Against Effective Altruism
fantasticanachronism.com
fantasticanachronism.com
The critical flaw of the essay is that the only evidence to back this point up is (1) "look, a bunch of people donated to the NY opera!" and (2) "look what some effective altruist said; he must represent all altruists". All in all, the essay's erratic logic is only rendered worse by its incomprehensible thesaurus mangling. Of course, intentional obfuscation is a hedge against criticism.
There's poorly-written philosophy and well-written philosophy. This is neither.
Edit: My apologies for the caustic comment, but I felt it warranted, given the glib tone of the article
It's definitely not written to win over any EA supporter, that's for sure.
We probably just define EA differently. When I'm elected dictator, it'll be illegal to write an essay like this without supplying your working definition of the thing you're against.
I don't think EA is utilitarian. Or at least, not in any way that requires objective moral realism. EA doesn't say, "moral goodness is quantifiable and I can prove on graph paper that one life saved from malaria is equivalent to 137 meals delivered to hungry people." It says, "I don't know what goodness is or how to measure it, but I need some way to decide where to donate, so..."
In other words, EA demands that you actually think about where your money goes and whether that's the best place for it, rather than just donating to whichever charity has the most emotionally moving imagery and music in its TV commercials. Once you do that, it naturally follows that almost any system you use will give the same answer: "Sheesh, I should probably donate less to the animal shelter." And I think 99% of the hate EA gets is rooted from the fact that people like donating to their local animal shelter, but can't really justify it.
Formal EA organizations and conferences also have a lot of utilitarians heavily involved.
So I think it's fair to say that EA is rooted in utilitarianism, although those same utilitarians might say, for utilitarian reasons, that it's a good thing when people think carefully -- or at all! -- about how to be more effective and have a higher impact, regardless of what metaethical views (if any) those people subscribe to.
I guess it comes down to this: when people argue with utilitarianism, in my experience it's specifically the part about treating strangers and friends equally, i.e. the idea that it might be better to save two drowning strangers than to save one drowning friend. I don't think EA relies on that or is based on it; you can have a value system that says it's better to save your drowning friend than to save ten or a hundred drowning strangers, and still find EA valuable.
Just bite the bullet. Say, "I've grown disenchanted with people, they suck. I'm going to dedicate myself to improve the lives of animals instead, who are mostly blameless victims of humanity, and are much cheaper to make happy than a human".
Utilitarianism doesn't really tell you how many dogs is a human worth, so you well can decide that you value dogs very highly, and that's all that's needed to make donating to an animal shelter very rational.
But there's a lot of complaining about the idea of comparing two different kinds of altruism. And the whole point of EA, I think, is that the fact that it's uncomfortable leads people not to do it at all, and prodding them to think about it feels like an attack.
That assumes a tie-breaking morality that says objectively that animal shelters aren't a good enough cause. If that's your mindset, then no wonder people who donate to animal shelters don't like you talking about EA : - )
What it does say is: conditional on selecting a utility function, you should attempt to use the tools of rationality, statistics, etc to maximize it efficiently. The fact that particular groups of EAs have sufficiently similar utility functions to pool resources in determining how to maximize them does not mean that all EAs must agree on those utility functions.
If your utility function says the greatest good is converting non-believers to flat earthism, then EA says you ought to study how best to achieve that before devoting lots of resources blindly. It doesn't tell you that flat earthism is bad.
Comic book Thanos wants to kill half the universe to woo Death, as in the female deity representing death. No altruism in that as far as I can tell, just the world's most brutal romantic gesture.
This is probably correct; if you maximize anything hard enough you'll end up in a logic trap, turn the world into paperclips, and get eaten by a utility monster[0]. That's because rationality doesn't actually work in the real world[1]. Of course, "just don't try hard" isn't going to work for everyone.
I think if you do try to rationalize "utilitarianism but not calculating too hard", you end up at virtue ethics, but ironically I haven't thought about that hard enough to say.
