Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 619 posts

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#371

Post by SuoDuanDao »

OJFord wrote: post #273
Joeboy wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're making that comment with the idea that it's self-evidently wrong? Do I understand you correctly? I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths" part. I don't get how on earth people weigh that as less important than the financial welfare of relatively well-off people in richer countries. Maybe this is some basic failure of humanity on my part.

The problem (and I think roughly the point being made) is that if you follow that logic through, then surely almost everyone here should have the vast majority of their possessions & wealth taken, to fund the equalising up-lifting of others. Charity and world aid is in a continual discussion & discovery of what we collectively think is 'good enough', helping people get to something that is perhaps 'not disaster', but…

'Possessions and wealth taken' and 'fund the equalizing up-lifting of others' co-occur, but that doesn't mean the latter is justifying the former. People who play the markets know they're taking a risk and willing to gamble on being smarter than their competition, they're consenting to have their money go to someone with better judgement than them and that's what justifies having their wealth taken. The winners of a game like that are exactly who I'd want funding the 'up-lifting' part. That doesn't mean it's kosher for the smartest person to expropriate every above-average person's money when they aren't willing to gamble with it.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#372

Post by ethanbond »

coldtea wrote: post #369
ethanbond wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Obviously intelligence plays a role in how fast science develops. The quality of experiments and the quality of inference from those experiments are (very obviously) modulated by intelligence. No reason to believe the absolute pinnacle of intelligence happens to sit inside a species of mostly hairless apes here on earth. Lots of reasons to believe fundamental understanding of the universe is more accessible to int…

> Obviously intelligence plays a role in how fast science develops Sort of. Most science is based on tinkering and experiment, with serendipity thrown in, including most major inventions, and in many cases the actual invention history is changed to make it more like a story of rational thinking process and regular steps than it was. > No reason to believe the absolute pinnacle of intelligence happens to sit inside a…

Sure, that’s true. And intelligence very clearly seems to matter. Not many 80 IQ folks are pushing the frontiers of understanding.

The best known, achieved result around this particular star (out of ~100,000,000,000,000 of them) after hundreds of millions of years with, ostensibly, hundreds of millions of years yet to come.

There’s a difference between being the current known hyper local maximum and being at the universal limit. Talk about weaseling! :D

No reason to believe we are the absolute pinnacle. There’s immense variation even within our own species, not to mention our near neighbors on evolution’s path.

Edit: No one is worried about your fridge. Anyway I’ve gotta start my day, have a good rest of your week!

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#373

Post by tomrod »

drdeca wrote: post #114
tomrod wrote: post #51

I mean, it broke because utility isn't additive, which is the issue with utilitarian ethics generally.

I agree that utilities between people aren’t really commensurate in a way that allows adding them to be particularly well-defined/meaningful, and that therefore utilitarianism is not the actual full truth of morality, However, I don’t think that precludes using a kind of utilitarianism where you just kinda fudge over that “there isn’t a canonical way of adding these” bit, in order to produce something which can be a…

Aye, you argue for sane bounds to utility where EA, to establish superiority as a morality, ignores and takes to extremes.

Good listen: https://pca.st/episode/61ba0858-0eac-4a92-91a3-9fbbacc49e69

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#374

Post by hderms »

concordDance wrote: post #313
ShroudedNight wrote: post #162

Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? I've yet to see any kind of rigorous argument in favour, yet seems like a fundamental requirement if one is going to expend such incredible resources into attempts to maximise this value. The reason I ask is that, when I first discovered Effective Altruism, finding the premise to be deeply compelling, I ended up staying up all night watc…

> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? Given a moral compass, yes. EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).

Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have value equal to our own, but how can we hope to assess how many of them there may be or what aspects of the realities of human life will change over the next century even? This is like trying to predict the future by reading tea leaves, except you have to pledge 10% of your income to whichever leaf talks about the risk of general AI the loudest.

So should everyone be forced to value all future human lives as being as concretely valuable as our own? In order to put them into a total ordering of morality one is forced to make a judgement call on how many people we think are likely to exist in the future as well as how relevant our musings of today actually capture what life will be like in that future.

Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future?

It just reeks of hubris to me. To be a really effective altruist you must first create a time travel device.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#375

Post by medstrom »

nonameiguess wrote: post #365
navane wrote: post #345

Their quality-of-life points combined with long-term-ism reminds me of that simcity build that maximized the population to absurd levels. If you get 'points' for each life, past and future, than maximizing the number of future life is the easiest way to maximize your high score. > Bostrom calculates that 10E29 potential lives are lost for every second that we fail to colonise the supercluster of galaxies containing t…

Seems like Bostrom isn't thinking big enough. If we could invent time travel and seed life earlier in the universe, figure out a way to slow down entropy and star death and make the current universe last longer, or create new universes wholesale, we can get far bigger total life numbers than that. Alternatively, since what we really care about is QALYs, not lives, making even just one person truly immortal gives us a…

Nick Bostrom wouldn't have missed that, he's a very precise philosopher (I'm reading his book Anthropic Bias, and damn I'm glad I didn't have to tease out that mess by myself).

