I am confused by your list of examples. From my perspective more than half of the organizations/people on your list are indeed quite terrible and have caused greatly more harm than good. If people use these examples as reason to be less risk-averse about causing great harm, then I think that would be an update in the wrong direction (indeed, I think the right lesson to learn here is something closer to “the road to hell is paved in good intentions”, e.g. yes, if you are ambitious and have strong ethical convictions, it is really important that you remain cognizant that you might instead be causing great harm, and should probably think about that a good amount).
To go one by one for your list of examples:
EU:
By my lights the EU seems really quite bad. Their pandemic response alone might be enough to make it go down as one of the worst institutions in history, and their general legal framework is one of the greatest blockers to economic growth in Europe. (This is not an obvious state of affairs, but I am not going to write a whole case against the EU here, which would take a while, and doesn’t seem top priority)
Mother Theresa
Indeed, my sense is the ethical commitments of Mother Theresa’s clinics were indeed bad enough to cause much more suffering than she prevented. When I last looked into this it seems like she primarily redirected resources that would have gone to more sane efforts.
Gandhi’s (and Nehru’s)
My guess is Gandhi did actually make the world better
Cesar Chaves
The National Farm Workers Association seems like a pretty terrible organization, and has had a hugely distortive effect on politics and has caused really quite great harm. Farm unions show up all over the place whenever I look into crazy regulations and policies. I haven’t looked a ton into the history of this, but my prior here would be that it’s quite bad.
I don’t know why I would even have a prior on the Vatican being good for the world.
So, out of your list of 5 organizations, 4 of them were really very much quite bad for the world, by my lights, and if you were to find yourself to be on track to having a similar balance of good and evil done in your life, I really would encourage you to stop and do something less impactful on the world.
Like, these are not institutions and individuals that have been “compromised” or “tainted”. These are examples that indeed seem to have caused solidly more harm than they have caused good, and we should take them primarily as lessons on what not to do.
I don’t think actually ending up net-negative like this is predetermined, and is not a result of just getting unlucky. I think it was ultimately predictable that these people/institutions would end up quite bad for the world, and we can avoid going down a similar path. I do think that involved a good amount of actually modeling the risk and being careful, and being aware of the skulls along the road that is filled with similarly ideologically committed people like us.
I read it, not as a list of good actors doing bad things. But as a list of idealistic actors [at least in public perception] not living up to their own standards [standards the public ascribes to them].
I understand your point, but I think you are especially harsh on these examples which would all require a lot of complex investigation on good vs harm done before writing them of as net harm. At least you could list potential good done by those people/orgs as well as harm and state that the EV is very unclear.
The EU is very complex. Horrendous harm done on the farming subsidies front, but what about the good in making war almost inconceivable within the union? And In allowing poor laborers to move freely and get better lives? To be fair you do acknowlege the difficulty assessing the EU harm/good tradeoff.
Mother Theresa and her organisation cared for people who were often completely neglected, and was a small part of opening up a global revolution in caring for the dying. Yes medical care wasn’t good enough and many her organisation cared for could have been cured with proper medical care. I’m open to this being net harm but my sense is it was probably net good (but again so hard to know).
Chaves supported hundreds of thousands of workers’ to get improved pay and important public health measures like hand washing at sites, protection from pesticides, clean drinking water etc. Sure he will have done harm but enough to offset that good?
The Vatican is head office of a large religious body that has probably done both enormous good and enormous harm over their 2000 year history. Writing them off without explanation apart from a link to the clear and horrendous sexual abuse atrocities exposed in only the last 50 years seems too harsh
If one is a secular agnostic (like me) who doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, salvation, or an infinitely long, infinitely blissful afterlife in Heaven, then the Catholic Church over the last couple millennia probably looks like a net negative (arguably).
But if one believes in all these things, then insofar as the Catholic Church ‘saved’ hundreds of millions of souls, it’s been an enormous net positive.
We EAs need to be a bit more epistemically humble about these religious issues.
After all, many of us believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, which would imply that almost any conceivable theology that any human has ever believed, has a non-zero probability of being true—and our assessments of total utility generated by any particular person, movement, or organization should be modulated accordingly.