[0] ie you can increase happiness temporarily by giving everyone drugs, they'll just die after
[1] https://metarationality.com, also see Taleb on why you shouldn't always "maximize"
- policy decisions should be made on a consequentialist basis (which can involve utiliarianism like calculations but is to me most about considering second and third order consequences, with attempts at calculation as merely one mechanism through which to do so)
- personal decisions should be made on a virtue ethics basis
I'm not going to claim this as a Right Answer but this model has proven to be the least wrong / most useful one I've encountered in practice, at least for me.
The Stanford Encyclopedia gives several forms for instance. It seems probable any given person will pick one form to subscribe to, and then have some particular interpretation of what that means to them. That's what I'm curious about.
Virtue ethics is ... about trying to reach for the Good. People of faith regularly have a similar outlook except perhaps without one of the 'o's.
Caring about people in general, trying to be trustworthy, trying to be honourable, trying to look after your friends.
I guess you could say it's characterised by trying to come away from a situation feeling like you've done the morally virtuous thing (I am very aware of the tautology there) rather than necessarily the utility maximising thing.
It's very fuzzy, but also very human, and I'm conscious that I've not given you a solid meta-ethical grounding for it ... but then again, I'm not convinced there -is- one, and yet it seems to work for me.
Sorry for the massive vagueness, but realistically it cashes out to "try to do the right thing", which is necessarily vague and dependent on your own perception of what is morally correct ... which is why it's a terrible way to make policy (IMO) but works well on an individual basis, at least for me.
I guess the issue I have with virtue ethics in concept is that it's fuzzy enough that I'm not clear on how it sets itself apart against deontology and consequentialism. The way you put it, it seems deontology-lite.
> Caring about people in general, trying to be trustworthy, trying to be honourable, trying to look after your friends.
So it works out to sort of deontology, except less rigid maybe? Rather than a flat command of "tell the truth", you have a fuzzy idea of "try to be trustworthy"?
Do consequences matter? That is, what is important in the end, that you did the work of trying to look after a friend, even if in the end your effort made their lives worse, or whether your friends are happy?
I guess you could say it's characterised by trying to come away from a situation feeling like you've done the morally virtuous thing (I am very aware of the tautology there) rather than necessarily the utility maximising thing.
> I guess you could say it's characterised by trying to come away from a situation feeling like you've done the morally virtuous thing (I am very aware of the tautology there) rather than necessarily the utility maximising thing.
I think any utilitarian has to recognize that utility can't be predicted very far. Eg, the utility of a backup generator is highly dependent on whether you ever end up needing one, which highly depends on the local weather. So it makes no sense to obsess over it like a robot, you can't get there anyway.
The way I see it is that the split is about what matters in the end.
In consequentialist frameworks, it's the consequences. If everyone is happy, then there's no problem to be solved. On the other hand, if something horrible happened when somebody tried their best, they still did a bad thing in the end.
In deontology, it's the reverse. If you followed the rules, your conscience can be clear even if something bad did result. If you didn't, then you failed in your duties even if disaster was averted.
If I can ground why I find it useful at all, it would be in the intuition (and N=1 anecdata) that a heuristic of 'following the rules most of the time will, in fact, produce decent consequences overall.'
Caveats to that:
- I reject deontological absolutism as ridiculous and counterproductive.
- I can't really give you a solid idea of what my version of 'the rules' are and I certainly can't justify them beyond 'they feel right to me.'
With respect to the last part, I try to live by one of the tenets of Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism - "make the best choice you can with the information you have available, and if you did that, your conscience should be clear even if something bad results" with the caveat of "but you should probably still be -annoyed- that you got it wrong, and your conscience should only remain clear if you make an effort to understand how that happened and not repeat the error."
I very much have consequentialist -instincts-, but on a personal level I've effectively derived a form of virtue ethics from those instincts because I find it a more effective way to get an overall net good set of consequences than brute force calculation.
Fundamentally my choice to use of a form of virtue ethics for decision making is instrumental, not epistemic.
An example: as a general rule, lying is bad ... but keeping your mouth shut and/or omitting details is often useful, and I will happily lie to keep somebody's secret (e.g. avoiding outing somebody) both because of the desire to be trustworthy -and- because 'avoiding harm coming to your friends' is a virtue in and of itself.
I'm not sure I've made myself any clearer here.
