You simply need to try to evaluate the world that would have transpired if not for a specific agent(s) actions. In the case of your vaccine creation and distribution, letâs take the individual or team that created the initial vaccine and the companies (and their employees) that manufacture and distribute the vaccines.
If the individual or team did not did not create the initial vaccine, it likely would have been discovered later. On the other hand, if the manufacturers and distributors did not go into that manufacturing and distributing roles, other members of society would have filled these roles. So, the world is better to the degree that the discoverers accelerated this benefit to the world. However, the other agents (to the extent there were not other bottlenecks) did not counterfactually have an impact because if they hadnât been in that position, someone else would have.
I agree that it is hard to evaluate counterfactuals, but declining to do so will prevent us from looking for important gaps that help us achieve the best outcomes together.
I think counterfactual analysis as a guide to making decisions is sometimes (!) a useful approach (especially if it is done with appropriate epistemic humility in light of the empirical difficulties).
But, tentatively, I donât think that it is a valid method for calculating the impact an individual has had (or can be expected to have, if you calculate ex ante). I struggle a bit to put my thinking on this into words, but hereâs an attempt: If I say âAlec [random individual] has saved 1,000 livesâ, I think what I mean is â1,000 people now live because of Alec aloneâ. But if Alec was only able to save those lives with the help of twenty other people, and the 1,000 people would now be dead were it not for those twenty helpers, then it seems wrong to me to claim that the 1,000 survivors are alive only because of Alecâeven if Alec played a vital role in the endeavour and if it would have been impossible to replace Alec by some other random individual. And just because any one of the twenty people were easily replaceable, I donât think that they all suddenly count for nothing/âvery little in the impact evaluation; the fact seems to remain that Alec would not have been able to have any impact if he did not have twenty other people to help him⌠So it seems like an individual impact evaluation would need to include some sharing between Alec and the twenty other helpers; wouldnât it??
Correct me if you (anyone reading this) think Iâm misguided, but I believe the crux here is that Iâm using a different definition of âimpactâ than the one that underlies counterfactual analysis. I agree that the impact definition underlying counterfactual analysis can sometimes be useful for making individual decisions, but I would argue that the definition I use can be helpful when talking about efforts to do good as a community and when trying to build a strategy for how to live oneâs life over the long term (because it looks at what is needed for positive change in the aggregate).
It seems that you are gesturing toward the supporting roles that enabled or allowed Alec to save those lives. I find it both true (in this hypothetical scenario) that those lives were saved because of Alecâs choices, and also that AleCâs choices are in turn dependent on other things. This seems to echo some aspects of the ideas of dependent origination. If we really want to give âcredit,â then maybe we would have to use something vaguely analogous to exponential smoothing: Alec getâs 80% of the credit, and the person before that gets 80%^2 of the remaining credit, the person before that gets 80%^3 of the remaining credit, etc.
Also vaguely related, the book The Innovation Delusion has a section relating to this idea of giving credit and the idea of the enabling and supporting people that donât get credit for their contributions, describing it as a âcult of the inventor.â Here is a small excerpt:
Edisonâwidely celebrated as the inventor of the lightbulb, among many other thingsâis a good example. Edison did not toil alone in his Menlo Park laboratory; rather, he employed a staff of several dozen men who worked as machinists, ran experiments, researched patents, sketched designs, and kept careful records in notebooks. Teams of Irish and African American servants maintained their homes and boardinghouses. Menlo Park also had a boardinghouse for the workers, where Mrs. Sarah Jordan, her daughter Ida, and a domestic servant named Kate Williams cooked for the inventors and provided a clean and comfortable dwelling. But you wonât see any of those people in the iconic images of Edison posing with his lightbulb.
Yeah, I think the crux is that you want to weight counterfactual analysis less and myself and EAs generally think this is the ultimate question (at least to the extent consequentialism is motivating our actions as opposed to non-consequentialist moral considerations).
I think that the way to evaluate Alecâs impact is to say, if Alec had not taken action, would those thousand people be dead or would they be alive? (in this hypothetical, Iâm assuming Alec is playing a founder role regarding a new intervention). Regarding the twenty other people, ask yourself if the same is true of them. If they are volunteering, would there have been others to volunteer, or would the project been able to procure the funds to fund employees? If they are working for pay, was their work such that the project would not have been able to happen without them? Maybe it is the case that some or all of these people were truly indispensable to the project, such that a proper impact analysis would attribute much or even most of the impact to the twenty people other than Alec.
On the other hand, it may be the case that Alec secured funding to pay these twenty other people and if they had not taken the position, other competent people would. In this situation, provided that there were not other sources of funding for Alec, I would say an impact analysis would attribute half of the lives saved to Alec and half to the funder.
I acknowledge that determining the counterfactual is hard (for instance, maybe the 20 workers freed up other actors to do other impactful work). But as the endpoint of analysis, I definitely think we should be trying to determine what the world looks like if we do X rather than if we did not do X, rather than if we do something that other people consider admirable or otherwise feels good.
