Money, the Unit of Caring (2009)
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The lawyer does not truly spend the hour in the soup kitchen for the purpose of feeding people. But rather for what the lawyer gets out of spending that hour. Things like motivation and understanding the problem better.
Here is a concrete illustration of the principle. Back in the 1960s, Robert Townsend made it a requirement at Avis that everyone had to work a certain amount of time each year behind the service desk. Having vice presidents do that work was certainly not cheaper than hiring a random person to do it. But having vice presidents be directly aware of where the problems were in that job was in the long run far cheaper than letting them remain unaware and therefore not fixing the problems.
This is not what Robert Townsend is best known for though. He's known for having come in to a failing company, and turning it around. In particular he is the CEO under whom the slogan "We try harder" was begun. A slogan that, incidentally, was produced by his inspiring the ad people to try harder themselves!
He tells the story in his book Up The Organization! He didn't have a big ad budget. So he asked how he could best motivate the ad people to work on his account. A friend advised him that what they really most wanted was creative freedom. So he told them that he'd accept whatever they said was their best idea, sight unseen. This is why they dared come up with a slogan that undermined standard assumptions about how to do business - and it worked!
But if the lawyer is doing the volunteer manual labor hour instead of donating the much more valuable specialized work hour, then it's nothing like the Avis example.
The "utility-maximizing" choice, if both "effectiveness" and "feeling good" matters, would be to donate whatever one cares to and volunteer as much as one cares to.
There's even some advice to make sure you get your quota of warm fuzzies to stay motivated and connected with the cause you are working for. It's easier to burn out if you never see the upside of your efforts or the smile on people's faces directly.
However they are different things. Don't also forget to uh how do they say it.... "Shut up and multiply" I think and figure out what advances your cause the most. (While including enough direct touches to stay sane as otherwise you are less effective)
Though I don't often see the finding problems case stated. That is important too.
Purchasing warm fuzzies is sometimes efficient (from an emotional or long-term mental health perspective), even though it's very inefficient at doing good directly. But ideally you should be able to be honest with yourself about what it is you're actually buying with that hour.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
Sometimes I do my own drywall work at my house. Not because it's more efficient (it'd be better to hire someone) but because I enjoy it in this sort of zen way. That's a really weird abstract sort of reasoning that utility calculations can't capture well.
If the lawyer works in the soup kitchen because the rest of their time is spent around rich people and they want to better understand the whole of human experience, that also can't be factored into the utility calculus.
If the primary purpose of the hour volunteering is not to bring maximum good to others but instead to enjoy the hour or socialize, then the hour may be spent efficiently for the lawyer, but it is not pursuing the primary purpose of "caring for others' good."
Any (functional) utility calculation does take into account internal state & knowledge gained. Pretty much by definition, utilons are internal-only. The lawyer's enjoyment of the hour is factored in; however, if the point of the hour is to maximize total utility across all humans, the lawyer would be better to spend an extra hour at work (unless soup kitchen work provides a large enough multiplier to mental health, or they wouldn't be motivated to do lawyer work without the hour at the soup kitchen). Even in cases where soup kitchen work is better in the long-haul, those hours in the soup kitchen are spent buying fuzzies, not utilons directly.
This only works from a utilitarian perspective. If the lawyer getting maximal enjoyment from their good is more important than the amount of good produced, then soup kitchening will ~always be more effective, but you're no longer engaging with the core philosophy of the essay.
I have a good friend who is a lawyer who does a mixture of family law and immigration law. He is wealthy, and spends most of his time around other wealthy people. Sometimes he volunteers to do (non-lawyer) work with immigrants.
He doesn't do it for fuzzies. He might explain it as attempting to better understand his client pool. He has to understand, to a good enough degree, their lives and mental state to best work with them.
There is a calculus here. Some omniscient entity could work out a grand formula of "How much does this time spent with immigrants help him become a better lawyer to help immigrants". That is a knowable variable..
But it can't be known by us. It's too much of an internal state. Even if we had high quality assessments for "skill as an immigration lawyer" and tested him before and after his volunteering, we wouldn't see a linear correlation. He is hoping for "aha" moments of understanding.
Thus the problem is a utilitarian problem. There is a calculus of how much he improves the lives of others. Yet the utilitarian calculus can't capture the value of these volunteering events yet they do feed into his ability.
Utility calculus always has this flaw. Humans are not cold logic utility machines. We require a mix of soft (culture, religion, emotion) inputs and hard inputs (training, logic) to do our best. Even though we can have mathmatical conversations about the soft inputs, we can't actually run the utility calculus on them.
