Extreme altruism: caring for strangers at the expense of family | Hacker News Reader

Extreme altruism: caring for strangers at the expense of family

theguardian.com

62 pointsaschearer71 comments

> What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than anyone else’s?

They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too.

Because seriously, a lot of bad things stem from the fact that majority of people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as exploitable.

I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people.

In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even thousands of people to save one relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't even blink.

Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity, not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We are family.

And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people with dreams of brighter future. But somebody has to do the job of fixing things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.

This deserves to be less of an HN comment, and more of a manifesto (I mean that as a compliment).

In wartime, it is thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause. In ordinary times, to ask a person to sacrifice his life for a stranger seems outrageous, but in war it is commonplace.

In wartime, you go off to war in hopes of preventing it from coming to your village, in hopes of protecting your family and your land and your people and your little world. I think we are seeing articles like this because with 7 billion people on the planet and dead zones in the ocean and global media, we cannot escape the awareness that the fabric of society is tattered and could fray further and the only hope for protecting our little corner or the world is to somehow find a way to make the entire world more stable. Yet, no one knows how to make that happen.

People are scared, even wealthy people. And some of them react by trying to make the entire world a better place. Global media makes it hard to have those boundaries that distinguish clearly between whom we should help or must help and whom we have no obligation to help. Global media makes it hard to figure out where to draw those lines. It has erased boundaries we did not know we had, and now we don't know how this new reality works.

I have been thinking about the world as if we are in wartime* for some time now. It kind of makes a lot of things that I see around me make a lot more sense.

But I don't think it's true that no one knows how to make the entire world more stable. I think the article explains it very well: You just start treating people outside your family as if they were in your family.

(Family, meaning your circle of care, not your biological family.)

Many are already doing this, but since poverty is still here it apparently isn't enough people yet. Pile on!

* The war, in this sense, is between those who want to add more individuals to their family and those who want to farm individuals as resources. And of course many of us play both roles, sometimes simultaneously.

Poverty is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. If poor Africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty - If you give them the wrong kind of help, you will just allow them to survive and have more children but it wont create any long term improvements.

I think the root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible.

The One Child policy was a draconian method. A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally. Educated, empowered women choose to have fewer children, take better care of them, etc.

Sadly, you have to also start tackling religious issues: Catholicism can not further forbid abortion or use of condoms. This is seriously hurting humanity.

Catholicism also promotes the idea of the sanctity of individual life, places moral burdens on business and political leaders in countries where brutality and exploitation are the norm, and creates a culture that emphasizes and encourages education. (Not to mention the whole "creating the moral foundation Western Democracy takes for granted" thing.)

You don't need to start fighting religion to help the poor; religion has provided, for many, the most effective means of getting out poverty. Also, going in to a place and starting a fight against the local religion (be it Catholicism, Islam, neo-Jobsian technocracy) is a good way to be ignored by the people your trying to help.

I'm not saying to fight religion, but to tackle religious issues. It can not be allowed for an institution like the church continuing to forbid population control. The hopeful solution would be that the church reforms itself.

I have heard some bad stories about that - But I think it's important to decouple the policy itself from the way it was enforced.

The policy is very powerful in at least two ways: Firstly, it allows parents to focus all their energy and resources on raising and educating a single child. Then secondly, because Chinese people have fewer children, the assets in China will be inherited by fewer people which means a higher net worth per capita for the next generation.

It's a terrible policy. Have you looked into the gender imbalance in China? Google "China gender imbalance"

This policy will hurt China for decades.

> But I think it's important to decouple the policy itself from the way it was enforced.

I'm not sure you can do that and still enforce such a policy.

> A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally

Why not "improve education and rights for people globally"?

I would like to see the world become a better place for people globally. The problem with your framing is that trying to enhance the "rights" of men has a tendency to make our current problems worse. The things men typically need in order to live more balanced, healthy, full lives is an ability to provide self care instead of relying on a woman to do it, slack time that they rarely get, and so on. You could discuss that in terms of rights, but that isn't really what most people will think of when you talk about rights for men. Rights for children are legally limited because their decision making ability is still formative.

