Researcher at the Center on Long-Term Risk. All opinions my own.
Anthony DiGiovanni
Karma: 1,378
It seems like you’re conflating the following two views:
Utilitarianism.net has an obligation to present views other than total symmetric utilitarianism in a sympathetic light.
Utilitarianism.net has an obligation not to present views other than total symmetric utilitarianism in an uncharitable and dismissive light.
I would claim #2, not #1, and presumably so would Michael. The quote about nihilism etc. is objectionable because it’s not just unsympathetic to such views, it’s condescending. Clearly many people who have reflected carefully about ethics think these alternatives are worth taking seriously, and it’s controversial to claim that “humane values” necessitate wanting to create happy beings de novo even at some (serious) opportunity cost to suffering. “Nihilistic” also connotes something stronger than denying positive value.
One is that views of the “making people happy” variety basically always wind up facing structural weirdness when you formalize them. It was my impression until recently that all of these views imply intransitive preferences (i.e something like A>B>C>A), until I had a discussion with Michael St Jules in which he pointed out more recent work that instead denies the independence of irrelevant alternatives.
It depends if by valuing “making people happy” one means 1) intrinsically valuing adding happiness to existing people’s lives, or 2) valuing “making them happy” in the sense of relieving their suffering (practically, this is often what happiness does for people). I agree that violations of transitivity or IIA seem inevitable for views of type (1), and that’s pretty bad.
But (2) is an alternative that I think has gotten weirdly sidelined in (EA) population axiology discourse. If some person is completely content and has no frustrated desires (state A), I don’t see any moral obligation to make them happier (state B), so I don’t violate transitivity by saying the world is not better by adding person A and also not better by adding person B. I suspect lots of people’s “person-affecting” intuitions really boil down to the intuition that preferences that don’t exist—and will not exist—have no need to be fulfilled, as you allude to in your last big paragraph:
A frustrated interest exists in the timeline it is frustrated in, and so any ethics needs to care about it. A positive interest (i.e. having something even better than an already good or neutral state) does not exist in a world in which it isn’t brought about, so it doesn’t provide reasons to that world in the same way
Second, I might be mistaken about what this agent’s choice would be. For instance, perhaps the lake is so cold that the pain of jumping in is of greater moral importance than any happiness I obtain.
Yeah, I think this is pretty plausible at least for sufficiently horrible forms of suffering (and probably all forms, upon reflection on how bad the alternative moral views are IMO). I doubt my common sense intuitions about bundles of happiness and suffering can properly empathize, in my state of current comfort, with the suffering-moments.
But given you said the point above, I’m a bit surprised you also said this:
One of the following three things is true:
(1) One would not accept a week of the worst torture conceptually possible in exchange for an arbitrarily large amount of happiness for an arbitrarily long time.
(2) One would not accept such a trade, but believes that a perfectly rational, self-interested hedonist would accept it …
(3) One would accept such a trade, and further this belief is predicated on the existence of compelling arguments in favor of proposition (i).
What about “(4): One would accept such a trade, but believes that a perfectly rational, self-interested hedonist would not accept it”?
There is a defense of ideas related to your position here
For the record I also don’t find that post compelling, and I’m not sure how related it is to my point. I think you can coherently think that the moral truth is consistent (and that ethics is likely to not be consistent if there is no moral truth), but be uncertain about it. Analogously I’m pretty uncertain what the correct decision theory is, and think that whatever that decision theory is, it would have to be self-consistent.
I also would be interested in seeing someone compare the tradeoffs on non- views vs person-affecting. E.g. person affecting views might entail X weirdness, but maybe X weirdness is better to accept than the repugnant conclusion, etc.
Agreed—while I expect people’s intuitions on which is “better” to differ, a comprehensive accounting of which bullets different views have to bite would be a really handy resource. By “comprehensive” I don’t mean literally every possible thought experiment, of course, but something that gives a sense of the significant considerations people have thought of. Ideally these would be organized in such a way that it’s easy to keep track of which cases that bite different views are relevantly similar, and there isn’t double-counting.
Also, moral realism seems more predictive of ethics being consistent, not less. (Not consistent with our unreflected intuitions, though.)
