5 ms·

No wonder Singer didn’t end up liking Marx. EA is the most alienating code of ethics that I’ve seen.

by yrimaxi 6y ago

yboris 6y ago
What's alienating about EA for you?
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  A scenario: you want to help people. You have the opportunity to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street (finance or whatever). You reckon that you would optimize your good-output by working more rather than helping directly (you don’t have the skills or know-how to help directly, you also reckon). So you get a well-paying job, work 60 hours a week in order to earn more money and advance your career, live frugally and donate 70% of your income to charity. At this point you are spent: you cannot do more good than working those hours without burning out and thus hurting your career long-term. Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.
  - IHLayman 6y ago
    That is the point though... would you rather “feel good” doing charity, or have a positive effect on society? Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Note that many food charities for decades now but even in the past year are like don’t send cans of food, send cash, because it has the most effect.
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      > Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Do you have proof? Because whether it “feels good” (or rather, feels like you are actually doing something, rather than trying to motivate yourself by convincing yourself that the numbers are correct and you are (indirectly) doing something) will influence how much good you can do. Some things—like only eating Soylent or maximizing your goodiness-output by working on Wall Street (or wherever else)—might only work well on paper. In any case my point all along was the alienation factor. That’s the point, to me. Raise whatever other point you would like. (Of course an EA-enthusiast would only care about the supposed numbers.)
    - notahacker 6y ago
      > Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. It can be more effective sure, especially if the physical participation is flying long haul to offer considerably less skilled construction labour than locally-based hungry people. But a division of labour between smart, driven people working outside the third sector to fund it and only people incapable of securing well paid jobs left inside the sector to spend it is also unlikely to lead to better resource allocation. There are certainly initiatives that could use a good software lead more than they could use a generous portion of a software lead's FAANG salary to hire some mediocre contractors, for example.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - yboris 6y ago
    Thank you for a concrete example. I think you will agree though, that the outcome you describe isn't inevitable or most-likely. Over time you will likely figure out a good life-work-philanthropy balance. Much of the conversation within EA is about self-care and long-term planning. If giving 70% of your income to charity works for you, that's magnificent. But if you realize you need to give less and take more care of yourself so you don't burn out, that's the appropriate decision. I gave 50% one year but it didn't work out long term. I've been giving 10% for almost a decade and intend to ramp up to 20% in the future. My wife does 10% too - it works out well for us.
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      Burn out wasn’t the point. I explicitly disregarded that by putting in the premise that the hypothetical person is not and will not get burned out with that philanthropy schedule. I could have just as well have written that they made a million a year and only donated 5%—that’s besides (my/the) point. I guess we are all so alienated these days that we don’t find working on Wall Street—or Main Street—in order to indirectly help other people with our money instead of helping directly not the least bit weird at all. Or to help people by working as a programmer and donating a lot of your salary to some school instead of just working there as a teacher, helping people directly (to use another example). (Oh, that reminds me. I need to take my vitamin D supplements right about now. I calculated that being in the Sun is not worth my time so I have to compensate a bit, you see.)
      - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
        Well, in the end, do you want to avoid feeling weird, or to help people? Both of those are valid desires, but they don't always go together. Sometimes you can find something that does both and that's great, but not everyone can.
        yrimaxi 6y ago
        Describing non-alienation as “feeling good” (as another commenter did) or “not feeling weird” is a great way to pathologize my observation of how weird it is to work a six-figure, ad/surveillance-optimizing job at Google in order for there to be more malaria nets in Africa. Trust me: I don’t believe that EA is sound in any way (or “effective”, if you like), but in this thread I chose to focus on just one aspect of it, indeed its most bizarre feature, which apparently isn’t bizarre at all to all of the Soylent-drinking life-optimizers out there, so my point has been like, as they say, seeds on barren ground.
