Lukas_Gloor

• Lukas_Gloor 30 Jan 2015 21:19 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: Tom_Ash’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Utilitarianism

  I agree that the core EA tenets make sense also according to most non-consequentialist views. But consequentialism might be better at activating people because it has very concrete implications. It seems to me that non-consequentialist positions are often vague when it comes to practical application, which makes it easy for adherents to not really do much. In addition, adherence to consequentialism correlates with analytical thinking skills and mindware such as expected utility theory, which is central to understanding/​internalizing the EA concept of cost-effectiveness. Finally, there’s a tension between agent-relative positions and cause neutrality, so consequentialism selects for people who are more likely going to be on board with that.

• Lukas_Gloor 31 Jan 2015 16:40 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Geuss’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Utilitarianism

  This. Another core EA tenet might be that non-human animals count (if they are sentient).

  Kantianism has positive duties and Kant’s “realm of ends” to me sounds very much like taking into account “the instrumental rationality of charitable giving”. Kant himself didn’t grant babies or non-human animals intrinsic moral status, but some Kantian philosophers, most notably Korsgard, have given good arguments as to why sentientism should follow from the categorical imperative.

  Virtue ethics can be made to fit almost anything, so it seems easy to argue for the basic tenets of EA within that framework.

  Some forms of contractualism do not have positive rights, so these forms would be in conflict with EA. But if you ground contractualism in reasoning from behind the veil of ignorance, as did Rawls, then EA principles, perhaps in more modest application (even though it is unclear to me why the veil of ignorance approach shouldn’t output utilitarianism), will definitely follow from the theory. Contractualism that puts weight on reciprocity would not take non-human animals into consideration, but there, too, you have contractualists arguing in favor of sentientism, e.g. Mark Rowlands.

• Lukas_Gloor 23 Mar 2015 8:13 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Should al­tru­ism be self­less?

  If EA were perceived as something people do for primarily selfless reasons, this would probably make it harder to persuade new people to join. Implicitly, the presence of an EA would be calling into question the moral character of the non-EA, which can tend to make people defensive and prone to rationalizing, see for instance this effect.

  As to what is really going on with EAs: I think that the abstract philosophical motivation is indeed often selfless, because even if you’re an EA in order to feel good and find your life meaningful, this trick only works if you manage to fully convince yourself of the EA-goal. However, when it comes to having the motivation to overcome akrasia and put things into practice, I think that selfish reasons play a large role as to how far people will go. This is supported e.g. by the influence of social involvement on people becoming active.

• Lukas_Gloor 23 Mar 2015 18:24 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Non-English lan­guage effec­tive al­tru­ism (in­clud­ing a list of venues)

  (My impression is German, especially in Switzerland, and following that Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. It’s interesting that north European and historically protestant countries are particularly strong; I believe these have especially strong ethoses of private charity, in particular the UK—think the Victorian culture of charity.)

  These countries also have better education systems than the average European countries, see for instance here (I’m surprised Sweden is not in that global top20 but it’s probably close). Edit: Norway is 21, Sweden 24. My guess is that this is more relevant. In fact, I’d be hesitant to even bet on a correlation between a country’s tradition of charity and proneness to EA once you control for things like GDP. EAs tend to not be very influenced by tradition, plus quite a few EAs I know recount that they weren’t involved in traditional do-good-activities at all before they encountered EA. Maybe things change once EA becomes more mainstream, but especially in the early phase where EA is something novel, I would not expect there to be much of a correlation.

• Lukas_Gloor 24 Mar 2015 17:02 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Com­mon Mis­con­cep­tions about Effec­tive Altruism

  How do you define EA in this case? If you include e.g. all 17k TLYCS-plegders, then I’d probably agree with your statement, but if we take people in the EA-fb-group (minus the spam accounts or accidentally added ones) or people who self-report as EA then it seems more likely to me that Telofy is right.

