JBentham

Karma: 414

JBentham Jun 3, 2023, 2:44 PM
15 points
5 ∶ 0
on: EA and Longtermism: not a crux for saving the world
Thank you for this. I particularly appreciated the “counterarguments” and “anti-claims” sections, which I felt accurately represented the views of those of us who disagree.

One further counterargument I’d mention, to balance out the point you make about honesty, is that it also feels potentially dicey/dishonest to be gaming out ways of how to get people to do things we want, on grounds we don’t ourselves find to be the most compelling. To be clear, I think there is a good way of going about this, which involves being honest about our views while making it clear that we’re trying to appeal to people of different persuasions.

JBentham May 27, 2023, 12:42 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Do you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? Think again?
I agree that animal feed may influence the chance of collapse, but I again think this will be negligible given high expected animal product consumption pre-AGI and the much smaller human population.

I certainly agree that we should not act as if we are sure, but I also think that saying we are completely “clueless” or “don’t know” is also inaccurate. We should of course take these considerations seriously, and think about them carefully and try to get more information about them (and to be clear, I also discount the climate-related worries for the possibility of AGI arriving before then).

JBentham May 27, 2023, 11:12 AM
19 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Do you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? Think again?
Thanks for writing this. I’m pretty skeptical of your points related to food shocks and abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios, especially given the academic controversy surrounding nuclear winter scenarios (which I don’t believe you’ve adequately updated on despite this controversy being pointed out to you beneath one of your other posts). A nuclear exchange that’s of the magnitude required to potentially cause nuclear winter is also exceedingly unlikely before AGI arrives.

Also, note that in any such scenario, the human population will be far lower than it is today, so the quantity of animal feed is almost certainly not going to be the thing that determines whether humanity recovers from collapse (especially if we’re assuming that such a scenario occurs in the next few decades before AGI, when animal product consumption is expected to be pretty high).

Robin Hanson has also questioned whether farmland used to grow crops for animal feed would be ‘re-wilded’ - at least some of it will be used for development, which will actually reduce wild animal numbers. In any case, whether or not wild animals have net-negative lives is incredibly uncertain.

So, the direct effects on factory farmed animals of reducing consumption, plus lower greenhouse gas emissions (which, given my skepticism about your food shock points, and the fact that climate change probably increases the risk of an existential catastrophe by reducing global stability and increasing the likelihood of extreme/tail-risk climate scenarios), seem to make reducing consumption net-positive.

JBentham Apr 24, 2023, 8:57 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Impartiality is not baked into to Christianity
I strongly agree, and this is especially clear when it comes to the EA focus on animal welfare and digital minds.

JBentham Mar 24, 2023, 8:14 AM
0 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Sabs’s comment on: If Adult Insects Matter, How Much Do Juveniles Matter?
The aim of EA is to do the most good, and to attract people who are open to updating their views on how to carry out this project. If the “weirdness” of EA means that we repel people who aren’t committed to doing the most good, that’s probably a good thing. And, I’d be far more trusting of utilitarians/consequentialists within EA than I would be of those who practice common sense morality (who let millions of people die every year), egoists (who’d save themselves even if it meant millions died), deontologists (who wouldn’t lie to protect me from a totalitarian regime), religious fundamentalists, or people who say they want to nuke San Francisco.

JBentham Mar 17, 2023, 1:07 PM
0 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: River’s comment on: Offer an option to Muslim donors; grow effective giving
I sympathise with this position. Impartiality is a key tenet of EA. At the same time, EA already tolerates outright speciesism (people, including a number of high-status individuals within the community, who explicitly say that they value non-humans less than humans not because of sentience, but because they are simply members of a different species). Moreover, as Jason says, these people would have still been recipients anyway.

JBentham Feb 28, 2023, 9:02 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: ‘Evolutionary debunking arguments’ about human moral intuitions
Sorry for the late response. I don’t actually think that non-utilitarian intuitions/principles are necessarily more evolutionarily biased than utilitarian principles. I think certain deontological precepts (like Kant’s categorical imperative) could also be less vulnerable to evolutionary debunking arguments than ‘common-sense’ moral intuitions, for example. I don’t think it’s as easy to argue that something like this, or the principle of Universal Benevolence, is the product of natural selection. It could be, but it seems we have less reason to think it is. And if ethics is about how we ought (in a reason-implying sense) to live, then focusing on what we have most reason to do is sufficient.