This quote comes from a particular thought experiment. As I'm sure you'll grant, thought experiments don't discuss what to do if that exact hypothetical were reality, they only discuss what attitude to take towards this whole category of situations. In concrete terms yes, some humongously big number of lives are lost every second, more than 10E29 of them, if time travel is possible or creating new universes is possible, but that doesn't change the conclusion.

And you miss two things as far as I can see: achieving immortality for yourself is not the maximal good, since for one thing it would clearly be even better to achieve immortality for everyone. Second, you're equating infinities. It's hard for humans to reason about infinities, but mathematicians have in fact described that there are infinities of different orders: you can still speak of some "infinite" quantities as being greater than other "infinite" quantities. It's easier if you just drop the word in favour of "zillion" and reason intuitively about that.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#376

Post by coldtea »

ethanbond wrote: post #372
coldtea wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously intelligence plays a role in how fast science develops Sort of. Most science is based on tinkering and experiment, with serendipity thrown in, including most major inventions, and in many cases the actual invention history is changed to make it more like a story of rational thinking process and regular steps than it was. > No reason to believe the absolute pinnacle of intelligence happens to sit inside a…

Sure, that’s true. And intelligence very clearly seems to matter. Not many 80 IQ folks are pushing the frontiers of understanding. The best known, achieved result around this particular star (out of ~100,000,000,000,000 of them) after hundreds of millions of years with, ostensibly, hundreds of millions of years yet to come. There’s a difference between being the current known hyper local maximum and being at the univ…

>The best known, achieved result around this particular star (out of ~100,000,000,000,000 of them) after hundreds of millions of years with, ostensibly, hundreds of millions of years yet to come.

Still, this formulation heavily beats the "hairless apes" one doesn't it?

Also, I'm not sure about the relevance of pointing out that it's the "best known". Or the number of stars. Are we aware of any "not known"? Or have seen any signs in any of those stars? Because decades of trying (with SETI, etc.) and so on, has mostly shown the opposite (consider e.g. the Fermi paradox).

So, I think we better stick with the knowns (of which it's the best results among millions of competing organisms anyway), than handwave about what possible magic intelligence remote aliens we haven't seen and don't even know exist have... Sure, we can do it for fun and speculation, but we shouldn't use it as an argument for limitless intelligence. I mean, "Intelligence is limitless, because if E.T. exists, he could have 1000x our IQ" is not exactly an argument.

>Edit: No one is worried about your fridge.

No, but they're worried about the imminent danger of AGI conquering the world and killing us all when the practical examples attaibable are not far from the level of my fridge.

Have a good week yourself. See you around!

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#377

Post by jmull »

medstrom wrote: post #348
jmull wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both those 1%s are very unlikely to be anywhere close to being true. The sci-fi version of AGI that people are imaging now will never exist. No one has any idea how to create AGI now, and therefore, no one knows what it might actually look like if it ever does. Any “solutions” people come up with now will have nothing to do with the problems a real AGI might pose. If people want to get together and talk about this st…

There's nothing substantive in this post, just unexplained opinions...

The main substantive point I made is: "No one has any idea how to create AGI now"

Correct, no?

The rest follows by basic logic. You can't craft solutions to problems you don't know anything about. You can't assign probabilities to outcomes without any information on the inputs or mechanisms of the system.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#378

Post by peteradio »

roenxi wrote: post #189
heavyset_go wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someon…

I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. If they don't, that means: 1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation…

Mass prosperity -> too many entitled folks -> mass destruction of environment -> meta vr as alternative environment in post apocalyptic hellscape

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#379

Post by endominus »

kethinov wrote: post #327
rcoveson wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard. I can understand having a negative opinion of the EA movement as it exists today. But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism. Or at least the idea that being more altruisti…

There are principled reasons to be against charity, namely that charity redistributes money to causes arbitrarily and undemocratically rather than to causes decided by a majority of people voting on what causes to support. When the government runs these programs, we get to vote on how they're administered. When billionaires run them, who gets help and who doesn't is entirely at the mercy of King Tech Bro the First. A…

There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#380

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

jmull wrote: post #340
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

Both those 1%s are very unlikely to be anywhere close to being true. The sci-fi version of AGI that people are imaging now will never exist. No one has any idea how to create AGI now, and therefore, no one knows what it might actually look like if it ever does. Any “solutions” people come up with now will have nothing to do with the problems a real AGI might pose. If people want to get together and talk about this st…

Exactly. Researching AI safety today is like researching how to reduce the proliferation of black hole bombs.
Post reply on HN