Working on psychological questions related to minimalist axiologies and on reasons to be careful about the practical implications of abstract formalisms.
I have MA and BA degrees in psychology, with minors in mathematics, cognitive science, statistics, computer science, and analytic philosophy.
This is not the case when there’s a well-defined procedure for resolving such conflicts.
Yes, but there isn’t. The theoretical case for terminal value monism is strong because monism doesn’t need such a procedure. All forms of terminal value pluralism run into the problem of incommensurability; monism doesn’t. With monism, we can evaluate and compare x-risks and positive psychology states & traits (vs. suffering) by their instrumental effects for minimizing suffering (which may be empirically difficult, but not theoretically impossible). What more do we want from a unified theory?
Do we want the slightest (epsilon) increase in x-risk to end up weighing more than any suffering? If this is our pre-decided definition, are we going to give up on suffering as a terminal value, caring about suffering only if it increases x-risk?
For example, you can map several terminal values onto a numerical “utility” scale.
I can’t. Who can? (In a non-arbitrary way we could agree on from behind the veil of ignorance.) The analogy of a scale requires a common dimension by which the comparator can sort the two (mass, in the analogy of a scale). What is a common dimension for intercomparing suffering & x-risk, or suffering & positive states? An arbitrary numerical assignment?
To arrive at an impartial theory that doesn’t sanctify our self-serving intuitions, we’d want to formulate our terminal value pluralism, “behind the veil”, by agreeing on independent numerical utility values for different terminal value-grounded currencies, such as:
(1) +epsilon probability of human extinction
(2) +epsilon probability that someone undergoes, e.g., a cluster headache episode (or equivalent)
(3) +epsilon probability that someone instantiates/deepens a positive psychology state [requiring a common dimension for “positivity”, unlike monism]
With monism, we don’t need to agree on definitions & values for multiple such currencies. Instead, we want to ground the (dis)value of other values in their relationships to extreme suffering, which everyone already finds terminally motivating in their own case (unlike x-risk reduction or positivity-production, worth noting). I wouldn’t agree to any theory where extreme suffering can be outweighed by enough positivity elsewhere, because outweighing “does not compute”: positivity can only outweigh suffering if it reduces even more suffering, but not by itself, because a positive fantasy of infinite utility is not an antidote to suffering, because the aggregate terminal positivity physically exists only as a fantasy [an imaginary spreadsheet cell] that never interacts with our terminal suffering.
Without monism, how do we agree on the pluralist numerical values if we could end up undergoing the cluster headache-equivalent suffering ourselves (i.e., simulating an impartial compassion)? Are we to trust that cluster headaches aren’t so bad, when they’re outweighed according to a formula that some (not all) people agreed on?
Thanks for the guidelines.
Is there any policy (or existing discussion) on commenting on old posts? Is anything relevant enough to be worth adding to posts that are years old, or do you prefer that replies (across years) become their own posts linking to the original ones?
By “doesn’t have to work on reducing x-risk”, do you mean that they don’t want to?
I’d expect that negative utilitarians (NUs) do want to reduce x-risk, because
(1) x-risk is rarely an either/or risk of 100% extinction; instead, more x-risk probably correlates with more risk of extreme suffering (from non-total pandemics/disasters/wars/etc., and all of their after-effects)
(2) even facing a 100% human extinction, we’d want to account for our epistemic uncertainty of the conditions from which suffering can evolve (re-evolve on Earth, or be found elsewhere within the reach of our descendants)
NUs don’t necessarily jump to suicide as a solution, because helping others is an infinite game to live for, especially after accounting for the epistemic uncertainty of all possible forms of suffering and their evolution. There is further basic research on suffering to be done before turning off the lights and hoping that all the billions of exoplanets would have their own guardians.
It is a straw man argument that NUs don’t value life or positive states, because NUs value them instrumentally, which may translate into substantial practical efforts (compared even with someone who claims to be terminally motivated by them).
This would be my practical question as well, for the following reasons.
I don’t see a way to ultimately resolve conflicts between an (infinite) optimizing (i.e., maximizing or minimizing) goal and other goals if they’re conceptualized as independent from the optimizing goal. Even if we consider the independent goals as something to only “satisfice” (i.e., take care of “well enough”) instead of optimize as much as possible, it’ll be the case that our optimizing goal, by its infinite nature, wants to negotiate to itself as much resources as possible, and its reasons for earning its living within me are independently convincing (that’s why it’s an infinite goal of mine in the first place).
So an infinite goal of preventing suffering wants to understand why my conflicting other goals require a certain amount of resources (time, attention, energy, money) for them to be satisficed, and in practice this feels to me like an irreconcilable conflict unless they can negotiate by speaking a common language, i.e., one which the infinite goal can understand.
