“I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting. ”—I’m interested in why you think this?
It puts you in a high SNS activation state, which is inimical to the kind of nuanced math good EA requires
As Minh says, it’s based in avoidance of shame and guilt, which also make people worse at nuanced math.
The full parable is “drowning child in a shallow pond”, and the shallow pond smuggles in a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true for global health and poverty. Such as
“we know what to do”, “we know how to implement it”, and “the downside is known and finite”, which just don’t hold for global health and poverty work. Even if you believe sure fire interventions exist and somehow haven’t been fully funded, the average person’s ability to recognize them is dismal, and many options make things actively worse. The urgency of drowningchildgottasavethemnow makes people worse as distinguishing good charities from bad. The more accurate analogy would be “drowning child in a fast moving river when you don’t know how to swim”.
I think Peter Singer believes this so he’s not being inconsistent, I just think he’s wrong.
“you can fix this with a single action, after which you are done.” Solving poverty for even a single child is a marathon.
“you are the only person who can solve this”. I think there is something good about getting people to feel ownership over the problem and avoiding bystandard effect, but falsely invoking an analogy to a situation where that’s true is not the way to do it.
A single drowning child can be fixed via emergency action. A thousand drowning children scattered across my block, replenishing every day, requires a systemic fix. Maybe a fence, or draining the land. And again, the fight or flight mode suitable for saving a single child in a shallow pond is completely inappropriate for figuring out and implementing the systemic solution.
EA is much more about saying “sorry actively drowning children, I can more good by putting up this fence and preventing future deaths”.
When Singer first made the analogy clothes were much more expensive than they are now, and when I see the argument being made it’s typically towards people who care very little about clothes. What was “you’d make a substantial sacrifice if a child’s life was on the line” has become “you aren’t so petty as to care about your $30 fast fashion shoes, right?”. Just switching the analogy to “ruining your cell phone” would get more of the original intent.
Do people still care about drowning child analogy? Is it still used in recruiting? I’d feel kind of dumb railing against a point no one actually believed in.
I will say I also never use the Drowning Child argument. For several reasons:
I generally don’t think negative emotions like shame and guilt are a good first impression/initial reason to join EA. People tend to distance themselves from sources of guilt. It’s fine to mention the drowning child argument maybe 10-20 minutes in, but I prefer to lead with positive associations.
I prefer to minimise use of thought experiments/hypotheticals in intros, and prefer to use examples relatable to the other person. IMO, thought experiments make the ethical stakes seem too trivial and distant.
What I often do is to figure out what cause areas the other person might relate to based on what they already care about, describe EA as fundamentally “doing good, better” in the sense of getting people to engage more thoughtfully with values they already hold.
“I think the drowning child analogy is deceitful, manipulative, and anti-epistemic, so it’s no hardship for me to say we should remove that from recruiting. ”—I’m interested in why you think this?
It puts you in a high SNS activation state, which is inimical to the kind of nuanced math good EA requires
As Minh says, it’s based in avoidance of shame and guilt, which also make people worse at nuanced math.
The full parable is “drowning child in a shallow pond”, and the shallow pond smuggles in a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true for global health and poverty. Such as
“we know what to do”, “we know how to implement it”, and “the downside is known and finite”, which just don’t hold for global health and poverty work. Even if you believe sure fire interventions exist and somehow haven’t been fully funded, the average person’s ability to recognize them is dismal, and many options make things actively worse. The urgency of drowningchildgottasavethemnow makes people worse as distinguishing good charities from bad. The more accurate analogy would be “drowning child in a fast moving river when you don’t know how to swim”.
I think Peter Singer believes this so he’s not being inconsistent, I just think he’s wrong.
“you can fix this with a single action, after which you are done.” Solving poverty for even a single child is a marathon.
“you are the only person who can solve this”. I think there is something good about getting people to feel ownership over the problem and avoiding bystandard effect, but falsely invoking an analogy to a situation where that’s true is not the way to do it.
A single drowning child can be fixed via emergency action. A thousand drowning children scattered across my block, replenishing every day, requires a systemic fix. Maybe a fence, or draining the land. And again, the fight or flight mode suitable for saving a single child in a shallow pond is completely inappropriate for figuring out and implementing the systemic solution.
EA is much more about saying “sorry actively drowning children, I can more good by putting up this fence and preventing future deaths”.
When Singer first made the analogy clothes were much more expensive than they are now, and when I see the argument being made it’s typically towards people who care very little about clothes. What was “you’d make a substantial sacrifice if a child’s life was on the line” has become “you aren’t so petty as to care about your $30 fast fashion shoes, right?”. Just switching the analogy to “ruining your cell phone” would get more of the original intent.
I think this might be a good top level post—would be keen for you more people to see and discuss this point
Do people still care about drowning child analogy? Is it still used in recruiting? I’d feel kind of dumb railing against a point no one actually believed in.
I’m not sure (my active intro cb days were ~2019), but I think it is possibly still in the intro syllabus ? You could add a disclaimer at the top.
I will say I also never use the Drowning Child argument. For several reasons:
I generally don’t think negative emotions like shame and guilt are a good first impression/initial reason to join EA. People tend to distance themselves from sources of guilt. It’s fine to mention the drowning child argument maybe 10-20 minutes in, but I prefer to lead with positive associations.
I prefer to minimise use of thought experiments/hypotheticals in intros, and prefer to use examples relatable to the other person. IMO, thought experiments make the ethical stakes seem too trivial and distant.
What I often do is to figure out what cause areas the other person might relate to based on what they already care about, describe EA as fundamentally “doing good, better” in the sense of getting people to engage more thoughtfully with values they already hold.
Thanks that’s helpful!