Rights for women have a well established and proven track record of counterbalancing the deficiencies of the so called "patriarchy", a term I loathe but I don't know how else to frame this particular point. Rights for women often revolve around things like maternity leave, which helps protect both the health of the child and the career of the mother. So I make statements like the above in spite of not self-identifying as a feminist because it is the most proven method I know of for moving things forward.

Hm... well, as "rights" I understand things like freedom of speech, including the ability to criticize the government, justice, no persecution, democracy, accessible healthcare, low corruption, etc... I think without these, there's little use for maternity leave or reproductive rights

Well, then I will suggest you have a poor understanding of how most women experience life. And I will also suggest that my position might make more sense if you just think of it in terms of female empowerment and try to not get too hung up on the word rights.

Poverty (within our current socioeconomic system) is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. (citation needed). If poor africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty. (Raising standards of living is pretty much guaranteed to reduce the fertility rate, you have your rate of causation backwards on this one). The root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. (Sorry, but this is a borderline racist statement, I'm not saying you intended that to be the case, just that it is). I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible. (So you think possibly one of the most authoritarian policies in recent history is the answer?)

I don't think the statement was borderline racist. It's fair to point out that a certain group has exhibited certain statistical tendencies (large numbers of children in this case), so long as that tendency is not attributed explicitly to race itself (which it wasn't here). I don't see how we could ever have a productive discussion on issues like this if just straightforward observations are torn down as racist.

I do agree with your point that most likely better education will lead to fewer children rather than fewer children leading to better education. However, clearly that's easier said than done.

* Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem". By any reasonable measure, global poverty has been cut by at least half. Keep in mind that both China and India each still have larger populations than the entire continent of Africa, and that the median Chinese and the median Indian were not in significantly better shape than the median African 50 years ago. Furthermore, some African leaders, most notably Rwanda's Paul Kagame, are now achieving some success at adapting Asian development patterns to their own conditions.

* Taiwan and South Korea did not need draconian one child policies, or any other form of population control, to become prosperous. And they've gotten much further than China. Of all the lessons you could draw from East Asia's rise, "copy the one child policy" is close to the most nonsensical. I won't deny the obvious fact that you can't sustainably have each generation be 5 times larger than the previous one, but we have tons of data points indicating that women's education, and other things you'd want to do anyway to facilitate economic development, happen to solve the "unsustainable fertility rate" problem as a side effect, and the causal mechanisms are fairly well understood (when women are permitted to do other things with their lives than serve as full-time brood mares, most of them take advantage of the additional options...).

>>Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem"

The overwhelming majority of that progress comes from replacing an evil, murderous, and incompetent dictatorship in the world's largest nation with a decent dictatorship. One faction, led at enormous personal danger by Deng Hsiaoping, replaced the preferred successors of Mao with ordinary dictators that wanted to rule a prosperous middle income country instead of a disaster area.

All the other progress in the world is small in comparison and we aren't going to see China rescued from sociopathic communism again.

There has been progress in SE Asia and India and Latin America and even some post-post-colonial recovery in Africa. There isn't that much grinding poverty in Latin America to alleviate anymore and SE Asia is getting there. But that leave the most intractable problems to deal with.

India and Africa have enormous birth rates, populations that have proven resistant to education, and local politics unfriendly to economic growth. Latin America and China brought down birth rates and raised educational achievement quickly as soon as their governments allowed it, but India and Africa have tried and the people aren't taking to either.

There are some encouraging places like Tamil Nadu and Botswana, but there are diminishing returns in development as in any industry. It gets harder and harder to grow economies once you've done the easy cases like China and Korea.

And because of birthrates, the hard cases just become a larger and larger problem. Two thirds of mankind will be Sub-Saharan African and Indian/Pakistani by 2100 according to the most optimistic projections. Will they still be grindingly poor? I hope not. Still there's no clear road from today to a decent future for most of mankind.

> India and Africa have enormous birth rates,

I don't get it. India's birth rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2012 and 2.3 children per woman in 2013, barely above replacement. We should expect it to get down below replacement rate in the next five years.

It looks like your post contains interesting thoughts, but it's hard to take the rest of it seriously when there's such extremely obvious inaccuracy.