Hence why so many utilitarians use contractualism/virtue ethics/etc for day-to-day decisions; utility is the "reason" that informs big-picture decisions, but it's too impractical to start crunching numbers at every possible crossroads. See also: the many, many warnings against "naive act utilitarianism" even from within big utilitarian groups (LW, EA, 80k, etc.).
Pretty sure we've veered off from the actual problem the original post is getting at, but if you want to talk more about the practicalities of utilitarianism, I'd be very happy to (or to link to SEP/LW/EA essays that dig more into this issue). :-)
One great book that addresses this issue specifically is Against Empathy, on the limits of reasoning by what "feels" best (while still respecting that it's impossible to perfectly calculate utility irl); would highly recommend if you're interested.
I'll add Against Empathy to my reading list (though working on House of Leaves at the moment, so give me a few months).
One of my general criticisms of strict EA folks (and EA is a wide spectrum from common sense to very strict interpretations) is that they get stuck in a loop of describing the internal motivations of others ("People volunteer for the fuzzies!") and then use their own description of that black box to dismiss it ("Fuzzies aren't worth much!"). That is a fundamentally flawed logic.
More than the obvious flaw there is a hidden one: the assumption that because the value of a thing is poorly described (the fuzzies) that it has little value or only soft value. Humans are feeling machines who sometimes engage in rationality - doing rationality more or better does not change that equation. Those who can't understand that are doomed to not be successful.
At any rate there's no mutual exclusivity between donating and volunteering, and no one really follows an imperative to absolutely maximize the dollar amount they could donate (no one making money, anyway). I suspect that very few are particularly motivated to work overtime hours just to give it all away.
The other and more important is relationships. I could work more and get payed more (I’m salaried so I wouldn’t actually be payed more but hypothetically if I did) and donate that for someone to build homes but it changes the dynamic of relationship and I’m missing from it. I’ve advised people I’ve worked with and for on college, software, or even just how home loans work. And the fact I’m doing all this for free for them is meaningful for both of us, probably even more so than a mediocre handrail I added to the stairway
I don't think this is useful.
Do Americans care twice as much about health as Swedes do, given that they spend twice the amount (% of GDP) on healthcare?
Does random-SV-billionaire care three thousand times as much as I do about time, given that he has spent $300k on an AP watch, and I've spent $100 on a swatch?
Also, someone that spends $300k on a watch isn't doing it because they care about time.
But, to your point about useful models, even if you do grant that on some level society does "care" more about something when it expends more money on it, can you tell from the outside view what it actually cares about? Most things that we spend money on are hopelessly complicated, and, like, some of the value we get out of, say, our expenditures on schools are "political favor for Democrats through the Teacher's Union" (and some of what we get from our expenditures on police are "political favor for Republicans through the Policeman's Union.") So do you get much useful information by saying, "Ah, we spend $X on thing A and $Y on thing B"? I mean, not much.
Uh, I'm pretty sure Swedes on average fight a lot less with doctors and pharmaceutical companies (and insurance companies) than Americans. The whole point of centralized healthcare is that it's both cheaper and less energy-draining for individuals because there's a small number of professional people paid to do the "fighting" (negotiating) on behalf of millions of other people.
But just like one USD in India is worth more than one USD in the US, it's not fruitful to naively compare the "amount of caring" by using GDP% as a proxy if the contexts are different enough. That doesn't invalidate the basic point of the article. The reason the US spends so much is that the US system is incredibly inefficient due to various coordination problems. If the US spent twice the money per capita and as a result had twice as good healthcare as Sweden then, certainly, you could say that the US cares much more about health than Sweden. But that's not the case.
And, like, it's always hard to get into the nitty gritty of why US healthcare costs so much, there's a lot of different things going on, but similarly you might say, "Okay, maybe the US has a 'coordination problem,'" but what does that cash out to? Hospital administration salaries? Again, are you gonna pick that fight? Providing extremely inefficient end-of-life care that still has at least some arguable benefit? Are you gonna pick that fight?
From there, the article gets exponentially worse by the paragraph. It's pseudo-mathematical and pseudo-philosophical nonsense.
The final claims are fundamentally sociological(!!!) But the author makes zero effort to empirically or rationally interrogate how his prescribed behavioral modifications would impact human individual behavior or human group dynamics. He fails to make any testable hypotheses.