Once we’ve reasoned about “who counts?”, we can then move on to “what counts?”

I think hedonism is the most defensible answer to “what counts?”, and when you combine that with plausible answers to “who counts?”, you arrive at hedonistic utilitarianism.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 8:14 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: O Carciente’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
Great comment, thanks for clarifying your position. To be clear, I’m not particularly concerned about the survival of most particular worldviews as long as they decline organically. I just want to ensure that there’s a marketplace in which different worldviews can compete, rather than some kind of irreversible ‘lock-in’ scenario.

I have some issues with the entire ‘WEIRD’ concept and certainly wouldn’t want humanity to lock in ‘WEIRD’ values (which are typically speciesist). Within that marketplace, I do want to promote moral circle expansion and a broadly utilitarian outlook as a whole. I wouldn’t say this is as neglected as you claim it is — MacAskill discusses the value of the future (not just whether there is a future) extensively in his recent book, and there are EA organisations devoted to moral values spreading. It’s also partly why “philosopher” is recommended as a career in some cases, too.

If we want to spread those values, I agree with you that learning about competitor philosophies, ideologies, cultures and perspectives (I personally spend a fair bit of time on this) would be important, and that lowering language barriers could be helpful.

It could also be useful to explore whether there are interventions in cultures that we’re less familiar with that could improve people’s well-being even more than the typical global health interventions that are currently recommended. Perhaps there’s something about a particular culture which, if promoted more effectively, would really improve people’s lives. But maybe not: children dying of malaria is really, really bad, and that’s not a culture-specific phenomenon.

Needless to say, none of the above applies to the vast majority of moral patients on the planet, whether they’re factory farmed land animals, fishes or shrimps. (Though if we want to improve, say, shrimp welfare in Asia, learning local languages could help us work and recruit more effectively as well as spread values.)

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 4:29 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: O Carciente’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
Thanks for your reply! Firstly, there will many EAs (particularly from the non-Anglosphere West and non-Western countries) who do understand multiple languages. I imagine there are also many EAs who have read world literature.

When we say that EAs “mostly” have a certain demographic background, we should remember that this still means there are hundreds of EAs that don’t fit that background at all and they shouldn’t be forgotten. Relatedly, I (somewhat ironically) think critics of EA could do with studying world history because it would show them that EA-like ideas haven’t just popped up in the West by any means.

I also don’t think one needs to understand radically different perspectives to want a world in which those perspectives can survive and flourish into the future. There are so many worldviews out there that you have to ultimately draw a line somewhere, and many of those perspectives will just be diametrically opposed to core EA principles, so it would be odd to promote them at the community level. Should people try to expand their intellectual horizons as a personal project? Possibly!

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 4:14 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Moya’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
Thanks for your reply! I’m not saying that EA should be able to exclude others’ visions because others are doing so. I’m claiming that it’s impossible not to exclude others’ visions of the future. Let’s take the pluralistic vision of the future that appeals to MacAskill and Ord. There will be many people in the world (fascists, Islamists, evangelical Christians) who disagree with such a vision. MacAskill and Ord are thus excluding those visions of the future. Is this a bad thing? I will let the reader decide.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 4:07 PM
12 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: FJehn’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
Alternatives to QALYs (such as WELLBYs) have been put forward from within the EA movement. But if we’re trying to help others, it seems plausible that we should do it in ways that they care about. Most people care about their quality of life or well-being, as well as the amount of time they’ll have to experience or realise that well-being.

