I quite agree with this, particularly since there is a straightforward explanation why Christian scripture would not have focused on people far away in time and space: there were fewer technological possibilities for affecting people far away than there are today. [Edit: I now realize this point appears in footnote 2]
I do find it noteworthy that on the one occasion where Jesus was asked whom to count as a neighbour, he deliberately expands the circle and asks listeners to think about whom they can be a neighbour to.
dominicroser
The post is really nicely structured and written.
However, to me the key debate is not whether it’s possible to have growth while (1) protecting the planet and (2) eradicating poverty. The question is how probable it is. I have generally found the arguments by the degrowth people quite convincing that it is in many ways improbable.
However, strictly speaking, the question is not even how improbable it is but the comparative question whether it is more improbable than having degrowth while (1) protecting the planet and (2) eradicating poverty. And this, I find even more improbable.
In other words: we should not just examine how growth makes poverty-eradication-cum-protecting-the-planet hard, but we should equally carefully examine how degrowth makes it hard—and probably even harder.
I love this post.
BTW, note that there have been two entries on closely related themes for the Cause Exploration Prize: here and here.
I think it is curious that effective altruism doesn’t talk more about friendships or, more broadly, relationships. As far as I understand, relationships are a key determinant of happiness. Also, relationships are one of the first things that come to mind when objective list theorists try to explain to hedonists what might matter in addition to happiness. Relationships thus seem important.
They also seems neglected: I can remember few deliberate policy interventions aimed at promoting good relationships. It might be such a cross-cutting and vague issue that it simply didn’t occur to many that the broad goal of promoting good relationships merits intense attention.
It’s a bit harder to see how it’s tractable.
Brian Green, the author of the epilogue, has contributed to EA for Christians in a number of helpful ways in the past (eg https://youtu.be/L3q6C-JzIyA)
If the case for growth in rich and poor is very different (possibly negative in the one but not the other case), then it starts to matter a lot whether we can promote growth in poor countries without promoting growth in rich countries as a side-effect. I don’t know how the proposed interventions fare in this respect?
Also, some ways of mitigating climate change have (positive or negative) side benefits* for humanity’s ability to solve other upcoming challenges, such as AI safety or pandemics. And from an EA perspective, these latter challenges might possibly be higher priority than climate change. Thus, there’s a further avenue for EAs who do not care much about climate change to “harness” the current societal focus on climate change for EA-aligned goals.
*For example, I’m thinking of side benefits of strategies such as:
-- strengthening global cooperation
-- spreading a radically technology-friendly mindset among greens
-- fighting anti-science trends in society
-- etc
I’ve written a blogpost on whether Christians should share the emphasis that many EAs put on the long term, including extinction risks. Since this fits nicely with your aim in this blogpost—i.e. whether *many* worldviews should prioritise existential risks—I thought I’d mention it here: https://eachdiscussion.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/how-much-should-christian-eas-care-about-the-far-future-part-i/
Thanks for the *great* discussion.
One question that was raised is whether there is a trade-off between Impact Investing and donations. I am not sure whether one of the biggest reasons for the existence of such a trade-off has been mentioned so far: People who invest socially responsibly feel more comfortable about owning that money and may therefore be less prone to donations. Conversely, people who feel that they are earning their money in illegitimate ways may feel under more pressure to give it away.
I don’t have any data to support this claim. It’s merely my personal impression that *a lot* of my non-EA friends who care about poverty, animals, etc. are much drawn to the idea that what they should *really* be doing is aiming at clean hands by investing & consuming ethically. They feel that if they earned & spend their money in a clean way, any donations are then superogatory.
Because of this sense, I often strategically try to undermine people’s belief in impact investing—in order to convince them that it’s (at the very least) not a comprehensive solution and that donations are crucial as well. Neither Gabe nor Max claimed that it’s a comprehensive solution but I believe that people perceive it as such. And this perception implies that there are significant trade-off in promoting impact investments rather than donations.
P.S.: One solution to that would of course be to promote impact investing but *frame* it such that people don’t feel like they can refrain from donations simply because the money was earned in a “clean” way.
Thanks for writing this up so nicely. The framing in terms of EA relevance is perfect.
Here’s another question I have that would be relevant to EA. Do you think that currently the risks from Back Contamination and Forward Contamination receive too much attention (relative to other risks)? In other words: is there some inertia in the sense that once a novel catastrophic risk does get recognized as a serious issue, it then doesn’t easily get out of people’s minds & institutional processes again?
(The background for my question is this: I read quite a bit about space ethics and sustainability in recent months. At times, I was astonished to see how often back & forward contamination come up as one of the “big topics” in space ethics/sustainability discussions. According to my—extremely unreliable—intuition, I found it hard to see why planetary protection should be such a central topic given that space exploration comes with many other major risks & opportunities. This was just my vague, subjective impression...)
I love this post. It singles out a very specific problem and tackles it very thoughtfully.
On website blockers: I have also quitted them regularly but since I have started using ColdTurkey I have quitted much less. I think it’s better than other blockers.
For myself, family life has done the trick of making me go to bed at a reasonable hour. But as soon as my wife and kids are gone for a day or two, I (regrettably!) just stay up forever. One of the reasons why I do so (and which doesn’t come up on your list) is that my mood often happens to be very good when I stay up late and I also enter flow states more easily when working late at night.
Thanks for this! Very interesting.
And really sorry for replying only now—I somehow missed this and only saw it now.