• Lukas_Gloor 26 Mar 2015 9:37 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: We might be get­ting a lot of new EAs. What are we go­ing to do when they ar­rive?

  I agree with this and would add that even monthly meetings only could be very valuable if they’re combined with good online follow-up. When you know someone from a meeting first you’re probably more likely to ask them lots of questions that if they were just recommended to you over the internet. Nevertheless, I also think it could be promising to invest into personalized online guidance. Michelle mentioned below that the buddy-system wasn’t used much, but maybe something similar could work well especially if the demand from new people increases as expected.

Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

• Lukas_Gloor 26 Mar 2015 21:29 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  Thanks, great points! I got some help and managed to fix the layout.

• Lukas_Gloor 27 Mar 2015 17:32 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: dph121’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  Thanks for this feedback! You bring up a very important point with the danger of things turning into merely “pretending to try”. I see this problem, but at the same time I think many people are far closer to the other end of the spectrum.

  I’m part of the target audience, I think, but this post isn’t very helpful to me. Mistrust of arguments which tell me to calm down may be a part of it, but it seems like you’re looking for reasons to excuse caring for other things than effective altruism, rather than weighing the evidence for what works better for getting EA results.

  I suspect that many people don’t really get involved in EA in the first place because they’re on some level afraid that things will grow over their head. And I know of cases where people gave up EA at least partially because of these problems. This to me is enough evidence that there are people who are putting too much pressure on themselves and would benefit from doing it less. Of course, there is a possibility that a post like this one does more harm because it provides others with “ammunition” to rationalize more, but I doubt this would make much of a difference – it’s unfortunately easy to rationalize in general and you don’t need that much “ammunition” for it.

  Your “two considerations”, look like a two-tiered defence against EA pressures rather than convergence on a single right answer on how to consider your goals.

  That’s what they are. I think there’s no other criterion that make your goals the “right” ones other than that you would in fact choose these goals upon careful reflection.

  Maybe you mean that some people are ‘partial EAs’ and others are ‘full EAs (who are far from highly productive EA work in willpower -space)’, but it isn’t very clear.

  Yes, that’s what I meant. And I agree it’s unclear because it’s confusing that I’m talking only about 2) in all of what follows, I’ll try to make this more clear. So to clarify, most of my post addresses 2), “full EAs (who are far from highly productive in willpower-space)”, and 1) is another option that I mention and then don’t explore more because the consequences are straightforward. I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with 1), if your goals are different from mine then that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making a mistake about your goals. I personally focus on suffering and don’t care about preventing death, all else being equal, but I don’t (necessarily) consider you irrational for doing so.

  Now, on ‘partial EAs’: If you agree that effective altruism = good (if you don’t, adjust your EA accordingly, IMO), then agency attached to something with different goals is bad compared to agency towards EA. Even if those goals can’t be changed right now, they would still be worse, just like death is bad even if we can’t change it (yet (except maybe with cryonics)).

  I’m arguing within a framework of moral anti-realism. I basically don’t understand what people mean by the term “good” that could do the philosophical work they expect it to do. A partial EA is someone who would refuse to self-modify to become more altruistic IF this conflicts with other goals (like personal happiness, specific commitments/​relationships, etc). I don’t think there’s any meaningful and fruitful sense in which these people are doing something bad or making some sort of mistake, all you can say is that they’re being less altruistic as someone with a 100%-EA goal, and they would reply: “Yes.”

  Concerning ‘full EAs who are far from being very effective EAs in willpower -space”, this triggers many alarm bells in my mind, warning of the risk of it turning into an excuse to merely try. You reduce effective effective altruists’ productivity to a personality trait (and ‘skills’ which in context sound unlearnable), which doesn’t match 80,000hours’ conclusion that people can’t estimate well how good they are at things or how much they’ll enjoy things before they’ve tried.