EDIT: I realize you put âand those thousand people would not be saved but for the twenty othersâ. If this is true, then the impact âcreditâ should definitely be spread among them. I think it bears considering whether that is true.
Regarding the impact attribution point-
You simply need to try to evaluate the world that would have transpired if not for a specific agent(s) actions. In the case of your vaccine creation and distribution, letâs take the individual or team that created the initial vaccine and the companies (and their employees) that manufacture and distribute the vaccines.
If the individual or team did not did not create the initial vaccine, it likely would have been discovered later. On the other hand, if the manufacturers and distributors did not go into that manufacturing and distributing roles, other members of society would have filled these roles. So, the world is better to the degree that the discoverers accelerated this benefit to the world. However, the other agents (to the extent there were not other bottlenecks) did not counterfactually have an impact because if they hadnât been in that position, someone else would have.
I agree that it is hard to evaluate counterfactuals, but declining to do so will prevent us from looking for important gaps that help us achieve the best outcomes together.
I think counterfactual analysis as a guide to making decisions is sometimes (!) a useful approach (especially if it is done with appropriate epistemic humility in light of the empirical difficulties).
But, tentatively, I donât think that it is a valid method for calculating the impact an individual has had (or can be expected to have, if you calculate ex ante). I struggle a bit to put my thinking on this into words, but hereâs an attempt: If I say âAlec [random individual] has saved 1,000 livesâ, I think what I mean is â1,000 people now live because of Alec aloneâ. But if Alec was only able to save those lives with the help of twenty other people, and the 1,000 people would now be dead were it not for those twenty helpers, then it seems wrong to me to claim that the 1,000 survivors are alive only because of Alecâeven if Alec played a vital role in the endeavour and if it would have been impossible to replace Alec by some other random individual. And just because any one of the twenty people were easily replaceable, I donât think that they all suddenly count for nothing/âvery little in the impact evaluation; the fact seems to remain that Alec would not have been able to have any impact if he did not have twenty other people to help him⌠So it seems like an individual impact evaluation would need to include some sharing between Alec and the twenty other helpers; wouldnât it??
Correct me if you (anyone reading this) think Iâm misguided, but I believe the crux here is that Iâm using a different definition of âimpactâ than the one that underlies counterfactual analysis. I agree that the impact definition underlying counterfactual analysis can sometimes be useful for making individual decisions, but I would argue that the definition I use can be helpful when talking about efforts to do good as a community and when trying to build a strategy for how to live oneâs life over the long term (because it looks at what is needed for positive change in the aggregate).
It seems that you are gesturing toward the supporting roles that enabled or allowed Alec to save those lives. I find it both true (in this hypothetical scenario) that those lives were saved because of Alecâs choices, and also that AleCâs choices are in turn dependent on other things. This seems to echo some aspects of the ideas of dependent origination. If we really want to give âcredit,â then maybe we would have to use something vaguely analogous to exponential smoothing: Alec getâs 80% of the credit, and the person before that gets 80%^2 of the remaining credit, the person before that gets 80%^3 of the remaining credit, etc.
Also vaguely related, the book The Innovation Delusion has a section relating to this idea of giving credit and the idea of the enabling and supporting people that donât get credit for their contributions, describing it as a âcult of the inventor.â Here is a small excerpt:
Yeah, I think the crux is that you want to weight counterfactual analysis less and myself and EAs generally think this is the ultimate question (at least to the extent consequentialism is motivating our actions as opposed to non-consequentialist moral considerations).
I think that the way to evaluate Alecâs impact is to say, if Alec had not taken action, would those thousand people be dead or would they be alive? (in this hypothetical, Iâm assuming Alec is playing a founder role regarding a new intervention). Regarding the twenty other people, ask yourself if the same is true of them. If they are volunteering, would there have been others to volunteer, or would the project been able to procure the funds to fund employees? If they are working for pay, was their work such that the project would not have been able to happen without them? Maybe it is the case that some or all of these people were truly indispensable to the project, such that a proper impact analysis would attribute much or even most of the impact to the twenty people other than Alec.
On the other hand, it may be the case that Alec secured funding to pay these twenty other people and if they had not taken the position, other competent people would. In this situation, provided that there were not other sources of funding for Alec, I would say an impact analysis would attribute half of the lives saved to Alec and half to the funder.
I acknowledge that determining the counterfactual is hard (for instance, maybe the 20 workers freed up other actors to do other impactful work). But as the endpoint of analysis, I definitely think we should be trying to determine what the world looks like if we do X rather than if we did not do X, rather than if we do something that other people consider admirable or otherwise feels good.
EDIT: I realize you put âand those thousand people would not be saved but for the twenty othersâ. If this is true, then the impact âcreditâ should definitely be spread among them. I think it bears considering whether that is true.