbors, are all higher values, in the case of children perhaps a higher value for me than my own life. To say that ethical values require self destruction in the name of strangers on different continents is to render "ethics" so convoluted and upside down, that it is no wonder most people simply tune it out completely.
Ethics shouldn't be able gimmicky games involving railroad tracks switches, or war scenarios involving crying babies and the SS - but about how to choose the values you need daily to build your life.
Once you understand that doesn't involve lying, cheating, and stealing- that those methods are necessarily self destructive, and not 'cheat codes' to do well - witness the lives and mental conditions of even 'successful' Dictators and criminals- then the rest fills itself in.
Hey. If you're the big time CEO making trillions and you want to give some away, great. But honestly- if you've *earned* a trillion in a free market building something that incredibly valuable, then you've probably transformed daily human life. Jeff Bezos transformed life for the better - I get to read any book, anywhere, in easy on my eyes ink, and spend time with my kid instead of shopping for things because I can click a few things on my phone in about 1 minute. Guys like that - they're probably better off just doing what they did to get rich, if you're talking about helping humanity.
That's how you get cheap, affordable Healthcare, longer life-spans, and even the things you want to make life worth living and enjoyable. Not figuring out formulas for how many mosquito nets someone in some corner needs - by all means, do it- but it's amazing how quickly that marginal utility turns into burning the rich to feed the poor, and everyone being equal in misery and poverty.
Although I, personally, don't think that Zuckerberg has made life better. But only because he amplified the worst of people, not because he created evil.
Wytham Abbey is super nice, good choice for an HQ. When I run out of people within a few hundred miles of me that need my little bits of help, I will start worrying about malaria in Congo.
How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants? Literally how many times have I "built a well" or "given animals" or "trained farmers on crop techniques" to learn that the pipes and pumps were stolen and sold, the animals were slaughtered when we left, or that the people reverted to their terrible crop practices after three years. The school I built in Haiti was turned into the local gang club house, or a predatory regime is largely funded by the 50% seizure of the donations made by Westerners ...
You point out excellent ethics. In the 21st Century, the real world now, the only reason anyone, anywhere, needs food, water, shelter, education, is that there are 100s of millions of terrible humans grifting on the others. We're not solving "people suck" by giving them anything at all. Someone here mentions that, essentially, loosely directed capitalism has done more for the world than all the charities of the 21st Century. I reckon that's probably true.
This is very interesting because it feels totally different than what I think the original story is, although you obviously have a lot more of the "inside view". I think the argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality is:
1. We could save lives far away from us with not that big of a sacrifice.
2. We all agree that morality demands this of us in some situations.
3. The actual situation is not morally different.
Thus, you should give significantly more money to Oxfam than you're doing now, if you're a middle class westerner. Furthermore, giving money to the local symphony obviously saves fewer lives than giving to Oxfam.
Singer also held a bunch of other views, notably that animals were morally significant, but they didn't connect that much.
Then, some philosophy grad students decided that they should live by the conclusions of these arguments, and started giving away a lot of money. As a result, people became interested in the question of "which place to give money will help people the most", and they started evaluating this.
Then, thanks to the internet and various other means, people in this space became connected with the rationalist community (whose sources were different people with different moral commitments). Also, some of the philosophers became interested in classic philosophical discussions about the limits of utilitarianism, which led them to various strong conclusions about the future.
The rationalism is where all the ideas you're foregrounding come in: market failure, thinking correctly, status, evolutionary psychology, etc. Additonally, rationalism is where the focus on AI comes in -- they were thinking a lot about AI well before Oxford moral philosophers were.
Yeah I’ll try to write out more of the history as I see it in future posts. I think the “override your local status system when it looks robustly good, we live in a hyper-globalized world” argument is a key implicit argument in FA&M, even if he didn’t develop it further
I love that you point out that EA becomes its own social status system - a competition for the highest expected value. All the while, those EAs believe they are "rational" and without cognitive illusions, “Reason and evidence” aren’t magic words that exempt any of us from bias. EV becomes its own "religion."
Thank you for bringing this up. I know it doesn't apply to all EAs.
My own framing is slightly different. Primarily, I care about preventing the most severe suffering. Suffering doesn't simply “sum” across individuals. That's where EV goes off the rails.
But we are still left with the same question: given limited time and money, at the margin, how can we actually prevent the worst experiences? I thank the EA community (and the pre-EA folk like Peter Singer and Jason Gaverick Matheny) for this.
"Social cohesion was a matter of life and death, and relied on members of the group not randomly getting some idea in their heads that seemed logical and right but didn’t fit what the group needed from them."
