Hello, I’m Devin, I blog here along with Nick/Heather Kross. Recently got my bioethics MA, now looking into getting a philosophy PhD.
Devin Kalish
Karma: 1,893
I’m not sure, again I haven’t really spoken with my professor about this, and agree with Leah that the numbers are likely inflated. On the one hand Some ways of spelling out this position just seem to imply that yes, these deaths are as important to prevent. On the other hand, speaking less generously and more meta-philosophically for the moment, my impression is that people most likely to be comfortable with the age-neutral position in the first place also tend to be the ones willing to weave arbitrarily elaborate networks of moral cruft for themselves in order to avoid biting almost any bullet.
I’m not sure I even share your definition here, I think “disadvantaged” doesn’t refer to a lack of compensation or anything else so specific, just overall whether you are below the relevant threshold of advantages. This seems very straightforward and I don’t think I need a definition of disadvantage that specifically references compensation anywhere, just one that doesn’t discount a level of advantage if it turns out compensation was involved in getting it. I also kind of disagree that you can just rely on “this is what words mean” anyway. I have taken very few surveys where I could just literally answer all the questions. Because of phrasing limitations, many questions are only really designed to allow uncomplicated yes/no or multiple choice answers to a few possible positions. Typically I have to imagine a slightly different version of survey questions in order to answer them at all.
Hm, something like this confusion could be boosting numbers, but I do have a professor who holds a position like this (I haven’t spoken to her about it, so I don’t know her exact justification). I find the position extremely implausible, but my steelman is probably something like this:
It is better to give someone twenty more years of life rather than two more years of life, but it is also better to give someone a million more dollars rather than a thousand.
We don’t think, however, that it is right to give preferential treatment to saving a millionaire’s life rather than the life of someone living paycheck to paycheck.
We infer from this that when we are making life or death decisions, we typically should not think in terms of deprived additional wellbeing at all, but rather the loss of something basic to autonomy/rights any being with certain minimum properties already has.
There are more details I could go into about theories that are skeptical of a deprivation account of death but this is sort of an attempted gloss of where they might be coming from, I recommend Shelley Kagan’s book “Death” for anyone interested in an accessible treatment of this and other nearby issues. Again, I do not endorse this view, I think whatever commonality you find between all deaths, it is still very hard to deny that the deprivation is an additional consideration that is important enough to be decision-relevant. I just want to provide the steelman.
I think a complication is that some people answering might have a theory of justice wherein a fully just world by definition corrects/compensates any disadvantages that come with being blind. I think this view still raises concerns for people who either think that the loss of a major personal capability isn’t something that is fungible with any social compensation for reasons basic to their theory of autonomy/flourishing, or people who think that justice will not demand fully compensating disadvantages like this at all. Still, I doubt 40% of respondents think the less plausible interpretation of this answer is true.
Thanks for doing this research Leah! I’ve been hoping to see something like this for a while. Most of the results aren’t that surprising to me (paid organ donation and non-medical embryo selection are a little surprising to me, I expected them to be controversial, not so one-sided). On my overall views on the field I reserve judgement—these look relatively normal for what I expect to see in the general public with a few exceptions, which is more or less what I expected. I unfortunately don’t seem to have institutional access to the paper diving into this question more
and I still don’t know how to use sci-hub, so I’ll have to figure that part out later. Again, thanks for running more formal research on this subject!
I never met Marissa, in fact I never even heard of her until today. But this is an incredibly tragic end to an incredible life – that she died so young, and that what she suffered through was enough to make her think death was worth it. But this suffering and this death is part of the fight she joined us in, with great dedication. When things like this happen within the community I can’t help but think of a quote from Yudkowky’s writing on his own brother’s death,
“When Michael Wilson heard the news, he said: ‘We shall have to work faster.’ Any similar condolences are welcome. Other condolences are not.”
While this seems too strong to me, and I think of this sentiment in the context of suffering, not just death, I think it’s ultimately my source of solace and motivation in times like these. Her suffering and death can’t be undone, but we can continue the fight for what she cared about and against what took her, and her loss is a reminder that we shall have to work faster.
I don’t have much to add here, except for two things.
This post asks for mental health resources for other EAs struggling. The main thing I can offer along these lines is related to addiction – I founded a server for EAs struggling with addiction, if anyone here thinks this can be helpful for their own struggles:
https://discord.gg/W8sFnNEbdT
It isn’t very active right now, but I will continue maintaining it, and starting up meetings where possible. You can also ask for advice, vent, or celebrate accomplishments on the text channels, even without the meetings. If this isn’t of interest, feel free to reach out to me directly, and I can try to offer comfort, advice, and resources where possible. I recently made a sequence of my writings on this subject that contain hopefully useful insights about addiction as well. I have less experience with other mental health difficulties, but feel free to reach out anyway if you want someone to talk to.