There's also the problem that if your birth rate is below replacement your population gets old and shrinks and dies. This is a bad thing in the long term, and getting out of that situation is turning into a major challenge worldwide. We need to be very careful that we haven't swung this pendulum way too far in the wrong direction.

Poverty is hard to solve, but it's becoming easy to solve very quickly. Let's assume for a minute we have all the money in the world. Poverty is easily solved by removing the obstacles that are preventing the poor from being self-sufficient. But what are those obstacles? Poverty is not considered a disorder yet, and we do not have good diagnostic tools for diagnosing those obstacles.

Let's think for a second about how it if you are wealthy. If your family has enough money, you can have access to 24-hour care for much of your development, either from a stay-at-home parent or a nanny. In other words, you have a person whose full-time job is removing those obstacles and training you to detect and remove them on your own. Not everyone's parents actually do that well, but they at least had a shot at it.

That's great, but it's not useful to us for fixing poverty because it's too expensive to scale. We can't assign a full-time nanny to everyone in poverty, it'd be in the trillions of dollars.

But I think the internet changes the economics of this substantially.

For every one of those specific obstacles that is THE big blocker in a poor person's life, there is someone somewhere else in the world, who has either been there before, or seen it a million times, and who knows exactly what are the main tools you need in your toolbag if you are going to make it through that kind of situation. If we had that all of those equipment lists in a giant database for all of the world's poor, we wouldn't need a full-time nanny, we could just equip the poor person with some tools, and they would have a good shot at leveling up. Tools like I'm describing would be orders of magnitude cheaper than a full time nanny.

So there's a chunk of work for someone: How do you connect poor people with other people who have seen people get through their specific bottleneck?

Of course then they'll need some supplies and probably some ongoing hourly work by whatever relevant professionals are needed. And obviously you are paying rent and health insurance and all of that until those things become self sufficienct.

I think good information tools could bring the cost of this down from trillions to billions.

Still a lot of money, how could we make it back?

By bringing people out of poverty you basically get first crack at marketing to a totally new market. You could also make recruiting deals. I think as long as you're transparent about what is advertising and what is advice, it's morally OK to do this. Although I would love to hear other ideas about that. I am not attached to the model.

All of these transitions I'm talking about facilitating are going to have very high variability, which makes this also a very difficult endeavor to fund or insure. But if you can get all of the tools as efficient as possible, I think a relatively small amount of capital might be able to bootstrap the process. You just have to get your scale to something above the stochastic noise in the outcomes for individual clients.

Once it was bootstrapped though, you could just fund it with VC.

It's actually not impossible. Stop fueling the corruption in those countries and educate the women. Most of what perpetuates the poverty is eliminated by those 2 shifts. It's not easy...but not impossible either.

The old party line of the Communist Party USA was to not only not support charity, but on some level to work against charity. As Europe and North America shifted from farming and feudalism, a new group came into existence, the "reserve army of labor" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), also known as the unemployed. As the people who control production want this, trying to fight this charity and whatnot is considered a waste of time - the people who control production want unemployment and poverty to be at a certain level, and if the working class makes a massive effort to relieve it one place, the controllers of production will just increase it elsewhere.

You can see this in its modern form by reading the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek etc. in the year 2000. There were worries the unemployment rate had gotten "too low" (<4%), i.e. it was a problem too many people looking for a job could find one. Talks of inflation and so forth, basically the WSJ-speak way which can easily be translated into Marxist terminology.

If the powers that be were openly seeking to increase unemployment in 2000, what is the point of devoting a lot of effort to charity? The communists thought charities contributed to this problem, by prolonging the agony. It seems the problem is more structural.

The problem I see with the title concept--caring for strangers at the expense of family, or more generally caring for people you don't know, at the expense of people you do know--is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them. But no one person can know everyone in the world. Human beings don't scale. The only effective way to get a lot of people helped is to have a lot of people willing to help, each of whom gets to know a few people well enough to understand what will help them, and then helps those few people.

But for some odd reason, we don't think of "charity" this way. We think that helping people you know, so that your help is as effective as possible, is somehow less "moral" than "helping" people you don't know at all, so that you don't know what will help them.

> in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them

Or maybe not -- what do you think of https://givedirectly.org/?