  I accept that there’s a danger that my post can be read as such, but that’s not what I’m saying. Not all skills are learnable to the same extent, but of course there is also a component to how much people try! And I would also second the advice that it’s important to try things even if they seem very hard to do at first. But the thing is, some people have tried and failed and feel miserable about it, or even the thought of trying makes them feel miserable, so that certainly cannot be ideal because these people aren’t being productive at that point.

  Your statement on compartmentalisation (and Ben Kuhn’s original post) both just seem to assume that because denying yourself social contact because you could be making money itself is bad, therefore compartmentalisation is good. But the reasoning for this compartmentalisation—it causes happiness, which causes productivity—isn’t (necessarily) compartmentalised, so why compartmentalise at all? Your choice isn’t just between a delicious candy bar and deworming someone, it’s between a delicious candy bar which empowers you to work to deworm two people and deworming one person. This choice isn’t removed when you use the compartmentalisation heuristic, it’s just hidden. You’re “freeing your mind from the moral dilemma”, but that is exactly what evading cognitive dissonance is.

  Human brains are not designed to optimize towards a single goal. It can drive you crazy. For some, it works, for others, it probably does not. I’m not saying “if you’re stressed sometimes, do less EA stuff”. Maybe being stressed is the lesser problem. My point is: “If you’re stressed to the point that the status quo is not sustainable, then change something and don’t feel bad about it”.

  To sum up, I’m aware that rationalizing is a huge danger – it always amazes me just how irrational people can become when they are protecting a cherished belief – but I think that there are certain people who really aren’t in danger of setting their expectations too low, because they have a problem with doing the opposite.

• Lukas_Gloor 30 Mar 2015 12:50 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: dph121’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  Someone who is so emotionally affected by EA that they give up is definitely someone who ‘merely tried’ to affect the world, because you can’t just give up if you care in an agentic sense.

  I strongly disagree. Why would people be so deeply affected if they didn’t truly care? The way I see it, when you give up EA because it’s causing you too much stress, what happens constitutes a failure of goal-preservation, which is irrational, but after you’ve given up, you’ve become a different sort of agent. Just because you don’t care/​try anymore does not mean that caring/​trying in the earlier stages was somehow fake.

  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. As I said before (and you expressed skepticism), humans are not designed to efficiently pursue a single goal. 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. Instead, what you have is a web of situational heuristics (system-1), combined with some explicitly or implicitly represented beliefs and goals (system-2), which can well be contradictory. There is often no clear way to get out a utility-function. 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.

  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. 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.

  […] to me at least it isn’t obvious if you meant that people should still try their hardest to be highly agentic but merely not beat themselves up over falling short.

  Have you considered that for some people, the most agenty thing to do would be to change their decision-procedure so it becomes less “agenty”?

  An analogy (adapted from Parfit): You have a combination-safe at home and get robbed, the robbers want the combination from you. They threaten to kill your family if you don’t comply. The safe contains something that is extremely valuable to you, e.g. you and your family would be in gigantic trouble if it got stolen. You realize that the robbers are probably going to kill you and your family anyway after they got the safe open, because you all have seen their faces. What do you do? Now, imagine you had a magic pill that temporarily turns you, a rational, agenty person, into an irrational person whose actions don’t make sense. Imagine that this state would be transparent to the robbers, e.g. they would know with certainty that you’re not faking it and therefore realize that they can’t get the combination from you. Should you take the pill, or would you say “I’m rational, so I can never decide to try to become less rational in the future”? Of course, you’d take the pill, because the rational action for your present self here is rendering your future self irrational.

  Likewise: If you notice that trying to be more agenty is counterproductive in important regards, the right/​rational/​agenty thing for you to do would be to try become a bit less agenty in the future. The robbers in the EA examples is your system-1 and personality vs. your idealized self-image/​system-2/​goal. With EA being too demanding, you don’t even have to change your goals, it suffices to adjust your expectations to yourself. Both would have the same desired effect, the main difference being that, when you don’t change your goals, you would want to become more agenty again if you discovered a means to overcome your obstacles in a different way.

