Yes I appreciate very much what you’re saying, I’m learning much from this dialogue. I think what I said that didn’t communicate well to you and Brad West isn’t some kind of comparison of utilitarianism and communist thought...but rather how people defend their ideal when it’s failing, whatever it is...religion, etc. that, “They’re not doing it right”...”If you did it right (as I see it) then it would produce much better stuff”.
EA is uniquely bereft of art in comparison to all other categories of human endeavor: education, business, big tech, military, healthcare, social society, etc. So for EA there’s been ten years of incredible activity and massive funding, but no art in sight...so whatever is causing that is a bug and not a feature. Maybe my thesis that utilitarianism is the culprit is wrong. I’d be happy to abandon that thesis if I could find a better one.
But given that EA “attracts, creates and retains consequentialists” as you say, and that they are hopefully not the bad kind that doesn’t work (naive) but the good kind that works (mature) then why the gaping hole in the center where the art should be? I think it’s not naive versus mature utilitarianism, it’s that utilitarianism is a mathematical algorithm and simply doesn’t work for optimizing human living...it’s great for robots. And great for the first pioneering wave of EA blazing a new path...but ulitimately unsustainable for the future.
Eric Hoel does a far better job outlining the poison in utilitarianism that remains no matter how you dilute it or claim it to be naive or mature (but unlike him I am an Effective Altruist).
And of course I agree with you on the “it’s hard to tell one religion to be another religion”, which I myself said in my reply post. In fact, I have a college degree in exactly that—Christian Ministry with an emphasis in “missions’ where you go tell people in foreign countries to abandon their culture and religion and adopt yours...and amazingly, you’d be surprised at how well it works. Any religious group that does proselytizing usually gets decent results. I don’t agree with doing that anymore with religion, but it is surprisingly effective...and so I don’t mind telling a bunch of utilitarians to stop being utilitarians...on the other hand if I can figure out a different reason for the debilitating lack of art in EA and the anxious mental health issues connected to not saving enough lives guilt, I’ll gladly change tactics.
If you compare EA to all those other human endeavors I listed above, what’s the point of differentiation? Why do even military organizations have tons of art compared to EA?
You seem to think if art was good for human optimization then consequentialists should have plenty, so why don’t they around here?
Thanks for taking my comment in the spirit intended. As a noncentral EA it’s not obvious to me why EA has little art, but it could be something simple like artists not historically being attracted to EA. It occurs to me that membership drives have often been at elite universities that maybe don’t have lots of art majors.
Speaking personally, I’m an engineer and a (unpaid) writer. As such I want to play to my strengths and any time I spend on making art is time not spent using my valuable specialized skills… at least I started using AI art in my latest article about AI (well, duh). I write almost exclusively about things I think are very important, because that feeling of importance is usually what drives me to write. But the result has been that my audience has normally been very close to zero (even when writing on EA forum), which caused me to write much less and, when I do write, I tend to write on Twitter instead or in the comment areas of ACX. Okay I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this line of thought, but it’s a painful fact that I sometimes feel like ranting about. But here’s a couple of vaguely related hypotheses: (i) maybe there is some EA art but it’s not promoted well so we don’t see it; (ii) EAs can imagine art being potentially valuable, but are extremely uncertain about how and when it should be used, and so don’t fund it or put the time into it. EAs want to do “the most impactful thing they can” and it’s hard to believe art is it. However, you can argue that EA art is neglected (even though art is commonplace) and that certain ways of using art would be impactful, much as I argued that some of the most important climate change interventions are neglected (even though climate change interventions are commonplace). I would further argue that artists are famously inexpensive to hire, which can boost the benefit/cost ratio (related: the most perplexing thing to me about EA is having hubs in places that are so expensive it would pain me to live there; I suggested Toledo which is inexpensive and near two major cities, earning no votes or comments. Story of my life, I swear, and I’ve been thinking of starting a blog called “No one listens to me”.)
Any religious group that does proselytizing usually gets decent results.
I noticed that too, but I assumed that (for unknown reasons) it worked better for big shifts (pagan to Christian) than more modest ones. But I mentioned “Protestant to Catholic” specifically because the former group was formed in opposition to the latter. I used to be Mormon; we had a whole doctrine about why our religion made more sense and was the True One, and it’s hard to imagine any other sect could’ve come along and changed my mind unless they could counter the exact rationales I had learned from my church. As I see it, mature consequentialist utilitarianism is a lot like this. Unless you seem to understand it very well, I will perceive your pushback against it as being the result of misunderstanding it.