Here's a counter-theory: the prescribed course of action would have the effect of alienating the wealthy from the poor, resulting in worse outcomes for everyone involved than a society where there is more fraternity between class categories but in which man hours are slightly less "efficiently" allocated.
I also suspect that wealthy people throw money at rationalists because "continue being On Top And In Charge because you are Better and it's morally justified as long as you Donate To Help The Poors" is far less dangerous to the status quo wealth distribution than telling every middle and upper income person "maybe you should spend a few weeks volunteering in a homeless shelter".
Money says more about the government than it says about the people who use it.
Even in that model though, they all average out to "mostly rational". People do too.
What about this argument requires that people be individually rational rather than on-average rational?
You're injecting some weird morality into it which just doesn't belong. Economics works not despite the fact that some are irrational, but because all the irrationality averages out.
Seen the blog? It's literally called "Less Wrong". It's not perfect, but it provides interesting insights. As such, I found that article valuable.
> In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.
>
> This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny.
This is not a definition, and I don’t think it is obvious. What “society” are you talking about? Your national borders? Also, as a counterexample, society whatever it may be cares about motherhood, that doesn’t mean it pays money to mothers…
Unless there is combined social pressure to care, the most psychopathic among us will always delegate the social responsibility to those who are "soft-hearted" and choose to hoard their money or spend it in a self-centered way.
The rationalists always make this mistake, intentionally or unintentionally, to take the average person and think that that's all there is in society.
I can see why he wrote this. He founded the Singularity Institute for AI, which eventually became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which ultimately provides him with his sinecure. Despite producing no research of any value, MIRI has been funded with "units of caring" by people like Peter Thiel, Vitalik Buterin and Dustin Moskovitz. Now Eliezer has transformed fully into a modern Cassandra, prophesying imminent AI apocalypse from which there is no escape. Sadly, for him, there are not enough units of caring to save us.
The only exceptions are the United States, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean (namely the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Tonga), every other country in the world, no matter how poor they might be, do pay money to mothers.
It feels like it is not enough to talk about a concept, we need mega-utilons, or hyper-tail-distribution. As if they wanted to sell you a best-seller at an airport about this new concept. I have been disappointed in enough articles there that use these new concepts to hide flaws in argumentation, to not bother with lesswrong.
On the contrary, it's an example, not a counterexample. The fact that the US, almost alone in the world, doesn't have mandatory paid parental leave, absolutely says something about how much the American society cares about parenthood. Of course, you don't have to pay people to make future taxpayers if they're doing it for free – and indeed spending a lot of money raising said future taxpayers, so on an individual level Americans certainly seem to care about children.
Of course there are also other ways than money to manipulate people into having more kids, such as poor sex education and making it socially frowned upon or even illegal to use contraception or have an abortion. In any case, having children is obviously an extreme edge case given that there's a couple billion years worth of genetic programming making us want to have them, or at the very least making us want to partake in the activity that's supposed to result in children.
The article can be aptly summarized as: "Talk is cheap, show me the money". An individual or a society can virtue signal however much they like, but to find out what they really care about, take a look at where the money is going.
A better and fairer approach is to have a tax structure that progressively increases relative to one's income, as was the case in 1960s America. Yes, there were many loopholes but they also pushed individuals in certain directions - for example, corporations could avoid high taxation rates by plowing a good chunk of their profits into R & D programs, there was a high estate tax so children of the ultra-wealthy would be encouraged to develop marketable skills rather than just inheriting their wealth, and the tax revenue was used to build robust domestic infrastructure, quality public schools, and a public healthcare system accessible to all - along with services like police, fire, emergency services, national defense, scientific research, etc.
Incidentally, modern neoclassical economics is fundamentally flawed, as humans are not rational actors, utility is not energy, externalities are not a valid concept, etc. It has little if any predictive power and serves more as a propagandistic justification of a failing economic system. See:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-economist-has...
But that entirely depends on how they make a lot of money. If someone has harmed others (or supported those that harm others) to do that, donating the money to philanthropic organizations doesn't make it right or good.
Price is the measure of how much someone cares about something; specifically with respect to how much they are willing to give up in order to get that something. While price is often recorded relative to units of currency, that does not make them equivalent.
Currency, or "money", is an IOU. It is used when one does not have present value available to make a trade, but offers future value in exchange for something of present value. In the future, one can redeem currency for something of value, ultimately satisfying the trade made.