  Whose “right” are we talking about, here? If it’s “right” according to effective altruism, that is obviously false: someone who discovers they like murdering is wrong by EA standards (as well as those of the general population).

  We were talking about whether and to what extent people’s goals contain EA-components. If part of people’s goals contradict EA tenets, then of course they cannot be (fully) EA. I do agree with your implicit point that “right according to x” is a meaningful notion if “x” is sufficiently clearly defined.

  “Careful reflection” also isn’t enough for humans to converge on an answer for themselves. If it was, tens of thousands of philosophers should have managed to map out morality, and we wouldn’t need the likes of MIRI.

  Are you equating “morality” with “figuring out an answer for one’s goals that converges for all humans”? If yes, then I suspect that the reference of “morality” fails because goals probably don’t converge (completely). Why is there so much disagreement in moral philosophy? To a large extent, people seem to be trying to answer different questions. In addition, some people are certainly being irrational at what they’re trying to do, e.g. they fail to distinguish between things that they care about terminally and things they only care about instrumentally, or they might fail to even ask fundamental questions.

  People’s goals can be changed and/​or people can be wrong about their goals, depending on what you consider proper “goals”.

  I agree, see my 2nd footnote in my original post. The point where we disagree is whether you can infer from an existing disagreement about goals that at least one participant is necessary being irrational/​wrong about her goals. I’m saying that’s not the case.

  I’m sufficiently confident that I’m either misunderstanding you or that you’re wrong about your morality [...]

  I probably thought about my values more than most EAs and have gone through unusual lengths to lay out my arguments and reasons. If you want to try to find mistakes, inconsistencies or thought experiment that would make me change them, feel free to send me a PM here or on FB.

  Humans are sort of like agents and we’re all sort of similar, so our moralities tend to always be sort of the same.

  With lots of caveats, e.g. people will be more or less altruistic, and that’s part of your “morality-axis” as well if morality=your_goals. In addition, people will disagree about the specifics of even such “straightfoward” things as what “altruism” implies. Is it altruistic to give someone a sleeping pill against their will if they plan to engage in some activity you consider bad for them? Is it altruistic to turn rocks into happy people? People will disagree about what they would choose here, and it’s entirely possible that they are not making any meaningful sort of mistake in the process of disagreeing.

  That isn’t trivial. If 1 out of X miserable people manages to find a way to make things work eventually they could be more productive than Y people who chose to give up on levelling up and to be ‘regular’ EAs instead, with Y greater than X, and in that case we should advice people to keep trying even if they’re depressed and miserable.

  OK, but even so, I would in such a case at least be right about the theoretical possibility of there being people to whom my advice applies correctly. For what it’s worth, I consider it dangerous that EA will be associated with a lot of “bad press” if people drop out due to it being too stressful. All my experience with pitching EA so far indicates that it’s bad to be too demanding. Sure, you can say you shouldn’t be demanding towards newcomers, not established EAs, but you won’t be able to keep up a memetic barrier there.

  But more importantly, it’s a false choice: it should be possible to have people be less miserable but still to continue trying, and you could give advice on how to do that, if you know it.

  As a general point, I object to your choice of words: I don’t think my posts ever argued for people to stop trying. I’m putting a lot of emphasis on getting the things right that you do do, like e.g. splitting separate motivations for donating so people don’t end up donating to fuzzies only due to rationalizing or actual giving-up. I agree with the sentiment that advice is better the more it helps people stay well and still remain super-productive, I tried to give some advice that goes into that direction, e.g. the “Viewing life as a game” is also useful for when you’re thinking about EA all the time, but of course I don’t have all the advice either; I also welcome more contributions, and from what I’ve heard, CFAR has helped a lot of people in these regards.

  • I’m using terms like “system-2” in a non-technical sense here.