I agree that, if you have already decided you're going to give to people you don't know, it's more effective to give them money than anything else, since that is the most flexible form of help. Whether it is as effective as helping people you do know is a different question.

> is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them

It is not strictly true. Yes, helping someone effectively involves a person who knows the recipient of aid enough to understand their needs. But that doesn't have to be you. You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives. You can work on making those nets, and that is helping. Or you can have a well-paying job and use surplus income to support people distributing those nets, people who know those they're helping.

Also, a lot of low-hanging-fruits of world-fixing exist on social or global level, not on the level of individuals. I don't need to know of or care about any sick person in particular to help fight malaria effectively - in fact, getting emotional is often counterproductive. What matters are aggregate effects. Number of people who would die but are not going to because of the aid is what matters. Average quality of life improving is what matters.

But I think that's orthogonal to the issue of family vs. strangers, and conflating the two doesn't help with anything. I agree that we shouldn't treat helping people we know as less moral just because we know them (and thus get to experience their gratitude). But I also don't think that those close to me are inherently more worth than those further. I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense. This comes naturally when you start extending your concept of 'family and friends' to the entire world.

> You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives.

No, but if the criterion is effectiveness, you do have to know that distributing mosquito nets is the most effective thing you can do to help those people. How can you know that if you don't know them? What if it would be more effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make something they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to teach them how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To know whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people.

> What matters are aggregate effects.

I don't agree with this as a blanket statement. I agree that in certain cases, aggregate effects may be the best measure to use; but to say they're what matters in all cases is going way beyond our knowledge. Individual human beings don't average; every single one of us is a unique individual. Reducing 7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers is ignoring so much information that the claim that those aggregate effects are "what matters" seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

> I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense.

First, the reason we have an instinctual drive to help people close to us is not that they are worth more than everyone else; it's that we know much more about them, so we know much more about what they need.

Second, "worth" is not an intrinsic property of a person. It's a property of relationships between people. My family is worth more to me than someone I don't know in Africa because I have a close relationship with them. But the family of that person in Africa is worth more to them than I am. Saying that every single person must be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once again, ignores so much information about the individual people and their relationships that it seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

And just so it's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone, seems to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good while avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their needs, so that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution; they want to be able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that they're helping in the most effective way they can. They don't want to face the fact that helping people doesn't scale; one person can't effectively help millions of other people. One person should be focused on helping a few people that they know well; for millions of people to be helped, there need to be millions of people willing to help and willing to do the work of each getting to know a few people well in order to help them.

> How can you know that if you don't know them? What if it would be more effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make something they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to teach them how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To know whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people.

Or, you can trust the people who know the people. Or if you're willing to risk it a little bit more, you can trust the people who know and trust the people who know the people, and that gives you http://www.givewell.org/.

The problem is, none of us has enough time and resources to research everything, nor it would be the most effective use of our time. That's why, in general, humans invented professional specialization.

> I don't agree with this as a blanket statement.

I didn't really intended it to be a blanket one. I was trying to point out that among the possible effective ways of helping, there are a lot of easy things that do not require you to know the person you're helping, because the projects are resource-starved, not care-starved.

> Individual human beings don't average; every single one of us is a unique individual. Reducing 7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers is ignoring so much information that the claim that those aggregate effects are "what matters" seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

Oh yes they do, they do average quite well. I don't mean that you should always treat people as numbers, but there are cases when you absolutely must. You must because neither our heads nor our tools have enough computing power to account for every single person's differences and idiosyncrasies. In problems of scale, like saving lives effectively, you have to simplify, or you won't be able to do anything at all. [[...]]

> My family is worth more to me than someone I don't know in Africa because I have a close relationship with them. But the family of that person in Africa is worth more to them than I am. Saying that every single person must be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once again, ignores so much information about the individual people and their relationships that it seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

I get this sentiment. My family is worth "more" to me than some random African family in so far that I have stronger emotional ties with people I know better. And true, ceteris paribus, I would be able to help people I know personally much more. But I suppose I was talking about a different concept under the word "worth". What I'm aiming at is that for me, it is immoral to hurt an innocent stranger badly in some way, in order to save myself or someone close to me from some lesser hurt. Or if I had a choice to make, whether save 1000 strangers or 100 people I know, among which there are my friends, then however badly this would hurt I still feel that I need to choose 1000 strangers. In this way, human lives are equivalent. (In practice one also has to adjust for things like QALY, or alternative strategies, etc., but that's just deeper structure of the same general point.)

