Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion

Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating all your excess money to organizations to end malaria?

It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world.

It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals.

You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world.

If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.

This is awful. He starts with people giving away money and wanting it to do the most good rather than be wasted and goes from there to trollies running over people, leaving drowning kids to die, butchering people for their organs, and bulldozing cities. This appears to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities of chaos and uncertainty.

Just to point out two very real examples that run counter to this thinking:

Recent studies of benefit programs that give college scholarships to top academic performers it was found that these programs are entirely dominated by girls with essentially zero male participation. This was unexpected, unintended, and raises some major issues regarding gender balance and equity. But in the context set up in this talk both of these outcomes are essentially the same and not differentiable.

This is also all hovering near the issue of how best to execute philanthropy. One of the big issues in this space is how much workers involved should be paid. Currently dominant thinking is that charity work as good and wholesome and no money should be wasted and so pay for charity workers tends to be a fraction of what people with similar skills would make at the same or similar jobs in industry. However, experimentation has shown that paying charity workers similar amounts to what people earn in industry jobs results in increased productivity and mission successes. So there is a very interesting open question about exactly how much charity workers should be paid. It seems that in this piece the argument is being made that the entire issue is fundamentally grotesque and immoral.

So the issues related to making philanthropy are real and do not in general involve trollies, drowning children, people as potential organ banks willing or not, or the bulldozing of cities. This is really just another sad and tired example of philosophers completely missing the point of pragmatic action.

Hey, maybe when dealing with a runaway trolly or when deciding what worlds to bring into existence you can really nitpick the details but I don't really need to have that sorted out to tell that I prefer 10 people's lives saved compared to 5 or compared to a puppy getting surgery.

If someone can do the math and tell me this charity would on average save X lives while that will save Y with your money, that already helps me a lot compared to just donating to Red Cross or whoever because I saw their ad without considering strong alternatives.

Every single moral system leads to repugnant conclusions if you push it just right.

So okay, you don't like utilitarianism. Let's try deontology for size. Deontology works effectively to following a set of rules and duties, consequences be damned. So if our rules say you don't steal, then you don't. Don't murder. Etc.

But the snag is that since you don't care about the consequences, any consequences, of any size are irrelevant. So for instance, if contraception is deemed bad, then no amount of negative consequences has any relevance. Families are brought down to crushing poverty, orphanages are overflowing, starving children are wandering on the streets? Absolutely not a reason to change that rule.

Also, where utilitarianism can make iffy tradeoffs (eg, this particular person would be better dead because we'd benefit from it), there's usually some practical limit to that. If you ever can do that under deontology you can do it on an unlimited scale. If you ever work out that "those people" aren't really people legally speaking and you can just kill one of them, then you can kill them all you want, any time you want, on any scale you want.

Point being, most any system followed indiscriminately has problems because people are people and will look for loopholes and ways to exploit any rules to benefit.

I didn’t listen to this, but the essay is full of straw men and contrived arguments about how utilitarianism is a bad moral philosophy. While utilitarianism is not perfect, this essay just regurgitates others’ criticisms of it and provides no useful alternative. As an aside that bothered me (but not related to the content directly), the tone of the article also wants to be scholarly so badly, which made it really long-winded and hard to read.

>> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month.

I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.

Russ Robert's Econtalk podcast is fantastic. He brings on all sorts of authors and discusses their books, challenges their theories, gets challenged back.

He's had Michael Pollen on about psychedelics and I thought he was pretty fair and engaged considering he's a conservative Jewish guy in his 60's that leans more right than left (though with libertarian beliefs, but mostly economic ones).

It's a very academic podcast (Russ is an economics professor at the Hoover Institute), but his podcasts on the financial crisis (I think there are over a dozen) are really good if you want to understand how all the stuff works under the hood. He had former heads of the Fed on, numerous professors who are globally recognized as monetary experts, etc.

And the podcast archives go back to like 2006.

Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.

Philosophical frameworks can be useful when you know their limits. A single formula cannot possibly give you the answer to any human interaction. Physicists (successful ones anyway) do not try to use a single equation for all problems. Only fanatics think a single moral framework can solve all problems, no need to give them any mind.

Looking for someone to summarize the content for those who don't want to hear the audio