• Lukas_Gloor 12 Apr 2015 11:59 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: dph121’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  It seems obvious to me that we’re talking past each other, meaning we’re in many cases trying to accomplish different things with our models/​explanations. The fact that this doesn’t seem obvious to you suggests to me that I’m either bad at explaining, or that you might be interpreting my comments uncharitably. I agree with your tl;dr, btw!

  This matches the data quite nicely, methinks. Better than “irrationality”, anyway.

  You’re presupposing that the agent would not modify any of its emotional links if it had the means to do so. This assumption might apply in some cases, but it seems obviously wrong as a generalization. Therefore, your model is incomplete. Reread what I wrote in the part “On goals”. I’m making a distinction between “utility-function_1“, which reflects all the decisions/​actions an agent will make in all possible situations, and “utility-function_2”, which reflects all the decisions/​actions an agent would want to make in all possible situations. You’re focusing on “utility-function_1”, and what you’re saying is entirely accurate – I like your model in regard to what it is trying to do. However, I find “utility-function_2s” much more interesting and relevant, which is why I’m focusing on them. Why don’t you find them interesting?

  Agenty/​rational behaviour isn’t exclusive to system 2. How does system 1 decide when to trigger this coping mechanism?

  Again, we have different understandings of rationality. The way I defined “goals” in the section “On goals”, it is only the system 2 that is defining what is rational, and system 1 heuristics can be “rational” if they are calibrated in a way that produces outcomes that are good in regard to the system 2 goals, given the most probable environment the agent will encounter. This part seems to be standard usage, in fact.

  Side note: Your theory of rationality is quite Panglossian, it is certainly possible to interpret all of human behavior as “rational” (as e.g. Gigerenzer does), but that would strike me as a weird/​pointless thing to do.

  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?

  This claim strikes me as really obvious, so I’m wondering whether you might be misunderstanding what I mean. Have you never noticed just how bad people are at consequentialism? When people first hear of utilitarianism/​EA, they think EA implies to give away all their wealth until they are penniless, instead of considering future earning prospects. Or they think having children and indoctrinating them with utilitarian beliefs is an effective way to do good, ignoring that you could just use the money to teach other people’s children more effectively. The point EY makes in the Godshatter article is all about how evolution programmed many goals into humans even though evolution only (metaphorically) has one goal.

  What I’m saying is the following: Humans are bad at being consequentialists, they are bad at orienting their entire lives, i.e. jobs/​relationships/​free-time/​self-improvement… towards one well-defined aim. Why? Well for one thing, if you ask most people “what is your goal”, they’ll have a hard time to even answer! In addition, evolution programmed us to value many things, so someone whose goal is solely “reduce as much suffering as possible” cannot count on evolutionarily adaptive heuristics, and thus, biases against efficient behavioral consequentialism are to be expected.

  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.

  I know, what I was trying to say by “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” – emphasis should be on CLEAR – was that there is no representation in the brain where you look at it and see “ah, that’s where the utility function is”. Instead (and I tried to make this clear with my very next sentence, which you quoted), you have to look at the whole agent, where eventually, all the situational heuristics, the emotional weights you talked about, and the agent’s beliefs, together imply a utility-function in the utility-function_1-sense. Contrast this to a possible AI: It should be possible to construct an AI with a more clearly represented utility function, or a “neutral” prototype-AI where scientists need to fill in the utility-function part with whatever they care to fill in. When we speak of “agents”, we have in mind an entity that knows what it’s goals are. When we represent an FAI or a paperclip maximizer, we assume this entity knows what its goal is. However, most humans do not know what their goals are. This is interesting, isn’t it? Paperclippers would not enagage in discussions on moral philosophy, because they know what their goals are. Humans are often confused about their goals (and about morality, which some take to imply more than just goals). So your model of human utility functions should incorporate this curious fact of confusion. I was very confused by it myself, but I now think I understand what is going on.

  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.

