Someone recently cross-posted this to the main EA Facebook group, where it got a lot of attention from people who came to EA from sources other than LessWrong. I think the essay is a classic, so I’m cross-posting it to the Forum, where I expect at least a few people to see it who hadn’t seen it before.
— Aaron
Yesterday:
There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone...
If the lawyer needs to work an hour at the soup kitchen to keep himself motivated and remind himself why he’s doing what he’s doing, that’s fine. But he should also be donating some of the hours he worked at the office, because that is the power of professional specialization and it is how grownups really get things done. One might consider the check as buying the right to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or validating the time spent at the soup kitchen.
I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can’t actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I’m sure it has, sometime in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car’s interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.
Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify true concern for another’s welfare, or fear of guilt for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn’t deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.
But in my own case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises as to whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?
The obvious defense—or perhaps, obvious rationalization—is that an act of altruism like this one acts as an willpower restorer, much more efficiently than, say, listening to music. I also mistrust my ability to be an altruist only in theory; I suspect that if I walk past problems, my altruism will start to fade. I’ve never pushed that far enough to test it; it doesn’t seem worth the risk.
But if that’s the defense, then my act can’t be defended as a good deed, can it? For these are self-directed benefits that I list.
Well—who said that I was defending the act as a selfless good deed? It’s a selfish good deed. If it restores my willpower, or if it keeps me altruistic, then there are indirect other-directed benefits from that (or so I believe). You could, of course, reply that you don’t trust selfish acts that are supposed to be other-benefiting as an “ulterior motive”; but then I could just as easily respond that, by the same principle, you should just look directly at the original good deed rather than its supposed ulterior motive.
Can I get away with that? That is, can I really get away with calling it a “selfish good deed”, and still derive willpower restoration therefrom, rather than feeling guilt about it being selfish? Apparently I can. I’m surprised it works out that way, but it does. So long as I knock to tell them about the open trunk, and so long as the one says “Thank you!”, my brain feels like it’s done its wonderful good deed for the day.
Your mileage may vary, of course. The problem with trying to work out an art of willpower restoration is that different things seem to work for different people. (That is: We’re probing around on the level of surface phenomena without understanding the deeper rules that would also predict the variations.)
But if you find that you are like me in this aspect—that selfish good deeds still work—then I recommend that you purchase warm fuzzies and utilons separately. Not at the same time. Trying to do both at the same time just means that neither ends up done well. If status matters to you, purchase status separately too!
If I had to give advice to some new-minted billionaire entering the realm of charity, my advice would go something like this:
To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000. Repeat as desired.
To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years.
Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar. Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list.
I would furthermore advise the billionaire that what they spend on utilons should be at least, say, 20 times what they spend on warm fuzzies—5% overhead on keeping yourself altruistic seems reasonable, and I, your dispassionate judge, would have no trouble validating the warm fuzzies against a multiplier that large. Save that the original, fuzzy act really should be helpful rather than actively harmful.
(Purchasing status seems to me essentially unrelated to altruism. If giving money to the X-Prize gets you more awe from your friends than an equivalently priced speedboat, then there’s really no reason to buy the speedboat. Just put the money under the “impressing friends” column, and be aware that this is not the “altruism” column.)
But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time. Writing a check for $10,000,000 to a breast-cancer charity—while far more laudable than spending the same $10,000,000 on, I don’t know, parties or something—won’t give you the concentrated euphoria of being present in person when you turn a single human’s life around, probably not anywhere close. It won’t give you as much to talk about at parties as donating to something sexy like an X-Prize—maybe a short nod from the other rich. And if you threw away all concern for warm fuzzies and status, there are probably at least a thousand underserved existing charities that could produce orders of magnitude more utilons with ten million dollars. Trying to optimize for all three criteria in one go only ensures that none of them end up optimized very well—just vague pushes along all three dimensions.
Of course, if you’re not a millionaire or even a billionaire—then you can’t be quite as efficient about things, can’t so easily purchase in bulk. But I would still say—for warm fuzzies, find a relatively cheap charity with bright, vivid, ideally in-person and direct beneficiaries. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or just get your warm fuzzies from holding open doors for little old ladies. Let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons, but don’t confuse it with purchasing utilons. Status is probably cheaper to purchase by buying nice clothes.
And when it comes to purchasing expected utilons—then, of course, shut up and multiply.
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Meh, I really don’t like the tonality of the essay.
I think that if an average person with money tried to read it, it would not convert them to donating more to effective charities. Quite the opposite, it would put them off donating altogether.