So, if you say utilitarianism is only fit for robots, I just say: nope. You say: utilitarianism is a mathematical algorithm. I say: although it can be put into mathematical models, it can also be imprinted deeply in your mind, and (if you’re highly intelligent and rational) it may work better there than in a traditional computer program. This is because humans can more easily take many nuances into account in their minds than type those nuances into a program. Thus, while mental calculations are imprecise, they are richer in detail which can (with practice) lead to relatively good decisions (both relative to decisions suggested by a computer program that lacks important nuances, and relative to human decisions that are rooted in deontology, virtue ethics, conventional wisdom, popular ideology, or legal precedent).
I did add a caveat there about intelligence and rationality, because the strongest argument against utilitarianism that comes to mind is that it requires a lot of mental horsepower and discipline to be used well as a decision procedure. This is also why I value rules and virtues: an mathematically ideal consequentialist would have no need of them per se, but such a being cannot exist because it would require too much computational power. I think of rules and virtues as a way of computationally bounding otherwise intractable mental calculations, though they are also very useful for predicting public perception of one’s actions (as most of the public primarily views morality through the lenses of rules and virtues). Related: superforecasters are human, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that lots of EAs like forecasting as a test of intelligence and rationality.
However, I think that consequentialist utilitarianism (CU) has value for people of all intelligence levels for judging which rules and virtues are good and which are not. For example, we can explain in CU terms why common rules such as “don’t steal” and “don’t lie” are usually justified, and by the same means it is hard to justify rules like “don’t masturbate” or the Third Reich’s rule that only non-Jewish people of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens (except via strange axioms).
This makes it very valuable from a secular perspective: without CU, what other foundation is there to judge proposed rules or virtues? Most people, it seems to me, just go with the flow: whatever rules/virtues are promoted by trusted people are assumed to be good. This leads to people acting like lemmings, sometimes believing good things and other times bad things according to whatever is popular in their tribe/group, since they have no foundational principle on which to judge (they do have principles promoted by other people, which, again, could be good or bad). While Christians say “God is my rock”, I say “these two axioms are my bedrock, which led me to a mountain I call mature consequentialist utilitarianism”. I could say much more on this but alas, this is a mere comment in a thread and writing takes too much time. But here’s a story I love about Heartstone, the magic gemstone of morality.
For predictive decision-making, choosing actions via CU works better the more processing power you use (whether mental or silicon). Nevertheless, after arriving at a decision, it should always be possible to explain the decision to people without access to the same horsepower. We shouldn’t say “My giant brain determined this to be the right decision, via reasoning so advanced that your puny mind cannot comprehend it. Trust me.” It seems to me that anyone using CU should be able to explain (and defend) their decision in CU terms that don’t require high intelligence to understand. However, (i) the audience cannot verify that the decision is correct without using at least as much computing power, they can only verify that the decision sounds reasonable, (ii) different people have different values which can correctly lead to disagreement about the right course of action, and (iii) there are always numerous ways that an audience can misunderstand what was said, even if it was said in plain and unambiguous language (I suspect this is because many people prefer other modes of thought, not because they can’t think in a consequentialist manner.)
Now, just in case I sound a bit “robotic” here, note that I like the way I am. Not because I like sounding like Spock or Data, but because there is a whole life journey spanning decades that led to where I am now, a journey where I compared different ways of being and found what seem to be the best, most useful and truth-centered principles from which to derive my beliefs and goals. (Plus I’ve always loved computers, so a computational framing comes naturally.)
a different reason for [...] the anxious mental health issues connected to not saving enough lives guilt[?]
I think a lot of EAs have an above-average level of empathy and sense of responsibility. My poth (hypothesis) is that these things are what caused them to join EA in the first place, and also caused them to have this anxiety about lives not saved and good not done. This poth leads me to predict that such a person will have had some anxiety from the first day they found out about the disease and starvation in Africa, even if joining EA managed to increase that anxiety further. For me personally, global poverty bothered me since I first learned about it, I have a deep yearning to improve the world that appeared 15+ years before I learned about EA, I don’t feel like my anxiety increased after joining EA, and the analysis we’re talking about (in which there is a utilitarian justification not to feel bad about only giving 10% of our income) helps me not to feel too bad about the limits of my altruism, although I still want to give much more to fund direct work, mainly because I have little confidence in my ability to persuade other EAs about what I think needs to be done (only 31 karma including my own strong upvote? Yikes! 😳😱)
Why do even military organizations have tons of art compared to EA?
