I wrote this last Autumn as a private “blog post” shared only with a few colleagues. I’m posting it publicly now (after mild editing) because I have some vague idea that it can be good to make things like this public.
I recently finished listening to Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s excellent The Elephant in the Brain. Although I’d probably been exposed to the main ideas before, it got me thinking more about people’s hidden motivations for doing things.
In particular, I’ve been thinking a bit about the motives (hidden or otherwise) for being an Effective Altruist.
It would probably feel really great to save someone’s life by rescuing them from a burning building, or to rescue a drowning child as in Peter Singer’s famous drowning child argument, and so you might think that the feeling of saving a life is reward enough. I do think it would feel really great to pull someone from a burning building or to save a drowning child—but does it feel as great to save a life by giving $4500 to AMF? Not to me.
It’s not too hard to explain why saving someone from a burning building would feel better—you get to experience the gratitude from the person, their loved ones and their friends, for example. Simler and Hanson give an additional reason, or maybe the underlying reason, which I find quite compelling: when you perform a charitable act, you experience a benefit by showing others that you’re the kind of person who will look out for them, making people think that you’d make a good ally (friend, romantic partner, and so on). To be clear, this is a hidden, subconscious motive—according to the theory, you will not be consciously aware that you have this motive.
What explains Effective Altruism, then? Firstly I should say that I don’t think Simler and Hanson would necessarily argue that “true altruism” doesn’t exist—I think they’d say that people are complicated, and you can rarely use a single motive (hidden or not) to explain the behaviour of a diverse group of individuals. So true altruism may well be part of the explanation, even on their view as I understand it. Still, presumably true altruism isn’t the only motive even for really committed Effective Altruists.
One thing that seems true about our selfish, hidden motives is that they only work as long as they can remain hidden. So maybe, in the case of charitable behaviour, it’s possible to alert everyone to the selfish hidden motive: “if you’re donating purely because you want to help others, why don’t you donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, and do much more good than you do currently by donating to [some famous less effective charity]?” When everyone knows that there’s a basically solid argument for only donating to effective charities if you want to benefit others, when people donate to ineffective charities it’ll transparently be due to selfish motives.
Thinking along these lines, joining the Effective Altruism movement can be seen as a way to “get in at the ground floor”: if the movement is eventually successful in changing the status quo, you will get brownie points for having been right all along, and the Effective Altruist area you’ve built a career in will get a large prestige boost when everyone agrees that it is indeed effectively altruistic.
One fairly obvious (and hardly surprising) prediction you would make from this is that if Effective Altruism doesn’t look like it will grow further (either through community growth or through wider adoption of Effective Altruist ideas), you would expect Effective Altruists to feel significantly less motivated.
This in turn suggests that spreading Effective Altruist ideas might be important purely for maintaining motivation for people already part of the Effective Altruist community. This sounds pretty obvious, but I don’t really hear people talking about it.
Maybe this is a neglected source of interventions. This would make sense given the nature of the hidden motives Simler and Hanson describe—a key feature of these hidden motives is that we don’t like to admit that we have them, which is hard to avoid if we want to use them to justify interventions.
In any case, I don’t think that the existence of this motive for being part of the Effective Altruism movement is a particularly bad thing. We are all human, after all. If Effective Altruist ideas are eventually adopted as common sense partly thanks to the Effective Altruism movement, that seems like a pretty big win to me, regardless of what might have motivated individuals within the movement.
It would also strike me as a pretty Pinker-esque story of quasi-inevitable progress: the claim is that these (true) Effective Altruist beliefs will propagate through society because people like being proved right. Maybe I’m naive, but in this particular case it seems plausible to me.
Thinking along these lines, joining the Effective Altruism movement can be seen as a way to “get in at the ground floor”: if the movement is eventually successful in changing the status quo, you will get brownie points for having been right all along, and the Effective Altruist area you’ve built a career in will get a large prestige boost when everyone agrees that it is indeed effectively altruistic.
Joining EA seems like a very suboptimal way to get brownie points from society at large and even from groups which EA represents the best (students/graduates of elite colleges). Isn’t getting into social justice a better investment? What are the subgroups you think EAs try hard to impress?
