I’m a researcher in psychology and philosophy.
Stefan_Schubert
Karma: 6,520
The following quote from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, is not an Effective Altruist quote in the narrow sense, but it exhibits a spirit that is similar to that of the EA movement. I find Mann’s slightly ironizing depiction of a certain kind of didacting rationalist both amusing and spot on.
The Magic Mountain is viewed as one of the greatest 20th century novels on the theme of progressive rationalism vs conservative irrationalism. I much recommend it.
Herr Settembrini had delivered a private lecture, almost whispered it into his ear, with his back to the rest of the people in the room; it had been so pointed, so unsocial, so little conversable in its nature, that merely to command its eloquence seemed lacking in tact. One does not tell a schoolmaster that he has expressed himself well. Hans Castorp, indeed, had done so once or twice in the early days of their acquaintance, probably from an instinct to preserve the social equilibrium; but the humanist’s utterances had never before reached quite such a didacting pitch. There was nothing for it but to pocket the admonition, feeling as embarrassed as a schoolboy at so much moralizing. Moreover, one could see by Herr Settembrini’s expression that he had not finished his train of thought. He still stood so close to Hans Castorp that the young man was constrained to bend a little backwards; and his black eyes gazed fixedly into the other’s face.
“You suffer, Engineer,” he went on. “You are like one distraught—who could help seeing it? But your attitude could be a European attitude; it should not be the oriental, which in its soft abandonment inclines so readily to seek this spot. The oriental attitude toward suffering is one of pity and a boundless patience—that cannot, it ought not to be ours, to be yours! - Look—we were speaking of what the post had brought us, look at these! Or better, come with me, it is impossible here—let us withdraw, and I will disclose to you certain matters. Come with me!”
...
“These papers”, he said, “bear the stamp, in French, of the International League for the Organization of Progress. I have them from Lugano, where there is an office of a branch of the League. You inquire after its principles, its scope? The League for the Organization of Progress deduces from Darwinian theory the philosophic concept that man’s profoundest natural impulse is in the direction of self-realization. From this it follows that all those who seek satisfaction of this impulse must become co-labourers in the cause of human progress. Many are those who have responded to the call; there is a considerable membership, in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and in Germany itself. I myself have the honour of having my name inscribed on the roll. A comprehensive and scientifically executed programme has been drawn up, embracing all the projects for human improvement conceivable at the moment. We are studying the problem of our health as a race, and the means for combating the degeneration which is a regrettable accompanying phenomenon of our increasing industrialization. The League envisages the founding of universities for the people, the resolution of the class conflict by means of social ameliorations which recommend themselves for the purpose, and finally the doing away with national conflicts, the abolition of war through the development of international law. You perceive that the objects toward which the League directs its efforts are ambitious and broad in their scope. Several international periodicals are evidence of its activities—monthly reviews, which contain articles in three or four languages on the subject of the progressive evolution of civilized humanity. Numerous local groups have been established in the various countries; it is expected that they will exert an edifying and enlightening influence by means of discussion evenings and appropriate Sunday observances. Above all, the League will strive its utmost to aid with the material at its disposal the political party of progress in every country. You follow me, Engineer?”
Herr Settembrini appeared satisfied. “I assume that these are new and surprising ideas to you?”
“Yes, I confess this is the first time I have heard of these—these endeavours.”
“Ah, Settembrini murmured, “ah, if you had only heard of them earlier! But perhaps it is not yet too late. These circulars—you would like to know what they say? Listen.
...
[T]he League for the Organization of Progress, mindful of its task of furthering human happiness—in other words, of combating human suffering by the available social methods, to the end of finally eliminating it altogether; mindful also of the fact that this lofty task can only be accomplished by the aid of sociology, the end and aim of which is the perfect State, the League, in session at Barcelona, determined upon the publication of a series of volumes bearing the general title The Sociology of Suffering. It should be the aim of the series to classify human suffering according to classes and categories, and to treat it systematically and exhaustively. You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systematization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject—the actual enemy is the unknown. We must lead the human race up out of the primitive stages of fear and patient stupidity, and set its feet on the path of conscious activity. We must enlighten it upon two points: first, that given effects become void when one first recognizes and then removes their causes; and second, that almost all individual suffering is due to disease of the social organism. Very well; this is the object of the Sociological Pathology. It will be issued in some twenty folio volumes, treating every species of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the great collective struggles arising from the conflicting interests of classes and nationals; it will, in short, exhibit the chemical elements whose combination in various proportions results in all the ills to which our human flesh is heir. The publication will in every case take as its norm the dignity and happiness of mankind, and seek to indicate the measures and remedies calculated to remove the cause of each deviation. Famous European specialists, physicians, psychologists, and economists will share in the composition of this encyclopedia of suffering, and the general editorial bureau at Lugano will act as the reservoir to collect all the articles which shall flow into it.”