Is that true? I’m not surprised if military personnel make a lot of art, but I don’t expect it from the formal structures or leadership. But, if a military does spend money on art, I expect it’s a result of some people who advocated for art to sympathetic ears that controlled the purse strings, and that this worked either because they were persuasive or because people liked art. The same should work in EA if you find a framing that appeals to EAs. (which reminds me of the odd fact that although I identify strongly with common EA beliefs and principles, I have little confidence in my ability to persuade other EAs, as I am often downvoted or not upvoted. I cannot explain this.)
You seem to think if art was good for human optimization then consequentialists should have plenty, so why don’t they around here?
My guess is that it’s a combination of
the difficulty EAs have had seeing art as an impactful intervention (although I feel like it could be, e.g. as a way of attracting new EAs and improving EA mental health). Note: although EAs like theoretical models and RCTs demonstrating good cost/benefit, my sense is that EA leaders also understand (in a CU manner) that some interventions are valuable enough to support even when there’s no solid theoretical/scientific basis for them.
artists rarely becoming EAs (why? maybe selection bias in membership drives… maybe artists being turned off by EA vibes for some reason...)
EA being a young movement, so (i) lots of things still haven’t been worked out and (ii) the smaller the movement is, the less likely that art is worthy of funding (the explanation for this assertion feels too complicated to briefly explain.)
Wow thanks for your long and thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate your thinking and I’m glad CU is working for you and you’re happy with it...that is a good thing.
I do think you’ve given me a little boost in my argument against CU unfortunately, though, in the idea that our brain just doesn’t have enough compute. There was a post a while back from a well know EA about their long experience starting orgs and “doing EA stuff” and how the lesson they’d taken from it all is that there are just too many unknown variables in life for anything we try to build and plan outcomes for to really work out how we hoped...it’s a lot of shots in the dark and sometimes you hit. That is similar to my experience as well...and the reason is we just don’t have enough data nor enough compute to process it all...nor adequate points or spectrums of input. The thing that better fits in that kind of category is a robot who with an AI mind can do far more compute...but even they are challenged. So for me that’s another good reason against CU optimizing well for humans.
And the other big thing I haven’t mentioned is our mysterious inner life, the one that responds to spirituality and to emotions within human relationships, and to art...this part of us does not follow logic or compute...it is somehow organic and you could almost say quantum in how we are connected to other people...living with it is vital for happiness...I think the attraction of CU is that it adds to us the logic side that our inner life doesn’t always have...and so the answer is to live with both together...to use CU thinking for the effective things it does, but also to realize where it is very ineffective toward human thriving...and so that may be similar to the differences you see between naive and mature CU. Maybe that’s how we synthesize our two views.
How I would apply this to the Original Post here is that we should see “the gaping hole where the art should be” in EA as a form of evidence of a bug in EA that we should seek to fix. I personally hope as we turn this corner toward a third wave, we will include that on the list of priorities.
Well, okay. I’ve argued that other decision procedures and moralities do have value, but are properly considered subordinate to CU. Not sure if these ideas swayed you at all, but if you’re Christian you may be thinking “I have my Rock” so you feel no need for another.
If you want to criticize utilitarianism itself, you would have to say the goal of maximizing well-being should be constrained or subordinated by other principles/rules, such as requirements of honesty or glorifying God/etc.
You could do this, but you’d be arguing axiomatically. A claim like “my axioms are above those of utilitarians!” would just be a bare assertion with nothing to back it up. As I mentioned, I have axioms too, but only the bare minimum necessary, because axioms are unprovable, and years of reflection led me to reject all unnecessary axioms.
You could say something like the production of art/beauty is intrinsically valuable apart from the well-being it produces and thus utilitarianism is flawed in that it fails to capture this intrinsic value (and only captures the instrumental value.
The most important thing to realize is that “things with intrinsic value” is a choice that lies outside consequentialism. A consequentialist could indeed choose an axiom that “art is intrinsically valuable”. Calling it “utilitarian” feels like nonstandard terminology, but such value assignment seems utilitarian-adjacent unless you treat it merely as a virtue or rule rather than as a goal you seek after.