I’m confused — welfare economics seems premised on the view that interpersonal comparisons of utility are possible. In any case, ethics =/= economics; comparisons of charity effectiveness aren’t assessing interpersonal “utility” in the sense of VNM preferences, they’re concerned with “utility” in the sense of e.g. hedonic states, life satisfaction, so-called objective lists, and so on.
No, longtermism is not redundant
I’m not keen on the recent trend of arguments that persuading people of longtermism is unnecessary, or even counterproductive, for encouraging them to work on certain cause areas (e.g., here, here). This is for a few reasons:
It’s not enough to believe that extinction risks within our lifetimes are high, and that extinction would constitute a significant moral problem purely on the grounds of harms to existing beings. Arguments for the tractability of reducing those risks, sufficient to outweigh the nearterm good done by focusing on global human health or animal welfare, seem lacking in the arguments I’ve seen for prioritizing extinction risk reduction on non-longtermist grounds.
Take the AI alignment problem as one example (among the possible extinction risks, I’m most familiar with this one). I think it’s plausible that the collective efforts of alignment researchers and people working on governance will prevent extinction, though I’m not prepared to put a number on this. But as far as I’ve seen, there haven’t been compelling cost-effectiveness estimates suggesting that the marginal dollar or work-hour invested in alignment is competitive with GiveWell charities or interventions against factory farming, from a purely neartermist perspective. (Shulman discusses this in this interview, but without specifics about tractability that I would find persuasive.)
More importantly, not all longtermist cause areas are risks that would befall currently existing beings. MacAskill discusses this a bit here, including the importance of shaping the values of the future rather than (I would say “complacently”) supposing things will converge towards a utopia by default. Near-term extinction risks do seem likely to be the most time-sensitive thing that non-downside-focused longtermists would want to prioritize. But again, tractability makes a difference, and for those who are downside-focused, there simply isn’t this convenient convergence between near- and long-term interventions. As far I can tell, s-risks affecting beings in the near future fortunately seem highly unlikely.
I think this is just an equivocation of “utility.” Utility in the ethical sense is not identical to the “utility” of von Neumann Morgenstern utility functions.
It’s notable that a pilot study (N = 172, compared to N = 474 for the results given in Fig. 1) discussed in the supplementary materials of this paper suggests a stronger suffering/happiness asymmetry in people’s intuitions about creating populations. e.g. In response to the question, “Suppose you could push a button that created a new world with X people who are generally happy and 10 people who generally suffer. How high would X have to be for you to push the button?”, the median response was X = 1000.
For a mundane example, imagine I’m ambivalent about mini-golfing. But you know me, and you suspect I’ll love it, so you take me mini-golfing. Afterwards, I enthusiastically agree that you were right, and I loved mini-golfing.
It seems you can accommodate this just as well, if not better, within a hedonistic view—you didn’t prefer to go mini-golfing, but mini-golfing made you happier once you tried it, so that’s why you endorse people encouraging you to try new things. (Although I’m inclined to say, it really depends on what you would’ve otherwise done with your time instead of mini-golfing, and if someone is fine not wanting something, it’s reasonable to err on the side of not making them want it.)
In Defense of Aiming for the Minimum
I’m not really sympathetic to the following common sentiment: “EAs should not try to do as much good as feasible at the expense of their own well-being / the good of their close associates.”
It’s tautologically true that if trying to hyper-optimize comes at too much of a cost to the energy you can devote to your most important altruistic work, then trying to hyper-optimize is altruistically counterproductive. I acknowledge that this is the principle behind the sentiment above, and evidently some people’s effectiveness has benefited from advice like this.
But in practice, I see EAs apply this principle in ways that seem suspiciously favorable to their own well-being, or to the status quo. When you find yourself trying to justify on the grounds of impact the amounts of self-care people afford themselves when they don’t care about being effectively altruistic, you should be extremely suspicious.
Some examples, which I cite not to pick on the authors in particular—since I think many others are making a similar mistake—but just because they actually wrote these claims down.
1. “Aiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerous”
I felt a bit suspicious, looking at how I spent my time. Surely that long road trip wasn’t necessary to avoid misery? Did I really need to spend several weekends in a row building a ridiculous LED laser maze, when my other side project was talking to young synthetic biologists about ethics?