  - yboris 6y ago
    I wonder what alternative you would propose. Presumably, not doing philanthropy is not an alternative, because that would be the most alienating approach. If it's connection to people you want, why not "Purchase Fuzzes and Utilons Separately"? [0] Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      What alternative? How is that even a question? The answer is obvious: do good directly, with your own mind and hands, not indirectly. That’s the obvious alternative. Maybe not everyone has the opportunity to do that, just like not everyone has the opportunity to get a non-alienating job. > Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others. You see? Both of these things are still indirect do-gooding. Donating to charity? How about being good, doing good? Or are you only able to assess the moral weight of something if you can read about them in some spreadsheet?
      - yboris 6y ago
        There are many ways to look at the problem we're discussing. One is to think about what the effect on the world would be if people follow one strategy over another. The strategy of "help those around you" results in rich people who live in rich areas with multi-million-dollar-homes helping those that live in merely million dollar homes (because that's what's around). And if they venture too far geographically, they end up feeling alienated, apparently. Furthermore, these people, rather than taking the tremendous power of their wealth, do something "with their own minds and hands" - which is presumably serving some soup in a soup kitchen. My observation is that it's really unfortunate that many people feel the need for a personal connection, and therefore do less good than they could otherwise. My response is to ignore the ill-fitting kluge that is the evolution-installed software I have. When you know that a $3 donation protects 2 people from malaria for about 3 years, can you really think you can do more good with your hands and mind than to just protect those people with $3 you have? You can get your warm feeling of having done good through doing something, and then use your money to give to cost-effective charities regardless of how "alienated" that makes you feel.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    What I read in this is essentially an observation that "A scenario: you want to help people" does not necessarily (and possibly not even in most cases) imply "you want to maximize your good-output". In many (perhaps most?) cases the feeling and motivation people have is the intuitive desire to feel good about helping others in their society personally, which is in many ways different from "true altruism". And it makes some sense (from e.g. evolutionary psychology perspective) to consider that our innate desire to "do good" is closely related to building social ties and status, and by helping people close to us in various ways (kinship, common "tribe-in-the-wide-sense-of-that-word", previous relationship history, expected future interactions) as opposed to simply helping abstract people as much as you can. True altruism is the exception (IMHO) rather than the norm, it certainly exists in some cases, but most helping others and charity and doing good is driven by "ordinary goodwill" that includes a mix of other motivations. And, of course, if someone's goal is not really altruism, then doing more effective altruism won't help them achieve their goals. If we ("abstract we") want to optimize effective altruism, then instead we should help optimize people's efforts witin the area where true altruism overlaps with their actual goals to "do good" (whatever they mean by "do good" since that likely isn't exactly the same thing as true altruism); since once we get to the proposals which are more altruistic but contrary to their true personal goals/values, people are just going to reject the whole thing (as most do).
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      I keep getting impressed by the EA-proponents ability and eagerness to frame EA as “true altruism” (an actual quote in this case!), as if EA is some purely-rational approach with no philosophical baggage or assumptions. How utterly self-congratulatory. Another problem I have with EA is how incredibly fragile it is: because it is so reductive and narrowly-focused, you are likely to optimize for the wrong thing (the map is never the territory) and might even do more harm than good. In the best case scenario you might do a lot of good, though.
      - PeterisP 6y ago
        Ah, I'm not really an EA-proponent, so please don't use my arguments as bad examples of their position, that wouldn't be fair. My use of "true altruism" isn't a proper term, I just needed to somehow contrast two different aspects of "altruism-as-understood-in-common-language", to differentiate the theoretical concept of fully unselfish concern for the welfare of others with the (IMHO more popular/realistic) concept that's somewhat like "general habit/desire/concer/action of doing good for others with limited (but still some) selfishness, because of a mix of motivation only part of which is actual altruism". I mean, IMHO framing "effective altruism" as "true altruism" isn't that inaccurate as far as philosophy and definitions are concerned - my main criticism of EA is that actual altruism (according to a strict definition of altruism) is quite rare, so for most people effective altruism isn't personally relevant because most people (including me) simply aren't truly altruistic; it provides a guide on how to maximize something that most people (myself included) don't really want to maximize, they want to maximize other things which may have some overlap with altruism but diverge from it as you leave commonly accepted charity practices and approach various maximums. I do concede that it's definitely good according to most value systems (including purely selfish ones) to have everyone else in your society to be a bit more altruistic, everything just works better that way, so facilitating various nudges towards altruism is generally a Good Thing no matter how altruistic you or I personally are.