Note, however, that beauty doesn’t exist apart from an observer to view it, which is part of the reason I think this choice would be a mistake. Imagine a completely dead universe―no people, no life, no souls/God/heaven/hell, and no chance life will ever arise. Just an endless void pockmarked by black holes. Suppose there is art drifting through the void (perhaps Boltzmann art, by analogy to a Boltzmann brain). Does it have value? I say it does not. But if, in the endless void, a billion light years beyond the light cone of this art that can never be seen, there should be one solitary civilization left alive, I argue that this civilization’s art is infinitely more valuable. More pointedly, I would say that it is the experience of art that is valuable and not the art itself, or that art is instrumentally valuable, not intrinsically. Thus a great work of art viewed by a million people has delivered 100 times as much value as the same art only seen by 10,000 people―though one should take into account countervailing factors such as the fact that the first 10,000 who see it are more likely to be connoisseurs who appreciate it a lot, and the fact that any art you experience takes away time you might have spent seeing other art. e.g. for me I wish I could listen to more EA and geeky songs (as long as they have beautiful melodies), but lacking that, I still enjoy hearing nice music that isn’t tailored as much to my tastes. Thus EA art is less valuable in a world that is already full of art. But EA art could be instrumentally valuable both in the experiences it creates (experiences with intrinsic value) and in its tendency to make the EA movement healthy and growing.
So, to be clear, I don’t see a bug in utilitarianism; I see the other views as the ones with bugs. This is simply because I see no flaws in my moral system, but I see flaws in other systems. There are of course flaws in myself , as I illustrate below.
And the other big thing I haven’t mentioned is our mysterious inner life, the one that responds to spirituality and to emotions within human relationships, and to art...this part of us does not follow logic or compute...it is somehow organic and you could almost say quantum in how we are connected to other people...living with it is vital for happiness
I think it’s important to understand and accept that humans cannot be maximally moral; we are all flawed. And this is not a controversial statement to a Christian, right? We can be flawed even in our own efforts to act morally! I’ll give an example from last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine. I was suddenly and deeply interested in helping, seeing that a rapid response was needed. But other EAs weren’t nearly as interested as I was. I would’ve argued that although Ukrainian lives are less cost-effective to save than Africans, there was a meaningful longtermist angle: Russia was tipping the global balance of power from democracy to dictatorship, and if we don’t respond strongly against Putin, Xi Jinping could be emboldened to invade Taiwan; in the long term, this could lead to tyranny taking over the world (EA relies on freedom to work, so this is a threat to us). Yet I didn’t make this argument to EAs; I kept it to myself (perhaps for the same reason I waited ~6 months to publish this, I was afraid EAs wouldn’t care). I ended up thinking deeply about the war―about what it might be like as a civilian on the front lines, about what kinds of things would help Ukraine most on a small-ish budget, about how the best Russians weren’t getting the support they deserved, and about how events might play out (which turned into a hobby of learning and forecasting, and the horrors of war I’ve seen are like―holy shit, did I burn out my empathy unit?). But not a single EA organization offered any way to help Ukraine and I was left looking for other ways to help. So, I ended up giving $2000 CAD to Ukraine-related causes, half of which went to Ripley’s Heroes which turned out to be a (probably, mostly) fraudulent organization. Not my best EA moment! From a CU perspective, I performed badly. I f**ked up. I should’ve been able to look at the situation and accept that there was no way I could give military aid effectively with the information I had. And I certainly knew that military aid was far from an ideal intervention and that there were probably better interventions, I just didn’t have access to them AFAIK. The correct course of action was not to donate to Ukraine (understanding that some people could help effectively, just not me). But emotionally I couldn’t accept that. But you know, I have no doubt that it was myself that was flawed and not my moral system; CU’s name be praised! 😉 Also I don’t really feel guilty about it, I just think “well, I’m human, I’ll make some mistakes and no one’s judging me anyway, hopefully I’ll do better next time.”
In sum: humans can’t meet the ideals of (M)CU, but that doesn’t mean (M)CU isn’t the correct standard by which to make and evaluate choices. There is no better standard. And again, the Christian view is similar, just with a different axiomatic foundation.
5.6: Isn’t utilitarianism hostile to music and art and nature and maybe love?
No. Some people seem to think this, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If a world with music and art and nature and love is better than a world without them (and everyone seems to agree that it is) and if they make people happy (and everyone seems to agree that they do) then of course utilitarians will support these things.
There’s a more comprehensive treatment of this objection in 7.8 below.
If art production is critical to EA’s ability to maximize well-being and EA is failing to do so, then this is a failure of EA not to be utilitarian enough. Your criticism perhaps stems from the culture and notions of people who happen to subscribe to utilitarianism, not utilitarianism itself. Utilitarians are human, and thus capable of being in error as to what will do the most good.
