I’m glad you aren’t offended! I get easily worried that I might be saying things in an offensive manner and I appreciate you reassuring me that I didn’t! I am always very happy to write long and elaborate reviews of fiction and I am glad you appreciated it.
And I would agree that the protagonist is evil (indeed, he admits he is evil—he’s quite clear that he enjoyed what he did) and also took a set of actions which may have had net-positive utility. I don’t think we know that it did; it’s possible that some vague combination of making people distrust EA-style arguments, imposing costs on people both directly (his victims) and indirectly (court costs, prison costs, stress to everyone vaguely associated, costs of additional security precautions taken because his existence is evidence of the world being less safe than you thought) and so forth and so on made it net-negative.
But I will confidently deny that he was in an epistemic position to expect his actions would be positive, let alone the optimal decision. I could theoretically imagine a world in which this was false, and he genuinely did have the knowledge required for his actions to actually be both ex post and ex ante optimal, but I don’t actually think I can actually imagine a world in which I was in the epistemic state of knowing that he knew his actions were ex post and ex ante optimal; my mental state in such a world would be sufficiently different that I’m not sure I’d be the same person. So I’m really quite comfortable condemning him, though I’ll admit I’d vote for life imprisonment instead of execution.
And Unsong is very interesting! It doesn’t always succeed at what it’s doing, as I mentioned I find the protagonist kind of boring, but it’s trying such fascinating things and it succeeds sufficiently often to be worth reading.
Reply-edit for clarification to expand my response to one of your points: I think it is worth, in a lot of situations, judging based on “should it have worked,” instead of “did it work.” That your model predicted it shouldn’t work and it did work is evidence your model is seriously flawed, just to be clear, I’m not arguing we should completely throw out the experiment and just go with our previous model, but, also, we shouldn’t say “the one guy who won the lottery was right and everyone else was wrong,” because everyone who bought a ticket had the same chance of winning, and ex ante the lottery was a losing bet for all of them.
(Unless the lottery was crooked but that’s a side note.)
So, even if it worked, I still think the protagonist’s motive was unreasonable; even if it worked, I don’t feel it should have worked, statistically speaking, as opposed to him getting immediately spotted, arrested, and spending the next five years of his life in jail in which he can do no good at all. Or someone’s angry brother taking a shot at him with a firearm, causing him to die instantly after he’d donated only $8000 to Givewell’s top charities, as opposed to if he’d peacefully sat back and worked a high-paying job he would have donated $800,000 over the course of his life. Or someone successfully suing to get all the donated money back as a class-action suit, causing the Against Malaria Foundation to go bankrupt because it already spent it all on bed nets and couldn’t get a refund. Not that all of those are equally likely, but there are a lot of ways for his kind of plan to fail at levels of badness approaching these, and if they fail this way he definitely killed people, and I don’t find the assumption that he knew none of them would happen very persuasive.
I’m glad you aren’t offended! I get easily worried that I might be saying things in an offensive manner and I appreciate you reassuring me that I didn’t! I am always very happy to write long and elaborate reviews of fiction and I am glad you appreciated it.
And I would agree that the protagonist is evil (indeed, he admits he is evil—he’s quite clear that he enjoyed what he did) and also took a set of actions which may have had net-positive utility. I don’t think we know that it did; it’s possible that some vague combination of making people distrust EA-style arguments, imposing costs on people both directly (his victims) and indirectly (court costs, prison costs, stress to everyone vaguely associated, costs of additional security precautions taken because his existence is evidence of the world being less safe than you thought) and so forth and so on made it net-negative.
But I will confidently deny that he was in an epistemic position to expect his actions would be positive, let alone the optimal decision. I could theoretically imagine a world in which this was false, and he genuinely did have the knowledge required for his actions to actually be both ex post and ex ante optimal, but I don’t actually think I can actually imagine a world in which I was in the epistemic state of knowing that he knew his actions were ex post and ex ante optimal; my mental state in such a world would be sufficiently different that I’m not sure I’d be the same person. So I’m really quite comfortable condemning him, though I’ll admit I’d vote for life imprisonment instead of execution.
And Unsong is very interesting! It doesn’t always succeed at what it’s doing, as I mentioned I find the protagonist kind of boring, but it’s trying such fascinating things and it succeeds sufficiently often to be worth reading.
Reply-edit for clarification to expand my response to one of your points: I think it is worth, in a lot of situations, judging based on “should it have worked,” instead of “did it work.” That your model predicted it shouldn’t work and it did work is evidence your model is seriously flawed, just to be clear, I’m not arguing we should completely throw out the experiment and just go with our previous model, but, also, we shouldn’t say “the one guy who won the lottery was right and everyone else was wrong,” because everyone who bought a ticket had the same chance of winning, and ex ante the lottery was a losing bet for all of them.
(Unless the lottery was crooked but that’s a side note.)
So, even if it worked, I still think the protagonist’s motive was unreasonable; even if it worked, I don’t feel it should have worked, statistically speaking, as opposed to him getting immediately spotted, arrested, and spending the next five years of his life in jail in which he can do no good at all. Or someone’s angry brother taking a shot at him with a firearm, causing him to die instantly after he’d donated only $8000 to Givewell’s top charities, as opposed to if he’d peacefully sat back and worked a high-paying job he would have donated $800,000 over the course of his life. Or someone successfully suing to get all the donated money back as a class-action suit, causing the Against Malaria Foundation to go bankrupt because it already spent it all on bed nets and couldn’t get a refund. Not that all of those are equally likely, but there are a lot of ways for his kind of plan to fail at levels of badness approaching these, and if they fail this way he definitely killed people, and I don’t find the assumption that he knew none of them would happen very persuasive.