nathan98000

Karma: 229

nathan98000 10 Sep 2025 19:16 UTC
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on: Could a list of capabilities be a better criterion than well-being?
Not all capabilities matter. For example, the capability to burp really loudly is not a morally important one. If we were trying to improve the world, trying to give people the capability to burp loudly is not in the top 1000 list of things I’d suggest prioritizing.
And plausibly, the reason why this capability doesn’t matter is because it doesn’t promote wellbeing. And more generally, this might be true of any capability. The reason why the capability to get an education or access healthcare are important is precisely because they reliably lead to people living better lives.

nathan98000 20 Aug 2025 0:10 UTC
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on: Question about ″going beyond the call of duty″
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, there are good reasons to spend time with loved ones, cultivate emotional bonds, and pursue personal hobbies:
1. Your own well-being counts too. A utilitarian doesn’t just care about the welfare of strangers. They care about everyone’s welfare, including their own. If living altruistically leaves you miserable, then by utilitarian standards that’s a loss of value, not a gain.
2. Not all goods are fungible. Money can be redirected to different causes, but emotional attachments and sources of intrinsic motivation aren’t as transferable. So it doesn’t make sense for a utilitarian to demand that people rewire these aspects of themselves. Human being just don’t work that way.
3. Burnout is real. A person who devotes themselves single-mindedly to a cause might be admirable, but they risk exhaustion and loss of motivation in the long run. And conversely, a person who feels joy about life will be more motivated to continue working towards the ends they care about.
4. Role models can inspire others. If utilitarianism looks unpleasant, fewer people will want to adopt it for themselves. But if people see utilitarians living rich, balanced lives, they’re more likely to be inspired by example and join in.
That said, I don’t think EA is committed to utilitarianism. Instead, I think EA is more centered around beneficentrism, the idea that it’s really important to help others. The difference is that beneficentrism doesn’t entail maximizing the world’s total welfare. Rather, it’s consistent with this view to be partial to one’s family and loved ones and to have carveouts for one’s own personal projects.

nathan98000 18 Jun 2025 16:35 UTC
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on: Moral Alignment: An Idea I’m Embarrassed I Didn’t Think of Myself
Scott Alexander discusses this in his post here. I’m skeptical that humans will able to align AI with morality anytime soon. Humans have been disagreeing about what morality consists of for a few thousand years. It’s unlikely we’ll solve the issue in the next 10.

nathan98000 18 Jun 2025 13:36 UTC
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on: If rational aliens do exist, they are -probably- vegan.
A couple comments:

1. Evolution does not imply that every organism has an “intrinsic desire for survivability and reproduction.” Rather, it implies that organisms will tend to act in ways that would lead to survival and reproduction in their ancestral environment, but these actions need not be motivated by a drive to survive and reproduce. In slogan form: We are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.
For example, the reason people nowadays eat Twinkies is not because we want to survive or reproduce, but because we like the taste! This preference for sugary foods would have been fitness enhancing in our ancestral environment, but it is maladaptive in our modern one. Yet people continue eating Twinkies anyways.
2. The “core” of your argument doesn’t seem sound to me. You say that hyper-sentient (V1) aliens wouldn’t eat humans because other super duper sentient (V2) aliens might eat them. And V3 aliens might eat the V2 aliens, and so on. But… the mere possibility of other aliens is not a strong reason to do anything. After all, it’s hypothetically possible that the V2 aliens would be positively elated that the V1 aliens are eating humans and reward the V1 aliens even more. What matters though is not what’s possible but rather about what the expected effects of one’s actions are.

If V2 aliens don’t actually exist and the V1 aliens know this, what other prudential reason would the V1 aliens have for refraining from eating humans? I don’t see any.

nathan98000 1 Jun 2025 16:00 UTC
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on: Why is EA focused on handouts rather than on funding/driving institutional change in developing countries?
A couple thoughts on this:

1. Perhaps it’s true that elections are mostly sold to the highest bidder in developing poor countries. (I’m not familiar with the research on this, and I’d be reluctant to simply trust your Wikipedia link.) Should EAs help the “better” candidate buy their way to power? It seems like this risks undermining the legitimacy of their elections.

