Fiction, at first glance, seems like a great way to reach people who prefer art over numbers.
However on second glance, fiction thrives on the individual, on the specific, on one person’s story.
We want to convey that doing 100x more good is a great outcome. But how does focusing on one perspective help us to see that the other 100 lives that we’re not seeing are each just as valuable?
Is fiction even suitable for communicating EA ideas at all?
I worried that the answer to this question might be no.
However, with a bit of creativity, I think these challenges can be overcome.
Here’s my approach for generating creative EA fiction ideas
Identify the features of humanity that lead us to not do the most good. Example 1: our desire to do good is all about signalling, and optimising for signalling isn’t the same as optimising for good. Example 2: our empathy is not scope-sensitive, aka the one-death-is-a-tragedy,-a-million-deaths-is-a-statistic effect.
Imagine a world which is “tweaked” so that those features are no longer true in some way
Examples of ideas:
Imagine a person whose empathy was scope sensitive. What would her life be like if every time she reads about the death toll in WW2, she feels 100,000,000x more empathy than at the thought of one person dying?
Imagine if every morning when you woke up, your appearance was tweaked to make you more attractive if you had done more good and less attractive if you had done less good? And that this followed a utilitarian calculus?
These ideas are just meant to be illustrative—I hope that others can come up with much better ideas.
One problem from a fiction-writing perspective is that such tweaks could lead to a genuine utopia. And straightforward utopias don’t make for good stories.
Unfortunately authors tend to resolve this by making the utilitarian/good-maximising behaviour a subterfuge for evil. Which is sad.
I think there are other better ways of still generating a good story. These include:
Imagine a world where just one person has this tweak and everyone else is normal. This helps us to question whether we (who don’t have scope sensitive empathy, for example) are the weird ones.
Focus on the transition. If the world suddenly changed, and everyone’s desire to signal was now perfectly aligned with doing the most good, what would it mean for the mild-mannered middle-class tobacco marketeer who is suddenly signaling to the world how much harm they have done?
Be inspired by other genres. What would a zombie novel that conveyed EA ideas look like?
What if you had a world where karma is discovered to be real, but the amount of good karma you get is explicitly longtermist consequentialist and focus on expected utility? It’d be a great way of looking at effectiveness, and you’d also be able to explore really interesting neglectedness effects as people pile into effective areas.
I toyed with this idea too. I imagined a world where people could remember their past lives, and maybe there was also some way of making this public (some way of linking facebook profiles of your current life with your previous lives?) This was partly interesting because of the implications it had for people’s attitudes to animal welfare. (Hindu vegetarianism appears to have been unusually driven by a desire to promote animal welfare, as opposed to some other religious dietary restrictions which originated from human health needs).
However I think I preferred the world mentioned earlier in the post, where the same consequentialist utilitarian framework causes your appearance to update. It means that the feedback loops are faster. And I think people care more about being good-looking than they do having a nice time in their next life (even if they had good reason to believe that the next life were real).
The appearance-oriented idea is also a great mechanism for highlighting the fact that in the real world virtue and appearance are different (despite the fact that films and other art sometimes seem, horrifically, to confuse the two)
I’d also love to see a fictional world with a moral system that was explictly a karmic-utilitarian moral system. That is, the consequences of actions for particular agents matter proportionally to the amount of utility previously generated by those agents.
Fiction, at first glance, seems like a great way to reach people who prefer art over numbers.
However on second glance, fiction thrives on the individual, on the specific, on one person’s story.
We want to convey that doing 100x more good is a great outcome. But how does focusing on one perspective help us to see that the other 100 lives that we’re not seeing are each just as valuable?
Is fiction even suitable for communicating EA ideas at all?
I worried that the answer to this question might be no.
However, with a bit of creativity, I think these challenges can be overcome.
Here’s my approach for generating creative EA fiction ideas
Identify the features of humanity that lead us to not do the most good. Example 1: our desire to do good is all about signalling, and optimising for signalling isn’t the same as optimising for good. Example 2: our empathy is not scope-sensitive, aka the one-death-is-a-tragedy,-a-million-deaths-is-a-statistic effect.
Imagine a world which is “tweaked” so that those features are no longer true in some way
Examples of ideas:
Imagine a person whose empathy was scope sensitive. What would her life be like if every time she reads about the death toll in WW2, she feels 100,000,000x more empathy than at the thought of one person dying?
Imagine if every morning when you woke up, your appearance was tweaked to make you more attractive if you had done more good and less attractive if you had done less good? And that this followed a utilitarian calculus?
These ideas are just meant to be illustrative—I hope that others can come up with much better ideas.
One problem from a fiction-writing perspective is that such tweaks could lead to a genuine utopia. And straightforward utopias don’t make for good stories.
Unfortunately authors tend to resolve this by making the utilitarian/good-maximising behaviour a subterfuge for evil. Which is sad.
I think there are other better ways of still generating a good story. These include:
Imagine a world where just one person has this tweak and everyone else is normal. This helps us to question whether we (who don’t have scope sensitive empathy, for example) are the weird ones.
Focus on the transition. If the world suddenly changed, and everyone’s desire to signal was now perfectly aligned with doing the most good, what would it mean for the mild-mannered middle-class tobacco marketeer who is suddenly signaling to the world how much harm they have done?
Be inspired by other genres. What would a zombie novel that conveyed EA ideas look like?
What if you had a world where karma is discovered to be real, but the amount of good karma you get is explicitly longtermist consequentialist and focus on expected utility? It’d be a great way of looking at effectiveness, and you’d also be able to explore really interesting neglectedness effects as people pile into effective areas.
I toyed with this idea too. I imagined a world where people could remember their past lives, and maybe there was also some way of making this public (some way of linking facebook profiles of your current life with your previous lives?) This was partly interesting because of the implications it had for people’s attitudes to animal welfare. (Hindu vegetarianism appears to have been unusually driven by a desire to promote animal welfare, as opposed to some other religious dietary restrictions which originated from human health needs).
However I think I preferred the world mentioned earlier in the post, where the same consequentialist utilitarian framework causes your appearance to update. It means that the feedback loops are faster. And I think people care more about being good-looking than they do having a nice time in their next life (even if they had good reason to believe that the next life were real).
The appearance-oriented idea is also a great mechanism for highlighting the fact that in the real world virtue and appearance are different (despite the fact that films and other art sometimes seem, horrifically, to confuse the two)
I’d also love to see a fictional world with a moral system that was explictly a karmic-utilitarian moral system. That is, the consequences of actions for particular agents matter proportionally to the amount of utility previously generated by those agents.
Expected utility as the doer believes? Otherwise the system is too complex for the karma to actually work well. It’s also probably deterministic …
yes that’s how the world is!! yourmortgageonline
“Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don’t even notice it.” – Sakyong Mipham