In the case of my other goals wanting resources from an {infinite, universal, all-encompassing, impartial, uncompromising} compassion, my so-called other goals start to be conceptualized through the language of self-compassion, which the larger, universal compassion understands as a practical limitation worth spending resources on – not for the other goals’ independent sake, but because they play a necessary and valuable role in the context of self-compassion aligned with omnicompassion. In practice, it also feels most sustainable and long-term wise to usually if not always err on the side of self-compassion, and to only gradually attempt moving resources from self-compassionate sub-goals and mini-games towards the infinite goal. Eventually, omnicompassion may expect less and less attachment to the other goals as independent values, acknowledging only their relational value in terms of serving the infinite goal, but it is patient and understands human limitations and growing pains and the counterproductive nature of pushing its infinite agenda too much too quickly.
If others have found ways to reconcile infinite optimizing goals with satisficing goals without a common language to mediate negotiations between them, I’d be very interested in hearing about them, although this already works for me, and I’m working on becoming able to write more about this, because it has felt like an all-around unified “operating system”, replacing utilitarianism. :)
Thanks for doing long interviews!
I was intrigued by the hypothesis, mentioned by Andrés, that symmetry may be an efficient diagnostic tool for quickly checking on whether bodily functions are doing okay. (The example given was that a problem with one arm suddenly breaks the default sense of resonance or symmetry between the two arms.)
Does this imply the experimental predictions that
(1) symmetric pains might be detected more slowly than asymmetric pains, and
(2) subtle, symmetric sensations might go unnoticed more easily than asymmetric ones?
Could e.g. QRI test this?
Hi Ann, thanks for the reply! I agree that self-compassion can be an important piece of the puzzle for many people with an EA outlook.
I am definitely still working on reframing EA-related ideas and motivations so that the default language would not so easily lead to ‘EA guilt’ and some other problems. Lately I’ve been focusing on more general alternatives to ‘compassion’, because people often have different (and strong) preexisting notions of what compassion means, and so I’m not sure if compassion will serve as the kind of integrative ‘bridge concept’ that I’m looking for to help solve many (e.g. terminological) problems simultaneously.
So unfortunately I don’t have much (quickly publishable) stuff on compassion specifically, having been rotating abstract alternatives like ‘dissonance minimalism’ or ‘complex harmonization’. But who knows, maybe I’ll end up relating things via compassion again, at some point!
I’m not up-to-date on what the existing EA-memesphere writings on (self-)compassion are, but I love the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares (http://mindingourway.com/guilt), often mentioned on LW/EA. It has also been narrated as a podcast by Gianluca Truda. I believe it is a good recommendation for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the ambitions of EA.
Great post, full of good points!
FWIW, I also love your chosen name of Positive Impact Society Erasmus and find it much more relatable and less problematic than if you had gone with Effective Altruism Erasmus. It also sounds like you have good synergy with that name and the mission of the university.
I also agree that even ‘altruism’ can be an unfamiliar word (and/or a technical concept) and therefore worth avoiding in some popular contexts. I liked your example of the made-up group ‘Effective Marnaism’ and how it can sound weird or ideological.
I would support your suggestion of using “part of the EA network” as a way to communicate the wider context of local groups with locally working names. I’ll add that — re: avoiding the unnecessary use of -ism, and re: EA sometimes having an air of elitism — I am decidedly not a part of the informal Goodreads group called Effective Altruists because of the problems I have with its name.
Especially in English, it is tempting to use the shorthand (and/or signaling of ingroup membership) of speaking of “EAs” and “Non-EAs”, which sounds to me idealistic and exclusive in a negative way.
I don’t want to carry a visible badge of identifying as an effective altruist, because to me it sounds like an elitist claim of already being effective, which I see as an empirical and debatable claim. (Many people feel the need to specify their self-identity in the form of “aspiring X” instead of “X”.)
I would join a group called ‘EA network’, which sounds entirely unproblematic to me!
4) The direct translations of Effective Altruism can sound a bit forced. The dutch “Effectief Altruïsme” is a case in point. This can make you seem a bit “out of touch”. We checked with German and Spanish EA’s and they confirm that the direct translations sound rather awkward in their native tongue (a Polish EA we talked to have said that the name actually sounds really positive in Polish, so this point may not be relevant in all languages).