> And just so it's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone, seems to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good while avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their needs, so that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution; they want to be able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that they're helping in the most effective way they can.

I understand. But for me, insisting that we should care about only those we know is also a cop-out, a refusal to live in a society. Moreover, for most of the first-worlders, sending money is the most effective way they can help save lives. The actual help needs to be delivered by people personally involved with the recipents, but we have enough of them already. Most of the projects aren't constrained by personnel, they are constrained by resources. The "easy way" is indeed the right way for most, and if you look at people you'll notice that it's actually the hardest. People want to do everything but spend money. They'll happily volunteer, or participate in activism, or educate, or do absolutely anything as long as it doesn't involve them paying in hard cash. In so far as money is the unit of caring, they don't care.

It may be so that in the future, the biggest problems that need to be solved will require everyone to invest themselves personally. But right now, the most important problems involve producing and delivering life-saving medicine and tools to people in need. What they need the most is cold, hard cash. Mosquitoes don't care if you know the poor child they bit and infected. What they respond to is mosquito nets, and those aren't made of care, they're paid for by money.

> none of us has enough time and resources to research everything, nor it would be the most effective use of our time. That's why, in general, humans invented professional specialization.

So basically, you view charities as professional specialists in helping people. My answer to that is, if they really were professional, they would not be giving away things that could be traded for at a mutual profit. Instead, they would be using their professional expertise and the concentrated wealth given to them by donors to figure out how the people they want to help can create wealth. Then those people could just trade some of the wealth they create for other things they need.

> You must because neither our heads nor our tools have enough computing power to account for every single person's differences and idiosyncrasies.

No single human's head does. But the combination of all of our heads, plus our tools, working together, each of us dealing with a little piece of the problem, does. Your conclusion that "you have to simplify" assumes that we can't divide up the problem. But we can.

> or me, it is immoral to hurt an innocent stranger badly in some way, in order to save myself or someone close to me from some lesser hurt.

This is similar to Singer's argument that, if I would save a drowning child, even though it might ruin my clothes, I should also be willing to save someone in Africa, even if I have to give up some luxuries. This argument came up in a recent thread on effective altruism; rather than rehash my response here, I'll just link to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233978

> for me, insisting that we should care about only those we know is also a cop-out

I'm not suggesting that we should only care about those we know. I'm suggesting that the best way to care about people who need help in faraway countries is to ask ourselves why they need the help in the first place. We seem to think that all they need is some stuff given to them. In the short term, yes, that helps; people get better food, better homes, better clothes, better educations, etc.

But we've been doing this for decades now (if not longer), and yet the number of people who need all this help has not decreased. The deal was supposed to be that if we gave enough of these people enough resources, we would stop the cycle of poverty; in time, these people would stop needing help, because they would have become able to create their own wealth and trade it, instead of having to have wealth given to them. That hasn't happened. And that means that, by fixing the short term problem, by sending money, in the long term, we are not helping.

Eating an apple and feeling guilty... think about crazy people. I actually knew a handful of persons like that (mostly women). They cared about anyone except their own offspring, and the children are adults now, and struggling. So sorry, I can't agree with that, so sorry.

In economic terms, might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare?

I always thought some of my reasoning about the world was rather strange and hard to comprehend. Now I see that there are people who are even more extreme than me.

It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions.

You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want happiness and thus working towards others' happiness is a worthy goal.

The way you phrase it is as if one of those things follows from the other, but it doesn't.

Would you say "You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want ice cream, thus working towards giving them ice cream is a worthy goal"?

Just because other people want something doesn't mean that you value giving it to them, without some other unstated belief.

But it would make them happy? And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it. That’s like the whole point why social nations in Europe can exist. Because everyone is willing to help, sometimes even at their own cost.

>And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it.

