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Pablo
Karma: 10,701
Over at LessWrong, user “mushroom” recently proposed a debiasing heuristic for dealing with unpopular ideas. In sum, his claim is that we should be extra charitable to such ideas because they are disproportionately more likely to be promoted by its most extreme, disagreeable or crazy adherents. In a comment, I wrote:
Your analysis has implications not only for individuals exposed to unpopular ideas, but also for movements promoting such ideas. These movements (e.g., effective altruism) should be particularly worried about their ideas being represented inadequately by its most radical, disagreeable or crazy members, and should spend their resources accordingly (e.g. by prioritizing outreach activities, favoring more mainstream leaders, handling media requests strategically, etc.).
Do you find “mushroom”’s plausible? And do you agree that it has implications for our movement? If so, are there specific steps we can take to address this worry?
A more accurate characterization, I think, is to say that many or most EAs are consequentialists; utilitarianism is a more specific position that only a subset of consequentialists (and EAs) endorse.
Note that about one quarter of respondents in the recent PhilPapers survey accept or lean towards consequentialism; the remaining three quarters are roughly equally divided between those who accept or lean towards either deontology or virtue ethics, and those who endorse some other moral position. So I think you are exaggerating a bit the tension between the moral views of EAs and those of professional philosophers.
Finally, consequentialism has a feature that makes it unique among rival plausible moral views, namely, that all such views agree that good outcomes are at least part of what matters morally. Consequentialists take the further step of claiming that good outcomes are the only thing that matters. (By contrast, there is no component in deontology of virtue ethics that is shared by all other rival views, other than the consequentialist component.) It follows from this feature that research on what consequentialism implies has, in principle, relevance for all other theories, since such theories could be understood as issuing requirements that coincide with those of consequentialism except when they come into conflict with other requirements that they may issue (e.g., for some forms of deontology, you should maximize good unless this violates people’s rights, so when no rights are violated these theories imply that you should act as a consequentialist).
Effective altruism quotes
We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2, Oxford, 2011, p. 616
Why do we save the larger number? Because we give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is why more count for more.
Derek Parfit, ‘Innumerate Ethics’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 301
Lay off with the ‘You reason, so you don’t feel’ stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel […] I am reminded of Göring, who said ‘I think with my blood.’ See where it led him.
Peter Singer, ‘Reflections’, in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton, 1999, p. 89
My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case. It is good for the world as a whole if there are more people with these qualities. Even if going to Princeton does no more than open doors to jobs with higher salaries, that, too, is a benefit that can be spread to others, as long as after graduating you remain firm in the resolve to contribute a percentage of that salary to organizations working for the poor, and spread this idea among your highly paid colleagues. The danger, of course, is that your colleagues will instead persuade you that you can’t possibly drive anything less expensive than a BMW and that you absolutely must live in an impressively large apartment in one of the most expensive parts of town.
Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, London, 2009, pp. 138-139
At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, each of Geoff Anders, Peter Thiel, and Holden Karnofsky identified three heuristic criteria for effective altruists to use in selecting a cause area:
neglected
valuable
tractable
This “three factor model” of cause assessment has been used by 80,000 Hours for a long time (they use the terms ‘crowdedness’, ‘importance’ and ‘tractability’). Do we know where it originated?
Thanks for writing this, Jess!
One approach for dealing with decision paralysis that I’ve found helpful is to proceed by making a series of concrete pairwise comparisons rather than by trying to compare several different alternatives simultaneously. The goal is to first identify an option that one is at least minimally satisfied with, and then compare that default to some alternative. If, and only if, one concludes that the alternative is superior to the original, this alternative becomes the new default against which future alternatives are compared. One then repeats this process as many times as necessary to deal with the options one hasn’t yet evaluated.
(I’m not claiming any originality here; the approach seems so obvious that there’s probably a name for it. Yet it is often overlooked, so it seemed worth mentioning.)
The Economist on “extreme altruism”
Suppose for example that I have a question related to EA. This doesn’t seem right for a top-level post, but it could get lost in an open thread.
Coincidentally, I just had a Hangout with William Saunders where we discussed this issue. Possibilities include having a “sandbox” where newcomers could post without fear of asking dumb questions (as I suggest here) and giving such new EAs the option of having a one-to-one conversation with more experienced EAs (who would volunteered for this). I think this is something worth exploring further.
I agree. It would be interesting to know how EAs score on standard measures of empathy, relative to the general population or to other relevant subpopulations (such as psychopaths or hyper-empathetic folk).