--- On population increase: yes, many Christians work towards population increase but it’s equally true that many Christians don’t. An interesting side remark is that the influential passage Genesis 1,28 on which pro-natalism is often based calls for *filling* the earth. Arguably, humanity can claim to have unlocked this achievement. We can tick it off our To-Do-List. (Also, in terms of background information, my view that determining the optimal population size might be God’s task rather than a human task started with this blogpost: https://greenfutureethics.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/god-as-a-solution-for-population-paradoxes)
--- On miracles: One thing is that I find it a bit hard to exclude miracles from classical theism. But even if we exclude them (or understand them to be compatible with natural laws) and even if we understand God to act within the causal history of the universe, one thing we surely can’t exclude in classical theism is that God acts in addition to human agency (including acts which might be surprising). To the extent that this is true, Christian concern with x-risks should continue to be somewhat mitigated relative to the atheist’s concern?
--- And thanks for the helpful observation that the blogpost unhelpfully avoids clear upshots (and thus also avoids responsibility for actions that might follow from it). The thing is: I find it genuinely extremely hard to think about the right approach to long-termism from a Christian perspective and this actually was *merely* a start. The parliamentary model etc would indeed be needed to derive actionable conclusions. (And, just to say, I do agree with many EAs that the far future should definitely receive more consideration than it typically does).
I sincerely hope this cause will be taken as seriously as possible and thoroughly examined.
On an anecdotal basis, I have been repeatedly surprised just how many people around me have had significant experiences along these lines. I would never have guessed this before my friends all were in child-bearing age.
I also think the relevance of this cause area might typically remain hidden from public sight because:less than half the population ever gives birth
most people who do give birth, do so only once or very few times during their life
if something goes wrong, they are in a uniquely bad position to follow-up given that life with a small child is a uniquely intense phase
We should also naturally be open to the idea that OV happens much more frequently than assumed given that
birthing persons are in a uniquely vulnerable situation
health and safety concerns - even if well-intentioned—always provide a plausible cover/excuse
Thanks a lot for this pointer!
An odd observation: He cites someone who’s done such stuff before—John Nolt, a philosopher. He himself is professor of the psychology of music. I think the calculations of both of them are extremely useful (even if extremely speculative). But there’s a big question here: what prevented *scientists* from offering such numbers? Are they too afraid of publishing guesstimates? Does it not occur to them that these numbers are utterly relevant for the debate?
Doesn’t seem to personal for me (and, generally speaking, a good idea)
Thanks, that is a word of wisdom. I’ll have to practice this!
Here’s one challenge to your (convincing!) post: One of the only ways I get anything done in life is by promising it to someone and then being held accountable. What I achieve depends on what I promise—there are no independently “realistic deadlines” for me. However, I usually don’t achieve it by the date I promise. If I promise it by February, I get it done by March. But it wouldn’t help if I promised it by March. In that case, I would just achieve it by April.
While I’m exaggerating a bit to make my point clear, the upshot is that even though I agree with your reasoning, I’m still not sure I should underpromise—because it would just mean I achieve less? Overpromising is one of my only ways of making me move forward.
It is so helpful to have this overview assesment in concentrated form.
In public debates about the pros & cons of economic growth in rich countries there is often the idea “Growth in rich countries is unimportant/bad—but, yes, for poor countries it is important to still grow”.
The kind of work you portray about spillovers puts the viability of the idea “growth in poor countries without growth in rich countries” into question and helpfully puts numbers on how strongly growth in rich countries is linked to growth in poor countries.
Looking for help: what’s the opposite of counterfactual reasoning—in other words: when EAs encourage counterfactual reasoning, what do they discourage?
I ask because I’m writing about good epistemic practices and mindsets. I am trying to structure my writing as a list of opposites (scout mindset vs soldier mindset, numerical vs verbal reasoning, etc).
Would it be correct to say that in the case of counterfactual reasoning there is no real opposite? Rather, the appropriate contrast is: “counterfactual reasoning done well vs. counterfactual reasoning done badly”?
Thank you so much—this is the most helpful text I’ve read about this question!
I’d love it if someone were to write—
an equally detailed post about developing countries (rather than just something the length of section 4.4)
-- summarized how well it’s possible to boost growth in developing countries without doing so in developed countries.
The thought is that the best case for economic growth leading to happiness would be along the following lines (excluding the link between growth and catastrophic/existential risk):
- growth doesn’t hurt happiness in rich countries
- growth promotes happiness in poor countries
- growth in poor countries isn’t possible without growth in rich countries
You asked for other examples. The following two examples are certainly not the most relevant but they are interesting:
-- Benjamin Franklin, in his will, left £1,000 pounds each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, with the proviso that the money should be invested for 100 years, with 25 percent of the principal to be invested for a further 100 years. As a result, Boston wound up in 1990 with a fund of over $5 million, Philadelphia with $2.3 million.) [copy-pasted from a book review by Joseph Heathe in Ethics]
-- From Cliff Landesman’s 1995 2-page-paper (http://bit.ly/2QETQ9Z) ): “I and a dozen or so nickel and dime philanthropists belong to the 2492 Club. We each contributed less than $25 to open a Giftrust mutual fund account (#25000044879) with Twentieth Century Investors. With luck, a millennium after Columbus landed in America, this account will pay out its accumulated value (expected to exceed the equivalent of 26 million in 1992 dollars) to Oxfam America, an organization that fights hunger in partnership with poor people around the world. Other altruistic gamblers who wish to join the 2492 Club, hoping to influence events centuries from now, and betting that current conditions will prevail for another 500 years, should contact the author or Oxfam America.”
PS: In trying to remember where I found the quotes I came across the following two papers which pre-date the current EA discussion and I just post them here in case anyone who’s interested in this stuff hasn’t noted them: Dan Moller’s 2006 paper “Should we let people starve—for now?” (http://bit.ly/2TgJz5T) or Laura Valentini’s 2011 paper “On the duty to withhold global aid now to save more lives in the future” (http://bit.ly/37TbxIG) .