This can't be true (or did you just mean for ice cream, where the cost is negligible?). Some people are going to have a terrible life, and for something like 20% of your salary, you could dramatically improve it. I doubt there is a way to measure the impact where giving, say, half of disposable income directly to some poor folks isn't a net positive.

Well, that's one of the parts of social democracies, where you end up spending around half of your salary on income taxes.

>It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions.

What are you on about now?

> might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare?

Yes, and in fact this (entirely secular) philosophy has a name: utilitarianism.

Altruism defined in wealth terms is very narrow. It allows you to steal billions and give away millions and come out with a net balance of "wealthy philanthropist". The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice.

I think many do-gooders struggle with the problem on different terms: whether they can find a place where they both fit in the system and yet also do good for the system. For example, a basic researcher in the sciences does nothing at all now but might open the door to great achievements later. A politician will be distrusted no matter what they do, but if they are adept they gradually reorganize the landscape to enable policies progressive towards their vision of a better society. There is enormous room for people to do work that benefits them and nobody else, but that doesn't lead to a concrete conclusion about all workers, because this problem is faced in every sector.

> The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice.

Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are real people who are, so far as I know, pretty much as the article describes:

http://www.givinggladly.com/

http://www.jefftk.com/

What I find interesting, is that Bill Gates (and others) are doing literally this, giving large amounts of their wealth away to people other than their kids, and yet it doesn't seem odd in the slightest to most people.

The obvious retort is that he has more than enough, even after his charity, which then begs the question: how much is enough? In particular, does Bill Gates only have "enough" relatively, or is there some absolute level of enough.

I think Bill Gates (and others) understands that leaving his children too much wealth will hurt them, preclude from growing up into a functioning member of society that trusts their own strength.

There isn't an absolute level of "enough", but as a practical limit I'd consider that enough is the amount that lets you live without worrying about money for food and shelter being the major part of your day-to-day decisionmaking process.

this is nothing new and modern psychology explains it well.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-fear/201001/a...

The linked article isn't about "hero altruism" as described in your links. It's about people who put the welfare of strangers above their own. For example by contributing 50+% of their income to charities, forgoing children in order to pursue career and donate more, and so forth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness

The switch to male pronouns partway through the article when it became a theoretical person was a little jarring.

Yeah! That was weird.

What about animal and plant life? Articles like these are very human-centric. For example it might be best if everyone from South America was forced to relocate to Central America, and make all of South America a nature reserve.

Just another campaign in the cultural marxist war on the family. Who could be against altruism?

Why is it "another campaign"? I only see the testimony of a person with an extreme (and commendable) sense of morality.

But there is no reason to be altruistic. It's a total fantasy, just like any religion is.

To believe otherwise is to live an unexamined life, and the unexamined life is not worth living.

Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).

Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.

I can't really follow this. For one thing, I don't know what "person of enough collective benefit" means (seems like you are missing a proposition or something).

For another thing, it's not true that people are doomed to ignorance, and it seems like your argument probably rests on that assumption.

I don't see for a second why you'd say people are doomed to ignorance. We use sense perception to perceive stuff, and we develop a coherent picture of the world (so we learn to reconcile optical illusions, for instance). And for all intents and purposes, that is reality, and it's objective.

Maybe there's some other reality underneath that, but then, maybe there are pink unicorns dancing on Alpha Centauri; it's totally arbitrary, and thus irrelevant.

Why: "While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined." I have chosen to believe that I am more finite than life. Further I believe that I can only examine a subset of each passing moment. I currently believe that the invention of seamless Virtual Reality is inevitable. Also that with it we will actually create a whole new modality of ignorance. I also believe, as Nietzsche did, that society will increasingly trend towards nihilism.

I meant "preposition" in the first sentence there.

You can't call something irrational without providing the logical framework and values. Replace being altruistic with "having sex" or "enjoying drugs", etc. Some people enjoy being altruistic. Others perhaps do it for the social status it gives them. Saying there's no reason for it is rather pointless.

So I guess you are defending living blindly and doing whatever you feel like doing, rather than actually thinking about what it makes sense to do.

That does not sound like a good strategy.