I didn’t vote it down, but I think giving the Catholic Church the “benefit of the doubt” is off-base. You could say the same about anyone doing bad—“Maybe they’re right on some level.” The Catholic Church has simply done tons and tons of bad. And I think I’m saying this not just because of my personal hatred of the Catholic Church. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Matt—I’m not arguing that we should give the Catholic Church the ‘benefit of the doubt’. Only that if—big if—their theology and metaphysics are correct, and if they actually managed to ‘save some souls’ (switching their fate from infinite suffering in hell to infinite bliss in heaven), then their net consequentialist impact in the afterlife would totally swamp any evil they’ve done on Earth.
You may think there’s zero % chance their theology and metaphysics are correct, but their beliefs are basically a variant of a Simulation Hypothesis, in which human actions ‘in simulation’ (during mortal life) determine rewards ‘out of simulation (in the ‘real’ afterlife).
There’s obviously a variant of Pascal’s wager that raises some thorny problems here. And it applies equally to every other religion that posits reincarnation or an afterlife....
Do you know any good articles or posts exploring the phenomenon of “the road to hell is paved in good intentions”? In the absence of a thorough investigation, I’m tempted to think that “good intentions” is merely a PR front that human brains put up (not necessarily consciously), and that humans deeply aligned with altruism don’t really exist, or are even rarer than it looks. See my old post A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences for a simplistic model that should give you a sense of what I mean… On second thought, that post might be overly bleak as a model of real humans, and the truth might be closer to Shard Theory where altruism is a shard that only or mainly gets activated in PR contexts. In any case, if this is true, there seems to be a crucial problem of how to reliably do good using a bunch of agents who are not reliably interested in doing good, which I don’t see many people trying to solve or even talk about.
(Part of “not reliably interested in doing good” is that you strongly want to do things that look good to other people, but aren’t very motivated to find hidden flaws in your plans/ideas that only show up in the long run, or will never be legible to people whose opinions you care about.)
But maybe I’m on the wrong track and the main root cause of “the road to hell is paved in good intentions” is something else. Interested in your thoughts or pointers.
This is a great question and I’m sorry I don’t have anything really probative for you. Puzzle pieces:
“If hell then good intentions” isn’t what you mean. You also don’t mean “if good intentions then hell”. So you presumably mean some surprisingly strong correlation. But still weaker than that of bad intentions. We’d have to haggle over what number counts as surprising. r = 0.1?
Nearly everyone has something they would call good intentions. But most people don’t exploit others on any scale worth mentioning. So the correlation can’t be too high.
Good things happen, sometimes, despite the odds. We have a good theory of how this can happen in a world without good intentions, so I don’t want to use this as strong evidence for good intentions. But good things still happen without competition and counter to incentive gradients.
In general I have a pretty high bar for illusionism, eliminativism, accusations of false consciousness, etc (something something phenomenal conservatism).
In this case: we clearly have more information than others about our own intentions. (This might not be a lot on an absolute scale though.)
I buy the ‘moral licencing’ idea, where people’s sense of moral duty is (very) finite but their cupidity is way less bounded. So you can think that good intentions are real but just run out faster. Shard seems like a baroque but empirically adequate version of this.
I think I buy the PR spokesperson account of our internal narrative / phenomenal consciousness. But the spokesperson isn’t limited to retconning naive egoism, since we know that other solutions are evolutionarily stable in the presence of precommitment and all the other dongles, and so it could be hiding those too.
I could look up the psychology literature but i’m not sure it would update either you or me.
I really think egoism strains to fit the data. From a comment on a deleted post:
[in response to someone saying that self-sacrifice is necessarily about showing off and is thus selfish]:
How does this reduction [to selfishness] account for the many historical examples of people who defied local social incentives, with little hope of gain and sometimes even destruction?
(Off the top of my head: Ignaz Semmelweis, Irena Sendler, Sophie Scholl.)
We can always invent sufficiently strange posthoc preferences to “explain” any behaviour: but what do you gain in exchange for denying the seemingly simpler hypothesis “they had terminal values independent of their wellbeing”?
(Limiting this to atheists, since religious martyrs are explained well by incentives.)