I'm talking about stuff like spring cleaning around parks, living areas, recreational areas, sports fields, shoreline, and the list goes on. You don't get paid anything, but people still do it.
There's no "deeper" value or experience learned with those tasks, other than contributing to a nicer neighborhood and surroundings. In a world where money reigns supreme, no-one would care to do those tasks.
As somebody living in a "Nordic country", I respectfully disagree. The municipality often pays "volunteers" for this. It's usually sports clubs and similar organisations that need funding, and instead of just pouring it into them, the municipality "hires" them to do some cleaning, for example. So, after a big event in the city, you see folks all over the place cleaning up, often times kids from soccer clubs or such, but they don't do it entirely voluntarily, they do it because that will pay for their shirts next season or their trip to the training camp in the summer.
That said, it's also common to get involved in neighborhood activities that make things nice, planting some trees, painting some 300-year-old cabin in the woods with a bunch of neighbors that do care, this kind of thing, but I've lived in the U.S. for a while as well and we did that there too. Perhaps mostly with what you'd call hippies that participated mostly, but over here in $nordic_country, it's not like it's everybody who is contributing either. There are the more bourgeios who don't contribute and the I-don't-care-f*k-off type of neighbors as well.
> Economies of trade and professional specialization are not just vaguely good yet unnatural-sounding ideas, they are the only way that anything ever gets done in this world. Money is not pieces of paper, it is the common currency of caring.
Ask your mom how much money she made raising you.
I'm not even opposed to the basic ideas of effective altruism and I agree that giving your money to a cause isn't inherently lesser than giving your time. But why add all of this borderline incoherent babble at the start of the article?
You got that backwards: ask your mom how much money she SPENT on raising you, especially in comparison to her total income.
IMO any counterexample that's based on monetary expenditure is doomed to failure because it adopts OP's framing. Whoever can decide the rules can decide the outcome, and all that. Perhaps focusing on time is better. There's little money involved when I cook food for my family, or clean up after, but there is time. I spend that time because I think it matters - not only that the thing gets done, but that I personally should do it as a contribution and example in a social situation. I certainly could pay someone else to do those things. The fact that I don't, or that others do, has absolutely nothing to do with my motivations or how much I care. We all spend time on the things we care about. Money only becomes important when it's exchanged for time.
Perhaps another way to look at it is: how do people with "more than enough" money show that they care about something? How do people with no money do so? For many, money has been taken out of the equation but time is still relevant.
You got it the wrong way round: Ask your parents how much money they spent raising you?
Apart from getting this upside down like others point out -- Mom sent me to daycare, which is exactly the type of specialization discussed in the article. One woman taking care of 5-20 kids instead of 20 moms doing it on their own.
Through on reflection, I'm not sure what the author is trying to say anyway. He says:
> In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.
But who exactly is society here, and how do you choose to interpret it's spending? It seems much too vague to really argue about.
"There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen."
Of course, in that simple quote nothing is included about how much the Lawyer is enjoying the work, what value she gets from it in other ways than that expressed directly in money. So it may still be a "rational" exchange.
Atlas Shrugged changed my relationship with money, also changed my self esteem. As someone brought up in a, what I can only call, overly social way, a very christian way (self-sacrifice is holy etc), rational self-interest is liberating. And indeed I find it more ethical.
Us westerners in Christian based societies somehow always like to say that money is the root of all evil, but I feel that that stance (at the very least) doesn't take into account what the alternative is to money, and what money has enabled for us.
This quote sums it up for me:
"The act of donating money is not the momentary act of writing the check, it is the act of every hour you spent to earn the money to write that check—just as though you worked at the charity itself in your professional capacity, at maximum, grownup efficiency."
(Edit, I know, I shouldn't say this, I apologize Dang, I deserve the downvotes, but this is one of those posts that generates a lot of replies and I see it going up and down in karma. It's somehow "engaging". Mentioning Ayn Rand does that every time.)
A common mis-quote of the biblical verse.
"The Christian condemnation relates to avarice and greed rather than money itself."[0]
"So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . . Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"
I recognize all people as my equals, money enables trade between equals, value for value. To kill equals for money feels like staining the very idea of money.
True. Money also enables people to be unequal and is a tool for some people to oppress or take advantage of other people.
Money itself is value-neutral, it seems to me. It deserves neither love nor hate.
But the people I've met who actually love money have been ones that I would prefer to stay away from. They're not concerned with "good". They're concerned with their own comfort and/or power.
