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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

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

#611

Post by tptacek »

naasking wrote: post #608
tptacek wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids.

> I'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids. I'm not sure how you can be so confident that raising awareness wouldn't have beneficial downstream effects. I'm skeptical too, but outright dismissal doesn't seem warranted. Then again,…

I hereby dismiss all of this outright. Take that as you will.

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

#612

Post by tptacek »

edanm wrote: post #601
tptacek wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consequentialism says that the ends justify the means. They do not.

> Consequentialism says that the ends justify the means. They do not. Well, I disagree with that in the absolute sense, which might be where we differ? If we could accurately foresee the ends of some action lead to more people being better off, it would be moral to take that action. And I think the fact that "the ends don't justify the means" is such a slogan in our world, said as if it's obviously true, is ridiculou…

People keep mentioning philosophers here, as if we were having a debate about weak vs. strong rule utilitarianism. My point is that the philosophy being expounded here is pre-Benthamite; it is the philosophy of the Medicis, not of Mill.

There is right now on Twitter a circulating post regarding the CEO of the Future Fund, FTX's EA funding arm, a person who did a dissertation on utilitarian ethics, which stated that it might make more sense to save wealthy lives in the developed world before saving lives in the developing world, because the wealthy lives would have greater impact. This is what happens when you take a simple idea about minmaxing the benefit of charitable contributions and hook it up to the morals of 16th century banking families. The snake is eating its own tail.

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

#613

Post by MrPatan »

We need a way for bored narcissistic rich people to feel good about themselves while letting the rest of use go on about our lives.

I wish they just partied and spent their money competing on luxury buys with each other.

Instead, we made that "bad" or something, and now they compete on who can signal the most and biggest virtues, and here we are.

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

#614

Post by bioemerl »

afiori wrote: post #595
bioemerl wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complexity breeds ability. Our computers will have to continue to get more complex in order for AI to do the same. What humans have is scale. There are 10 billion devices connected to the internet. Cool, right? More than humans? No. Being human has really big perks. We are mobile. We have hands and feet. We have eyes and touch and smell and we use tools to expand what we can see. We each possess the ability to proces…

Humans are advanced, yes, but we cannot easily solve coordination problems. Think of how different the world would be if everybody was controlled by a single unified mind. If everyone was perfectly aware of where in the world their skill were best applied, if everyone agreed on social and economical objectives. AGI can duplicate itself and can reprogram itself. It is not about which one is more marvelous, more advanc…

> Think of how different the world would be if everybody was controlled by a single unified mind.

It would be terrible. We would lack diversity, society would stratify and get stuck that way forever.

Conflict is bad, but it's also good. Corrupt society should always fall and be renewed by something new and unique, and without such a process we'd land in social quicksand.

Finding the best place for you is a NP hard problem. The number of places for your grows exponentially as humanity does, and then on top of that you have to match every person to all those potential spots. We already have a roughly working system with self discovery.

There's room for improvement, but I don't believe it's scary super exponential, and a lot of the room to improve comes from things we can also access, like the internet.

Duplication runs into the same issue hiveminds do. I'm sure it will prove incredibly useful, but for the tasks humans do nowadays at a high level they'll be somewhat muted. You need diversity.

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

#615

Post by heavyset_go »

UncleMeat wrote: post #447
PebblesRox wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist?" I have always associated EA with the rationalist movement, since I came across it via reading rationalist stuff. If you define EA as "figuring out how to deploy a given set of resources so as to do the most good," your conclusions are going to depend on your value system: how do you define and measure good?…

One of the problems I observe in forum posts from these communities is that it is fun and cool to think differently than others. "What if fighting poverty now is actually bad and preventing the AI apocalypse later is actually better?" Then you get to feel superior to everybody, even those goody-two-shoes people down the street that donate a lot to the food bank. You know the secrets. It is the same kind of thinking t…

If you aren't aware already: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias

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

#616

Post by loeg »

tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. 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. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

> I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something

I mean, I think you were basically right before, and now you're over-reading a lot from an awkward sentence fragment. I agree that the phrase and implied comparison is garbage.

It seems kind of like hearing MTG talk about the Gazpacho Police or whatever and subsequently ascribing it to the GOP. Yes, the quote is clearly inane. Yes, she is a person of some influence in the GOP; no, that doesn't mean everyone in the GOP believes what MTG is saying. I guess you could say the GOP is a cult, but I think maybe cult doesn't mean anything if it applies to 40% of the US population.

Anyway, I totally agree as far as "AI safety." And fuck SBF and steal-to-give.

> Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.

What name would you give to a movement to point charitable dollars at, say, the front page of GiveWell? (Givewell is more or less what EA means to me.)

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

#618

Post by sooheon »

rsj_hn wrote: post #587
sooheon wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. We are unable to be full consequentialist because the computational cost of seeing all ends is infinite, and unable to be full deontologist because competing heuristics are arbitrarily instantiated and mutually contradictory. Even if we're stuck in the middle forever, I know which way I'd strive.

Real heuristics, of course, are not arbitrary, they are the result of trial and error processes where societies and people with differing moral systems compete with each other, proving the fitness of their heuristic by surviving while less fit heuristics fail. I'll go with the results of trial and error over long time horizons rather than blank slate theoretical calculations any day.

Heuristic selection as you describe is evolutionary. So the meme that survives may not have any bearing on human flourishing, just on its own viral ability to spread. Fitness of the heuristic is orthogonal to human benefit.

Further, when multiple heuristics are directly in conflict, it is up to the individual to make the final moral decision. The choice to reject one heuristic over another must be based in some moral calculus.

Finally, who said anything about blank slate? That's a clear straw man, as it's only logical for consequentialists to take current heuristics and their adherents into account.

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

#619

Post by medstrom »

headsoup wrote: post #570
medstrom wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that would make the movement suspect. But if you'd read MacAskill or other sources, you'd know the original motivation was pretty much the opposite. The were aghast that lots of people currently donate to charities that ensure e.g. 4 livers to save 4 lives for the same amount of money that could've saved 1000 lives in another country. To reiterate, all these donors are already altruistic , and the original EAs w…

I get that, but I find that kind of thinking achieves nothing practical because it's endlessly scalable, and hence the tie in knots problem because it starts justifying "well I just need to extract another 500% profit because then I can really start helping." and as soon as an immoral justification is accepted it's very conflicting. Obviously this is not a blanked outcome, but it seems to be where the wealthy SBF typ…

An interesting discussion to be sure. But can't "net good" be a satisfactory judge for the Sacklers' crisis?
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