If you want to criticize utilitarianism itself, you would have to say the goal of maximizing well-being should be constrained or subordinated by other principles/rules, such as requirements of honesty or glorifying God/etc. You could say something like the production of art/beauty is intrinsically valuable apart from the well-being it produces and thus utilitarianism is flawed in that it fails to capture this intrinsic value (and only captures the instrumental value.
I think a more apt target for your criticism would not be utilitarianism itself, but rather the cultures and mentalities of those who practice it.
Yes I appreciate very much what you’re saying, I’m learning much from this dialogue. I think what I said that didn’t communicate well to you and Brad West isn’t some kind of comparison of utilitarianism and communist thought...but rather how people defend their ideal when it’s failing, whatever it is...religion, etc. that, “They’re not doing it right”...”If you did it right (as I see it) then it would produce much better stuff”.
EA is uniquely bereft of art in comparison to all other categories of human endeavor: education, business, big tech, military, healthcare, social society, etc. So for EA there’s been ten years of incredible activity and massive funding, but no art in sight...so whatever is causing that is a bug and not a feature. Maybe my thesis that utilitarianism is the culprit is wrong. I’d be happy to abandon that thesis if I could find a better one.
But given that EA “attracts, creates and retains consequentialists” as you say, and that they are hopefully not the bad kind that doesn’t work (naive) but the good kind that works (mature) then why the gaping hole in the center where the art should be? I think it’s not naive versus mature utilitarianism, it’s that utilitarianism is a mathematical algorithm and simply doesn’t work for optimizing human living...it’s great for robots. And great for the first pioneering wave of EA blazing a new path...but ulitimately unsustainable for the future.
Eric Hoel does a far better job outlining the poison in utilitarianism that remains no matter how you dilute it or claim it to be naive or mature (but unlike him I am an Effective Altruist).
And of course I agree with you on the “it’s hard to tell one religion to be another religion”, which I myself said in my reply post. In fact, I have a college degree in exactly that—Christian Ministry with an emphasis in “missions’ where you go tell people in foreign countries to abandon their culture and religion and adopt yours...and amazingly, you’d be surprised at how well it works. Any religious group that does proselytizing usually gets decent results. I don’t agree with doing that anymore with religion, but it is surprisingly effective...and so I don’t mind telling a bunch of utilitarians to stop being utilitarians...on the other hand if I can figure out a different reason for the debilitating lack of art in EA and the anxious mental health issues connected to not saving enough lives guilt, I’ll gladly change tactics.
If you compare EA to all those other human endeavors I listed above, what’s the point of differentiation? Why do even military organizations have tons of art compared to EA?
You seem to think if art was good for human optimization then consequentialists should have plenty, so why don’t they around here?
Thanks for helping me think these things through.
Thanks for taking my comment in the spirit intended. As a noncentral EA it’s not obvious to me why EA has little art, but it could be something simple like artists not historically being attracted to EA. It occurs to me that membership drives have often been at elite universities that maybe don’t have lots of art majors.
Speaking personally, I’m an engineer and a (unpaid) writer. As such I want to play to my strengths and any time I spend on making art is time not spent using my valuable specialized skills… at least I started using AI art in my latest article about AI (well, duh). I write almost exclusively about things I think are very important, because that feeling of importance is usually what drives me to write. But the result has been that my audience has normally been very close to zero (even when writing on EA forum), which caused me to write much less and, when I do write, I tend to write on Twitter instead or in the comment areas of ACX. Okay I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this line of thought, but it’s a painful fact that I sometimes feel like ranting about. But here’s a couple of vaguely related hypotheses: (i) maybe there is some EA art but it’s not promoted well so we don’t see it; (ii) EAs can imagine art being potentially valuable, but are extremely uncertain about how and when it should be used, and so don’t fund it or put the time into it. EAs want to do “the most impactful thing they can” and it’s hard to believe art is it. However, you can argue that EA art is neglected (even though art is commonplace) and that certain ways of using art would be impactful, much as I argued that some of the most important climate change interventions are neglected (even though climate change interventions are commonplace). I would further argue that artists are famously inexpensive to hire, which can boost the benefit/cost ratio (related: the most perplexing thing to me about EA is having hubs in places that are so expensive it would pain me to live there; I suggested Toledo which is inexpensive and near two major cities, earning no votes or comments. Story of my life, I swear, and I’ve been thinking of starting a blog called “No one listens to me”.)