- Consequentialism has real issues with ethics in the very large to infinite scale (time, numbers of people, etc.). Most theories of ethics have issues in this limit as well, but Macaskill accepts the repugnant conclusion and advocates for "longtermism", which I think is undeveloped in anything more than a vague "we should think about the future" sense.
- It's perfectly valid for a human society to decide to have some non-consequentialist bright lines they won't cross.
I think you just need to believe two believe the following to be mostly an effective altruist.
1. Helping two people is better than helping one
2. Helping one person a lot is better than helping another person a little.
Moral realism is the position that mind-independent moral facts exist; it doesn't entail any particular belief about how or whether we can come to know them.
The book 'The Elephant in the Brain' by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler describes this position and has references to a lot of research.
It seems to me quite odd that moral philosophy seems always to get so bogged down in lingo. You'd think the study of "how to be good" should be something that values directness and accessibility. What is the point of a moral philosophy that only a couple academics can follow?
Analytic (Anglo/UK philosophy) philosophy tries to solve this by being extremely clear about everything to the point of looking like a math paper. This turned out to not work because math can't do that, but it still means there's a lot of specific -isms.
Continental (French/German) philosophy seems to just lean into it and can be nearly unreadable; some of this is translation issues, some people say this is because their points are so deep they can't be expressed in clear language, and some people say this is because French people don't respect philosophers unless they don't understand what they're talking about.
As for what you can do about this - well, maybe you could just ask them what they meant?
I'd argue that it is because among people talking about "artificial general intelligence" there is a rough consensus about what "intelligence" means in this context (generally, according to Legg&Hutter 2007, which is a long discussion but the essence is captured by "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments") and it's counterproductive to explicitly define it in detail (which is very tricky) unless the argument hinges on some nuance of the definition, which it almost never does.
In essence, the GAI arguments are unchanged for a whole 'family of definitions' so an attempt to push the debate towards "define intelligence" is just derailing the discussion by provoking to repeat a discussion that's essentially settled 15 years ago. In any GAI-related discussion I can reasonably presume that we have a shared understanding of what we're talking about, there isn't much debate about the terms within the field - and if it seems that someone not from the field is applying a wildly different definition of intelligence (i.e. taking the colloquial understanding or some definition that explicitly refers to humans or one that adds in specific goals as opposed to being good at achieving whatever goals the agent has) then it can be pointed out that no, that's not what we're talking about, but within the field the terminology is clear enough, and also as soon as you're talking about detail, you aren't talking about "intelligence in general" but rather about capabilities for specific kinds of decisonmaking or performance on specific tasks; and if a philosopher says "well, that isn't true intelligence" then I can fully concede it, but just state that for the discussion of AI it doesn't matter if it's "true intelligence" but this is what we're talking about as those properties are considered to be sufficient for the described capabilities and consequences.
If you're not careful about it though, people tend to slide into using specific definitions of "intelligence" like "calculation ability", implying it'll increase linearly as you add more GPUs to your data center. And you end up with assumptions that they'll necessarily be cold, calculating and perfect like a computer, but boredom could be a necessary property of a general intelligence, otherwise it'd get stuck on problems.
Or not. If not, maybe humans aren't generally intelligent.
The way I see it, as soon as you think about it seriously it becomes obvious that all (or at least most) the negative feelings we have are there for a very good practical reason. Boredom is effectively a push to prevent an agent from being stuck in a local optimum, and required to get a more effective explore-vs-exploit tradeoff (for whom we have theoretical grounding for what's good or not based on the analysis of "multi-armed-bandit" problems), and the same applies for satiating pleasure e.g. hedonic treadmill; burnout is required for an agent to be able to "say" "this isn't working, you need to do literally anything else"; fear has obvious benefits for risk management; and anger, hate and vengeance has obvious causes in game theory about optimal strategies in multi-actor games with potential defectors.
So that is an argument that any effective general intelligence is likely to possess at least some of the emotions that we recognize, simply because they are effective for a purpose.
On the other hand, these factors are (or were) required for a specific environment, namely evolution in a social community of peers - so perhaps an agent can be scarily effective without them, especially if their environment is very different.