I think this is just correct. If your argument is that EAs shouldn’t be totally self-effacing because some frivolities are psychologically necessary to keep rescuing people from the bottomless pit of suffering, then sure, do the things that are psychologically necessary. I’m skeptical that “psychologically necessary” actually looks similar to the amount of frivolities indulged by the average person who is as well-off as EAs generally are.
Do I live up to this standard? Hardly. That doesn’t mean I should pretend I’m doing the right thing.
Minimization is greedy. You don’t get to celebrate that you’ve gained an hour a day [from sleeping seven instead of eight hours], or done something impactful this week, because that minimizing urge is still looking at all your unclaimed time, and wondering why you aren’t using it better, too.
How important is my own celebration, though, when you really weigh it against what I could be doing with even more time? (This isn’t just abstract impact points; there are other beings whose struggles matter no less than mine do, and fewer frivolities for me could mean relief for them.)
I think where I fundamentally disagree with this post is that, for many people, I don’t think aiming for the minimum puts you close to less than the minimum. Getting to the minimum, much less below it, can be very hard, such that people who aim at it just aren’t in much danger of undershooting. If you find this is not true for yourself, then please do back off from the minimum. But remember that in the counterfactual where you hadn’t tested your limits, you probably would not have gotten close to optimal.
This post includes some saddening anecdotes about people ending up miserable because they tried to optimize all their time for altruism. I don’t want to trivialize their suffering. Yet I can conjure anecdotes in the opposite direction (and the kind of altruism I care about reduces more suffering in expectation). Several of my colleagues seem to work more than the typical job entails, and I don’t have any evidence of the quality of their work being the worse for this. I’ve found that the amount of time I can realistically devote to altruistic efforts is pretty malleable. No, I’m not a machine; of course I have my limits. But when I gave myself permission to do altruistic things for parts of weekends, or into later hours of weekdays, well, I could. “My happiness is not the point,” as Julia said in this post, and while she evidently doesn’t endorse that statement, I do. That just seems to be the inevitable consequence of taking the sentience of other beings besides yourself (or your loved ones) seriously.
See also this comment:
Personally have been trying to think of my life only as a means to an end. Will my life technically might have value, I am fairly sure it is rather minuscule compared to the potential impact can make. I think it’s possible, though probably difficult, to intuit this and still feel fine / not guilty, about things. … I’m a bit wary on this topic that people might be a bit biased to select beliefs based on what is satisfying or which ones feel good.
I do think Tessa’s point about slack has some force—though in a sense, this merely shifts the “minimum” up by some robustness margin, which is unlikely to be large enough to justify the average person’s indulgences.
2. “You have more than one goal, and that’s fine”
If I donate to my friend’s fundraiser for her sick uncle, I’m pursuing a goal. But it’s the goal of “support my friend and our friendship,” not my goal of “make the world as good as possible.” When I make a decision, it’s better if I’m clear about which goal I’m pursuing. I don’t have to beat myself up about this money not being used for optimizing the world — that was never the point of that donation. That money is coming from my “personal satisfaction” budget, along with money I use for things like getting coffee with friends.
It puzzles me that, as common as concerns about the utility monster—sacrificing the well-being of the many for the super-happiness of one—are, we seem to find it totally intuitive that one can (passively) sacrifice the well-being of the many for one’s own rather mild comforts. (This is confounded by the act vs. omission distinction, but do you really endorse that?)
The latter conclusion is basically the implication of accepting goals other than “make the world as good as possible.” What makes these other goals so special, that they can demand disproportionate attention (“disproportionate” relative to how much actual well-being is at stake)?
Due to the writing style, it’s honestly not clear to me what exactly this post was claiming. But the author does emphatically say that devoting all of their time to the activity that helps more people per hour would be “premature optimization.” And they celebrate an example of a less effective thing they do because it consistently makes a few people happy.
I don’t see how the post actually defends doing the less effective thing. To the extent that you impartially care about other sentient beings, and don’t think their experiences matter any less because you have fewer warm fuzzy feelings about them, what is the justification for willingly helping fewer people?