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Pure selfishness can’t work, since if everyone is selfish, why would anyone believe anyone else’s PR? I guess there has to be some amount of real altruism mixed in, just that when push comes to shove, people who will make decisions truly aligned with altruism (e.g., try hard to find flaws in one’s supposedly altruistic plans, give up power after you’ve gained power for supposedly temporary purposes, forgo hidden bets that have positive selfish EV but negative altruistic EV) may be few and far between.
Ignaz Semmelweis
This is just a reasonable decision (from a selfish perspective) that went badly, right? I mean if you have empirical evidence that hand-washing greatly reduced mortality, it seems pretty reasonable that you might be able to convince the medical establishment of this fact, and as a result gain a great deal of status/influence (which could eventually be turned into power/money).
The other two examples seem like real altruism to me, at least at first glance.
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Question is, is there a better explanation than this?
So, out of your list of 5 organizations, 4 of them were really very much quite bad for the world, by my lights, and if you were to find yourself to be on track to having a similar balance of good and evil done in your life, I really would encourage you to stop and do something less impactful on the world.
This view is myopic (doesn’t consider the nth-order effects of the projects) and ahistorical (compares them to present-day moral standards rather than the counterfactuals of the time).
Good point thanks (though I am way less sure of the EU’s sign). That list of examples is serving two purposes, which were blended in my head til your comment:
examples of net-positive organisations with terrible mistakes (not a good list for this)
examples of very well-regarded things which are nonetheless extremely compromised (good list for this)
You seem to be using compromised to mean “good but flawed”, where I’m using it to mean “looks bad” without necessarily evaluating the EV.
Yet another lesson about me needing to write out my arguments explicitly.
Yeah, to be clear, my estimates of EU impact have pretty huge variance, so I also wouldn’t describe myself as confident (though I do think these days the expected value seems more solidly in the negative).
I’m down with a lot of this, but I’m not sure about the EU. Given the history of war on the continent, I think the EU is a totally reasonable response. Hard to run the counter-factual.
By my lights the EU seems really quite bad. Their pandemic response alone might be enough to make it go down as one of the worst institutions in history, and their general legal framework is one of the greatest blockers to economic growth in Europe.
Why exactly do you think that greater economic growth would lead to higher wellbeing in Europe ? From my understanding, in rich countries (US, UK, Germany, Australia), average subjective well being barely changed in the last decades, even if GDP greatly increased.
I am confused by your list of examples. From my perspective more than half of the organizations/people on your list are indeed quite terrible and have caused greatly more harm than good. If people use these examples as reason to be less risk-averse about causing great harm, then I think that would be an update in the wrong direction (indeed, I think the right lesson to learn here is something closer to “the road to hell is paved in good intentions”, e.g. yes, if you are ambitious and have strong ethical convictions, it is really important that you remain cognizant that you might instead be causing great harm, and should probably think about that a good amount).
To go one by one for your list of examples:
EU:
By my lights the EU seems really quite bad. Their pandemic response alone might be enough to make it go down as one of the worst institutions in history, and their general legal framework is one of the greatest blockers to economic growth in Europe. (This is not an obvious state of affairs, but I am not going to write a whole case against the EU here, which would take a while, and doesn’t seem top priority)
Mother Theresa
Indeed, my sense is the ethical commitments of Mother Theresa’s clinics were indeed bad enough to cause much more suffering than she prevented. When I last looked into this it seems like she primarily redirected resources that would have gone to more sane efforts.
Gandhi’s (and Nehru’s)
My guess is Gandhi did actually make the world better
Cesar Chaves
The National Farm Workers Association seems like a pretty terrible organization, and has had a hugely distortive effect on politics and has caused really quite great harm. Farm unions show up all over the place whenever I look into crazy regulations and policies. I haven’t looked a ton into the history of this, but my prior here would be that it’s quite bad.
The Vatican.
I don’t know why I would even have a prior on the Vatican being good for the world.
So, out of your list of 5 organizations, 4 of them were really very much quite bad for the world, by my lights, and if you were to find yourself to be on track to having a similar balance of good and evil done in your life, I really would encourage you to stop and do something less impactful on the world.
