Sorry for not replying sooner.
tl;dr: Effective Altruism shouldn’t be a job you do because it’s The Right Thing To Do, which you come home from tired and drained, you should integrate it with your life and include your own wellbeing in the decision process.
I strongly disagree. Why would people be so deeply affected if they didn’t truly care?
They do truly care, in the emotional sense. They just can’t be modeled like a utility-maximiser which values it greatly compared to their own mental well-being. You call the aberration ‘irrationality’, but that isn’t an explanation. A model which does offer an explanation (simpler than an ad-hoc rule) is therefore strictly better. Given how predictable and intentional it is, I think it makes more sense to model it as a rational action of an agent which values the well-being of humanity less than the emotions generated by caring (about the well-being of humanity or something else).
Suppose we have an agent. It has a utility function over its ‘emotional states’, and these emotional states are a priori linked to the environment in certain ways. It has a strong utility penalty for changing these links, but it is able to. In that case, if we place the agent in an environment which causes misery, then if it becomes unlikely that the situation will change, the agent will change the way the environment links to misery to prevent future misery. The link between the environment and the emotions is “caring for things in the environment”, with all expected behaviours, but the agent does not terminally value the environment in this model.
We should also consider that people sometimes do start emotionally caring again if a problem stops appearing hopeless. This could be modeled by a utility boost for switching back to the “proper” emotional link-ups (though smaller than the utility loss for becoming jaded, because otherwise you would just always shield yourself from nasty emotions and switch back for the positive ones afterwards), which means that there is a complete map of “proper” emotional link-ups in the utility function, albeit lower-ranked than the emotional hookups. The agent’s true optimum would therefore mean having “proper” emotional link-ups, and an environment identical to that of an agent which has the proper emotional link-ups as its utility function.
This matches the data quite nicely, methinks. Better than “irrationality”, anyway.
Giving up is not a rational decision made by your system-2*, it’s a coping mechanism triggered by your system-1 feeling miserable, which then creates changes/rationalizations in system-2 that could become permanent.
Agenty/rational behaviour isn’t exclusive to system 2. How does system 1 decide when to trigger this coping mechanism? Or to beg the question less, how is existence parsed into the existence or nonexistence of a trigger?
As I said before (and you expressed skepticism), humans are not designed to efficiently pursue a single goal.
That does not follow from the linked page. It states that our utility function (such that it exists) is very complex, not that there isn’t a way to make one value dominant. For example, humans can be convinced to efficiently pursue the singular goal of watching flashing lights of a slot machine, getting heroin into their bloodstream, etc.
Was that the evidence you have for the claim that humans aren’t designed to efficiently pursue a single goal? Or do you have more evidence?
A neuroscientist of the future, when the remaining mysteries of the human brain will be solved, will not be able to look at people’s brains and read out a clear utility-function.
It is trivially true that a utility function-based agent exists (in a mathematical sense) which perfectly models someone’s behaviour. It may not be the simplest, but it must exist.
Instead, what you have is a web of situational heuristics (system-1), combined with some explicitly or implicitly represented beliefs and goals (system-2),
“Non-technical” is one thing, an entirely different sorting from the common usage which AFAIK has no basis in cognitive science is quite another. How did you manage to come upon those definitions? Never mind that situational heuristics by construction have implicitly represented beliefs and goals (ducking if someone’s fist moves towards your face: I believe that their fist will continue to move in the rough direction it is going and I do not want to be hit in the face).
There is often no clear way to get out a utility-function.
That’s evidence against a simple UF, only a little against complex UFs. And since Thou Art Godshatter, a complex UF is expected.
Of course, people can decide to do what they can to self-modify towards becoming more agenty, and some succeed quite well despite of all the messy obstacles your brain throws at you. But if your ideal self-image and system-2 goals are too far removed from your system-1 intuitions and generally the way your mind works, then this will create a tension that leads to unhappiness and quite likely cognitive dissonance somewhere. If you keep going without changing anything, the outcome won’t be good for neither you nor your goals.
How could you possibly know this? How do you know what “keeping going” is for those who are going to read this?
You mentioned in your earlier comment that lowering your expectations is exactly what evading cognitive dissonance is. Indeed! But look at the alternatives: If your expectations are impossible to fulfill for you, then you cannot reduce cognitive dissonance by improving your behavior. So either you lower your expectations (which preserves your EA-goal!), or you don’t, in which case the only way to reduce the cognitive dissonance is by rationalizing and changing your goal.
This is very different from how I would describe it, to the point that I have trouble understanding you. Am I correct in interpreting this as you expecting people to use some kind of EA utility quota, where “expectations” are a moral standard you want yourself to reach? That’s… well, I guess it explains why people have donation quota, but it’s very different from how I think about it by default.