It may lead you to being a totally self-sacrificial shmoo living in a fantasy world, like the woman profiled in the article. Or it may lead you to being a jihadist. Or it may lead you to advocating political ideas that are destructive (like, say, the Nazis).

Man has the faculty of reason, let's use it.

There is such a thing as empathy for other people or animals that is genuine, but you shouldn't sacrifice more important values for it. Similarly I like playing board games sometimes, but I don't choose to play them all day and impoverish myself.

> Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).

At the end of the day we all are robot executing a program.Yet saying that serves little purpose. It's as stupid as saying "we're all made of atoms", it doesn't make someone who is pain feel better. There are reasonable solutions today to most problems of mankind. Making a difference is important because we are all on the same "boat". No man is an island, even nihilists like you aren't.

I consider myself to be a nihilist and suspect you may misunderstand it. The full scope of nihilism subsumes the smug and misanthropic blackhole that people seem to relate to it. It's just, as you put it, another robot executing a program. The fundamental belief is in fact that you have agency over this mechanism. You get to choose what to believe. You alone are responsible for your semantic relationship to reality. You can toil in the adaptation of harmony between your desires and an apparently meaningless world. You can get a pre-optimized strategy from your local minister. It's just an expression of a new degree of freedom. It's more of a meta-philosophy than a philosophy. It's intended to describe a lack of meaning and not to prescribe it.

Nihilism often goes unidentified. Anyone who has ever changed beliefs has acted momentarily as a nihilist. A person who is open-minded is a partial nihilist. A complete nihilist being someone who has developed a core belief that none of their other beliefs are certainly true. They simply recognize each as subjectively and temporarily optimal. Notably this evaluation changes, for every existing belief, every time you change any single belief. At it's extreme nihilism can be anxiety inducing. There's always that sneaking suspicion that your core belief is no longer subjectively or temporarily optimal. That and no way to test your suspicion but to maintain your core belief. You can get sort've stuck in an anti-dogmatic loop frantically evaluating philosophies. This doesn't have to be your experience of nihilism. You can simply adapt beliefs to manage this problem.

Problem is, reality is knowable and there is meaning in life. So you are wrong.

You can choose to believe that there is meaning in life or that your relationship with it necessarily generalizes to all other human beings. It's just sort've annoying.

You can't "choose to believe" that there is meaning in life for the same reason that I can't "choose to believe" that God exists, or that the moon is made of cheese, or that Saturn has 28 moons, or that the world is 8.7 billion years old (I just made that number up).

If you "choose to believe" something, it's just a fantasy. If you "choose to believe" something, you don't really believe it. To really believe something, you have to have enough evidence to be certain about it.

Fortunately, pleasure is inherently valuable (this is given by biology), and moreover, our brains supply us with pleasure (in the form of brain chemistry). So now we have a basic value that we can erect other values around. Of course only if they are valid. I can value preserving my life (for instance), art, my loved ones, and so on, but I can't value something arbitrarily.

(The exact psychological mechanism of genuinely enjoying and thus valuing art and loved ones, and such things, is not straighforward, but it's there. Seeing how preserving one's own life is a value is more straightforward. I am a total egoist, by the way, because you can't out of that with the framework I am describing.)

I'm choosing to believe that our notions of "belief" differ.

Well, that's the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and saying "lallalalaa I can't hear you!"

edit: In other words: you should not just choose to "believe" one thing or another. You should look at reality and decide what the evidence favors.

Otherwise, you don't really know, and you know that you don't really know, and you are flying blind in life, and thereby engendering in yourself a sense of helplesness and anxiety (no coincidence that one of Sartre's works was called Nausea...).

I believe your notion of "belief" is false. Empirically in fact. As evidenced here. I would suggest that you ask yourself if your current idea of "belief" is actually serving you. If you did that you might see why you're failing to persuade me to adapt that belief.

First, I'm not a nihilist.

Second, if we want to make the world a better place, the best way to do it is to spread rationality and to counter forms of irrationality---in this case, altruism.

I'm not against human happiness. I'm for it. But I'm for doing it in a way that works, not a way that doesn't.

These "saints" will destroy the world.

http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_ta...

You have a right to your opinion. Care to elaborate on why you think this way? What makes you think you are above everyone else?

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