  I find this quite a good description, actually. One is your system 2, “what you would want to do under reflection”, the other is “primal, animal-like brain”, to use outdated language. I wouldn’t call the result “cognitive dissonance” necessarily. If you rationally understand what is going on, and realize that rebelling against your instincts/​intuitions/​emotional set-up is going to lead to a worse outcome than trying to reconcile your conflicting motivations, then the latter is literally the most sensible thing for your system 2 to attempt to do.

• Lukas_Gloor 12 Apr 2015 12:41 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: dph121’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  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?

  There are problems to every approach. Talk about your commitment to others, they will remind you. I’m not saying this whole strategy always works, but I’m quite sure there are many people for whom it is the best idea to try.

  Regarding the “utility quota”, what I mean by “personal moral expecations”: Basically, this just makes the point that it is useless to beat yourself up over things you cannot change. And yet we often do this, feel sad about things we probably couldn’t have done differently. (One interesting hypothesis for this reaction is described here.)

  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.

  Note that if this were true, you still need reasons why you expect there to be just one human morality. I know what EY wrote on the topic, and I find it question-begging and unconvincing. What EY is saying is that human utility-function_1s are complex and similar. What I’m interested in, and what I think you and EY should also be interested in, are utility-function_2s. But that’s another discussion, I’ve been meaning to write up my views on the topic of metaethics and goal-uncertainty, but I expect it’ll take me at least a few months until I get around to it.

  This doesn’t really prove my case by itself, but it’s an awesome quote nevertheless, so I’m including it here (David Hume, Enquiry):

  “It might reasonably be expected in questions which have been canvassed and disputed with great eagerness, since the first origin of science and philosophy, that the meaning of all the terms, at least, should have been agreed upon among the disputants; and our enquiries, in the course of two thousand years, been able to pass from words to the true and real subject of the controversy. For how easy may it seem to give exact definitions of the terms employed in reasoning, and make these definitions, not the mere sound of words, the object of future scrutiny and examination? But if we consider the matter more narrowly, we shall be apt to draw a quite opposite conclusion. From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot, and remains still undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy.”

  Why not do this publicly? Why not address the thought experiment I proposed?

  Lack of time, given that I’ve already written a lot of text on the topic. And because I’m considering to publish some of it at some point in the future, I’m wary of posting long excerpts of it online.

  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.

  Isn’t the whole point of string theory that it is pretty simple (in terms of Kolmogorov complexity that is, not in whether I can understand it)? If anything, this would be testimony to how good humans are at natural speech as opposed to math. Although humans aren’t that good at natural speech, because they often don’t notice when they’re being confused or talking past each other. But this is being too metaphorical.

  I don’t really understand your point here. Aren’t you presupposing that there is one answer people will converge on with these cases? I’ve talked to very intelligent people about these sorts of questions, and we’ve narrowed down all the factual disagreements we could think of. Certainly it is possible that I and the people I was talking to (who disagreed with my views), were missing something. But it seems more probable that answers just don’t always converge.

  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.

  What, I thought you were saying that, at least more so than I’m saying it.

  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.

  Differentiate between 1) “ways of trying to accomplish a goal, e.g. in terms of decisional algorithms or habits” and 2) “pursuing a goal by whichever means are most effective”. I did not try to discourage anyone from 2), and that’s clearly what is relevant. I’m encouraging people to stop trying a particular variant of 1) because I believe that particular variant of 1) works for some people (to some extent), but not for all of them. It’s a spectrum of course, not just two distinct modes of going about the problem.

  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.

  Let’s not get into this, this discussion is already long enough. I can say that I see the point of your last remark, I did not mean to imply that Williams himself, given the time the text was written, was being sexist.

• Lukas_Gloor 20 Apr 2015 21:06 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: dph121’s comment on: Room for Other Things: How to ad­just if EA seems overwhelming

  Just read this, it expresses well what I meant by “humans are not designed to pursue a single goal”: http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​2p5/​​humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/​​

• Lukas_Gloor 20 May 2015 13:19 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: How im­por­tant is marginal earn­ing to give?