I noticed that too, but I assumed that (for unknown reasons) it worked better for big shifts (pagan to Christian) than more modest ones. But I mentioned “Protestant to Catholic” specifically because the former group was formed in opposition to the latter. I used to be Mormon; we had a whole doctrine about why our religion made more sense and was the True One, and it’s hard to imagine any other sect could’ve come along and changed my mind unless they could counter the exact rationales I had learned from my church. As I see it, mature consequentialist utilitarianism is a lot like this. Unless you seem to understand it very well, I will perceive your pushback against it as being the result of misunderstanding it.
So, if you say utilitarianism is only fit for robots, I just say: nope. You say: utilitarianism is a mathematical algorithm. I say: although it can be put into mathematical models, it can also be imprinted deeply in your mind, and (if you’re highly intelligent and rational) it may work better there than in a traditional computer program. This is because humans can more easily take many nuances into account in their minds than type those nuances into a program. Thus, while mental calculations are imprecise, they are richer in detail which can (with practice) lead to relatively good decisions (both relative to decisions suggested by a computer program that lacks important nuances, and relative to human decisions that are rooted in deontology, virtue ethics, conventional wisdom, popular ideology, or legal precedent).
I did add a caveat there about intelligence and rationality, because the strongest argument against utilitarianism that comes to mind is that it requires a lot of mental horsepower and discipline to be used well as a decision procedure. This is also why I value rules and virtues: an mathematically ideal consequentialist would have no need of them per se, but such a being cannot exist because it would require too much computational power. I think of rules and virtues as a way of computationally bounding otherwise intractable mental calculations, though they are also very useful for predicting public perception of one’s actions (as most of the public primarily views morality through the lenses of rules and virtues). Related: superforecasters are human, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that lots of EAs like forecasting as a test of intelligence and rationality.
However, I think that consequentialist utilitarianism (CU) has value for people of all intelligence levels for judging which rules and virtues are good and which are not. For example, we can explain in CU terms why common rules such as “don’t steal” and “don’t lie” are usually justified, and by the same means it is hard to justify rules like “don’t masturbate” or the Third Reich’s rule that only non-Jewish people of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens (except via strange axioms).
This makes it very valuable from a secular perspective: without CU, what other foundation is there to judge proposed rules or virtues? Most people, it seems to me, just go with the flow: whatever rules/virtues are promoted by trusted people are assumed to be good. This leads to people acting like lemmings, sometimes believing good things and other times bad things according to whatever is popular in their tribe/group, since they have no foundational principle on which to judge (they do have principles promoted by other people, which, again, could be good or bad). While Christians say “God is my rock”, I say “these two axioms are my bedrock, which led me to a mountain I call mature consequentialist utilitarianism”. I could say much more on this but alas, this is a mere comment in a thread and writing takes too much time. But here’s a story I love about Heartstone, the magic gemstone of morality.
For predictive decision-making, choosing actions via CU works better the more processing power you use (whether mental or silicon). Nevertheless, after arriving at a decision, it should always be possible to explain the decision to people without access to the same horsepower. We shouldn’t say “My giant brain determined this to be the right decision, via reasoning so advanced that your puny mind cannot comprehend it. Trust me.” It seems to me that anyone using CU should be able to explain (and defend) their decision in CU terms that don’t require high intelligence to understand. However, (i) the audience cannot verify that the decision is correct without using at least as much computing power, they can only verify that the decision sounds reasonable, (ii) different people have different values which can correctly lead to disagreement about the right course of action, and (iii) there are always numerous ways that an audience can misunderstand what was said, even if it was said in plain and unambiguous language (I suspect this is because many people prefer other modes of thought, not because they can’t think in a consequentialist manner.)
Now, just in case I sound a bit “robotic” here, note that I like the way I am. Not because I like sounding like Spock or Data, but because there is a whole life journey spanning decades that led to where I am now, a journey where I compared different ways of being and found what seem to be the best, most useful and truth-centered principles from which to derive my beliefs and goals. (Plus I’ve always loved computers, so a computational framing comes naturally.)