- rossnordby 6y ago
  I'm not yrimaxi, and I'm very much in the EA camp, but I suspect a lot of people bounce off the implication that there isn't really such a thing as supererogation. A lot of EA messaging tries to work around this by trying to avoid guilt trips or demanding that you do everything you possibly can, since asking too much is a good way to end up with nothing. See Giving What We Can and similar. But a lot of the justifications for this kind of approach can very easily imply a much higher bar than anyone can meet. Taking global health as an example- millions of preventable deaths a year, and if you work yourself to the bone for years, you can only hope to partially mitigate it. Even if the messaging says, "hey, just do what you can sustainably and don't worry about being perfect, because that's way better than nothing," the logic behind it is based on nothing more than observations of actions and their consequences. There's not a specific threshold where your job is actually done, and 'failure' to meet the impossible bar generally means mass death. For someone outside EA, it is very easy to go from that observation to "these people are telling me I am basically a mass murderer for not helping, and even if I help, I'll still in practice be a mass murderer because I'll help suboptimally, gee thanks." Even if very few identifying with the EA community would endorse that phrasing or the implied moral judgment, I can see how people could end up feeling that way. Not sure what to do about it.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    Maybe you are pursuing a different point than mine, but my own point was about alienation, not supererogation. I don’t put EA proponents on such a lofty pedestal.
    - rossnordby 6y ago
      Yup, started writing my response before I saw yours, definitely a different point. I do think that the implied burden is still alienating in a sense and that's what motivated my post (the philosophy can just feel really bad in some ways when you get into the nitty gritty, and many people don't respond well to that), but you were clearly talking about a different kind of alienation.
      - 6y ago

No wonder Singer didn’t end up liking Marx. EA is the most alienating code of ethics that I’ve seen.

yboris 6y ago

What's alienating about EA for you?

yrimaxi 6y ago
A scenario: you want to help people. You have the opportunity to get a very well-paying job on Wall Street (finance or whatever). You reckon that you would optimize your good-output by working more rather than helping directly (you don’t have the skills or know-how to help directly, you also reckon). So you get a well-paying job, work 60 hours a week in order to earn more money and advance your career, live frugally and donate 70% of your income to charity. At this point you are spent: you cannot do more good than working those hours without burning out and thus hurting your career long-term. Now you are alienated from your charity: your work in finance indirectly helps other people, but you have no way of experiencing or connecting to that other than looking at statistics and numbers; the lifeworld of your charitable work is just some numbers that you get every quarter from the various charities that you donate to. You have no direct involvement in them.
- IHLayman 6y ago
  That is the point though... would you rather “feel good” doing charity, or have a positive effect on society? Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Note that many food charities for decades now but even in the past year are like don’t send cans of food, send cash, because it has the most effect.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    > Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. Do you have proof? Because whether it “feels good” (or rather, feels like you are actually doing something, rather than trying to motivate yourself by convincing yourself that the numbers are correct and you are (indirectly) doing something) will influence how much good you can do. Some things—like only eating Soylent or maximizing your goodiness-output by working on Wall Street (or wherever else)—might only work well on paper. In any case my point all along was the alienation factor. That’s the point, to me. Raise whatever other point you would like. (Of course an EA-enthusiast would only care about the supposed numbers.)