I’m sure there are people who would say they are most effectively helping others by “saving their souls” or promoting their “natural rights”. They’re free to act as they wish. But the reason that EAs (and not just EAs, because QALYs are widely used in health economics and resource allocation) have settled on quality of life and length of life is frankly because they’re the most plausible (or least implausible) ways of measuring the extent to which we’ve helped others.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 3:40 PM
−2 points
3 ∶ 4
in reply to: FJehn’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
I think reason is as close to an objective tool as we’re likely to get and often isn’t born from our standpoint in the world or the culture we grow up in. That’s why people from many different cultures have often reached similar conclusions, and why almost everyone (regardless of their background) can recognise logical and mathematical truths. It’s also why most people agree that the sun will rise the next morning and that attempting to leave your house from your upper floor window is a bad idea.

I think the onus is on advocates of these movements to explain their relevance to “doing the most good”. As for the various 20th Century criticisms of utilitarianism, my sense is that they’ve been parried rather successfully by other philosophers. Finally, my point about utilitarianism being just as modern is that it hasn’t in any way been superseded by these other movements — it’s still practiced and used today.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 1:26 PM
4 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Felix Wolf 🔸’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
I’m sure Thorn does do this (I haven’t watched the video in full yet), but it seems more productive to criticise the “EA vision of the future” than to ask where it comes from (and there were EA-like ideas in China, India, Ancient Greece and the Islamic world long before Bentham).

MacAskill, Ord and others seem to me to have advocated a highly pluralistic future in which humanity is able to reflect on its values. Clearly, some people don’t like what they think is the “EA vision of the future” and want their vision to prevail instead. The question seems to imply, though, that EAs are the only ones who are excluding others’ visions of the future from their thinking. Actually, everyone is doing that, otherwise they wouldn’t have a specific vision.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 1:12 PM
0 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ekaterina_Ilin’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
My comment mainly referred to the causes we’ve generally decided to prioritise. When we engage in cause prioritisation decisions, we don’t ask ourselves whether they’re a “leftist” or “rightist” cause area.

I did say that EAs may engage in party politics in an individual or group capacity. But they’re still often doing so in order to advocate for causes that EAs care about, and which people from various standard political ideologies can get on board with. Bankman-Fried also donated to Republican candidates who he thought were good on EA issues, for example. And the name of the “all-party” parliamentary group clearly distinguishes it from just advocating for a standard political ideology or party.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 1:01 PM
5 points
5 ∶ 5
in reply to: Ekaterina_Ilin’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
I don’t quite see how existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism and fascism are going to help us be more effectively altruistic, or how they’re going to help us prioritise causes. Communism is a different case as in some formats it’s a potential altruistic cause area that people may choose to prioritise.

I also don’t think that these ideas are more “modern” than utilitarianism, or that their supposed novelty is a point in their favour. Fascism, just to take one of these movements, has been thoroughly discredited and is pretty much the antithesis of altruism. These movements are movements in their own right, and I don’t think they’d want EAs to turn them into something they’re not. The same is true in the opposite direction.

By all means, make an argument in favour of these movements or their relevance to EA. But claiming that EAs haven’t considered these movements (I have, and think they’re false) isn’t likely to change much.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 11:04 AM
8 points
5 ∶ 4
in reply to: Ekaterina_Ilin’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
EA is a movement that aims to use reason and evidence to do the most good, so the centrality of “rationality” (broadly speaking) shouldn’t be too surprising. Many EAs are also deeply familiar with alternatives to utilitarianism. While most (according to the surveys) are utilitarians, some are non-utilitarian consequentialists or pluralists.

I suspect that the movement is dominated by utilitarians and utilitarian-leaning people because while all effective altruists shouldn’t necessarily be utilitarians, all utilitarians should be effective altruists. In contrast, it’s hard to see why a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist should, as a matter of philosophical consistency, be an effective altruist. It’s also difficult to see how a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist could engage in cause prioritisation decisions without ultimately appealing to consequences.

JBentham Feb 25, 2023, 10:56 AM
0 points
1 ∶ 3
in reply to: FJehn’s comment on: On Philosophy Tube’s Video on Effective Altruism
I agree that the choices we make are in some sense political. But they’re not political in the sense that they involve party or partisan politics. Perhaps it would be good for EAs to get involved in that kind of politics (and we sometimes do, usually in an individual capacity), but I personally don’t think it would be fruitful at an institutional level and it’s a position that has to be argued for.

