Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

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Another important aspect might be to consider how the $20k was obtained in the first place. What resources were consumed to generate that wealth? What pollution was generated? Which parts of society benefited, and which did not?

Here is a contrived example:

Suppose you obtained $20k by applying your skills as a consultant where you helped some business make an additional $200k profit by more effectively advertising their products.

Suppose that business has a profit of 20% for each item they sell, so you've actually lifted their revenue by $1m.

Now, suppose these products are essentially useless consumer products that will go out of fashion within 1 year.

I claim without evidence that the environmental impact of producing, advertising, distributing and disposing of $1m of useless products may, in many cases, be well in excess of how much of that impact you could attempt to reverse with a $20k budget.

So, another option is to consider is that the world may be better off if you didn't earn that $20k in the first place. It very much depends on the direct and indirect effects of how you did it.

edit: I am curious if I am copping the odd down-vote because this argument is complete nonsense (in which case please help me modify my beliefs!) or simply because I mention something that is perhaps uncomfortable to reflect upon. I claim no moral high ground here.

Someone else will be the consultant, perhaps spending $20k on more useless products. In that case, you doing the consulting is still net positive.

Perhaps a better suggestion than not earning that $20k is to earn it by working with companies which do not produce useless products. Certainly worth considering for someone who wants to spend $20k to do good. On the other hand, perhaps they are already doing that .).

Someone else will be the consultant, perhaps spending $20k on more useless products. In that case, you doing the consulting is still net positive.

Agreed, when you're evaluating the morality of the effects of an action - rather than the action in itself - you must compare them with what would likely have happened, not assume that nothing would happen instead.

A simple example is self-defence: punching someone it wrong - unless they would've harmed someone more if they hadn't been punched. Comparing the likely alternative scenario is essential to judge the effects of the action.

This argument is only correct under the assumption that you are the only person on earth making this decision. It is like arguing that you shouldn't go voting because the chance that your vote changes the result is, for all practical matters, zero.

You're thinking on the level of decisional strategies across agents. Arguments earlier up the comment chain where thinking on the level of implementing decisions in a given context for one agent, where the context includes other agents with unmodifiable strategies.

Yes, and I believe it is very strange to assume that those other agents have unmodifiable strategies when you are discussing strategies with them :-)

No, it still works if you assume that enough people simply don't care about the ethics of the action. Only if the vast majority of consultants were asking themselves the same thing would it really matter.

Your analogy doesn't really work for me, because I do think the effect of voting for an individual, and therefore its moral outcome, is mostly irrelevant. I vote because I like the action in itself.

Granted, assuming you trust your own judgement about other people's values. Still, something doesn't feel right to me. It sounds too much like a "cognitive dissonance" type of justification for acting against one's own values. You have a lot more certainty about the effect and morality of things you yourself are doing, and a lot uncertainty about how much damage this other person (who would happily fill in for you) is doing now instead. It's hard to know if one less person willing to do "bad things" would simply cause another person (who doesn't care) to "turn bad". Or to put it more extreme: you don't become a dealer of illegal drugs because someone else will sell the drugs instead who would spend the earnings worse than you.

There's certainly a large element of uncertainty, but that is hardly a reason to avoid taking these into account.

You say it sounds like a justification for acting against one's values - I'd put it in reverse: values, much like rights, are a system for deciding what to do when the uncertainty or cost of making a decision is too great. Blindly following them is folly if you actually want to avoid harming people.

I think that "work with companies that do not produce useless products" is a mildly positive idea, given the context of the system we're in. Even better - work with organisations that are not solely for-profit and that do work that genuinely benefits society, particularly the disadvantaged. Some examples:

1. the "getup.org / kickstarter" crowd-sourced lobbying suggestion made by `icanhackit` in this thread. Particularly if you can lobby to introduce legislation/regulation to bend the rules of the capitalist game in a socially progressive direction!

2. Pollinate Energy (http://pollinateenergy.org/) make solar-powered lights to displace the use of kerosene for lighting by some of India's poor. They run it as a mix of a business and a charity. Unlike a charity, they sell their products and make money to keep operating. Their products displace an inferior competing lighting solution (saving people money and reducing risk from fire). Compared to a pure-charity approach, people take better care of solar lights that they have to pay for (rather ones they are given for free).

People don't like their lifestyle called into question. When they and their peers each consume 10-100x average per capita consumption, there are some uncomfortable truths.

mind... blown... hah I've definitely read things like this before but.... damn it just sounds so much like people thinking electric cars will save the world without considering where the energy is actually (not hypothetically) coming from.... then that example starts to gets recursive because electric cars are expensive, HOW did you get that extra 40k to be able to afford it? hah

I think you're right and the biggest example of this is Bill Gates, he shouldn't have scrapped that much money in the first place...

When people try to make these judgements you end up repeating the mistakes of communism, where (e.g.) very good research into genetics and psychology was abandoned because people thought it wouldn't be useful, and resources were wasted producing old manufactured goods (inefficient machines and the like) that no-one wanted.

Even if in this one example the $20k was obtained through a net negative action, overall it seems like the invisible hand is better at allocating resources than well-intentioned human judgement. So the best strategy for the world, as counterintuitive as it seems, is to blindly do whatever makes you the most money.

You should read about negative externalities. If everyone did whatever would make them the most money, the net effect would be to exploit as many resources and turn them into waste at an ever increasing speed, since the goal is simply to increase the money velocity. The result would be a population explosion and crash.

Looking at the graph of the human population, are you so sure the efficiency of capitalism is sustainable?

Sure; there are specific cases where capitalism doesn't work well and other approaches are better. I see what I wrote goes further than I intended. What I meant to say was that in the general, overall average case capitalism works best. But "blindly" was overstating it.

Under ideal circumstances, the invisible hand finds the best solution for people's needs weighted by their wealth. The needs of a poor person do not count at all, which is why we are considering donations. We have many rules already in place to prevent negative side-effects caused by people doing "blindly whatever makes the most money", like enslaving their debtors. The failure of communism does not mean that everyone is better off when we stop thinking about the needs of others.

>the mistakes of communism, where (e.g.) very good research into genetics and psychology was abandoned because people thought it wouldn't be useful, and resources were wasted producing old manufactured goods (inefficient machines and the like) that no-one wanted

Are you taking as given that this never happens under capitalism?

> Are you taking as given that this never happens under capitalism?

Of course it's not foolproof. But the feedback loops that supply and demand provide mean that resources are more likely to be spent on things that at least some people want.

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