The point is that reasoning that non-profits have more potential to cause harm that for-profit seems to ignore that many for-profit enterprises operate at much larger scale than any non-profits and do tremendous amounts of harm
You’re absolutely right. For profits absolutely do harm. In general “capitalism has really huge harms”, almost every EA or reader here would agree (note that I’m not an EA necessarily or represent EA thought).
The scale is the point here—you’re also exactly right. For many activities, it makes many, many millions to create a situation where we are harming people.
To be tangible, it’s hard to think of any business you or I could setup that would be that harmful as posing as a fake charity and disrupting medical service or food supply.
Well, I’ve actually sort of slipped into another argument about scale and relative harm, and got you to talk about that.
But that doesn’t respond to your original point, that businesses can do huge harm and EA needs to account for that. So that’s unfair to you.
Trying to answer your point, and using your view about explicitly weighing and balancing harms, there’s another point about “counterfactual harm” that responds to a lot of your concerns.
In the case of a crypto currency company:
If you make a new make crypto company, and become successful by operating a new exchange, even if you become the world’s biggest exchange, it’s unclear how much that actually caused any more mining (e.g. by increasing Bitcoin’s price).
There’s dozens of exchanges already, besides the one you created. So it’s not true that you can assign or attribute 20% or 50% of emissions to money, just from association.
In reality, I think it’s reasonable that the effect is small, so even if the top #1 trading platform wasn’t founded, almost the same amount of mining would occur. (If you track cryptocurrency prices, it seems plausible that no one cares that much about the quality of exchanges).
So the money that would have gone to your platform and been donated to charity, would buy yachts for someone else instead.
(By the way—as part of your crypto currency company, if you make and promote a new cryptocurrency that doesn’t mine, and “stakes” instead, then your cryptocurrency company might accelerate the transition to “staking”, which doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses like mining. Your contribution to greenhouse gasses is negative despite being a crypto company. But I share the sentiment that you can totally roll your eyes at this idea, let’s just leave this point here.)
You mentioned other concerns about other companies. I think it’s too difficult for me to respond, for reasons that aren’t related to the merit of the concern.
Since we agree scale is a key part of this, I don’t know how you can be confident that an imagined fake charity that disrupts medical service or food supply would ever be large enough to equal scale the harms caused by some of the most powerful global corporations. In this era of extreme wealth inequality it’s plausible that some billionaire could accrue massive personal wealth and then transfer that wealth to a non-profit, which, freed from the shackles of having to make a profit, could focus solely on doing harm. But equally that billionaire could found an institution focused on turning a profit while doing harm and use the profits to grow the institution to a scale and concomitant harm that far exceeds what they would have been able to achieve with a non-profit.
For example, if we are going to imagine a fake that charity that disrupts delivery of a medical service, why don’t we imagine that they do this by acting as a middleman that extracts a profit by reselling medical supplies for an unconscionable profit. This profit, in turn enables them to grow and slip their “services” between more people and their medical providers. While this may seem like a criminal enterprise, for many companies that exist today this basically their business model, and they operate at scales that eclipse most medical non-profits I know of.
Being a non-profit does provide good cover for operating in harmful fashion, but growth through accumulation of capital is very power mechanism—I don’t think we should be surprised to find the largest harm causing institutions use it as their engi
I don’t know how you can be confident that an imagined fake charity that disrupts medical service or food supply would ever be large enough to equal scale the harms caused by some of the most powerful global corporations.
But we’re talking about the relative harm of a bad new charity compared to a harmful business.
I think you agree it doesn’t make sense to compare the effect of our new charity versus, literally all of capitalism or a major global corporation.
But equally that billionaire could found an institution focused on turning a profit while doing harm and use the profits to grow the institution to a scale and concomitant harm that far exceeds what they would have been able to achieve with a non-profit.
Let’s be honest, we both know perfectly well, that your view and understanding of the world is that, if a business could make significantly more profit being evil, it would already be doing it. That niche would be filled. I probably agree.
But if that’s true, it must be that even an amoral business person could not make profit by doing the same evil—all the evil capitalists got there first. So there’s no evil super harm possible as described in your story.
why don’t we imagine that they do this by acting as a middleman that extracts a profit by reselling medical supplies for an unconscionable profit. This profit, in turn enables them to grow and slip their “services” between more people and their medical providers. While this may seem like a criminal enterprise, for many companies that exist today this basically their business model, and they operate at scales that eclipse most medical non-profits I know of.
