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The ‘effective altruists’

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Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#41

Post by gglitch »

a3voices wrote: post #40
msilenus wrote: post #2

I've read this book together with the two books about Effective Altruism bei Peter Singer (The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do), and I have to say these books have really changed my life. I know it sounds cheesy, but I've never read books that had such a lasting influence on me. Those books provide just the right rational and scientific arguments and have shown me with how much cognitive dissonance I,…

I'd argue that being an effective altruist actually makes you less rational. As part of your genetic fitness, your brain is optimized for survival, reproduction, and keeping your children alive. If you're in the middle class and you give your money away then it goes against those objectives.

By extension of that logic, the brain is not geared for reason, which I think is probably true.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#42

Post by Kurtz79 »

a3voices wrote: post #40
msilenus wrote: post #2

I've read this book together with the two books about Effective Altruism bei Peter Singer (The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do), and I have to say these books have really changed my life. I know it sounds cheesy, but I've never read books that had such a lasting influence on me. Those books provide just the right rational and scientific arguments and have shown me with how much cognitive dissonance I,…

I'd argue that being an effective altruist actually makes you less rational. As part of your genetic fitness, your brain is optimized for survival, reproduction, and keeping your children alive. If you're in the middle class and you give your money away then it goes against those objectives.

I'd argue that survival, reproduction, and keeping your children alive have more to do with instinct and subconscious, and rationality is trying to go beyond this basic movers.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#43

Post by a3voices »

gglitch wrote: post #41
a3voices wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that being an effective altruist actually makes you less rational. As part of your genetic fitness, your brain is optimized for survival, reproduction, and keeping your children alive. If you're in the middle class and you give your money away then it goes against those objectives.

By extension of that logic, the brain is not geared for reason, which I think is probably true.

Well I think the fundamental issue is that it is impossible to rationally prove which values are more important than other ones. You have to almost arbitrarily decide. For example you could hypothetically design an artificial intelligence that is optimized for creating paperclips. As a person, you could decide your life goal is to drink as much glue as possible or something stupid like that. But since it goes against your survival instinct and cultural values (and everyone else's) you will just be a dysfunctional crazy person.

Biologically you could define a "good" value system as one which is conducive to you having offspring. Ethics, morality, cultural values, etc. are not necessary for that although they might provide intellectual simplifications that help.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#44

Post by vinceguidry »

I have trouble both with Effective Altruists' claims that they can actually quantify human well-being to the point to where if you spend $X, you'll get $Y benefit out of it, and without that, the entire point is lost.

Even if you could, with a fair amount of certainty, say that for every $40 that the Yurt charity gets, they'll build 3 homes, there's a pretty hard limit on how many $40's they'll be able to turn into homes. Eventually they'll run out of qualified people willing to build homes for peanuts. Charity simply doesn't scale. The more you try, the more it just looks like regular old business.

EA could very well be a viable philosophy at the low volumes that participate right now, but if they're successful as a movement, whatever they build is just going to turn into another Red Cross. The Red Cross couldn't scale appropriately, and I highly doubt it was due to any lack of can-do willingness.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#45

Post by JamesBarney »

lucajona wrote: post #18
philh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the factors that influences human flourishing is the prevalence of malaria nearby. If you get malaria and die, your ability to improve your own circumstances falls to 0. "People now have access to bed nets which make them less likely to get malaria and die" seems like it would count as a systemic change.

Good point. But if the only way you can avoid malaria is if someone gives you a bed net, then your ability to improve your own circumstances is still close to 0. You're still impoverished and powerless, you're just not dead. And now you're dependent on a source of bed nets that might dry up. If plain old reciprocal altruism hadn't somehow failed, there would be a way that you could exchange your labour or otherwise f…

Some people value their independence over a reduced risk of malaria. These people would turn down the anti-malaria net(utility doesn't change). Other people value a reduced risk of malaria over independence. These people would take the anti-malaria net(increased utility). So by offering a malaria net you are always benefiting people.

So I don't think I know how a charity could reduce utility as long as the recipients have a choice and are rationally self-interested actors.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#46

Post by mrob »

evanpw wrote: post #32
mrob wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sacrificing other people for a supposed "greater good" is highly unlikely to be beneficial because it destroys trust in society. It's a major cost if everybody has to be constantly wary of utilitarians pushing them in front of trolleys, and if everybody will betray you as soon as their calculations say it's a good idea then capitalism can't function, and capitalism is the only effective economic system yet discovered…

This seems like a straw man, but maybe this really is how some utilitarians think. My view is: if the cost in terms of trust lost is greater than the expected benefit of an action, then the utilitarian answer is not to do it. If the only way to prevent a "race to zero trust" is to make some bright line rules and enforce them universally, then that's the utilitarian answer. It's literally impossible for another ethica…

That's assuming that everybody calculates utility the same way, which is false. One obvious difference is how to value hypothetical people, which is why there's so much controversy about existential risk charities. Multiple competing utilitarian systems could easily be worse than none at all- eg. the health charities and the AI charities could both calculate the best option is to sabotage each other to avoid "wasting" resources, even if they both agree on expected results of their work. You end up with a prisoner's dilemma type situation. With deontology both "good" and "bad" people are protected by the rule of law, so you avoid that problem. Utilitarianism is ethical anarchy.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#48

Post by pdonis »

JamesBarney wrote: post #39
dmvaldman wrote: post #3

What I like about the effective altruist movement is the research they provide. What I don't like is the cultish behavior, and inherent bias that what I think is good is "universally" good. Effective altruism is nothing more than a rebranding of utilitarianism, and suffers from the same moral quandaries. Should I kill someone if it is the best way to decrease child mortality rates in Africa? Should we all quit our jo…

I'm curious as to what are some alternate theories of how to do the most good besides a summing-like equation across individuals?

The problem isn't that there are no "alternate theories" besides utilitarianism. The problem is the idea that "the most good" has some absolute meaning. What if it doesn't? What if there is no well-defined way to "sum across individuals"? What if goods experienced by different people are simply incommensurable? Utilitarianism blithely ignores all these possibilities, and just assumes that every single "good" in the world can be measured on a single numeric scale and summed up.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#49

Post by Anderkent »

a3voices wrote: post #36
Anderkent wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world thinks they have a consensus opinion on this, but actually they probably don't. Otherwise, why is bin laden dead?

Because Obama likes to kill bad guys.

And how is someone who is single-handedly responsible for a significant portion of child mortality rates in Africa not a bad guy? If we find killing Bin Laden excusable (even if not morally correct), shouldn't killing some kind of Joker - who's poisoning African wells with mercury and increasing child mortality rates - be excusable as well?

The problem with all those 'oh should I kill someone if it is the best way to decrease child mortality rates in Africa?' is that people try to intuitively reason about abstract situations; for which our intuition is shit. If you imagine what it would actually take for one person to have measurable impact on child mortality, so that just killing that one person decreases the rates, you always end up with monsters that 1. don't actually exist 2. your intuition would say should be killed.

Re: The ‘effective altruists’

#50

Post by [deleted] »

vinceguidry wrote: post #44

I have trouble both with Effective Altruists' claims that they can actually quantify human well-being to the point to where if you spend $X, you'll get $Y benefit out of it, and without that, the entire point is lost. Even if you could, with a fair amount of certainty, say that for every $40 that the Yurt charity gets, they'll build 3 homes, there's a pretty hard limit on how many $40's they'll be able to turn into h…

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