For what it’s worth, my experience hasn’t matched this. I started becoming concerned about the prevalence of net-negative lives during a particularly happy period of my own life, and have noticed very little correlation between the strength of this concern and the quality of my life over time. There are definitely some acute periods where, if I’m especially happy or especially struggling, I have more or less of a system-1 endorsement of this view. But it’s pretty hard to say how much of that is a biased extrapolation, versus just a change in the size of my empathy gap from others’ suffering.
But only some s-risks are very concerning to utilitarians—for example, utilitarians don’t worry much about the s-risk of 10^30 suffering people in a universe with 10^40 flourishing people.
Utilitarianism =/= classical utilitarianism. I’m a utilitarian who would think that outcome is extremely awful. It depends on the axiology.
Longtermism, as a worldview, does not want present day people to suffer; instead, it wants to work towards a future with as little suffering as possible, for everyone.
This is a bit misleading. Some longtermists, myself included, prioritizing minimizing suffering in the future. But this is definitely not a consensus among longtermists, and many popular longtermist interventions will probably increase future suffering (by increasing future sentient life, including mostly-happy lives, in general).
I think the strength of these considerations depends on what sort of longtermist intervention you’re comparing to, depending on your ethics. I do find the abject suffering of so many animals a compelling counter to prioritizing creating an intergalactic utopia (if the counterfactual is just that fewer sentient beings exist in the future). But some longtermist interventions are about reducing far greater scales of suffering, by beings who don’t matter any less than today’s animals. So when comparing to those interventions, while of course I feel really horrified by current suffering, I feel even more horrified by those greater scales in the future—we just have to triage our efforts in this bad situation.
Longtermism is probably not really worth it if the far future contains much more suffering than happiness
Longtermism isn’t synonymous with making sure more sentient beings exist in the far future. That’s one subset, which is popular in EA, but an important alternative is that you could work to reduce the suffering of beings in the far future.
Thanks for the kind feedback. :) I appreciated your post as well—I worry that many longtermists are too complacent about the inevitability of the end of animal farming (or its analogues for digital minds).
Ambitious value learning and CEV are not a particularly large share of what AGI safety researchers are working on on a day-to-day basis, AFAICT. And insofar as researchers are thinking about those things, a lot of that work is trying to figure out whether those things are good ideas the first place, e.g. whether they would lead to religious hell.
Sure, but people are still researching narrow alignment/corrigibility as a prerequisite for ambitious value learning/CEV. If you buy the argument that safety with respect to s-risks is non-monotonic in proximity to “human values” and control, then marginal progress on narrow alignment can still be net-negative w.r.t. s-risks, by increasing the probability that we get to “something close to ambitious alignment occurs but without a Long Reflection, technical measures against s-risks, etc.” At least, if we’re in the regime of severe misalignment being the most likely outcome conditional on no more narrow alignment work occurring, which I think is a pretty popular longtermist take. (I don’t currently think most alignment work clearly increases s-risks, but I’m pretty close to 50⁄50 due to considerations like this.)
Oh I absolutely agree with this. My objections to that quote have no bearing on how legitimate your view is, and I never claimed as much. What I find objectionable is that by using such dismissive language about the view you disagree with, not merely critical language, you’re causing harm to population ethics discourse. Ideally readers will form their views on this topic based on their merits and intuitions, not based on claims that views are “too divorced from humane values to be worth taking seriously.”
Personally I don’t think you need to do this.
Again, I didn’t claim that your dismissiveness bears on the merit of your view. The objectionable thing is that you’re confounding readers’ perceptions of the views with labels like “[not] worth taking seriously.” The fact that many people do take this view seriously suggests that that kind of label is uncharitable. (I suppose I’m not opposed in principle to being dismissive to views that are decently popular—I would have that response to the view that animals don’t matter morally, for example. But what bothers me about this case is partly that your argument for why it’s not worth taking seriously is pretty unsatisfactory.)
I’m certainly not calling for you to pass no judgments whatsoever on philosophical views, and “merely report on others’ arguments,” and I don’t think a reasonable reading of my comment would lead you to believe that.
Indeed, I gave substantive feedback on the Population Ethics page a few months back, and hope you and your coauthors take it into account. :)