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > Donating cash instead of physically participating in charity can be alienating, sure... but certainly more effective. It can be more effective sure, especially if the physical participation is flying long haul to offer considerably less skilled construction labour than locally-based hungry people. But a division of labour between smart, driven people working outside the third sector to fund it and only people incapable of securing well paid jobs left inside the sector to spend it is also unlikely to lead to better resource allocation. There are certainly initiatives that could use a good software lead more than they could use a generous portion of a software lead's FAANG salary to hire some mediocre contractors, for example.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- yboris 6y ago
  Thank you for a concrete example. I think you will agree though, that the outcome you describe isn't inevitable or most-likely. Over time you will likely figure out a good life-work-philanthropy balance. Much of the conversation within EA is about self-care and long-term planning. If giving 70% of your income to charity works for you, that's magnificent. But if you realize you need to give less and take more care of yourself so you don't burn out, that's the appropriate decision. I gave 50% one year but it didn't work out long term. I've been giving 10% for almost a decade and intend to ramp up to 20% in the future. My wife does 10% too - it works out well for us.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    Burn out wasn’t the point. I explicitly disregarded that by putting in the premise that the hypothetical person is not and will not get burned out with that philanthropy schedule. I could have just as well have written that they made a million a year and only donated 5%—that’s besides (my/the) point. I guess we are all so alienated these days that we don’t find working on Wall Street—or Main Street—in order to indirectly help other people with our money instead of helping directly not the least bit weird at all. Or to help people by working as a programmer and donating a lot of your salary to some school instead of just working there as a teacher, helping people directly (to use another example). (Oh, that reminds me. I need to take my vitamin D supplements right about now. I calculated that being in the Sun is not worth my time so I have to compensate a bit, you see.)
    - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
      Well, in the end, do you want to avoid feeling weird, or to help people? Both of those are valid desires, but they don't always go together. Sometimes you can find something that does both and that's great, but not everyone can.
      - yrimaxi 6y ago
        Describing non-alienation as “feeling good” (as another commenter did) or “not feeling weird” is a great way to pathologize my observation of how weird it is to work a six-figure, ad/surveillance-optimizing job at Google in order for there to be more malaria nets in Africa. Trust me: I don’t believe that EA is sound in any way (or “effective”, if you like), but in this thread I chose to focus on just one aspect of it, indeed its most bizarre feature, which apparently isn’t bizarre at all to all of the Soylent-drinking life-optimizers out there, so my point has been like, as they say, seeds on barren ground.
- yboris 6y ago
  I wonder what alternative you would propose. Presumably, not doing philanthropy is not an alternative, because that would be the most alienating approach. If it's connection to people you want, why not "Purchase Fuzzes and Utilons Separately"? [0] Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    What alternative? How is that even a question? The answer is obvious: do good directly, with your own mind and hands, not indirectly. That’s the obvious alternative. Maybe not everyone has the opportunity to do that, just like not everyone has the opportunity to get a non-alienating job. > Give enough to charities that make you not feel alienated, and then donate the rest to charities that are making a greater positive impact on the lives of others. You see? Both of these things are still indirect do-gooding. Donating to charity? How about being good, doing good? Or are you only able to assess the moral weight of something if you can read about them in some spreadsheet?
    - yboris 6y ago
      There are many ways to look at the problem we're discussing. One is to think about what the effect on the world would be if people follow one strategy over another. The strategy of "help those around you" results in rich people who live in rich areas with multi-million-dollar-homes helping those that live in merely million dollar homes (because that's what's around). And if they venture too far geographically, they end up feeling alienated, apparently. Furthermore, these people, rather than taking the tremendous power of their wealth, do something "with their own minds and hands" - which is presumably serving some soup in a soup kitchen. My observation is that it's really unfortunate that many people feel the need for a personal connection, and therefore do less good than they could otherwise. My response is to ignore the ill-fitting kluge that is the evolution-installed software I have. When you know that a $3 donation protects 2 people from malaria for about 3 years, can you really think you can do more good with your hands and mind than to just protect those people with $3 you have? You can get your warm feeling of having done good through doing something, and then use your money to give to cost-effective charities regardless of how "alienated" that makes you feel.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  What I read in this is essentially an observation that "A scenario: you want to help people" does not necessarily (and possibly not even in most cases) imply "you want to maximize your good-output". In many (perhaps most?) cases the feeling and motivation people have is the intuitive desire to feel good about helping others in their society personally, which is in many ways different from "true altruism". And it makes some sense (from e.g. evolutionary psychology perspective) to consider that our innate desire to "do good" is closely related to building social ties and status, and by helping people close to us in various ways (kinship, common "tribe-in-the-wide-sense-of-that-word", previous relationship history, expected future interactions) as opposed to simply helping abstract people as much as you can. True altruism is the exception (IMHO) rather than the norm, it certainly exists in some cases, but most helping others and charity and doing good is driven by "ordinary goodwill" that includes a mix of other motivations. And, of course, if someone's goal is not really altruism, then doing more effective altruism won't help them achieve their goals. If we ("abstract we") want to optimize effective altruism, then instead we should help optimize people's efforts witin the area where true altruism overlaps with their actual goals to "do good" (whatever they mean by "do good" since that likely isn't exactly the same thing as true altruism); since once we get to the proposals which are more altruistic but contrary to their true personal goals/values, people are just going to reject the whole thing (as most do).
