My interests are in areas where a statutory solution is infeasible.
I’m a Trustee at Action for Child Trauma International. We work on training people to deliver PTSD treatment to children after conflict. When there is a large number of children with PTSD, it often means that the state has collapsed or is not functioning.
I’m also the Product Lead at Samaritans. This is a suicide reduction charity in the UK & Ireland that provides 24⁄7 emotional support. When people are suicidal, it may be difficult or impossible to disclose this to friends, family or statutory services that may have obligations to act in ways the individual knows will be counter to their interests.
Some possible worlds:
SBF was aligned with EA
Some possible stances in these worlds:
I’m a relative outsider and I don’t know which world the community thinks it is in, or which stance it is adopting in that world.
Some hypotheses:
When trying to guide altruists, it matters what problem-domain they are operating in.
In the obvious domain, solutions are known. If you have the aptitude, be a doctor rather than a small-time pimp.
In a complicated domain, solutions are found through analysis. Seems like the EA community is analytically minded, so may have a bias towards characterising complex and chaotic problems as complicated. This is dangerous because in the complicated domain, the value of iteration and incrementalism is low whereas in the complex domain it’s very high.
In a complex domain, solutions are found through experimentation. There should be a strong preference for ability to run more experiments.
In a chaotic domain, solutions are found through acting before your environment destroys you. There should be a strong preference for establishing easy to follow heuristics that are unlikely to introduce catastrophic risk across a wide range of environments.
2. Consequentialist ethics are inherently future-oriented. The future contains unknown unknowns and unknowable unknowns, so any system of consequentialist ethics is always working in the complex and chaotic domains. Consequentialism proceeds by analytical reasoning, even if a subset of the reasoning is probabilistic, and this is not applicable to the complex and chaotic domains, so it’s not a useful framework.
3. What’s actually happening when thinking through things from a consequentialist perspective is that you are imagining possible futures and identifying ways to get there, which is an imaginative process not an analytical one.
4. Better frameworks would be present-oriented, focusing on needs and how to sustainably meet them. Virtue ethics and deontological ethics are present-oriented ethical frameworks that may have some value. Orientation towards establishing services and infrastructure at the right scale and resilience level, rather than outputs (e.g. lives-saved) would be more fruitful over the long-term.