Considering much of continental philosophy is a response to Kant and/or Hegel, I don't know how you're able to convince yourself of this rather reductionist take on the history of that conversation (because this isn't even close to fair) unless you've never read Kant or Hegel, and don't understand why it would follow that the way one writes is implicated by the conclusions of Kant/Hegel.
This goes as far back as Nietzsche, who never stops talking about why form/content divide is completely misleading and a historical artifact itself, some examples off the top of my head, paraphrased, like "The Greeks thought Socrates was refuted by his ugliness"; "Spinoza purposely writes in a style to make you think his argument is mathematically irrefutable, as if it were dipped in bronze", "naming things is the first form of political power", etc, etc. This theme carries threw from his first book to his last.
There's more to this story when you get to the likes of Heiddeger, Derrida, Foucault, etc so I'm condensing for brevity, but its just strange to me that you approach continental philosophy as some arbitrary veering off course when there's a well-vetted history as to why it takes such form over time. You're not actually making some argument from first principles (the conduction of philosophical discourse looks like this...") nor are you demonstrating an exhaustive accounting of European philosophy, you're merely demonstrating you've already made a certain philosophical commitment, and that's that.
Conversely (per gp), analytic tries too hard to be clear and precise, at the expense of possibly missing some difficult to express subtleties (or, perhaps continentals might say, missing the point entirely).
But it's no surprise that continental is always gonna get trashed when people who aren't pre-committed to the canon want to discuss philosophical topics. And I agree with the takes that say (as I understand gp to be implying) that philosophy needs other styles to be accessible and to effectively cross-pollinate with other disciplines.
I understand the modern analytics now consider their own approach to have not worked that well and been more of a writing style than a field of study, but that may just be the ones I know. (http://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-end-of-analytic...)
I don't think I know any authentic continentals to know what they think about themselves; in America you tend to just run into people who've misread them (political activists who go around calling everything "social constructs").
The field seems to attract mostly curious people and overthinkers but also a very vocal minority of people that don’t seek answers or even very good questions but want to ramble in a seemingly eloquent way about very broad topics - so broad that philosophers seldom dare to write books about them without decades of sincere chipping at academic details under their belt.
This blog post I just dragged myself to read until the end has nothing to do with philosophy - that’s not a dig at the author, more at the audience which assumes that a post about moral philosophy obviously has to be philosophy. By typing this out I hope to be able to illustrate the logical error that lead to this top comment along its children.
It’s just a blog post that was obviously crafted with a certain audience in mind and more of a cheeky rambling than an honest attempt to talk about moral philosophy in a way that transcends the discussion of pretty well read people with too many alcohol in them at the ugly and tired end of a drawn out social event.
The rant is at times funny to read because of the use of so many exclamation marks, italics and whatnot. I imagined a person gesturing wildly with a counterpart gasping in the pauses to try for a rebuttal but finally nodding apathetically while swaying his glass of wine.
TL,DR: This is not philosophy but a blog post and you guys should keep that in mind while discussing its content.
Yourself included, apparently
> Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader.
As fun as it is to re-litigate the culture wars of yesterdecade, I don't really think the post-Bush administration diminishment of public Christianity in the U.S. is creating the society that the New Atheists want(ed). Conspiracy theories and irrational memeplexes have completely run rampant in the public sphere in the U.S. and the western world. Superstition and magical thinking is all over the place, the objects of devotion just happen to center around modern politics and items from the news, rather than figures from ancient history. If anything, many people are less firm atheists and more like apatheists - people just sort of believe whatever their social circle and social media reinforces.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
I would love to have something equivalently helpful and engaging that isn't based on superstitions. But something like the Big 5 model is a mouthful of sawdust compared with the other things I mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
For self awareness in the small (i.e. surfacing my subconscious view of a specific situation) I've always been fond of rune casting, or in a pinch a dice roll or coin flip.
In the sense that if I'm faced with a choice between two options, I flip a coin for it, and immediately upon seeing the results can tell if that's the 'right' answer or not.
Must be because of a comet that passes by on that cadence.
Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
I also tried searching for distribution of astrological signs by birth month and it was weird but there was a 1:1 distribution (… I joke) But the fact you didn’t investigate this and jumped straight to support of astrology clearly pegs you as a Virgo
And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism
https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-...
Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions.
Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/
Ironically (or not), Buddhism definitely involves meditating about death, but it might be harder to encounter it in the modern world where you don't have nine children six of whom died of consumption.
It sounds a bit boring though. They should start a fight club, or throw themselves off cliffs, or something.
i.e. we have it as a sort of cultural and moral framework but faith (or lack thereof) is effectively orthogonal to that.
Edit: Found a quote from one of Newbigin's books: “The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashed demonic powers.” From his book Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philos...
The unloyal opposition being people who want to donate to local charities, people who hate charities because they're billionaire conspiracies, people who want to keep their money, and humanities types who don't like STEM types and want to do radical poetry reading meetings instead[0]. And people who've noticed the "longtermists" don't actually have positions that involve being "long term"[1].
[0] https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/146925467086249574...
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-long-term-about-longtermi...
[0] $3,900 for four nights https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-co...
> The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values.
I know Bush himself was elected as "religious right", but the author seems to view the neocons as atheist ("moralogian"), and Bush himself was kind of a well-meaning puppet puppy... I always thought "atheism for the masses" got rolling much earlier in '92 (I think of Clinton as "nihilist pseudo-liberal conservative" but that's just me).
I don't even know what to call the current moment - batshit delusionalism? That kinda works...
Neocons are pretty secular so the moralogian reference isn't inaccurate. But it's probably more compatible with Bush's evangelical Christian worldview than the distinction between moralogian and theologian makes it to be.
The article, as far as I can follow it, seems to be trying to discredit the idea that we can know what a good measure is, objectively. Okay, I guess I can see that. But who cares? Lives/dollar seems like a good measure to me, and I like it. No more reasoning required. It's my money and I decide what to do with it. And I can still think people who disagree with me are wrong.
Moral realism, metaethics, what is all this crap? Is there more to Effective Altruism that I am unaware of? What are they even trying to argue? On either side?
There is an argument that you don't like the process by which the moral values were arrived to, but that's hardly a reason to indulge in moral nihilism.
Eg, I could decide that:
1. God exists.
2. God wants me to do/not do these particular things.
3. God will punish me for disobeying.
4. I still don't care and will do whatever I want.
You can't prevent #4 by any means whatsoever. "I don't care" is always an option.
You've got the concepts right.
However, Effective Altruism (with capital letters) has evolved into a collection of organizations, communities, bloggers, and personalities who exist adjacent to the "rationalist" community and spend a lot of time debating about things. There's also a large sect of the EA community that believes the risk of artificial intelligence becoming sentient and taking over the world in the future is the biggest risk to the world and therefore deserving of a lot of EA funding. Different people will give you different answers about how relevant this group is to the broader EA movement.
The more I read about Effective Altruism, the more I think it's best to stick to the high-level concepts and not get involved with all of the drama that surrounds self-labeled Effective Altruist communities or "movements". It gets weird, quickly.
In my experience this is true of most things.
Against ‘Effective Altruism’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28520719 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)
Also (thanks jinpan!):
Effective altruism as a tower of assumptions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32576224 - Aug 2022 (89 comments)
Edit: ok, also these:
The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386984 - Aug 2022 (185 comments)
‘Effective Altruism’ Is Neither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32224597 - July 2022 (22 comments)
Notes on Effective Altruism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609325 - June 2022 (116 comments)
The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285371 - May 2022 (78 comments)
Effective altruism is not effective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813763 - April 2021 (240 comments)
https://mflb.com/fine_1/effective_alturism_morality_out.html
EA won't produce the proper outcomes. It's the 80,000 hours people are likely more attracted to and the job listings that come with it. In most instances, positive outcomes for humans begin with negative perspectives because that's how our psychology works.
Practical Altruism isn't about what people deserve it's about what they need. It's not enough to teach a man to fish if he is unwilling to learn. You have to make them believe there will be a crop shortage so they need to learn.
True altruists will change their methods of effecting change for the situation, people, times, and needs. Because, if not we as humans will find a way to corrupt it.
Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. Which is why the invisible hand acts the way it acts.