A boyfriend (long gone) of my niece did a form of this. He got a Stanford Engineering degree then volunteered at soup kitchens etc. She dumped him. A waste of his life and her emotional investment, in her view.
Or perhaps it's more complex, there may be secondary effects that are beneficial to you, perhaps some form of status. Regardless, it feels disingenuous.
This makes no sense. An altruistic person is precisely someone who feels good about helping other without receiving anything in return.
If helping other people pleases you, doesn’t that just make you a good person?
Is it possible that such people exist, and that helping others need not only be the consequence of following the dictates of a rule based ‘imperative’?
If I needed help, I would far rather receive it from someone who was doing it because they received personal satisfaction from doing so, than someone doing it because they were trying to avoid violating an imperative.
I think egoism should just not be a bad word. Is a true altruist someone who helps others while hating it?
Egoism vs altruism is not bad vs good as is often presented in our culture. We consider someone who helps others while enjoying it of higher morale than the person who does it reluctantly. The first is an egoist, the latter is a true altruist, she sacrifices herself for others.
And it's logical, the most "good" is achieved in the case of helping others AND enjoying (dear I say "enriching") yourself in the process, win win for the social human with a rational self-interest and her peers.
I do agree that her "heroes" would not likely take money unless there was some value to be exchanged against it (ie like in an investment).
At least, that is how I interpreted it.
Traditionally, the saying is that the love of money is the root of all evil.
> I feel that that stance (at the very least) doesn't take into account what the alternative is to money
The alternative to loving money is not loving money.
Fundamentally, money is an IOU. It is certainly useful to be able to give something to someone now and not have to take what they have to trade at the same time. If I offer you work, and you offer me food in return, the food may be spoiled before I get around to eating it. Indeed, it is much better to take your IOU (money) for my work and then redeem it for fresh food later on when I'm hungry. That is an incredibly useful tool.
The love of money implies that one starts amassing more IOUs than they could ever possibly redeem just for the sake of having IOUs in their hand. This becomes a drain on one's life as they keep giving and giving without getting anything back in return, notably taking focus away from religion in order to give beyond their reasonable means.
> I deserve the downvotes, but this is one of those posts that generates a lot of replies and I see it going up and down in karma. It's somehow "engaging".
Downvotes and upvotes are equivalent, both providing record in a poor man's analytics system. Naturally it is engaging to think that your work is being seen. No doubt that is why you are here and not writing the same words in a private journal.
Consider the Folk Theorem. It's not a theorem. It's an arbitrary definition pretending to rationality. The author is simply asserting something without bothering to explain what any of the preconditions actually mean. The "Folk Theorem" uses four (undefined, lol) terms. None of these terms reasonably describe human behavior. Even worse, none of these terms describe human behavior that would necessarily result in a better world. So the assumptions are neither descriptive NOR prescriptive!
1. Rationality.
Humans aren't always rational. And when they are rational they aren't always good; humans will rationalize even horrific evils such as racialized eugenics. So "rational" isn't a good model of all human behavior and it's also not a model of necessarily good human behavior!
2. "Self-modifying agent"
Humans are bad modifying human behavior. Just ask anyone who is overweight why they don't simply work out more and eat healthier, or a smoker why they don't stop, or an abuser why they aren't nicer. And when humans are able to modify human behavior the results are not always good (eg, adtech and propaganda). So "self-modifying agent" is not a good model of all human behavior and it's also not a model of necessarily good human behavior!
3. "the marginal benefit of investing" is a nonsensical way to think about the effect human effort, both because humans are not robots and also because predicting the impact of one's labor is not always straight-forward. I suppose if "employee"/"robot"/"non-rich-western human"/"$$$" are interchangeable in your brain and you've got MBA-level brain damage about the measurability and predictability of knowledge work then this makes sense...
4. "resources" is undefined and prone to various types of "lump of ___" fallacies.
My general impression is that this entire genre functions as an excuse for the upper and upper-middle class to never have to look income inequality in the eyes and feel the human impact of the social structures their lifestyles depend upon. Maybe if the wealthy spend more time in homeless shelters the shape of society would slowly shift toward distributions that result in fewer homeless shelters, and the downtrodden wouldn't need to depend upon acts of blogpost-inspired generosity.
In any case, I firmly believe that writing an article like this one is almost certainly less useful to society than helping out in a soup kitchen.
I'm not at all supporting the pointless ramblings found in the OP, but Yudkowsky sidesteps this criticism by inserting the following intelligent-sounding words before "rational": "first-order approximation of"