This is a great post, although I’d maybe question the promotion of MSE as the best resource for UK personal finance. The site has a policy of only promoting risk-free products and strategies, so it has an over-emphasis on (eg.) savings accounts over investment accounts even in situations where the latter would be more appropriate. The information it provides is largely accurate, and sometimes useful, but I wouldn’t recommend adopting its overall approach to personal finance.
Ree
Karma: 63
I’d be pretty interested in working on something in this area, if you’d like to chat.
As someone who is not a hedonistic utilitarian, most of the arguments in this post strike me as incredibly weak. For example it can certainly be argued, and I personally believe, that negative experiences are not bad in such a way that a world without them would be superior. Grief is unpleasant, but I would not prefer a world without grief. I realise that this is not itself an argument, but the possibility of dissent does undermine the idea that the elimination of suffering follows so obviously from its existence that it can violate the is-ought gap.
The post is filled with the same sort of logical leaps, where the author’s beliefs “must” be true with no argument as to why. Most academic philosophers are not consequentialists. If you “find it hard to imagine an ultimate ethical theory that isn’t based on some form of utilitarianism” then you probably don’t have a very strong understanding of normative ethics.
I may be missing the argument in the post, and would welcome a clear restatement of the premises, but as far as I can tell there is no serious attempt to address criticisms or alternatives to hedonistic utilitarianism other than “if you thought about it hard enough, you’d agree with me”.
edit: I hadn’t read it before making this comment, but this other post from today seems to provide a much better answer to the central premise of this post than I would be able to provide.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7dGZnj7bwpM2kSJqm/against-meta-ethical-hedonism
I think you’re confusing the 2020 and 2022 elections. SBF was a fairly minor donor in 2020.
Rebranding in response to a scandal suggests an attempt to brush the issue under the rug without dealing with the underlying problems. Surely you want to be able to respond “this is how we changed to prevent that happening again,” not “we were hoping you wouldn’t remember that”?
I’m generally skeptical of digital people, but I think you can almost certainly say that meaningfully recreating a person without access to brain scans far beyond existing technology would be impossible. Even if you accept the philosophical assumptions necessary to believe that a recreated digital person is morally continuous with the person it’s based on, the only way to recreate a digital person without access to that kind of scan is by reversing entropy and recovering the lost information. No matter how many possible versions of the person you make based on incomplete information, you could never have enough compute to find one that matches, or the information to identify which one is correct. There are 8x1067 ways to order a deck of 52 cards. How many viable networks do you think there are of 82 billion neurons?
As you point out in your post, this project would have the most impact if it encourages people who aren’t likely to engage in earn-to-give or an effective career to pursue an independent project. As such, I’d suggest that it would be better not to tie the podcast too closely to the EA brand, or assume prior knowledge of EA. The title you’re using at the moment would seem pretty confusing to anyone not already in the EA community.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about something similar recently—not a podcast specifically, but a way to engage people outside the elitist circles that the EA movement tends to target in high impact projects. I’d love to chat to you directly if you’re interested in pursuing this.
There was no report, the OBR offered to update their forecasts to take account of the mini budget proposals but weren’t asked to. Even if there was a report though, and Truss/Kwarteng read it, the fact they didn’t publish it would indicate that it contradicts their course of action. That doesn’t support the idea that improved forecasting would’ve led to better decision making.
The UK already has mechanisms to investigate the impact of proposed government policy, in this case the Office for Budget Responsibility which provides independent economic forecasts. The Chancellor and Prime Minister refused to allow the publication of these forecasts alongside the mini-budget that caused market turmoil. I’m not sure you can reasonably blame the quality of existing forecasting mechanisms when the relevant decision-makers were openly disregarding them.
Overall I found this an interesting article, but I think there’s a strong argument that promoting ESG funds as an alternative to index funds runs counter to effective altruist principles. You presented two pragmatic arguments against ESG funds, that they have higher fees and lower returns than general index funds, but didn’t really question the assumption that investing in ESG funds has a meaningful positive impact. While I can’t claim to be an expert on the topic, from my personal research this seems to be highly controversial. The mechanism by which ‘sustainable investing’ claims to have a positive impact is fairly dubious, and I would be very surprised if the marginal value of investing in a sustainable fund over a general index fund is better than donating the additional returns provided by an index fund to an effective charity. Encouraging ESG investing could even have the effect of discouraging donations to effective charities by giving people the feeling of making a positive impact without needing to actively give away their money. I personally can’t see how ESG investing makes sense within an effective altruist framework.
Sure, I understand why it takes that stance, but I’d still suggest (eg.) the resources on r/ukpersonalfinance would be a better place to create a personal finance strategy. MSE is basically a consumer review site—it’ll give you some easy suggestions to save money, and comparisons of some financial products, but if you don’t have a long-term financial strategy then money saving only takes you so far.