Like, these are not institutions and individuals that have been “compromised” or “tainted”. These are examples that indeed seem to have caused solidly more harm than they have caused good, and we should take them primarily as lessons on what not to do.
I don’t think actually ending up net-negative like this is predetermined, and is not a result of just getting unlucky. I think it was ultimately predictable that these people/institutions would end up quite bad for the world, and we can avoid going down a similar path. I do think that involved a good amount of actually modeling the risk and being careful, and being aware of the skulls along the road that is filled with similarly ideologically committed people like us.
I read it, not as a list of good actors doing bad things. But as a list of idealistic actors [at least in public perception] not living up to their own standards [standards the public ascribes to them].
I understand your point, but I think you are especially harsh on these examples which would all require a lot of complex investigation on good vs harm done before writing them of as net harm. At least you could list potential good done by those people/orgs as well as harm and state that the EV is very unclear.
The EU is very complex. Horrendous harm done on the farming subsidies front, but what about the good in making war almost inconceivable within the union? And In allowing poor laborers to move freely and get better lives? To be fair you do acknowlege the difficulty assessing the EU harm/good tradeoff.
Mother Theresa and her organisation cared for people who were often completely neglected, and was a small part of opening up a global revolution in caring for the dying. Yes medical care wasn’t good enough and many her organisation cared for could have been cured with proper medical care. I’m open to this being net harm but my sense is it was probably net good (but again so hard to know).
Chaves supported hundreds of thousands of workers’ to get improved pay and important public health measures like hand washing at sites, protection from pesticides, clean drinking water etc. Sure he will have done harm but enough to offset that good?
The Vatican is head office of a large religious body that has probably done both enormous good and enormous harm over their 2000 year history. Writing them off without explanation apart from a link to the clear and horrendous sexual abuse atrocities exposed in only the last 50 years seems too harsh
Nick—strongly agree, esp. regarding the Vatican.
If one is a secular agnostic (like me) who doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, salvation, or an infinitely long, infinitely blissful afterlife in Heaven, then the Catholic Church over the last couple millennia probably looks like a net negative (arguably).
But if one believes in all these things, then insofar as the Catholic Church ‘saved’ hundreds of millions of souls, it’s been an enormous net positive.
We EAs need to be a bit more epistemically humble about these religious issues.
After all, many of us believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, which would imply that almost any conceivable theology that any human has ever believed, has a non-zero probability of being true—and our assessments of total utility generated by any particular person, movement, or organization should be modulated accordingly.
PS Folks who disagree-voted with this comment—I’m genuinely curious why you disagree?
I didn’t vote it down, but I think giving the Catholic Church the “benefit of the doubt” is off-base. You could say the same about anyone doing bad—“Maybe they’re right on some level.” The Catholic Church has simply done tons and tons of bad. And I think I’m saying this not just because of my personal hatred of the Catholic Church. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Matt—I’m not arguing that we should give the Catholic Church the ‘benefit of the doubt’. Only that if—big if—their theology and metaphysics are correct, and if they actually managed to ‘save some souls’ (switching their fate from infinite suffering in hell to infinite bliss in heaven), then their net consequentialist impact in the afterlife would totally swamp any evil they’ve done on Earth.
You may think there’s zero % chance their theology and metaphysics are correct, but their beliefs are basically a variant of a Simulation Hypothesis, in which human actions ‘in simulation’ (during mortal life) determine rewards ‘out of simulation (in the ‘real’ afterlife).
There’s obviously a variant of Pascal’s wager that raises some thorny problems here. And it applies equally to every other religion that posits reincarnation or an afterlife....
Do you know any good articles or posts exploring the phenomenon of “the road to hell is paved in good intentions”? In the absence of a thorough investigation, I’m tempted to think that “good intentions” is merely a PR front that human brains put up (not necessarily consciously), and that humans deeply aligned with altruism don’t really exist, or are even rarer than it looks. See my old post A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences for a simplistic model that should give you a sense of what I mean… On second thought, that post might be overly bleak as a model of real humans, and the truth might be closer to Shard Theory where altruism is a shard that only or mainly gets activated in PR contexts. In any case, if this is true, there seems to be a crucial problem of how to reliably do good using a bunch of agents who are not reliably interested in doing good, which I don’t see many people trying to solve or even talk about.