2. It’s not clear to me that it’s easy to figure out who the better candidate is. In one’s own country that can often be difficult. Understanding the politics of a foreign country would be even harder. And I’m skeptical that we can just defer to whatever the majority of a country wants because a) it won’t always be clear what the majority wants and b) there are reasons to think the majority will be mistaken due to bias or ignorance.

And I don’t see how the footnote you cite on this point supports your position. It summarizes research about the effects of information dissemination on voters’ choices. It finds that in some cases voters change their decisions after receiving information about social policies or political candidates. In other words, it shows that the citizens were ignorant—they did not know what was happening in politics. As the researchers note:
Voters may lack information about the qualifications and policy positions of candidates, making it difficult to make an informed vote choice.
Moreover, the upshot of the research is that sometimes people change their minds when given information about policies or candidates. This doesn’t show that they ended up choosing the better policy or candidate.

I think the standard of evidence needs to be much higher before EAs get involved in foreign countries’ political affairs.

nathan98000 13 May 2025 19:03 UTC
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on: An Argument for Objective Morality Grounded in Conscious Experience
I second Hay’s suggestion of making a more formal argument. The unstructured sections of this post made it unclear which propositions you took to support which.

I’d also note that your definition of “objectivity” at the beginning makes it trivially true that morality is sometimes subjective, since people are surely at least sometimes biased by their emotions when discussing morality.

An alternative definition of “objectivity” that is pretty standard within meta-ethics goes something like this: X is objective if it is not constitutively dependent on the attitudes/reactions of observers. The funniness of a comedian is subjective because it is constituted by how amused the comedian makes people feel. In contrast, the solidity of a table is objective because it does not depend on anyone’s reactions.

nathan98000 30 Mar 2025 14:47 UTC
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on: The Moral Duty To Marry An Immigrant
I don’t have a problem with this in principle—I think immigration restrictions in the US are unjustly restrictive. But I think there are many problems in practice. For example:
1. There are legal penalties for immigration marriage fraud, including 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
2. Many EAs advise following the math when trying to improve welfare but caution against breaking any widely held social/moral/legal norms. Lying about the purpose of your marriage would certainly count as one of those norms.
3. While there might not be substantial monetary costs to marrying someone, there are social costs:
  1. Without substantial time getting to know the immigrant you’re marrying, you might not be familiar with their personality—they might be abusive or mentally unwell.
  2. You won’t be able to marry someone else who’s more fitting for you romantically.
  3. People who know you might disapprove of your dishonesty.
You say that this “plainly pencils out as optimal,” but you don’t provide the penciling. I think a full accounting of this decision would show that’s it’s probably unwise.

nathan98000 27 Mar 2025 20:30 UTC
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on: Disagree Smarter, a schema:
Regarding 2: It can still be worth talking with someone who isn’t willing to change their mind. For example, I know nothing about physics, so I wouldn’t expect a physicist to seriously entertain the speculations that I have about the subject. But I think that I could learn a great deal about physics by talking to a physicist, so it makes the conversation worthwhile.

Also, in certain contexts, it can sound somewhat rude to ask someone if they are willing to change their mind. It can implicitly suggest that you think the other person is closed-minded, so it doesn’t make sense to ask it explicitly. (Likewise, I think of each of the questions in your post are useful rhetorical tools in the right context, but they don’t all need to be asked explicitly, even in an ideal conversation.) . An analogy: If you ask, “Did you smoke anything when you came up with that thought?” it implies that you have a low opinion of their intelligence.

Regarding 5: It seems false to say other people are never evil. Sometimes people do genuinely hold different values from us. And if they got what they wanted, it would be a significant set back to our own values. Eg. Some people place no weight on the welfare of humans in other countries or non-human animals.

nathan98000 28 Feb 2025 4:44 UTC
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in reply to: Non-zero-sum James’s comment on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
I’m not understanding the distinction you’re making between the “experience” and the “response.” In my example, there is a needle poking someone’s arm. Someone can experience that in different ways (including feeling more or less pain depending on one’s mindset). That experience is not distinct from a response, it just is a response.