I guess I’m saying that getting into social justice is more like “instant gratification”, and joining EA is more like “playing the long game” / “taking relative pain now for a huge payoff later”.
Also / alternatively, maybe getting into social justice is impressing one group of people but making another group of people massively dislike you (and making a lot of people shrug their shoulders), whereas when the correctness of EA is known to all, having got in early will lead to brownie points from everyone.
So maybe the subgroup is “most people at some future time” or something?
(hopefully it’s clear, but I’m ~trying to argue from the point of view of the post; I think this is fun to think about but I’m not sure how much I really believe it)
When everyone knows that there’s a basically solid argument for only donating to effective charities if you want to benefit others, when people donate to ineffective charities it’ll transparently be due to selfish motives.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. People may have motives for donating to ineffective charities that are better characterised as moral but not welfare-maximising (special obligations, expressing a virtue, etc).
Also, if everyone knows that there’s a solid argument for only donating to effective charities, then it seems that one would suffer reputationally for donating to ineffective charities. That may, in a sense, rather provide people with a selfish motive to donate to effective charities, meaning that we might expect donations to ineffective charities to be due to other motives.
I also wanted to share a comment on this from Max Daniel (also from last Autumn) that I found very interesting.
But many EAs already have lots of close personal relationships with other EAs, and so they can already get social status by acting in ways approved by those peers. I’m not sure it helps if the number of distant strangers also liking these ideas grow.
I actually think that, if anything, ‘hidden motives’ on balance cause EAs to _under_value growth: It mostly won’t feel that valuable because it has little effect on your day-to-day life, and it even threatens your status by recruiting competitors.
This is particularly true for proposed growth trajectories that would chance the social dynamics of the movement. Most EAs enjoy abstract, intellectual discussions with other people who are smart and are politically liberal, so any proposal that would dilute the ‘quality’ of the movement or recruit a lot of conservatives is harmful for the enjoyment most current EAs derive from community interactions. (There may also be impartial reasons against such growth trajectories of course.)
Actually I think what distant strangers think can matter a lot to someone, if it corresponds to what they do being highly prestigious. The person experiences that directly through friends/family/random people they meet being impressed (etc).
I guess it’s true that, if most of your friends/people you interact with already think EA is great, the effect is at least a bit weaker (maybe much weaker).
I like the point about “diluting the ‘quality’ of the movement” as being something that potentially biases people against movement growth, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.
This still seems like a weaker effect to me than the one I described, but I guess this at least depends on how deeply embedded in EA the person we’re thinking about is. And of course being deeply embedded in EA correlates strongly with being in a position to influence movement growth.
“Effective Altruism out of self interest”
I wrote this last Autumn as a private “blog post” shared only with a few colleagues. I’m posting it publicly now (after mild editing) because I have some vague idea that it can be good to make things like this public.
I recently finished listening to Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s excellent The Elephant in the Brain. Although I’d probably been exposed to the main ideas before, it got me thinking more about people’s hidden motivations for doing things.
In particular, I’ve been thinking a bit about the motives (hidden or otherwise) for being an Effective Altruist.
It would probably feel really great to save someone’s life by rescuing them from a burning building, or to rescue a drowning child as in Peter Singer’s famous drowning child argument, and so you might think that the feeling of saving a life is reward enough. I do think it would feel really great to pull someone from a burning building or to save a drowning child—but does it feel as great to save a life by giving $4500 to AMF? Not to me.
It’s not too hard to explain why saving someone from a burning building would feel better—you get to experience the gratitude from the person, their loved ones and their friends, for example. Simler and Hanson give an additional reason, or maybe the underlying reason, which I find quite compelling: when you perform a charitable act, you experience a benefit by showing others that you’re the kind of person who will look out for them, making people think that you’d make a good ally (friend, romantic partner, and so on). To be clear, this is a hidden, subconscious motive—according to the theory, you will not be consciously aware that you have this motive.
What explains Effective Altruism, then? Firstly I should say that I don’t think Simler and Hanson would necessarily argue that “true altruism” doesn’t exist—I think they’d say that people are complicated, and you can rarely use a single motive (hidden or not) to explain the behaviour of a diverse group of individuals. So true altruism may well be part of the explanation, even on their view as I understand it. Still, presumably true altruism isn’t the only motive even for really committed Effective Altruists.