But why should I care about these effects if I am not in charge of such systems?
Effective altruism brings opportunities for status, for sure.
But that doesn’t mean trying to help people effectively is a bad thing.
Would you walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond, when you could easily intervene and save them?
I'm not serious about the above, of course, but one can tie theirself in knots overthinking the moral consequences of every action. Which is, I believe, a critique that works equally well against both EA and anti-EA.
Do the right thing. If you fuck that up, try to learn and do the right thing tomorrow. Don't overthink it.
> The moralogians appeal to nothing and expect you to accept it! Is the origin of moral facts natural, or supernatural? If natural, can we engineer our own? Why or why not?
Of course morals are natural in origin, and the shared basis for them is genetic at its core.
Does this imply there is some grand plan outside of natural selection for them? Of course not. Does it mean that these rules can be engineered to our liking? No more than you can engineer your own DNA. Maybe someday, but what's the reason? Our billions of years of evolution has done a pretty good job of it IMO.
As for altruism, it's painfully obvious that a) it does exist, and that b) it is a universal condition we all hold.
Where did altruism come from? Dawkins points to our ancestor's lengthy existence in a small group of ~200 individuals. Survival meant not only optimizing for your own genetic survival, but for that of the collective.
Imagine for a moment the vast bulk of humanity living without altruism. I suspect things would fall to pieces very quickly. It's a good thing our genetic code is littered with bits of rules like altruism.
This is true. Or wrong, because getting nothing in return is very much in the spirit of Christian self-sacrifice.
Huh? Yes it does. You can't go on a rant in favor of moral anti-realism and them criticize people for not having the right set of values. I mean, you can, but it makes you an idiot.
Why not? I'd say huge parts of human behavior are enormously utilitarian. Eg, a huge amount of people will be pro-war if the war has a good purpose to it. Ultimately a war consists of A killing B, and B killing A, and most everyone will find a side to cheer for, which is usually extremely predictable based on who and where they are.
> It's not possible to reduce morality to mathematics and dollar expenditure but that seems to be what effective altruists are proposing.
I think on the whole examining the consequences of our actions results in a more pleasant world to live in long term. It's important to actually think why we're doing what we're doing. Is it to earn moral points for ourselves, or to create a better world long term?
Eg, charity done carelessly can be destructive to those we intend to help.
(It would appear that "moral realism" is just another way of saying "absolute morality", or "moral absolutism".)
The other variant of the GiveWell.org kind which is QALY focused appears to have worked on the QALY metric. Not everyone believes in QALY-based utilitarianism, so they're predictably unhappy, but that's it.
"I have heard that this MacAskill is an Effective Altruist. Now Singer considers that in the regulation of funeral matters a spare simplicity should be the rule. MacAskill thinks with EA doctrines to change the customs of the kingdom - how does he regard them as if they were wrong, and not honor them? Notwithstanding his views, MacAskill buried his own parents in a sumptuous manner, and so he served them in the way which his doctrines discountenance.
…
"Heaven gives birth to creatures in such a way that they have one root, and MacAskill makes them to have two roots. This is the cause of his error. In the most ancient times, there were some who did not inter their parents. When their parents died, they took them up and threw them into some water-channel. Afterwards, when passing by them, they saw foxes and wild-cats devouring them, and flies and gnats biting at them. The perspiration started out upon their foreheads, and they looked away, unable to bear the sight. It was not on account of other people that this perspiration flowed. The emotions of their hearts affected their faces and eyes, and instantly they went home, and came back with baskets and spades and covered the bodies. If the covering them thus was indeed right, you may see that the filial son and virtuous man, in interring in a handsome manner their parents, act according to a proper rule."
EA is based on our natural emotional responses: pain is bad, pleasure is good, etc. But it rationalizes until it has lost its own roots. Suddenly we're debating about making lions extinct because they hunt prey and converting the universe to hedonium. You must preserve the root!
(I have no dog in this fight, this is the best I can do to sort out the meaning of the post, I'm not necessarily interested in defending its argument)
https://www.readthesequences.com/Purchase-Fuzzies-And-Utilon...