And again, assuming the experience of pain is inescapable, why does it follow that it is necessarily bad? It can’t just be because the experience is inescapable. My example of paying attention to my fingers snapping was meant to show that merely being inescapable doesn’t make something good or bad.

I agree that many of the goals that people pursue implicitly suggest that they believe pleasure and the avoidance of pain are “value-laden”. However, in the links I included in my previous comment, I suggested there are people who explicitly reject the view that this is all that matters (a view known as hedonism in philosophy, not to be confused with the colloquial definition that prioritizes short-term pleasures). And you’ve asserted that hedonism is true, but I’m not sure what the argument for it has been.

So just to clarify, I see you as making two points:
1. If something causes pain/suffering, then it is necessarily (intrinsically) bad.
2. If something is bad, then it is only because it causes pain/suffering.
I’m looking for arguments for these two points.

nathan98000 27 Feb 2025 15:54 UTC
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in reply to: Non-zero-sum James’s comment on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
The foundational claim of inescapably value-laden experiences is that we do not get to choose how something feels to us
Well… this isn’t quite right. A stimulus can elicit different experiences in a person depending on their mindset. Someone might experience a vaccine with equanimity or they might freak out about the needle.
But regardless, even if some particular experience is inescapable, I don’t see how it would follow that it’s inherently value-laden. Like, if I snap my fingers in front of someone’s face, maybe they’ll inescapably pay attention to me for a second. It doesn’t follow that the experience of paying attention to me is inherently good or bad.
I challenge you to think about values we would agree are moral and see if you can derive them from pleasure and suffering
Some people explicitly reject the hedonism that you’re describing. For example, they’d say that experiencing reality, the environment, or beauty are valuable for their own sake, not because of their effect on pleasure and suffering. I don’t think you’ve given a reason to discard these views.

nathan98000 9 Feb 2025 11:25 UTC
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on: Inescapably Value-Laden Experience—Can We Make Morality Rationalisable?
Why think that pain is inherently bad? (Are you using “bad” as synonymous with “dispreferred”?) And why think that pleasure and pain are the only things that are value-laden?

nathan98000 20 Jan 2025 20:33 UTC
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on: Thoughts on Peter Singer’s moral premises predating the EA movement
There’s a common criticism made of utilitarianism: Utilitarianism requires that you calculate the probabilities of every outcome for every action, which is impossible to do.
And the standard response to this is that, no, spending your entire life calculating probabilities is unlikely to lead to the greatest happiness, so it’s fine to follow some other procedure for making decisions. I think a similar sort of response applies to some of the points in your post.
For example, are you really going to do the most good if you completely “set aside your emotional preferences for friends and family”? Probably not. You might get a reputation as someone who’s callous, manipulative, or traitorous. Without emotional attachments to friends and family, your mental health might suffer. You might not have people to support you when you’re at your low points. You might not have people willing to cooperate with you to achieve ambitious projects. Etc. In other words, there are many reasons why our emotional attachments make sense even under a utilitarian perspective.
And what if we’re forced to make a decision between the life of our own child and those of many others’? Does utilitarianism say that our own child’s death is “morally agreeable”? No! The death of our child will be a tragedy, since presumably they could have otherwise lived a long and happy life if not for our decision. The point of utilitarianism is not to minimize this tragedy. Rather, a utilitarian will point out that the death of someone else’s child is just as much a tragedy. And 10 deaths will be 10 times as much a tragedy, even if those people’s lives aren’t personally related to you. This seems correct to me.

nathan98000 18 Jan 2025 2:59 UTC
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on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
I do think EA would benefit from appealing more to conservatives. According to the most recent survey, EA is heavily leftist. And I don’t see any good reason for this.