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, London 1924/1999, pp. 243-246.
Hi! I’m a postdoc in philosophy at London School of Economics, mainly specializing in epistemology, broadly construed. I’m particularly interested in how we can use social media, online rating systems, internet tests, and various other internet applications to further efficiency, rationality and altruism. Here’s my blog, where I’m discussing these matters.
Good idea. Generals use wargames for the same purposes, which essentially are a kind of simulations. Perhaps some sort of analogous simulations can be constructed.
Another idea is of course to launch a mini version of your idea, if that’s possible. This version has to be sufficiently similar to your main one for this to be a good strategy, however.
Excellent post. I think that the importance of kindness and generosity is often underestimated. In most communities, movements or workplaces, where yoy are working together towards a shared goal, the interpersonal atmosphere is only discussed if there are serious problems (e.g. open conflicts or hostility). In the absence of that, leaders and others won’t bother too much with how people behave towards each other. However, my hunch is that the positive effects of a better atmosphere do not stop at the point where there is no longer open hostility. On the contrary, movements where people are kind and encouraging in the way you suggest we should be are, I would guess, more effective than those where there is merely an absence of open hostility.
The following quote from The Economist sheds some light on these matters:
Condor works by sifting through data from Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and using them to predict how a public protest will evolve. It does so by performing what Dr Gloor calls “sentiment analysis” on the data.
Sentiment analysis first classifies protesters by their clout. An influential Twitter user, for instance, is one who has many followers but follows few people himself. His tweets are typically upbeat (containing words or phrases such as “great”, “fun”, “funny”, “good time”, “hilarious movie”, “you’ll love” and so forth), are rapidly retweeted, and appear to sway others. In a nod to the methods developed by Google, Dr Gloor refers to this process as “PageRanking for people”.
Having thus ranked protesters, Condor then follows those at the top of the list to see how their output changes. Dr Gloor has found that, in Western countries at least, non-violent protest movements begin to burn out when the upbeat tweets turn negative, with “not”, “never”, “lame”, “I hate”, “idiot” and so on becoming more frequent. Abundant complaints about idiots in the government or in an ideologically opposed group are a good signal of a movement’s decline. Complaints about idiots in one’s own movement or such infelicities as the theft of beer by a fellow demonstrator suggest the whole thing is almost over.
Perhaps we could let Condor analyze this forum, to see if we use a sufficient number of upbeat phrases...
Excellent post. One minor question: what if one or two considerations actually do outweigh all others?
I take it that hedgehogs (as opposed to toxes) are biased in the sense that they are prone to focus on a single argument or a single piece of evidence even when other argument or pieces of evidence should be considered. That seems to me to be a very common mistake. But, in cases where a single argument or a single piece of evidence is so overwhelming that other arguments or pieces of evidence become unimportant, it seems one actually should rely only on that single argument or piece of evidence.
Thanks for this. Mystal’s article is appallingly poor. I don’t quite agree with this characterization of Atri’s article, however:
The main issue seems to be that both responders have dismissed the possibility that someone going into corporate law would actually donate 25% of their salary.
A major theme in Atri’s article is Barlow’s unnecessarily provocative characterizations of people who choose not to go into Big Law. To some degree I understand that Atri is upset, in the light of sentences like these:
Alternatively, go into Public Interest, Government, or Academia, and feel warm and fuzzy about yourself. Sadly, when people at this school talk about public service, they mean the latter, rather than the former.
Lots of people who’ve gone into Public Interest, Government, or Academia have a tremendous amount of good—more good, I’d argue, than they could have done at a Big Law firm. What’s more, I think that some of them had reason to believe that when they choose their career, given what they knew about their capabilities. Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama is a name that springs to mind. In any case, the burden of proof is on Barlow. He shouldn’t start talking in this condescending way about people who don’t go into Big Law without giving us very firm evidence—much firmer than the rather shallow arguments that he gives (e.g. “Can poor people eat using your opinion on law’s impact on poor people?”—this is below the argumentative quality you’d expect from an effective altruist) - that choosing the Big Law path is indeed the right one for everyone.
I’m sure some people who go into Public Interest, Government, or Academia are self-important and/or confused over how they can best impact the world, but there are also morally serious and determined people similar to Obama out there. Hence sweeping generalizations such as this should be avoided.
Great, very inspirational post! I’ll direct people interested in the EA movement to this.