I think a lot of EAs have an above-average level of empathy and sense of responsibility. My poth (hypothesis) is that these things are what caused them to join EA in the first place, and also caused them to have this anxiety about lives not saved and good not done. This poth leads me to predict that such a person will have had some anxiety from the first day they found out about the disease and starvation in Africa, even if joining EA managed to increase that anxiety further. For me personally, global poverty bothered me since I first learned about it, I have a deep yearning to improve the world that appeared 15+ years before I learned about EA, I don’t feel like my anxiety increased after joining EA, and the analysis we’re talking about (in which there is a utilitarian justification not to feel bad about only giving 10% of our income) helps me not to feel too bad about the limits of my altruism, although I still want to give much more to fund direct work, mainly because I have little confidence in my ability to persuade other EAs about what I think needs to be done (only 31 karma including my own strong upvote? Yikes! 😳😱)
Is that true? I’m not surprised if military personnel make a lot of art, but I don’t expect it from the formal structures or leadership. But, if a military does spend money on art, I expect it’s a result of some people who advocated for art to sympathetic ears that controlled the purse strings, and that this worked either because they were persuasive or because people liked art. The same should work in EA if you find a framing that appeals to EAs. (which reminds me of the odd fact that although I identify strongly with common EA beliefs and principles, I have little confidence in my ability to persuade other EAs, as I am often downvoted or not upvoted. I cannot explain this.)
My guess is that it’s a combination of
the difficulty EAs have had seeing art as an impactful intervention (although I feel like it could be, e.g. as a way of attracting new EAs and improving EA mental health). Note: although EAs like theoretical models and RCTs demonstrating good cost/benefit, my sense is that EA leaders also understand (in a CU manner) that some interventions are valuable enough to support even when there’s no solid theoretical/scientific basis for them.
artists rarely becoming EAs (why? maybe selection bias in membership drives… maybe artists being turned off by EA vibes for some reason...)
EA being a young movement, so (i) lots of things still haven’t been worked out and (ii) the smaller the movement is, the less likely that art is worthy of funding (the explanation for this assertion feels too complicated to briefly explain.)
something else I didn’t think of (???)
Wow thanks for your long and thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate your thinking and I’m glad CU is working for you and you’re happy with it...that is a good thing.
I do think you’ve given me a little boost in my argument against CU unfortunately, though, in the idea that our brain just doesn’t have enough compute. There was a post a while back from a well know EA about their long experience starting orgs and “doing EA stuff” and how the lesson they’d taken from it all is that there are just too many unknown variables in life for anything we try to build and plan outcomes for to really work out how we hoped...it’s a lot of shots in the dark and sometimes you hit. That is similar to my experience as well...and the reason is we just don’t have enough data nor enough compute to process it all...nor adequate points or spectrums of input. The thing that better fits in that kind of category is a robot who with an AI mind can do far more compute...but even they are challenged. So for me that’s another good reason against CU optimizing well for humans.
And the other big thing I haven’t mentioned is our mysterious inner life, the one that responds to spirituality and to emotions within human relationships, and to art...this part of us does not follow logic or compute...it is somehow organic and you could almost say quantum in how we are connected to other people...living with it is vital for happiness...I think the attraction of CU is that it adds to us the logic side that our inner life doesn’t always have...and so the answer is to live with both together...to use CU thinking for the effective things it does, but also to realize where it is very ineffective toward human thriving...and so that may be similar to the differences you see between naive and mature CU. Maybe that’s how we synthesize our two views.
How I would apply this to the Original Post here is that we should see “the gaping hole where the art should be” in EA as a form of evidence of a bug in EA that we should seek to fix. I personally hope as we turn this corner toward a third wave, we will include that on the list of priorities.
Well, okay. I’ve argued that other decision procedures and moralities do have value, but are properly considered subordinate to CU. Not sure if these ideas swayed you at all, but if you’re Christian you may be thinking “I have my Rock” so you feel no need for another.
You could do this, but you’d be arguing axiomatically. A claim like “my axioms are above those of utilitarians!” would just be a bare assertion with nothing to back it up. As I mentioned, I have axioms too, but only the bare minimum necessary, because axioms are unprovable, and years of reflection led me to reject all unnecessary axioms.
The most important thing to realize is that “things with intrinsic value” is a choice that lies outside consequentialism. A consequentialist could indeed choose an axiom that “art is intrinsically valuable”. Calling it “utilitarian” feels like nonstandard terminology, but such value assignment seems utilitarian-adjacent unless you treat it merely as a virtue or rule rather than as a goal you seek after.