  It’s correct that the Swiss EA organizations are currently funding-constrained. We haven’t pitched any projects to the international community yet, but we’re considering it if an opportunity arises where this makes sense.

  I also think that funding is going to be less of an issue once more people in the movement transition from still being students to etg.

• Lukas_Gloor 28 Dec 2015 21:31 UTC

  1 point

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  on: The big prob­lem with how we do outreach

  Good points. I agree that EA’s message if often framed in a way that can seem alienating to people who don’t share all its assumptions. And I agree that the people who don’t share all the assumptions are not necessarily being irrational.

  Some people might argue that non-utilitarians will become utilitarian if they become more rational.

  FWIW, I think there’s indeed a trend. Teaching rationality can be kind of a dick move (only in a specific sense) because it forces you to think about consequentialist goals and opportunity costs, which is not necessarily good for your self-image if you’re not able to look back on huge accomplishments or promising future prospects. As long as your self-image as a “morally good person” is tied to common-sense morality, you can do well by just not being an asshole to the people around you. And where common-sense morality is called into question, you can always rationalize as long as you’re not yet being forced to look too closely. So people will say things like “I’m an emotional person” in order to be able to ignore all these arguments these “rationalists” are making, which usually end with “This is why you should change your life and donate”. Or they adopt a self-image as someone who is “just not into that philosophy-stuff” and thus will just not bother to think about it anymore once the discussions get too far.

  LW or EA discourse breaks down the alternatives. Once it’s too late, once your brain spots blatant attempts at rationalizing, this forces people to either self-identify as (effective) altruists or not, or at least state what %age of your utility function corresponds to which. And self-identifying as someone who really doesn’t care about people far away, as opposed to someone who still cares but “community comes first” and “money often doesn’t reach its destination anyway” and “isn’t it all so uncertain and stop with these unrealistic thought experiments already!” and “why are these EAs so dogmatic?”, is usually much harder. (At least for those who are empathetic/​social/​altruistic, or those who are in search of moral meaning to their lives).

  I suspect that this is why rationality doesn’t correlate with making people happier. It’s easier to be happy if your goal is to do alright in life and not be an asshole. It gets harder if your goal is to help fix this whole mess that includes wild animals suffering and worries about the fate of the galaxy.

  Arguably, people are being quite rational, on an intuitive level, by not being able to tell you what their precise consequentialist goal is. They’re satisficing, and it’s all good for them, so why make things more complicated? A heretic could ask: Why create a billion new ways in which they can fail to reach their goals? – Maybe the best thing is to just never think about goals that are hard to reach. Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying people shouldn’t have consequentialist goals, I’m just pointing out that the picture as I understand it is kind of messy.

  Handling the inherent demandingness of consequentialist goals is a big challenge imo, for EAs themselves as well as for making the movement more broadly appealing. I have written some thoughts on this here.

• Lukas_Gloor 28 Dec 2015 22:04 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Mo­ral anti-re­al­ists don’t have to bite bullets

  One question is what we want “morality” to refer to under anti-realism. For me, what seems important and action-guiding is what I want to do in life, so personally I think of normative ethics as “What is my goal?”.

  Under this interpretation, the difference between biting bullets or not is how much people care about their theories being elegant, simple, parsimonious, vs how much they care about tracking their intuitions as closely as possible. You mention two good reasons for favoring a more intuition-tracking approach.

  Alternatively, why might some people still want to bite bullets? Firstly, no one wants to accept a view that seems unacceptable. Introspectively biting a bullet can feel “right”, if I am convinced that the alternatives feel worse and if I realize that the aversion-generating intuitions are not intuitions that my rational self-image would endorse. For instance, I might feel quite uncomfortable with the thought to send all my money to people far away, while neglecting poor people in my community. I can accept this feeling as a sign that community matters intrinsically to me, i.e. that I care (somewhat) more strongly about the people close to me. Or I could bite the bullet and label “preference for in-group” as a “moral bias” – biased in relation to what I want my life-goals to be about. Perhaps, upon reflection, I decide that some moral intuitions matter more fundamentally to me, say for instance because I want to live for something that is “altruistic”/​”universalizable” from a perspective like Harsanyi’s Veil of Ignorance. Given this fundamental assumption, I’ll be happy to ignore agent-relative moral intuitions. Of course, it isn’t wrong to end up with a mix of both ideas if the intuition “people in my community really matter more to me!” is just as strong strong as the intuition that you want your goal to work behind a veil of ignorance.