Finnish definitely shares this problem. The two predominant ways to translate ‘effective’ into Finnish are:
tehokas (efficient)
vaikuttava (impressive or impactful)
Efficient is problematic because it’s not the same as impactful. Many people have emotional or ideological problems with the ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization, and would have a gut-feeling of resistance against, e.g., this definition (from Google Translate) applied to human behavior:
efficient: (especially of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
Impressive is even more problematic because an EA group would be wise to actively avoid the air of elitism which you mention. So “vaikuttava altruismi” is basically equally close to “impressive altruism” as it is to “impactful altruism” — and there is not really a word in Finnish to separately capture the intended meaning of impactful.
The direct translation, efektiivinen, is very forced, and seems to have only rare and technical use in other contexts.
For these reasons (and other points mentioned in the post), I would encourage Finnish groups to consider alternative names.
One needs to remove the dot after the URL :)
Just a readability suggestion: have the column for n (etc.) on the left and book on the right, so that we can read a left-aligned list of book names without the eyes having to jump around so much :)
MDMA-assisted couples therapy has been studied a bit. Could MDMA also be useful for interpersonal conflict resolution more generally, such as for enabling more constructive conversations between people with very different perspectives?
What would you say to journalists who may (or may not) be:
willing to do accurate reporting on these topics
too time-pressured (or otherwise unable) to read the original research
strongly incentivized to sensationalize these topics?
Is the renewed interest in psychedelic research & psychedelic-assisted therapy happening only in Western countries? Are other countries more worried about these substances for some reason(s)?
Was there some evidence that some psychedelics may have anti-addictive efficacy even at sub-psychedelic doses, or do the anti-addictive effects depend on the psychedelic experience?
You can send me anonymous feedback on this essay here.
Great post, thanks! What are some related concepts for understanding this? Echo chambers and selection effects come to mind, but I wonder if there are other equally related concepts nearby.
Interesting! Of course, the experience might be, in some ways, quite confusing compared to a human narration. For example, the automatic narration does not seem to separate headings or quotes from the main text. Could the AI be taught to identify headings and quotes, and make them stand out?
(E.g., headings might be ideally narrated with longer pauses, and quotes perhaps even in a different voice.)
Another difference between automatic vs. human narration: The automatic narration does not notify the listener whenever they might miss some meaningful hyperlink or figure in the text (unlike e.g. Holden Karnofsky’s self-narration of the Cold Takes Audio). Of course, this is part of the quantity over quality tradeoff; I’m just wondering what would be ideal and still possible to implement automatically. :)
Multiple terminal values will always lead to irreconcilable conflicts.
(1) Do you hold suffering to be a terminal value motivating its minimization for its own sake?
(2) Do you also hold that there is some positive maximand that does not ultimately derive its value from its instrumental usefulness for minimizing suffering?
Anyone who answers yes to both (1) and (2) is not a unified entity playing one infinite game with one common currency (infinite optimand), but contains at least two infinite optimands, because with limited resources, we will never fully satisfy any single terminal value (e.g., its probability of being minimized or maximized throughout space & time).
I’ve been working on a compassion-centric motivation unification (as an improvement of existing formulations of negative utilitarianism) because I find it the most consistent & psychologically realistic theory that solves all these theoretical problems with no ultimately unacceptable implications. To arrive at practical answers from thought experiments, we want to account for all possibly relevant externalities of our scenarios. For example, the practical situations of {killing children} vs. {not having children} do not have “roughly the same outcome” in any scenario I can think of (due to all kinds of inescapable interdependencies). Similarly, compassion for all sentient beings does not necessarily imply attempting to end Earth (do you see Buddhists researching that?), because technocivilization might reach more & more exoplanets the longer it survives, or at least want to remain to ensure that suffering won’t re-evolve here.
To further explore intuitions between terminal value monism vs. terminal value pluralism, can you order the following motivations by your certainty of holding them as absolutes?
(A) You want to minimize suffering moments.
(B) You want to minimize the risk of extinction (i.e., prolong the survival of life/consciousness).
(C) You want to maximize happy moments.
I sometimes imagine I’m a Dyson sphere of near-infinite resources splitting my budget between these goals. I find that B is often instrumental for A on a cosmic scale, but that C derives its budget entirely from the degree to which it helps A: equanimity, resilience, growth, learning, awe, gratitude, and other phenomena of positive psychology are wonderful tools for compassionate actors for minimizing suffering, but I would not copy/boost them beyond the degree to which they are the minimizing way. In other words, I could not tell my Exoplanet Rescue Mission Department why I wanted to spend their resources on creating more ecstatic meditators on Mars, because A is only interested in instruments for minimizing suffering. Besides, I wouldn’t undergo surgery without anaesthesia for any number of meditators on Mars, because they wouldn’t help my suffering; in a world where anaesthetics opportunity-cost a monastery on Mars, what would you do? Is “outweighing” between terminal values an actual physical computation taking place anywhere outside an ethicist’s head, or a fiction?