The 80,000 Hours website lists these as the most pressing world problems:
- Risks from AI
- Catastrophic pandemics
- Nuclear weapons
- Great power conflict
- Factory farming
- Global priorities research
- Building EA
- Improving decision making (especially in important institutions)
Apart from factory farming and maybe pandemic preparedness, none of these issues seem especially aligned with the political left. These are issues that everyone can get on board with. No one wants AI to kill everyone. No one wants North Korea to launch a nuclear missile.
So this doesn’t seem to me like a case of failing to appeal to conservative values. It seems more like a failure to appeal to conservatives, period. Anecdotally, a lot of outreach happens through people’s loose social networks. And if people only have leftist friends, then they’re only going to recruit more leftist people into EA.
I think it would be worth actively seeking out more conservative spaces to present EA ideas. I’d expect the College Republicans on many campuses to be open to learning more about policy in AI, nuclear weapons, and great power conflict. And I’d expect many Christian groups to be open to hearing about effective uses for their charitable donations.

nathan98000 13 Oct 2024 0:57 UTC
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in reply to: Non-zero-sum James’s comment on: Why People in Poverty Make Bad Decisions
I’m familiar with psychology. But the causes and consequences of poverty are beyond my expertise.

In general, I think the case for alleviating poverty doesn’t need to depend on what it does to people’s cognitive abilities. Alleviating poverty is good because poverty sucks. People in poverty have worse medical care, are less safe, have less access to quality food, etc. If someone isn’t moved by these things, then saying it also lowers IQ is kind of missing the point.

Another theme in your post is that those in poverty aren’t to blame, since it was the poverty that caused them to make their bad decisions. I think a stronger case can be made by pointing to the fact that people don’t choose where they’re born. (And this fact doesn’t depend on any dubious psychology studies.) For someone in Malawi, it will be hard to think about saving for retirement when you make $5/day.

nathan98000 9 Oct 2024 19:44 UTC
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in reply to: Non-zero-sum James’s comment on: Why People in Poverty Make Bad Decisions
The link I sent also discusses an article that meta-analyzed replications of studies using scarcity priming. The meta-analysis includes a failed replication of a key study from the Mani et al (2013) article you discuss in your post.

The Mani article itself has the hallmarks of questionable research practices. It’s true that each experiment has about 100 participants, but given that these participants are split across 4 conditions, this is the bare minimum for the standard (n = 20-30 / group) at that time. The main results also have p-values between .01-.05, which is an indicator of p-hacking. And yes, the abnormally large effect sizes are relevant. An effect as large as is claimed by Mani et al (d=.88-.94) should be glaringly obvious. That’s close to the effect size for the association between height and weight (r = .44 → d = .98)

And more generally at this point, the default view should be that priming studies are not credible. One shouldn’t wait for a direct failed replication of any particular study. There’s enough indirect evidence that that whole approach is beset by bad practices.

nathan98000 29 Sep 2024 2:50 UTC
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on: Capitalising on Trust—A Karmic Simulation

One phenomenon that has arisen through these explorations is that defectors gain a short term, relative advantage, while cooperators benefit from a sustained long term absolute advantage

It seems like you’re drawing a general conclusion about cooperation and defection. But your simulated game has very specific parameters. The pay off matrix, the stipulation that nobody dies, the stipulation that everyone who interacts with a defector recognizes so and remembers, the stipulation that there are only two types of agents, etc. It doesn’t seem like any general lessons about cooperation/defection are supported by a hyper-specific set up like this

nathan98000 12 Aug 2024 19:27 UTC
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on: Taking Uncertainty Seriously (or, Why Tools Matter)
I enjoyed this post and this series overall. However, I would have liked more elaboration on the section about EA’s objectionable epistemic features. Only one of the links in this section refer to EA specifically; the others warn about risks from group deliberation more generally.

And the one link that did specifically address the EA community wasn’t persuasive. It made many unsupported assertions. And I think it’s overconfident about the credibility of the literature on collective intelligence, which IMO has significant problems.

nathan98000 10 Aug 2024 17:22 UTC
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on: Why People in Poverty Make Bad Decisions
FWIW the study on scarcity priming that you cite on your website has failed to replicate.

nathan98000 30 Jun 2024 17:50 UTC
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on: EAs Shouldn’t Talk About (Most) Politics
It might help to provide a short summary of main points discussed in your post.

nathan98000 23 May 2024 15:40 UTC
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on: Moral Philosophy is Alchemy: Sam Harris Isn’t Pasta Man
You spend over a 1000 words saying that Sam Harris is correct. But at no point do you provide an argument for thinking he’s correct. You simply assert it. Over and over.