  On Lesswrong, people often point out that human values are complex, and that those who bite too many bullets are making a mistake. I disagree. What is complex are human moral intuitions. Values, by which I mean “goals” or “terminal values”, are chosen, not discovered. (Because consequentialists goals are new and weird and hard for humans to have, so why would they be discoverable in a straightforward manner from all the stuff we start out with?) And just because our intuitions are complex – and totally contradicting each other sometimes – doesn’t mean that we’re forced to choose goals that look the same. Likewise, I think people who think some form of utiltiarianism must be the thing are making a mistake as well.

• Lukas_Gloor 8 Jan 2016 17:08 UTC

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  in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: Mo­ral anti-re­al­ists don’t have to bite bullets

  Sorry for the late reply. Good question. I would be more inclined to call it a “mechanism” rather than a (meta-)value. You’re right, there has to be something that isn’t chosen. Introspectively, it feels to me as though I’m concerned about my self-image as a moral/​altruistic person, which is what drove me to hold the values I have. This is highly speculative, but perhaps “having a self-image as x” is what could be responsible for how people pick consequentialist goals?

• Lukas_Gloor 10 Nov 2016 23:16 UTC

  14 points

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  on: What does Trump mean for EA?

  I definitely became less interested in politics ever since identifying as an EA or utilitarian. But then Switzerland passed some ridiculous xenophobic propositions, and Brexit happened, and now Trump. And every time I had this worry in the back of my mind that we’re doing something wrong.

  Carl mentioned “Misallocating a huge mass of idealists’ human capital to donation for easily measurable things and away from more effective things elsewhere, sabotages more effective do-gooding for a net worsening of the world” here. This point doesn’t just apply to money, but also very much to attention and activism. And the bias may not just be towards things that are easily measurable, but there may also be a bias away from “current” or “urgent” events. These events shape public discourse, which could have important flow through effects. What’s the effect if altruistic and driven people disproportionally stop caring about current events and the discussions that surround them?

  Perhaps it’s negligible, but it’s certainly worth thinking about more. And I was glad to see how much attention the recent votes got within EA.

• Lukas_Gloor 28 Jun 2017 17:14 UTC

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  on: Hi, I’m Luke Muehlhauser. AMA about Open Philan­thropy’s new re­port on con­scious­ness and moral patienthood

  Did you always find illusionism plausible or was there a moment where it made “click” or just a gradual progression? Do you think reading more about neuroscience makes people more sympathetic to it?

  Do you think the p-zombie thought experiment can be helpful to explain the difference between illusionism and realism (“classic qualia” mapping onto the position “p-zombies are conceivable”), or do you find that it is unfair or often leads discussions astray?

• Lukas_Gloor 28 Jun 2017 17:29 UTC

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  on: Hi, I’m Luke Muehlhauser. AMA about Open Philan­thropy’s new re­port on con­scious­ness and moral patienthood

  Are you aware of any “hidden” (nociception-related?) cognitive processes that could be described as “two systems in conflict?” I find the hidden qualia view very plausible, but I also find it plausible that I might settle on a view on moral relevance where what matters about pain is not the “raw feel” (or “intrinsic undesirability” in Drescher’s words), but a kind of secondary layer of “judgment” in the sense of “wanting things to change/​be different” or “not accepting some mental component/​input.” I’m wondering whether most of the processes that would constitute hidden qualia are too simple to fit this phenomenological description or not…