Finally, because many people here have shared suicide prevention resources, I feel compelled to address maybe the unspoken barrier many people have in reaching out on time. If you are scared of losing control, being involuntarily detained and institutionalized, and are avoiding frank discussion or treatment, please at least reach out to a hotline using a concealed IP address. Absent this, I’ve consulted an anonymous psychiatrist for advice on this worry, and was told that even if your psychiatrist or the hotline try to call the police on you, there is almost never a manhunt, so you can always just hang out at the park for a few hours and most likely be in the clear. This is not discouragement from getting more thorough treatment, I’ve been to inpatient and found it helpful, it is encouragement to get treatment even if you have these fears. They are common worries, and you can get around them while still getting help in many cases, so please try. Your life is at stake after all.
Thank you so much for writing this! I hope this isn’t considered too off topic, but I run the Effective Altruism Addiction Recovery Group which I am maintaining but is still fairly slow at the moment. If you are reading this and are worried about your own addictive behaviors, feel free to join the server, or if you would rather not, feel free to reach out to me directly, and I would be happy to meet/help any way you think will be most useful. You should be able to join through this link:
Pinea did complain about how many dimensions I wanted in my ethics...
Thanks, I see what you’re saying now. I can see value in positive reinforcement at least, but I guess I have a few reactions to some of the more specific points here:
-
Insofar as people can find reference classes they don’t fit that predict alcoholism, they can do the same for not drinking. Muslims, some other conservative theists, people with physical health conditions, people who are recovering alcoholics, people who rarely hang out with friends. I think you are at high risk if you are say a young atheist socialite in somewhere like NYC, and you can also count on very few of your friends being teetotalers. Given this I think the bigger difference the half non-drinker stat makes is to the risk of alcoholism if you do drink, which it doesn’t quite double, but probably something close to doubles (base rate I would guess is nearly a quarter of American who drink qualify as alcoholics at some point in their lives).
-
If there are sufficiently reliable things about someone’s situation/history that they can reference that it brings their risk down very significantly, then good! I would still probably disagree that it’s worth the personal risk, and think “drinking culture” is sufficiently bad that even if you fall in that bucket there are morally irresponsible ways to promote drinking, but if I can only convince people who do not have strongly mitigating factors not to drink (or heck, even just the people who have strong risk factors), then I think that would do a lot of good.
-
Honestly as I’ve mentioned here I don’t trust people that much to judge their own risk factors off of reasonable criteria. Too many people I run into spend literal decades in denial when they actually are already alcoholics by their own later admission. Heck, I have a close friend with a personal history of an addiction-like disorder, co-occurring mental health problems, and family history of alcoholism who I haven’t been able to convince not to use cocaine because they “don’t have an addictive personality”. I think the best heuristic in these cases is usually to just not assume you’re special and go with the averages, which don’t look great.
-
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you mean here:
“I meant for the stat of non-drinkers to be a positive signal for the general population to choose not to drink and still feel normie.”
Could you rephrase? As for my stats, this is an example that’s been helpful. I definitely agree that most people can eventually recover and stop drinking pretty much for good (or less reliably, in moderation). I’m currently sober for about two months, and hope to fully recover myself. What I meant is that even if you do eventually recover, there are huge costs that are typically incurred along the way in physical and mental health, personal relationships, career, finances, time, immoral actions, sense of identity/control, raw suffering, and certainly an above average risk of just dying before you recover (either from things like heart attacks and cirrhosis, or suicide). Even considering that most people can eventually recover, it seems like drinking isn’t worth the risk of all this unless it was significantly rarer than it is.
Yeah, I’m getting the impression that one of the big things I ought to do with a final draft is expand my discussion of this change in my position, and possibly spin it off into its own appendix. For what it’s worth if this is true it means the risk from drinking is even higher than apparent, as even when you control for the portion of non-drinkers who are alcoholics or former alcoholics (depending on your preferred nomenclature), a quite significant portion of the people who don’t become alcoholics just don’t drink anyway (how much depends in large part on how many of these people used to drink a good deal and stopped, but never became alcoholics).
Thanks, this a decent gloss and I hope it will be helpful (I apologize again for the difficulty of the outline as currently written)
Worth adding though that alcoholism can get gradually worse over long periods, and many alcoholics spend decades in denial, so if you are trying to rule yourself into this class, you really should look at this much more objective criteria rather than sorta vibing “I’ve done this forever and I’m not an alcoholic”.