I don’t think Singer is committing himself to either of the two conceptions of equality that you distinguish in your comment. Rather, he is merely making the uncontroversial point that giving equal consideration to the interests of different beings doesn’t require one to treat these beings equally. All plausible forms of egalitarianism agree with this basic idea. The passage immediately following the sentence you quote makes this clear:
concern for the well-being of children growing up in America would require that we teach them to read; concern for the well-being of pigs may require no more than that we leave them with other pigs in a place where there is adequate food and room to run freely. But the basic element-the taking into account of the interests of the being, whatever those interests may be-must, according to the principle of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or feminine, human or nonhuman.
In conversation with Rolandas, we wondered whether there are enough EAs learning programming to justify creating a dedicated Facebook or Google group. If you would be interested in participating in such a group, please leave a comment or contact me privately.
When I click on a user, I cannot see their lifetime or monthly karma. Is this a bug or a feature?
I agree with what you say, except for this:
Speaking very broadly, EAs seem to have two main goals: getting more people to redirect their donations to more effective charities, and getting more people to donate more of their resources to charity.
There are multiple effective paths to impact, and only some of these involve making or giving money. I think it’s important to be clear about this: there are already critiques of the EA movement out there which foster this misconception (see e.g. the RationalWiki entry on EA), and this may be turning away people that would otherwise be receptive to our ideas.
A great talk! I’ve added it to my annotated bibliography on earning to give.
As someone with a background in philosophy who is considering programming as an earning to give career, I would be interested in reading more about how you transitioned into software development after quitting your philosophical studies.
It would also be useful to know if there are objective measures one can rely upon to determine if one is the kind of person that “gets” programming.
On the question “A lot of people follow the algorithm, hire everyone we possibly can”, Ben Kuhn’s remarks on “threshold hiring” in his post on replaceability are relevant:
Many firms, including e.g. earning-to-give darling Jane Street, do not hire to fill quotas. They hire as many qualified people as come their way. If you take a job at Jane Street, it won’t cause them to deny someone else a job—they’re expanding as fast as they find people who can do the work.
(Minor: the ‘Luke’ link is broken; and Peter’s last name is “Hurford”.)
You wrote about doctors being “to a large extent replaceable,” and taking this consideration at face-value in the past has made me give less consideration to this possibility. However, if you were a doctor, presumably you could be an earning-to-give doctor?
Yes. Greg Lewis, a British doctor, estimates that earning to give in medicine beats direct medical work by a considerable margin. As he put it in an interview I had with him recently, “the chequebook can likely beat the stethoscope.” He also believes medicine is a reasonably good earning to give career, though probably not as good as other lucrative careers prospective doctors can pursue instead.
Your original claim concerned moral philosophy, but the evidence you provide in your latest comment predominantly concerns political philosophy. Consequentialism (a moral view) is compatible with liberalism (a political view), so evidence for the popularity of liberalism is not itself evidence for the unpopularity of consequentialism.
Furthermore, a representative poll where professional philosophers can state their preferred moral views directly seems to be a better measure of the relative popularity of those views in the philosophy profession than citation counts of books published over a given time period. The latter may be relied upon as an imperfect proxy for the former in the absence of poll data, but their evidential relevance diminishes considerably once such data becomes available.
Note, too, that using your criterion we should conclude that falsificationism—advocated in Conjectures and Refutations and Scientific Knowledge—is the dominant position in philosophy of science, when it is in fact moribund. Similarly, that ranking would misleadingly suggest that eliminative materialism—advocated in Consciousness Explained—is the dominant view in philosophy of mind, when this isn’t at all the case. In fact, many if not most of the books cited in that ranking represent positions that have largely fallen out of favor in contemporary analytic philosophy; this is at least the case with Kuhn, MacIntyre, Ryle, Rorty, Searle and maybe Fodor, besides Popper and Dennett. In addition, owing to discrepancies in the number of philosophers who work in different philosophical areas and the popularity of some of these areas in disciplines outside philosophy, the poll grossly overrepresents some areas (political philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind) and underrepresents others of at least comparable importance (metaphysics, epistemology, normative ethics), strongly suggesting that it is particularly ill-suited for comparisons spanning multiple areas (such as one involving both normative ethics and political philosophy) and further strengthening the case for relying on poll data over citation counts.
Let me however highlight that I agree with you that the high prevalence of consequentialists in the EA movement is a striking fact that raises various concerns and certainly deserves further thought and study.
Well done, Ryan!