What I think is good:
admitting that the warm feeling people get from helping others is alright and important;
the idea of segmenting do-good instruments by the result they achieve: one for the warm feeling, another for prestige, a third for the actual impact.
However, I don’t believe it is the donor’s responsibility to understand this. This kind of self-reflection and dissection of one’s inner workings requires a lot of effort, and we simply can’t require it from everyone. This analytical, self-reflective approach could put a person off donating altogether: after spending some time thinking analytically about charity, whom to give and whom not etc., people lower their giving to everyone (Small, Loewenstein & Slovic 2007).
I believe the work of making EA appealing, sexy, and prestigious to the masses and to the few rich people is the responsibility of the organizers and ambassadors of the movement. So, using the terminology of the essay, I am pro “warm feeling” at the door and impact as the product of attracting people to that warm feeling.
A naive example: making Taylor Swift, Ronaldo, or some media influencer an ambassador of the EA movement and attracting some of their followers who come just for the warm fuzzies is, in my opinion, smart and good long-term. The MrBeast partnership with GiveDirectly is close to what I propose.
The closest counterpoint to my approach I found is the fidelity model. The basic idea, as I understand it: when you start appealing to a mass audience, you lose nuances that are important for understanding the idea, and the distortion can go so far that the idea stops working on the cause.
My take: this is real, this is a risk, but it doesn’t mean you should not do it at all.
Distortion happens anyway — look at how EA is now deeply associated with Anthropic and doomsday scenarios amid the AI hype. What could the general audience get from it? Those people are a little bit crazy, they try to scare us, and they write hellishly long essays that are tiresome to read..
The bigger problem is that almost no one knows about EA — genuine awareness in the US is around 1–2%. So, for me, the only logical way to scale the impact is to raise awareness and make EA more appealing. It’s better to try to control the narrative and get better at it than to avoid it altogether.
My speculation: a movement born in academia, led by PhDs and intellectuals, may simply be uncomfortable with people who don’t read long texts and who distort complex arguments. But those people are most of the world, and they always will be.
So what?
I would be really interested to hear opposing thoughts and the theory of change behind making donors more rational about how they think about doing good.
I would love to explore ideas in both directions:
how to make EA sexier and more appealing to the rich and the masses
and why it is a bad idea, and why the traditional way of educating people through essays, lectures, and books is better.
Perhaps this is another way to think about it.
In one of the EA job or volunteering applications I was asked:
This is the answer I gave and I believe it satisfies both warm fuzzies (80000hours.org), and expected good done (Against Malaria Foundation) at the same time:
I would donate 10% ($5,000) to https://givingmultiplier.org/ and split the donations so that 80% goes to Against Malaria Foundation (one of the charities recommended by https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities) and 20% to 80000hours.org. By committing 80% to a super-effective charity, it boosts the matching rate to 72% in Giving Multiplier, which amounts to $3,600 USD.
Effectively, even though I’m only donating $5,000, the actual amount donated becomes a total of $8,600 USD ($6,880 goes to Against Malaria Foundation (a charity that’s doing high-impact work proven by evidence and analysis), and $1,720 goes to 80000hours.org (a charity I believe is vital to furthering the EA movement and bringing in future EAs))
Of course, the warm fuzzies can be substituted for any other charity that your heart wants to give to. I think this is a great way to encouraging giving from the heart and the head
https://givingmultiplier.org/philosophy
Are not the warm fuzzies important in increasing social cohesion and a sense of goodness in the world. Potentially inspiring more good behavior?
I contest the existence of fuzzy-free util. That’s an abstraction to help make a decision and it raises these problems:
Should EA be disciplined when celebrating EA wins, like cage-free eggs, so as not to get any fuzzies? That’s supposed to be util work.
Is there any theory for why anyone would ever do util with no fuzzy? We’re all biological creatures, concerned with food, sex, respiration—fuzzies, not utils. What is the initial drive to get a util?
Billionaire donors do demand accountability and transparency. Should we not be suspicious there may be some fuzzies involved there?
There’s a utility monster thought experiment—if “burn money discreetly” saved 10^100 lives, can you really see EA retooling itself around that? I think it would struggle with recruitment, struggle to pull people out of AI and bio risk. Remember—no fuzzy, for feeding the util monster, only util. Yes this is a Pascal’s mugging but it’s a valid one—the theory should withstanding it if fuzzy and util are simply separate. My feeling is it’s unlikely we would cope near our current form. which implies our current form is not doing a fuzzy/util separation.
such a great way to not have to compromise one or the other
[I’m doing a bunch of low-effort reviews of posts I read a while ago and think are important. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to re-read them or say very nuanced things about them.]
Seems like a core post/idea to me.