Many EAs would also disagree with your assumption that there aren’t any objective moral truths. And many EAs who don’t endorse moral realism would agree that we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that all choices are equally valid, and that the only reason anyone makes decisions is due to our personal background.

Without wishing to be too self-congratulatory, when you look at the beings that most EAs consider to be potential moral patients (nonhuman animals including shrimp and insects, potential future people, digital beings), it’s hard to argue that EAs haven’t made more of an effort than most to escape their personal biases.

JBentham Feb 19, 2023, 12:25 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pete Rowlett’s comment on: Should ChatGPT make us downweight our belief in the consciousness of non-human animals?
Many nonhuman animals also show long-term abnormal behaviours, and will try to access analgesia (even paying a cost to do so), if they are in pain. I don’t think we have evidence that’s quite analogous to that with large language models, and if we did, it would cause me to update in favour of current models having sentience. It’s also worth noting that the same lines of evidence that cause me to believe nonhuman animals are sentient also lead me to believe that humans are sentient, even if some of the evidence (like physiological and neuro-anatomical similarities, and evolutionary distance) may be somewhat stronger in humans.

JBentham Feb 17, 2023, 5:35 PM
4 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Violet Hour’s comment on: Seeing more whole
This force is not what motivates this utilitarian. Rather, we should act as if we are in a finite world, and even in an infinite world we should understand that utilitarianism is not about maximising some abstract utility function or number in the sky, but about improving the conscious experiences of sentient beings. Infinities don’t change the fact that I can reduce the suffering of the person in front of me, or the sentient being on the other side of the world, or the fact that this is good for them. And there are good practical, utilitarian reasons not to spend one’s time focusing on other potential worlds.

JBentham Jan 29, 2023, 11:06 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: keir bradwell’s comment on: Non-utilitarian effective altruism
Thanks for your response. I don’t think we disagree on as much as I thought, then! I suppose I’m less confident than you that those disagreements down the line aren’t going to lead to the same sort of backlash that we currently see.
If we see EA as a community of individuals who are attempting to do good better (by their own lights), then while I certainly agree that the contributions of non-utilitarians are net-positive from a utilitarian perspective, we utilitarian EAs (including leaders of the movement, who some might say have an obligation to be more neutral for PR purposes) may still think it’s best to try to persuade others that our preferred causes should be prioritised even if it comes at the expense of bad PR and turning away some non-utilitarians. Given that philosophy may cause people to decisively change their views on prioritisation, spreading certain philosophical views may also be important.
I guess I am somewhat cheekily attempting to shift the burden of responsibility back onto non-utilitarians. As you say, even people like Torres are on board with the core ideas of EA, so in my view they should be engaging in philosophical and cause prioritisation debates from within the movement (as EAs do all the time, as you note) instead of trying to sabotage the entire project. But I do appreciate that this has become more difficult to do. I think it’s true that the ‘official messaging’ has subtly moved away from the idea that there are different ‘wings’ of EA (global health, animal welfare, existential risk) and toward an idea that not everyone will be able to get on board with (though I still think they should be able to, like many existing non-utilitarian EAs).
Trust seems to be important here. EAs can have philosophical and cause prioritisation disagreements while trusting that people who disagree with them are committed to doing good and are probably doing some amount of good (longtermists can think global health people are doing some good, and vice-versa). Similarly, two utilitarians can as you say disagree empirically about the relative intensity of pleasure and suffering in different species without suspecting that the other isn‘t making a good faith attempt to understand how to maximise utility. On the other hand, critics like Torres and possibly some of the others you mentioned may think that EA is actively doing harm (and/or that prominent EAs are actively evil). One way it could be doing harm is by diverting resources away from the causes they think are important (and instead of trying to argue for their causes from within the movement, they may, on consequentialist grounds, think it’s better to try to damage the movement).
All of this is to say that I think these ‘disagreements down the line’ are mostly to blame for the current state of affairs and can’t really be avoided, while conceding that ‘official EA messaging’ has also played its part (but, as a take-no-prisoners utilitarian, I’m not really sure whether that’s net-negative or not!)