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But the "effective" part means more than just that. From their site: > It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work ou

But the "effective" part means more than just that. From their site: > It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible. This assumes that reasoning and evidence are sufficient to determine what will be most effective. Compare this to the Buddhists, for example, who believe that the networks of causality are so complex and intricate that trying to make such determinations (at least, on any humanly reasonable scale) are doomed due to missing a lot of the picture as well as generally incorporating many faulty assumptions. In other words, what is ultimately most effective at ending suffering may not fit into the metaphysical framework that EA implicitly adopts.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago
This is a common philosophical problem. EA fits in a philosophical framework broadly known as utilitarianism (which is also popular among rationalists, a group known to be fans of EA). Buddhism's ideas of moral philosophy often lie in a mixture of what is commonly known as Divine Will Ethics and Virtue Ethics. Utilitarianism is quite popular among modern STEM discourse, but there are moral alternatives out there that have been sufficiently explored. The idea that decision making may just be too complex to be effectively optimized is one of Utilitarianism's long-standing critiques (e.g., in the trolley problem, what happens if you save the 3 people over the 1 person, but one of those 3 people ends up becoming (or is) a dictator who orchestrates a genocide.)
- esyir 6y ago
  The trolley problem situation seems pretty straightforward under utilitarianism if you add probability into it, I've never found the "what if one of the 3/4/5 could have been Hitler?" argument particularly convincing. The dictator assumption would apply to all humans born, and we as a species clearly don't punish birth sufficiently if the dictator risk was that heavily weighted. Axiom 1: Human life has value, saving a life is thus positive utility. Assumption 1: We know nothing of the people tied to the trolley -> All humans are probabilistically equal. Thus, the utilitarian presses the button and saves 3 at the cost of 1.
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    I'm not sure what probabilities have to do with anything here. It sounds like you're applying a prior that each individual on each side has some "badness" that is uniformly distributed. In effect, a uniform distribution is probably one of the weakest priors and leads to some of the highest variance results (save perhaps Jeffery's Prior). I would go so far as to say assuming uniform probability of "badness" is probably a bad assumption on the way humans actually discriminate on other humans.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Probability is the reflection of the state of your knowledge. If you know someone might become the next Hitler, but you don't know who that might be, or if they're even on the tracks right now, then this is reflected by assigning the same probability of "hitlerism" to all the people on tracks. And even if you had some suspicions, once you honestly factor in your certainty about predictive value of your suspicions, it multiplies down to nothing - so in practice, an uniform prior is a pretty good choice. Yes, it's true that all this stuff is not computable in practice, that it's too complex - but it's not really an obstacle! Everything in life is like that. When you're cooking and a recipe calls for 200g of an ingredient, you're fine with anything between 180g or 220g, and don't care how much of it is water. A restaurant may need to do 200g ± 5g. A chemical plant may want to do 200g ± 0.5g, after first demoisturizing. Nobody tries to hit 200g to ± 1 dalton, because that would be ridiculously complex to do, and require to control for phenomena that most people don't even know exist. We've been trading precision for compute time ever since humans first figured out that things can be measured. The solution is what it's always been: calculating using heuristics and approximations, while keeping tracks of the bounds of those heuristics and approximations.
      - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
        > And even if you had some suspicions, once you honestly factor in your certainty about predictive value of your suspicions, it multiplies down to nothing - so in practice, an uniform prior is a pretty good choice. Does it? You seem to be marginalizing across the entire population, but it's eminently obvious that most humans do _not_ see a human and erase all aspects of their being and then consider them to be one human in a uniformly distributed pool. Humans make snap judgements based on hundreds of subconscious factors all the time. Most humans look at a person and immediately bucket them into a cohort using some mix of physical attributes and prior beliefs of these attributes. Once we're in a cohort, relative probabilities can change. In this particular example, what happens if one of the 3 happens to be wearing military fatigues? What if they have a well-known authoritarian political symbol on their clothing? Anyway, lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism, such as Utility Monsters, and then there's the issue of even being able to impose a utility-based order between disparate things such as "tasty candy" and "rocks underneath my feet". Feel free to read those on the internet.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > (e.g., in the trolley problem, what happens if you save the 3 people over the 1 person, but one of those 3 people ends up becoming (or is) a dictator who orchestrates a genocide.) Presumably by this logic, you'd have no opinion on whether a midwife should save a newborn baby's life, as it's unknowable whether the baby will one day orchestrate a genocide?
  - lars512 6y ago
    I'll bite. Probability comes into play. The vast majority of babies do not in future orchestrate a genocide, but instead live lives worth living, and in turn contribute in some way to shared human progress and wellbeing. So the expected value of the baby's life is positive, the baby should be saved. The very low chance of a future genocide does not weigh highly in this decision.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      Thanks, but elsewhere Karrot_Kream says "I'm not sure what probabilities have to do with anything here" so I'm really hoping to hear their non-probability-based thinking.
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    Well this gets into the absurdity of relative utility of goodness altogether. If I'm comparing a child's happiness from eating a candy to the unhappiness of stepping on a pebble, what are the relative magnitudes? Regardless, there are lots of criticisms of utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is far from the ascendant moral philosophy, so feel free to find others online.
vecplane 6y ago
My point is that you can have both, but rich people have the means to be more 'effective' with their altruism (EDIT: across a wider population).
medlyyy 6y ago
Why the fuck are you worrying about "metaphysical frameworks?" The things EA mostly focuses on are people dying of easily preventable starvation and disease. There is no need to bring up highly abstract ideas about "metaphysics" (whatever you mean by that - morality isn't generally considered to be in the field of metaphysics) when the suffering is so blatantly concrete.
- monktastic1 6y ago
  At the EA conference I attended, one of the talks that got people excited was about false vacuum decay of the universe (which would end all life everywhere), and why therefore QFT research was the most effective. Even if that's not their major focus now, it fit nicely into their framework.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago

This is a common philosophical problem. EA fits in a philosophical framework broadly known as utilitarianism (which is also popular among rationalists, a group known to be fans of EA). Buddhism's ideas of moral philosophy often lie in a mixture of what is commonly known as Divine Will Ethics and Virtue Ethics. Utilitarianism is quite popular among modern STEM discourse, but there are moral alternatives out there that have been sufficiently explored. The idea that decision making may just be too complex to be effectively optimized is one of Utilitarianism's long-standing critiques (e.g., in the trolley problem, what happens if you save the 3 people over the 1 person, but one of those 3 people ends up becoming (or is) a dictator who orchestrates a genocide.)

esyir 6y ago
The trolley problem situation seems pretty straightforward under utilitarianism if you add probability into it, I've never found the "what if one of the 3/4/5 could have been Hitler?" argument particularly convincing. The dictator assumption would apply to all humans born, and we as a species clearly don't punish birth sufficiently if the dictator risk was that heavily weighted. Axiom 1: Human life has value, saving a life is thus positive utility. Assumption 1: We know nothing of the people tied to the trolley -> All humans are probabilistically equal. Thus, the utilitarian presses the button and saves 3 at the cost of 1.
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago
  I'm not sure what probabilities have to do with anything here. It sounds like you're applying a prior that each individual on each side has some "badness" that is uniformly distributed. In effect, a uniform distribution is probably one of the weakest priors and leads to some of the highest variance results (save perhaps Jeffery's Prior). I would go so far as to say assuming uniform probability of "badness" is probably a bad assumption on the way humans actually discriminate on other humans.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Probability is the reflection of the state of your knowledge. If you know someone might become the next Hitler, but you don't know who that might be, or if they're even on the tracks right now, then this is reflected by assigning the same probability of "hitlerism" to all the people on tracks. And even if you had some suspicions, once you honestly factor in your certainty about predictive value of your suspicions, it multiplies down to nothing - so in practice, an uniform prior is a pretty good choice. Yes, it's true that all this stuff is not computable in practice, that it's too complex - but it's not really an obstacle! Everything in life is like that. When you're cooking and a recipe calls for 200g of an ingredient, you're fine with anything between 180g or 220g, and don't care how much of it is water. A restaurant may need to do 200g ± 5g. A chemical plant may want to do 200g ± 0.5g, after first demoisturizing. Nobody tries to hit 200g to ± 1 dalton, because that would be ridiculously complex to do, and require to control for phenomena that most people don't even know exist. We've been trading precision for compute time ever since humans first figured out that things can be measured. The solution is what it's always been: calculating using heuristics and approximations, while keeping tracks of the bounds of those heuristics and approximations.
    - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
      > And even if you had some suspicions, once you honestly factor in your certainty about predictive value of your suspicions, it multiplies down to nothing - so in practice, an uniform prior is a pretty good choice. Does it? You seem to be marginalizing across the entire population, but it's eminently obvious that most humans do _not_ see a human and erase all aspects of their being and then consider them to be one human in a uniformly distributed pool. Humans make snap judgements based on hundreds of subconscious factors all the time. Most humans look at a person and immediately bucket them into a cohort using some mix of physical attributes and prior beliefs of these attributes. Once we're in a cohort, relative probabilities can change. In this particular example, what happens if one of the 3 happens to be wearing military fatigues? What if they have a well-known authoritarian political symbol on their clothing? Anyway, lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism, such as Utility Monsters, and then there's the issue of even being able to impose a utility-based order between disparate things such as "tasty candy" and "rocks underneath my feet". Feel free to read those on the internet.
michaelt 6y ago
> (e.g., in the trolley problem, what happens if you save the 3 people over the 1 person, but one of those 3 people ends up becoming (or is) a dictator who orchestrates a genocide.) Presumably by this logic, you'd have no opinion on whether a midwife should save a newborn baby's life, as it's unknowable whether the baby will one day orchestrate a genocide?
- lars512 6y ago
  I'll bite. Probability comes into play. The vast majority of babies do not in future orchestrate a genocide, but instead live lives worth living, and in turn contribute in some way to shared human progress and wellbeing. So the expected value of the baby's life is positive, the baby should be saved. The very low chance of a future genocide does not weigh highly in this decision.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Thanks, but elsewhere Karrot_Kream says "I'm not sure what probabilities have to do with anything here" so I'm really hoping to hear their non-probability-based thinking.
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago
  Well this gets into the absurdity of relative utility of goodness altogether. If I'm comparing a child's happiness from eating a candy to the unhappiness of stepping on a pebble, what are the relative magnitudes? Regardless, there are lots of criticisms of utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is far from the ascendant moral philosophy, so feel free to find others online.

vecplane 6y ago

My point is that you can have both, but rich people have the means to be more 'effective' with their altruism (EDIT: across a wider population).

medlyyy 6y ago

Why the fuck are you worrying about "metaphysical frameworks?" The things EA mostly focuses on are people dying of easily preventable starvation and disease. There is no need to bring up highly abstract ideas about "metaphysics" (whatever you mean by that - morality isn't generally considered to be in the field of metaphysics) when the suffering is so blatantly concrete.

monktastic1 6y ago
At the EA conference I attended, one of the talks that got people excited was about false vacuum decay of the universe (which would end all life everywhere), and why therefore QFT research was the most effective. Even if that's not their major focus now, it fit nicely into their framework.