(I do not by any means endorse all of EY's opinions but that specific article resonates with me)
The ground of ethics in Mencius is natural sentiment. You nurture your seeds of naturally good sentiments, and so grow into an ethical person who has mature sentiments. At the end of the process of maturation, you still have your seeds of desire intact and flowering in their fullest form.
The ground of ethics in EA/utilitarianism/Mohism is pleasure/pain/utility functions. That seems to make sense on the surface, but then the whole thing falls apart once you dig into it. The root of the thing is my instinct that I want my own utility function to be satisfied. Nothing in that root compels me to care about anyone else's utility. The logical thing to do is to just rewrite your own utility function to be happy with whatever happens and then stop trying to be a utilitarian or anything else! Why on earth should I rewrite it to "expand the circle" to use Singer's term or embrace "universal love" to use Moh's term? And if I could rewrite my utility function to care about others, why shouldn't we all just rewrite our functions to desire annihilation or whatever? The universe is already full of utility monsters. Am I supposed to slay them or let them slay me?
The fact that all the EA people end up being hypocrites is interesting just because it shows that end of the day they're not really able to put into practice the idea that their own utility is just one drop in a sea of cosmic utility. No one can.
* Mencius also appeals to Heaven as the source of our natural sentiments, so it's not a totally naturalistic system of ethics, but the system is pretty close to naturalistic, and you can choose to take that element of his system or leave it when you modernize him.
I don't find 'grounding ethics' to be a particularly fruitful thing to attempt, and having looked at efforts to do so that clearly involved far more intellectual investment than I've put into it, the obvious holes therein suggest there are better things for me to spend my thinking time on.
One proponent of EA did something different from what another proponent of EA suggests is correct (i.e. held a lavish funeral for a family member rather than something more sustainable).
This is a demonstration that when EA creates an internal conflict between what our natural impulses say are correct and the deductions of EA's tenants say are correct, the former is destined to win.
Instead of arguing the definition of morality, just go out and help other people. The end.
"Instead of arguing Utilitarianism vs Deontology, everyone should just follow Virtue Ethics"
It's almost as if there's some sort of a need for a normative science of what acts are truly helpful in the sense of improving lives and which aren't. I propose we call those acts that are helpful and make things better "good." Then we can go about trying to figure out what acts are "good" and under what circumstances in some kind of systematic way. Let's give this enterprise a Greek name to make it sound more impressive.
Actions that externalize the feedback and set up gatekeepers to manage matters seem to hit diminishing returns rapidly.
In a musical metaphor, life is jazz. An Effective Altruism seems like so many reams of sheet music that lack joy.
One of the strengths of the 'treat tropical diseases' arm of EA is that 99% people can agree that fewer deaths from malaria is a positive outcome, without having to know WTF "metaethics" and "anti-realism" and "deontology" mean
"metaethics": Study of moral thought. Rather arguing about whether euthanasia is a good thing or not, we're arguing about lofty matters like "what is morality anyway?"
"anti-realism": The rejection of the idea that a sentence with a moral statement is true or false. Eg, an anti-realist would look at "euthanasia is a good thing" and say that in reality you can't say "that's true", or "that wrong" like you might to "There's a bottle of milk in the fridge". In reality it means something more like "Euthanasia is a good thing if you subscribe to my particular values", or "The thought of being able to end my life when I want makes me happy".
"deontology": Moral behavior is following rules without regards of any consequences. Eg, if the rules are "don't lie", then you don't. No matter what happens as a result of that. If innocent people die, you still did a good thing. As opposed to consequentialism which holds that it's the consequences what matter. Lying to murderers is a good thing because it keeps victims alive. Lying about being qualified to build a bridge is bad because you'll probably kill people.
Would it be better to buy 10 needy people health insurance, or to use that money advocating for health care reforms? What if it's 100 people instead?
In general, should you act locally or act globally? Should you invest your money to use it for big improvements, or spend on an ongoing basis making small improvements instead?
I might be able to for example estimate that 1M spent on reform might have x% chance of improving outcomes for y number people, but it would be so tortured of an inference it's really just a guess based on what you already think. As a result I think going with your best guess is good enough, to avoid decision paralysis if nothing else.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than someone else, that's great—but in that case, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...