One thing that seems true about our selfish, hidden motives is that they only work as long as they can remain hidden. So maybe, in the case of charitable behaviour, it’s possible to alert everyone to the selfish hidden motive: “if you’re donating purely because you want to help others, why don’t you donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, and do much more good than you do currently by donating to [some famous less effective charity]?” When everyone knows that there’s a basically solid argument for only donating to effective charities if you want to benefit others, when people donate to ineffective charities it’ll transparently be due to selfish motives.
Thinking along these lines, joining the Effective Altruism movement can be seen as a way to “get in at the ground floor”: if the movement is eventually successful in changing the status quo, you will get brownie points for having been right all along, and the Effective Altruist area you’ve built a career in will get a large prestige boost when everyone agrees that it is indeed effectively altruistic.
And of course many Effective Altruists do want and expect the movement to grow. E.g. The Global Priorities Institute’s mission is (or at least was officially in 2017) to make Effective Altruist ideas mainstream within academia, and Open Philanthropy says it wants to grow the Effective Altruism community.
One fairly obvious (and hardly surprising) prediction you would make from this is that if Effective Altruism doesn’t look like it will grow further (either through community growth or through wider adoption of Effective Altruist ideas), you would expect Effective Altruists to feel significantly less motivated.
This in turn suggests that spreading Effective Altruist ideas might be important purely for maintaining motivation for people already part of the Effective Altruist community. This sounds pretty obvious, but I don’t really hear people talking about it.
Maybe this is a neglected source of interventions. This would make sense given the nature of the hidden motives Simler and Hanson describe—a key feature of these hidden motives is that we don’t like to admit that we have them, which is hard to avoid if we want to use them to justify interventions.
In any case, I don’t think that the existence of this motive for being part of the Effective Altruism movement is a particularly bad thing. We are all human, after all. If Effective Altruist ideas are eventually adopted as common sense partly thanks to the Effective Altruism movement, that seems like a pretty big win to me, regardless of what might have motivated individuals within the movement.
It would also strike me as a pretty Pinker-esque story of quasi-inevitable progress: the claim is that these (true) Effective Altruist beliefs will propagate through society because people like being proved right. Maybe I’m naive, but in this particular case it seems plausible to me.
Joining EA seems like a very suboptimal way to get brownie points from society at large and even from groups which EA represents the best (students/graduates of elite colleges). Isn’t getting into social justice a better investment? What are the subgroups you think EAs try hard to impress?
I guess I’m saying that getting into social justice is more like “instant gratification”, and joining EA is more like “playing the long game” / “taking relative pain now for a huge payoff later”.
Also / alternatively, maybe getting into social justice is impressing one group of people but making another group of people massively dislike you (and making a lot of people shrug their shoulders), whereas when the correctness of EA is known to all, having got in early will lead to brownie points from everyone.
So maybe the subgroup is “most people at some future time” or something?
(hopefully it’s clear, but I’m ~trying to argue from the point of view of the post; I think this is fun to think about but I’m not sure how much I really believe it)
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. People may have motives for donating to ineffective charities that are better characterised as moral but not welfare-maximising (special obligations, expressing a virtue, etc).
Also, if everyone knows that there’s a solid argument for only donating to effective charities, then it seems that one would suffer reputationally for donating to ineffective charities. That may, in a sense, rather provide people with a selfish motive to donate to effective charities, meaning that we might expect donations to ineffective charities to be due to other motives.
I also wanted to share a comment on this from Max Daniel (also from last Autumn) that I found very interesting.
My reaction to this:
Actually I think what distant strangers think can matter a lot to someone, if it corresponds to what they do being highly prestigious. The person experiences that directly through friends/family/random people they meet being impressed (etc).
I guess it’s true that, if most of your friends/people you interact with already think EA is great, the effect is at least a bit weaker (maybe much weaker).
I like the point about “diluting the ‘quality’ of the movement” as being something that potentially biases people against movement growth, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.
This still seems like a weaker effect to me than the one I described, but I guess this at least depends on how deeply embedded in EA the person we’re thinking about is. And of course being deeply embedded in EA correlates strongly with being in a position to influence movement growth.