That is *exactly* what kept humanity in starvation, famine, constant war, and appalling levels of infant mortality and primitive ignorance for virtually the entirety of human existence. Until around the 18th century. The problem, the massive mountainous elephant taking a dump in the room and screaming fire level of emergency problem, with EA is it -alongside most other ethical systems- pays basically zero attention to the problem of human, individual liberty and its relationship to production, without which we go back to starving tribes of savages murdering each other.
Ethics, properly, is about the human requirements of both living and living well. Loved ones, neighbors, are all higher values, in the case of children perhaps a higher value for me than my own life. To say that ethical values require self destruction in the name of strangers on different continents is to render "ethics" so convoluted and upside down, that it is no wonder most people simply tune it out completely.
Ethics shouldn't be able gimmicky games involving railroad tracks switches, or war scenarios involving crying babies and the SS - but about how to choose the values you need daily to build your life.
Once you understand that doesn't involve lying, cheating, and stealing- that those methods are necessarily self destructive, and not 'cheat codes' to do well - witness the lives and mental conditions of even 'successful' Dictators and criminals- then the rest fills itself in.
Hey. If you're the big time CEO making trillions and you want to give some away, great. But honestly- if you've *earned* a trillion in a free market building something that incredibly valuable, then you've probably transformed daily human life. Jeff Bezos transformed life for the better - I get to read any book, anywhere, in easy on my eyes ink, and spend time with my kid instead of shopping for things because I can click a few things on my phone in about 1 minute. Guys like that - they're probably better off just doing what they did to get rich, if you're talking about helping humanity.
That's how you get cheap, affordable Healthcare, longer life-spans, and even the things you want to make life worth living and enjoyable. Not figuring out formulas for how many mosquito nets someone in some corner needs - by all means, do it- but it's amazing how quickly that marginal utility turns into burning the rich to feed the poor, and everyone being equal in misery and poverty.
Andy, I think you and I are going to be friends!
E.g.
https://mattball.substack.com/p/how-would-you-like-wealth-beyond
Although I, personally, don't think that Zuckerberg has made life better. But only because he amplified the worst of people, not because he created evil.
Is the author aware of what a "tradeoff" is?
Wytham Abbey is super nice, good choice for an HQ. When I run out of people within a few hundred miles of me that need my little bits of help, I will start worrying about malaria in Congo.
How many of my malaria treatments or mosquito nets go to combatants? Literally how many times have I "built a well" or "given animals" or "trained farmers on crop techniques" to learn that the pipes and pumps were stolen and sold, the animals were slaughtered when we left, or that the people reverted to their terrible crop practices after three years. The school I built in Haiti was turned into the local gang club house, or a predatory regime is largely funded by the 50% seizure of the donations made by Westerners ...
You point out excellent ethics. In the 21st Century, the real world now, the only reason anyone, anywhere, needs food, water, shelter, education, is that there are 100s of millions of terrible humans grifting on the others. We're not solving "people suck" by giving them anything at all. Someone here mentions that, essentially, loosely directed capitalism has done more for the world than all the charities of the 21st Century. I reckon that's probably true.
This is very interesting because it feels totally different than what I think the original story is, although you obviously have a lot more of the "inside view". I think the argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality is:
1. We could save lives far away from us with not that big of a sacrifice.
2. We all agree that morality demands this of us in some situations.
3. The actual situation is not morally different.
Thus, you should give significantly more money to Oxfam than you're doing now, if you're a middle class westerner. Furthermore, giving money to the local symphony obviously saves fewer lives than giving to Oxfam.
Singer also held a bunch of other views, notably that animals were morally significant, but they didn't connect that much.
Then, some philosophy grad students decided that they should live by the conclusions of these arguments, and started giving away a lot of money. As a result, people became interested in the question of "which place to give money will help people the most", and they started evaluating this.
Then, thanks to the internet and various other means, people in this space became connected with the rationalist community (whose sources were different people with different moral commitments). Also, some of the philosophers became interested in classic philosophical discussions about the limits of utilitarianism, which led them to various strong conclusions about the future.
The rationalism is where all the ideas you're foregrounding come in: market failure, thinking correctly, status, evolutionary psychology, etc. Additonally, rationalism is where the focus on AI comes in -- they were thinking a lot about AI well before Oxford moral philosophers were.
Yeah I’ll try to write out more of the history as I see it in future posts. I think the “override your local status system when it looks robustly good, we live in a hyper-globalized world” argument is a key implicit argument in FA&M, even if he didn’t develop it further