If you’re a utilitarian, it is also Wrong, because either you’re not optimising for the right utility before meeting the quota or you’re necessarily doing worse after passing the quota than if you hadn’t passed it. Problem cases are failing to optimise for the right utility function—one which places great instrumental value on their emotional health. A utility quota masks that problem by allowing people to patch up their emotional health during down time, but it is not a solution: For example, problem cases would still be damaging their emotional health while ‘working’, requiring a longer time to fix than if they took action to minimise emotional health damage while working, which is not allowed under the utility quota model because it’s “slacking off during work time”. Someone whose quota allows them to just barely be okay would be in a constant struggle between their misaligned “EA utility quota” and their free time which tries to make them happy, as opposed to someone who has a more properly aligned EA utility quota, who also partially optimises work to be something they enjoy and as a consequence can get system 1 involved in creative thinking during work and spend more time working, leading to better happiness and productivity. (Disclaimer: no large scale test that I know of).
In my opinion, there is always cognitive dissonance in this entire paradigm of utility quotas. You’re making yourself act like two agents with two different moralities who share the same body but get control at different times. There is cognitive dissonance between those two agents. Even if you try to always have one agent in charge, there’s cognitive dissonance with the part you’re denying.
By choosing strategies like “Avoiding daily dilemmas”, you’re not changing your goals, your only changing the expectations you set for yourself in regard to these goals.
These “expectations”, as you use them, are the goals you actually engage in. I agree you’re not changing your true goals by changing your expectations, but you’re doing something which is suboptimal by your own standards, which you don’t see because you can’t naturally empathise with everything in your future light-cone and system 2 is saying that it’s all right.
(part 1⁄2)
part 2⁄2
Yes, I have, for myself, and I declined, because I didn’t see how it would help. Your analogy is indeed an analogy for what you believe, but it is not evidence. I asked you why you advise reducing one’s agency, and the mere fact that it is theoretically possible for it to be a good idea doesn’t demonstrate that it in fact is.
Note that in the analogy, if the robbers aren’t stupid, they will kill one of your family members because taking the pill is a form of non-compliance, wait for the pill to wear off, and then ask the same question minus one. If the hostage crisis is a good analogy for your internal self, what is to stop “system 1” from breaking its promises or being clever? That’s basically how addiction works: take a pill a day or start withdrawal. Doing that? Good. Now take one more a day or start withdrawal. Replace “pills” with “time/effort not spent on altruism” and you’re doomed.
The utility quota strikes again. Here, your problem is that EA can be “too demanding”—apparently there is some kind of better morality by which you can say that EA is being Wrong, but somehow you don’t decide to use that morality for EA instead.
No, in this case I’m referring to true morality, whatever it might be. If your explanation was true—if the divergence in theories was because of goals failing to converge or people answering different questions—we would expect philosophers to actually answer their questions. However, what we see is that philosophers do not manage to answer their own questions: every moral theory has holes and unanswered questions, not just differences of opinion between the author and others.
If there were moral consensus, then obviously there would be a single morality, so the lack of a consensus carries some evidential weight, but not much. People are great at creating disagreements over nothing, and ethics is complex enough to be opaque, so we would expect moral disagreement in both worlds with a single coherent morality for humanity and worlds without one.
And my point is that the inference is obsolete: since neither person has psychological knowledge thirty years ahead of their time, both are necessarily wrong and irrational about their goals.
Why not do this publicly? Why not address the thought experiment I proposed?
Those things are less straightforward than string theory, in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity. The fact that we can compress those queries into sentences which are simpler to introduce one to than algebra is testimony to how similar humans are.
Yes, but you couldn’t act on it without the benefit of hindsight. It is also theoretically possible that the moon is made out of cheese and that all information to the contrary has been spread by communist mice.
This should be included in the productivity calculation, naturally. Just like your own mental wellbeing naturally should be part of EA optimisation.
And all your experience has had the constant factor of being pitched by you, someone who believes “optimising for EA” being tiring and draining is all part of the plan.
Yes, if “optimising for EA” drains you, you should do less of it, because you aren’t optimising for EA (unless there’s an overlap, which there probably is, in which case you should keep doing the things which optimise for EA).
You’re telling people not to try to optimise their full lives to EA right now. If that is what they were trying before, then you are arguing for people to stop trying, QED.
On the topic of choice of words, though, in the original post you write “The same of course also applies to women.”—this implies that the author of the quote did not intend his statement to apply to women, despite using a (or at the time perhaps the) grammatically correct way to refer to an unspecified person of any gender (“he”). Considering you use a gendered pronoun to refer to unspecified people of any gender as well (“she”), I’m confused why you would wrongly ‘correct’ someone out like that.