Note, however, that beauty doesn’t exist apart from an observer to view it, which is part of the reason I think this choice would be a mistake. Imagine a completely dead universe―no people, no life, no souls/God/heaven/hell, and no chance life will ever arise. Just an endless void pockmarked by black holes. Suppose there is art drifting through the void (perhaps Boltzmann art, by analogy to a Boltzmann brain). Does it have value? I say it does not. But if, in the endless void, a billion light years beyond the light cone of this art that can never be seen, there should be one solitary civilization left alive, I argue that this civilization’s art is infinitely more valuable. More pointedly, I would say that it is the experience of art that is valuable and not the art itself, or that art is instrumentally valuable, not intrinsically. Thus a great work of art viewed by a million people has delivered 100 times as much value as the same art only seen by 10,000 people―though one should take into account countervailing factors such as the fact that the first 10,000 who see it are more likely to be connoisseurs who appreciate it a lot, and the fact that any art you experience takes away time you might have spent seeing other art. e.g. for me I wish I could listen to more EA and geeky songs (as long as they have beautiful melodies), but lacking that, I still enjoy hearing nice music that isn’t tailored as much to my tastes. Thus EA art is less valuable in a world that is already full of art. But EA art could be instrumentally valuable both in the experiences it creates (experiences with intrinsic value) and in its tendency to make the EA movement healthy and growing.
So, to be clear, I don’t see a bug in utilitarianism; I see the other views as the ones with bugs. This is simply because I see no flaws in my moral system, but I see flaws in other systems. There are of course flaws in myself , as I illustrate below.
I think it’s important to understand and accept that humans cannot be maximally moral; we are all flawed. And this is not a controversial statement to a Christian, right? We can be flawed even in our own efforts to act morally! I’ll give an example from last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine. I was suddenly and deeply interested in helping, seeing that a rapid response was needed. But other EAs weren’t nearly as interested as I was. I would’ve argued that although Ukrainian lives are less cost-effective to save than Africans, there was a meaningful longtermist angle: Russia was tipping the global balance of power from democracy to dictatorship, and if we don’t respond strongly against Putin, Xi Jinping could be emboldened to invade Taiwan; in the long term, this could lead to tyranny taking over the world (EA relies on freedom to work, so this is a threat to us). Yet I didn’t make this argument to EAs; I kept it to myself (perhaps for the same reason I waited ~6 months to publish this, I was afraid EAs wouldn’t care). I ended up thinking deeply about the war―about what it might be like as a civilian on the front lines, about what kinds of things would help Ukraine most on a small-ish budget, about how the best Russians weren’t getting the support they deserved, and about how events might play out (which turned into a hobby of learning and forecasting, and the horrors of war I’ve seen are like―holy shit, did I burn out my empathy unit?). But not a single EA organization offered any way to help Ukraine and I was left looking for other ways to help. So, I ended up giving $2000 CAD to Ukraine-related causes, half of which went to Ripley’s Heroes which turned out to be a (probably, mostly) fraudulent organization. Not my best EA moment! From a CU perspective, I performed badly. I f**ked up. I should’ve been able to look at the situation and accept that there was no way I could give military aid effectively with the information I had. And I certainly knew that military aid was far from an ideal intervention and that there were probably better interventions, I just didn’t have access to them AFAIK. The correct course of action was not to donate to Ukraine (understanding that some people could help effectively, just not me). But emotionally I couldn’t accept that. But you know, I have no doubt that it was myself that was flawed and not my moral system; CU’s name be praised! 😉 Also I don’t really feel guilty about it, I just think “well, I’m human, I’ll make some mistakes and no one’s judging me anyway, hopefully I’ll do better next time.”
In sum: humans can’t meet the ideals of (M)CU, but that doesn’t mean (M)CU isn’t the correct standard by which to make and evaluate choices. There is no better standard. And again, the Christian view is similar, just with a different axiomatic foundation.
Edit: P.S. a relevant bit of the Consequentialism FAQ:
If art production is critical to EA’s ability to maximize well-being and EA is failing to do so, then this is a failure of EA not to be utilitarian enough. Your criticism perhaps stems from the culture and notions of people who happen to subscribe to utilitarianism, not utilitarianism itself. Utilitarians are human, and thus capable of being in error as to what will do the most good.
If you want to criticize utilitarianism itself, you would have to say the goal of maximizing well-being should be constrained or subordinated by other principles/rules, such as requirements of honesty or glorifying God/etc. You could say something like the production of art/beauty is intrinsically valuable apart from the well-being it produces and thus utilitarianism is flawed in that it fails to capture this intrinsic value (and only captures the instrumental value.
I think a more apt target for your criticism would not be utilitarianism itself, but rather the cultures and mentalities of those who practice it.