This seems right to me.
I mean, people aren’t given “future alcoholic” cards. I think there are circumstances under which you can be sure drinking is especially risky, such as being a recovering alcoholic or having history with a different addiction or having a decent amount of recent family history with addiction, but I’m not aware of a ton of factors you can reference to be confident you won’t be one.
I don’t think your odds are more than half, but I do think they’re around one in ten if you’re an average American (if you’re drinking enough that cutting alcohol is a significant sacrifice, then I would guess your odds are worse than that). Those are very bad odds considering how badly this disorder fucks up your life and how small the upside is by comparison.
There’s also a risk of contributing to a drinking culture in which casual drinking is normalized or even expected in many contexts, hurting others who casually stumble into drinking because they didn’t realize how dangerous it was/just want to fit in (and drinking alone makes your odds even worse). I think we should treat alcohol a bit more like we tend to treat tobacco, so…the short answer is yes, I think almost no one should drink.
If anyone knows how to insert this table in my post, I would be very appreciative. I don’t know if it’s obvious or something, but I haven’t seen any instructions for it and I am not technically skilled.
-Response to “Welfare and Felt-Duration”
I seriously doubt I’ll have anything ready for this by draft amnesty week (maaaaybe a rough outline if I can post that), but it could be one of the most useful things for me to get feedback on, as it is what I’m planning to write for my thesis (not with that title, though if I adapt and shorten it into a blog post after writing it, it might have a title like that in the way this earlier post does):
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/meat-veggies-response/
Essentially, it’s on the topic of the issues subjective experience of time give to aggregative theories of well-being, and will especially use this preprint:
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/welfare-and-felt-duration-andreas-mogensen/
As a jumping off point. The basic idea will be to argue that theories of wellbeing that view individuals as the fundamental subject of morality, and moral value just being about doing what is good for these subjects, have a viable route to accommodate subjective time as opposed theories which view individuals more like containers which are filled with a certain amount of universal value, and views this value as the basic subject of morality. Essentially this will take on the “speed of thought” view Mogenson discusses, and views the wellbeing contribution of a given stimulus as relating to the “amount of subject” it impacts, and not just the raw amount of good or bad feeling the time period contains. I will also spend a good deal of time on objections to this suggestion, such as skepticism of the idea of personal identity, theories of consciousness that make feeling and thought relatively inseparable even in principle such as illusionism and phenomenal intentionality theory, and the objection that we have as much (or more) reason to identify with our feelings than our thoughts.
-Existentialist Currents in Pawn Hearts
Unlike the others here, I probably won’t post this one, either for draft amnesty, or on the forum, at all, as it isn’t sufficiently relevant (though I did make a related post on the forum which uh, remains my lowest karma post):
But it’s a post I am strongly thinking of putting on my own blog. Like my most recent blog post:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/fun-home/
This is one that I would be adapting from an undergrad essay, this one on the connections between existentialist thought and the Van Der Graaf Generator album “Pawn Hearts”. There are ways I like this essay even more than my last one, but I think it in even rougher shape.
-The Case for Pluralist Evaluation
This is another one I started and never finished. I actually specifically started it as an intended draft amnesty entrant last year, but I think it is in even rougher shape, and I also haven’t looked at it in a long time. Basically this was inspired by the controversy a little while ago over ACE evaluating their movement grants on criteria other than impact on animal welfare. I don’t defend this specific case but rather make a general argument against this type of argument. Basically the idea is that most EA donors (especially the great majority who claim to be somewhat “cause neutral”) care about things other than the impact of charities within their intended causes. Insofar as a charity evaluator is looking at charities that could have impacts in other cause areas, evaluators have a reason to take this into account if they can. Global Health and Longtermist charity evaluators probably aren’t ranking the charities ACE is at all, so it’s up to ACE to incorporate their impacts in other areas into their ranking (and then be clear about the priorities/decisions that went into this).
This seems very simple to me:
If you think fetuses are not of moral concern but grown persons are, then abortion is just birth control, and embryo selection affects the full life of a moral patient (because presumably the fetus will be born and become one).
I disagree on both counts, the first because while I am pro-choice, I think fetuses are worthy of moral concern by some point in pregnancy, and on embryo selection I think the non-identity problem bites and most attempts to rescue a more restrictive reproductive ethics based on things like intention and relationship violation are not well argued. Still, I kind of think some of the explanations on this page for surprising answers are kind of some version of “bioethicists are probably cartoonishly woke in some way”, rather than stepping back and thinking through the practical differences at play, and I would just caution people about that.