Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

(I'm the Jeff mentioned one the piece)

This is a really good critique, but the "misery trap" section feels like it is describing a problem that EA definitely had early on, but mostly doesn't now?

In early EA, people started thinking hard about this idea of doing the most good they could. Naively, this suggests doing things like giving up things that are seriously important to you (like having children), illegibily make you more productive (like a good work environment), or provide important flexibility (like having free time), and the author quotes some early EAs struggling with this conflict, like:

> my inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent (eg on dinner) to a fractional “death counter” of lives in expectation I could have saved if I’d donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like ah yeah seems reasonable

I really don't think many EAs would say "seems reasonable" now. If someone says this to me I'd give some of my personal history with this idea and talk about how it turns out that in practice this works terribly for people: it makes you miserable, very slightly increases how much you have available to donate, and massively decreases your likely long-term impact through burnout, depression, and short-term thinking.

One piece of writing that I think was helpful in turning this around was http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html Another was https://www.benkuhn.net/box/

I think it's not a coincidence that the examples the author links are 5+ years old? If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.)

In case people are curious: Julia and I now have three kids and it's been 10+ years since stress and conflict about painful trade-offs between our own happiness and making the world better were a major issue for us.

It seems like the basic trick here is setting boundaries. It’s broader than EA, but some formulations of EA (and utilitarianism in general) seem to advocate for not setting boundaries; consider Pete Singer’s drowning child thought experiment and how he advocates for treating everyone in the world as having an equal claim on your time and money.

I think that practically speaking, setting boundaries is important and a philosophy that doesn’t take that into account is a bad philosophy. Real world organizations set boundaries all the time; that’s what budgeting is.

But boundaries still seem philosophically suspect due to their arbitrariness: why give 10%, say, and not some other number? Does someone have a philosophical answer for people struggling with this?

My counter-argument question is: why would sending 10% of your income to the other side of the world be a better use of that money than giving your dinner server a 10% higher tip (or other arbitrary numbers)? Both improve the quality of someone else life. Both reduce your own spending power by equal amounts. But money also isn't some static thing that disappears when you spend it. Is is a medium for representing the continuous exchange of work (net of losses due to taxes). This is what "The Wealth of Nations" and others around the time of Adam Smith started to teach, creating the modern field of economics, and the basis for describing capitalism.

The article here seemed to mention being comfortable with the number being what was important, perhaps more so than the exact value of the number, or its arbitrariness?

Perhaps then the only losing move is not to play? So, even savings are good, since you are giving someone else access to your money, but completely removing yourself from society as a miser or hermit is expected to be a negative for society, since you are depriving others of your talents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Cost-effect...

The cost to yourself is the same. However, the benefit to others varies drastically.

I think EA is on firmer ground when the boundary has already been set. Let's say you have $10,000 that you've already decided goes to charity. (Suppose it's in a donor-advised fund.) What is the best way to spend it? EA says that it matters how you spend it, that you should try do at least as good job at this as you do choosing an investment when you invest your savings, that it's a hard problem, and that there should be charity advisers to help you make a good decision.

>net of losses due to taxes

It doesn't stop working then. It's still spent on things that put people to work.

It is not a zero-sum game. Some money spent on labor adds more jobs than others. For example, if I employ people building a road to nowhere, I have only employed the builders. If I build a road that is needed, more economic opportunities are unlocked.

The assumption of EA is that you strive for extra income to donate it. If we simply assume that you only maximize income for your own well being then spending your money will also improve the wellbeing of others. The only thing that wouldn't improve it is to keep money in your bank account, forcing other people to wait for you to spend it.

The reason for 10% is because (a) tithing isn't that hard on most people's finances and (b) it's a nice round number, memetically strong and aesthetically satisfying. Sure, it's arbitrary -- but it's arbitrary in a way that was designed to appeal to as many people as possible without making them feel like they have a moral obligation to make arbitrarily large sacrifices.

That's it. There's no broader philosophical reason for why 10% is Objectively Correct. This is driven entirely by practicality. (If we had twelve fingers, the number would probably be 12%.)

Yes, I'm well aware. I agree that it's arbitrary, and it doesn't bother me much.

The problem is that this argument doesn't seem likely to succeed if you're talking to someone who is especially interested in philosophical or moral consistency. The arbitrariness of the boundary will bother them.

> (If we had twelve fingers, the number would probably be 12%.)

Actually, it would be 8.33̅% - ie 10/100 in base 12, or 12/144.

Ah, of course. Thank you, kind emissary from Twelve-Fingered Alternate Earth.

Actually, I use hexadecimal (or occasionally 6, 60, or 5040 for the factors) - for me it would be 10% => 6.25% (1/10 => 1/16).

Not quite because if we had 12 fingers we would most likely use base 12.

It sort of seems like if you have to set hand-wavy boundaries to avoid making EA unworkable, maybe it's not that sound of a philosophy after all.

I think it's a broader question than that. What moral philosophies set boundaries? How do they justify them? Can you live with that?

So here's a clear boundary: thou shalt not kill.

But do you think the Ukrainians fighting the invasion by killing Russians are wrong?

There seem to be boundaries in all moral philosophies, some more arbitrary than others.

the characteristics of evolved human brains make not setting boundaries suboptimal. it's the same reason you "pace yourself" when running a race. better hardware would enable a more aggressive approach but we have to work with what we've got.

> If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.)

A big problem for me is that the various huge income differences exist in large part due to systemic violence. A factory worker makes $N, a software developer makes $50N supporting ads selling the factory's product, and the profits are largely captured by the super rich making $100000N. Violence -- colonialism, authoritarianism, wage slavery, nationalism and so on -- is required to make this happen and keep it going.

I'm not involved with "effective altruism" as a movement, only as the general concept of giving money in a numerically effective way. So numerically the situation is that for every $1 a high income person in a developed country considers donating, they may have done more than $1 in damage to get it; or some part of that $1 was earned through some absolutely evil means; or both. This depends on the job but once you reach the bar of, let's say twice the U.S. personal median income, it's virtually certain. So there is no way to reach ethical parity: it would be digging your way out of a hole.

Existing people need to eat and live so they must participate in the system as best they can. But once the essentials are gotten along with some small treats like ice cream, things become much more difficult ethically. The extra money is blood money, and what can a person do with that?

This feels like a pretty standard critique though I don't know if it counts as a "misery trap" if that is a technical term. I'm sure it's been discussed before and would be interested in knowing how "EA" people resolve it.

that's my quote, just want to add a few notes because I originally typed that out quickly in a comment on twitter and didn't expect it to get traction

1. At the time iirc maybe 60% of people meant something like "that's a reasonable symptom to run into from EA thinking, I've had something like it too, it's hard to fix even if you know it's not ideal". Although maybe 20% of people did think it actually just made sense as a way to operate and didn't see it as a big problem

2. I agree it's much less common now. I think it's possibly because EA has shifted more towards longtermism. Although around 2016 I switched to working on AGI safety which is very longtermist, so it's possible that's my local bias

3. Luckily the symptom was short lived, maybe ~4-6 weeks in total while I was also experiencing startup founder anxiety separate of EA. I consider myself maybe a little hurt by EA, but not that traumatized, and I still think it has lots of merits even if I don't identify as an "EA person" anymore

Effective altruism is only effective if you also give altruism to yourself.

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