I think we should write more articles like this (and/or encourage other media to do so—perhaps journalists should be invited to next year’s EA retreat/summit). For instance, we could write articles on individuals and or/groups within the EA movement who personify the sentiments that you’re expressing here. Concrete examples and personal, vivid stories that appeal to System 1 have a great persuasion power.
I think that many Marxists have thought of themselves as effective or scientific and altruistic. Marxism is a rather muddled intellectual tradition, but I think that because it used to have both altruistic and scientific connotations, lots of people who could have become effective altruists became Marxists instead. Influential ideologies have a tendency to “suck in” anyone in the vicinitiy in the logical space of ideas. Hence I think that the fall of Marxism did facilitate the birth of effective altruism.
Another reason why effective altruism is spreading now rather than, say, thirty years ago, is that the public debate and society at large is becoming ever more empirically minded. Watch, e.g., the development in journalism, where datajournalists such as Nate Silver are gradually replacing armchair pundits. Effective altruism is thus part of a larger trend that is making all parts of society ever more evidence-based (of course, this trend started a very long time ago—it goes back at least to the Scientific Revolution—though it perhaps is steeper now than before).
I understand the 14 Oct meetup is not in New York but rather at the University of York, UK.
Nice article! I also think all of these factors are important, not only to build to strengthen our ability to be supportive of another, but also because they simply make us better decision-makers. Here’s an interesting experiment on the “collective intelligence” of groups and what factors contribute to it:
Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
My emphasis.
Here’s the article (Science) and here’s a test of social sensitivity.
Thanks for posting this! Very good and well-crafted post. I also like the tactical thinking (playing the long game, etc) further down in the thread. Considering the very real risk that we won’t be able to live up to these points, and that that presumably would have a very significant negative effect, I think this is a topic we need to keep returning to.
Here’s a post from CivilPolitics.org (run by Jonathan Haidt a a number of other political psychologists) on evidence-based interventions to improve inter-group civility which might be useful for those of you who haven’t read it.
Excellent post! This important message is unfortunately too often forgotten. Reading this, I realize how utterly spoilt I am, sitting here complaining about bureaucratic research funding bodies. ;) Our ancestors did the hard part!
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.
According to World Giving Index (p. 11) the English-speaking countries have a much stronger tradition of private charity than Northern European countries such as Germany or the Scandinavian countries.
My guess is that in countries with a high tax ratio and a comprehensive welfare state, there is less private charity—partly because the citizens simply have less post-tax earnings, and partly because they think there is less need for it since their governments are better at solving social problems. For instance, Norway and Sweden give away a higher share of Gross National Income in development aid than any other country (more than 1 %).
At the same time, my own country, Sweden, is the most rationalist country in the world, according to World Values Survey. Also, Sweden has a very generous refugee politics and receives by far the most asylum seekers in the OECD, which indicates a high level of altruism. This means that Effective Altruism should have a huge potential in Sweden.
A hypothesis I have is that one reason why Effective Altruism hasn’t taken off in Sweden (besides the fact that EA generally is strongest in the English-speaking world) is the said comparatively weak tradition of charitable giving in Sweden. Therefore, I think it might be wise to emphasize other aspects of the EA movement when trying to sell it in Sweden. The same goes for other similar countries.
I recently wrote an introduction to the EA movement in Swedish on my blog and hope to be able to publish on the same topic in mainstream newspapers later on.
And there are four different books on effective altruism coming out, at least two of which will be marketed heavily by professionals.
I guess the two that will be marketed heavily by professionals are Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do and Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, but could you please tell us which the other two books are?
Thanks!
What a great paper. Thanks for sharing this. The details of this paper should be discussed more on this forum.
The effectiveness-alone strategy and evidence-based policy
Thanks! And good point. Yes, all the usual considerations apply, such as tractability, scale and neglectedness. It’s not obvious that making ineffective altruistic work always is tractable and neglected, and always has scale, but I think that in many cases, it does. For instance, I do think that making politics more rational fulfills all of those conditions.
That is a very good idea! I suppose someone must have tried that?
Good point. The person in world 2 is, as you say, doing two things:
a) They start doing altruistic things right away. b) They focus on convincing others to join the EA movement, rather than on doing object-level altruistic work.
a) and b) are obviously unrelated in the sense that you can do a) without doing b), and vice versa. However, the combiation of doing both a) and b) is potentially quite powerful, as you point out.
An obvious (minor) caveat is, however, that succesful object-level altruistic works probably are necessary in order to attract people to the EA movement. You need something to show them, as it were. Hence all effective altruists devoting all of their time to recruiting new effective altruists is probably not the most efficient way of recruiting new effective altruists. That said, I agree with the general point that effective altruists probably should spend more time convincing others to join the EA movement.