(Part of “not reliably interested in doing good” is that you strongly want to do things that look good to other people, but aren’t very motivated to find hidden flaws in your plans/ideas that only show up in the long run, or will never be legible to people whose opinions you care about.)
But maybe I’m on the wrong track and the main root cause of “the road to hell is paved in good intentions” is something else. Interested in your thoughts or pointers.
This is a great question and I’m sorry I don’t have anything really probative for you. Puzzle pieces:
“If hell then good intentions” isn’t what you mean. You also don’t mean “if good intentions then hell”. So you presumably mean some surprisingly strong correlation. But still weaker than that of bad intentions. We’d have to haggle over what number counts as surprising. r = 0.1?
Nearly everyone has something they would call good intentions. But most people don’t exploit others on any scale worth mentioning. So the correlation can’t be too high.
Good things happen, sometimes, despite the odds. We have a good theory of how this can happen in a world without good intentions, so I don’t want to use this as strong evidence for good intentions. But good things still happen without competition and counter to incentive gradients.
In general I have a pretty high bar for illusionism, eliminativism, accusations of false consciousness, etc (something something phenomenal conservatism).
In this case: we clearly have more information than others about our own intentions. (This might not be a lot on an absolute scale though.)
I buy the ‘moral licencing’ idea, where people’s sense of moral duty is (very) finite but their cupidity is way less bounded. So you can think that good intentions are real but just run out faster. Shard seems like a baroque but empirically adequate version of this.
I think I buy the PR spokesperson account of our internal narrative / phenomenal consciousness. But the spokesperson isn’t limited to retconning naive egoism, since we know that other solutions are evolutionarily stable in the presence of precommitment and all the other dongles, and so it could be hiding those too.
I could look up the psychology literature but i’m not sure it would update either you or me.
I really think egoism strains to fit the data. From a comment on a deleted post:
The best you can do is “egoism, plus virtue signalling, plus plain insanity in the hard cases”.
Pure selfishness can’t work, since if everyone is selfish, why would anyone believe anyone else’s PR? I guess there has to be some amount of real altruism mixed in, just that when push comes to shove, people who will make decisions truly aligned with altruism (e.g., try hard to find flaws in one’s supposedly altruistic plans, give up power after you’ve gained power for supposedly temporary purposes, forgo hidden bets that have positive selfish EV but negative altruistic EV) may be few and far between.
This is just a reasonable decision (from a selfish perspective) that went badly, right? I mean if you have empirical evidence that hand-washing greatly reduced mortality, it seems pretty reasonable that you might be able to convince the medical establishment of this fact, and as a result gain a great deal of status/influence (which could eventually be turned into power/money).
The other two examples seem like real altruism to me, at least at first glance.
Question is, is there a better explanation than this?
This view is myopic (doesn’t consider the nth-order effects of the projects) and ahistorical (compares them to present-day moral standards rather than the counterfactuals of the time).
Good point thanks (though I am way less sure of the EU’s sign). That list of examples is serving two purposes, which were blended in my head til your comment:
examples of net-positive organisations with terrible mistakes (not a good list for this)
examples of very well-regarded things which are nonetheless extremely compromised (good list for this)
You seem to be using compromised to mean “good but flawed”, where I’m using it to mean “looks bad” without necessarily evaluating the EV.
Yet another lesson about me needing to write out my arguments explicitly.
Yeah, to be clear, my estimates of EU impact have pretty huge variance, so I also wouldn’t describe myself as confident (though I do think these days the expected value seems more solidly in the negative).
And yeah, that makes sense.
I’m down with a lot of this, but I’m not sure about the EU. Given the history of war on the continent, I think the EU is a totally reasonable response. Hard to run the counter-factual.
Why exactly do you think that greater economic growth would lead to higher wellbeing in Europe ? From my understanding, in rich countries (US, UK, Germany, Australia), average subjective well being barely changed in the last decades, even if GDP greatly increased.
(However, environmental impact increased greatly in the same period, so this growth may have led to adverse consequences for other countries)