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    I keep getting impressed by the EA-proponents ability and eagerness to frame EA as “true altruism” (an actual quote in this case!), as if EA is some purely-rational approach with no philosophical baggage or assumptions. How utterly self-congratulatory. Another problem I have with EA is how incredibly fragile it is: because it is so reductive and narrowly-focused, you are likely to optimize for the wrong thing (the map is never the territory) and might even do more harm than good. In the best case scenario you might do a lot of good, though.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      Ah, I'm not really an EA-proponent, so please don't use my arguments as bad examples of their position, that wouldn't be fair. My use of "true altruism" isn't a proper term, I just needed to somehow contrast two different aspects of "altruism-as-understood-in-common-language", to differentiate the theoretical concept of fully unselfish concern for the welfare of others with the (IMHO more popular/realistic) concept that's somewhat like "general habit/desire/concer/action of doing good for others with limited (but still some) selfishness, because of a mix of motivation only part of which is actual altruism". I mean, IMHO framing "effective altruism" as "true altruism" isn't that inaccurate as far as philosophy and definitions are concerned - my main criticism of EA is that actual altruism (according to a strict definition of altruism) is quite rare, so for most people effective altruism isn't personally relevant because most people (including me) simply aren't truly altruistic; it provides a guide on how to maximize something that most people (myself included) don't really want to maximize, they want to maximize other things which may have some overlap with altruism but diverge from it as you leave commonly accepted charity practices and approach various maximums. I do concede that it's definitely good according to most value systems (including purely selfish ones) to have everyone else in your society to be a bit more altruistic, everything just works better that way, so facilitating various nudges towards altruism is generally a Good Thing no matter how altruistic you or I personally are.
rossnordby 6y ago
I'm not yrimaxi, and I'm very much in the EA camp, but I suspect a lot of people bounce off the implication that there isn't really such a thing as supererogation. A lot of EA messaging tries to work around this by trying to avoid guilt trips or demanding that you do everything you possibly can, since asking too much is a good way to end up with nothing. See Giving What We Can and similar. But a lot of the justifications for this kind of approach can very easily imply a much higher bar than anyone can meet. Taking global health as an example- millions of preventable deaths a year, and if you work yourself to the bone for years, you can only hope to partially mitigate it. Even if the messaging says, "hey, just do what you can sustainably and don't worry about being perfect, because that's way better than nothing," the logic behind it is based on nothing more than observations of actions and their consequences. There's not a specific threshold where your job is actually done, and 'failure' to meet the impossible bar generally means mass death. For someone outside EA, it is very easy to go from that observation to "these people are telling me I am basically a mass murderer for not helping, and even if I help, I'll still in practice be a mass murderer because I'll help suboptimally, gee thanks." Even if very few identifying with the EA community would endorse that phrasing or the implied moral judgment, I can see how people could end up feeling that way. Not sure what to do about it.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  Maybe you are pursuing a different point than mine, but my own point was about alienation, not supererogation. I don’t put EA proponents on such a lofty pedestal.
  - rossnordby 6y ago
    Yup, started writing my response before I saw yours, definitely a different point. I do think that the implied burden is still alienating in a sense and that's what motivated my post (the philosophy can just feel really bad in some ways when you get into the nitty gritty, and many people don't respond well to that), but you were clearly talking about a different kind of alienation.
    - 6y ago