Yes, basically, we sort of both agree this is happening.
The difference between our opinions is that, I think in healthy marketplaces, this profit seeking is extremely positive and saves lives (ugh, I sound like Kevin Murphy.)
Also, we both know that there’s not going to be any way to agree or prove eachother wrong or right about this specific issue.
And we’re really really far from the point here (and I think it’s better addressed by my other comment).
You’re absolutely right. For profits absolutely do harm. In general “capitalism has really huge harms”, almost every EA or reader here would agree (note that I’m not an EA necessarily or represent EA thought).
The scale is the point here—you’re also exactly right. For many activities, it makes many, many millions to create a situation where we are harming people.
To be tangible, it’s hard to think of any business you or I could setup that would be that harmful as posing as a fake charity and disrupting medical service or food supply.
Well, I’ve actually sort of slipped into another argument about scale and relative harm, and got you to talk about that.
But that doesn’t respond to your original point, that businesses can do huge harm and EA needs to account for that. So that’s unfair to you.
Trying to answer your point, and using your view about explicitly weighing and balancing harms, there’s another point about “counterfactual harm” that responds to a lot of your concerns.
In the case of a crypto currency company:
If you make a new make crypto company, and become successful by operating a new exchange, even if you become the world’s biggest exchange, it’s unclear how much that actually caused any more mining (e.g. by increasing Bitcoin’s price).
There’s dozens of exchanges already, besides the one you created. So it’s not true that you can assign or attribute 20% or 50% of emissions to money, just from association.
In reality, I think it’s reasonable that the effect is small, so even if the top #1 trading platform wasn’t founded, almost the same amount of mining would occur. (If you track cryptocurrency prices, it seems plausible that no one cares that much about the quality of exchanges).
So the money that would have gone to your platform and been donated to charity, would buy yachts for someone else instead.
(By the way—as part of your crypto currency company, if you make and promote a new cryptocurrency that doesn’t mine, and “stakes” instead, then your cryptocurrency company might accelerate the transition to “staking”, which doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses like mining. Your contribution to greenhouse gasses is negative despite being a crypto company. But I share the sentiment that you can totally roll your eyes at this idea, let’s just leave this point here.)
You mentioned other concerns about other companies. I think it’s too difficult for me to respond, for reasons that aren’t related to the merit of the concern.
Since we agree scale is a key part of this, I don’t know how you can be confident that an imagined fake charity that disrupts medical service or food supply would ever be large enough to equal scale the harms caused by some of the most powerful global corporations. In this era of extreme wealth inequality it’s plausible that some billionaire could accrue massive personal wealth and then transfer that wealth to a non-profit, which, freed from the shackles of having to make a profit, could focus solely on doing harm. But equally that billionaire could found an institution focused on turning a profit while doing harm and use the profits to grow the institution to a scale and concomitant harm that far exceeds what they would have been able to achieve with a non-profit.
For example, if we are going to imagine a fake that charity that disrupts delivery of a medical service, why don’t we imagine that they do this by acting as a middleman that extracts a profit by reselling medical supplies for an unconscionable profit. This profit, in turn enables them to grow and slip their “services” between more people and their medical providers. While this may seem like a criminal enterprise, for many companies that exist today this basically their business model, and they operate at scales that eclipse most medical non-profits I know of.
Being a non-profit does provide good cover for operating in harmful fashion, but growth through accumulation of capital is very power mechanism—I don’t think we should be surprised to find the largest harm causing institutions use it as their engi
But we’re talking about the relative harm of a bad new charity compared to a harmful business.
I think you agree it doesn’t make sense to compare the effect of our new charity versus, literally all of capitalism or a major global corporation.
Let’s be honest, we both know perfectly well, that your view and understanding of the world is that, if a business could make significantly more profit being evil, it would already be doing it. That niche would be filled. I probably agree.
But if that’s true, it must be that even an amoral business person could not make profit by doing the same evil—all the evil capitalists got there first. So there’s no evil super harm possible as described in your story.
Yes, basically, we sort of both agree this is happening.
The difference between our opinions is that, I think in healthy marketplaces, this profit seeking is extremely positive and saves lives (ugh, I sound like Kevin Murphy.)
Also, we both know that there’s not going to be any way to agree or prove eachother wrong or right about this specific issue.
And we’re really really far from the point here (and I think it’s better addressed by my other comment).