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There's a lot of talk in the comments here about how ads are terrible, Jeff is terrible, etc. Eg "I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a

There's a lot of talk in the comments here about how ads are terrible, Jeff is terrible, etc. Eg "I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts." According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history). Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children. Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views. [1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

bmn__ 5y ago
If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument. I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive. I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  That isn't how to evaluate a career choice. You evaluate it against all other choices, not in a vacuum. Choosing to work in advertising only comes out ahead if the excess of the good you do with the money you earn over the harm done by the job exceeds the excess good you could have done with money earned over harm of the job from any other job you could have chosen. Net good is better than net harm, but it's not better than even more net good. Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets. I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.
  - composer 5y ago
    I like this argument and would like to strengthen it in sligthly diffent dimension... Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic; AND if more persons are rehabbed than addicted then the whole endeavour is a good thing; AND I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones. The point of the analogy is to share the perspective that "net offsetting" isn't automatically a good thing. Many times the fundamental nature of the initial thing to be offset, in this case advertising, must be given primacy over anything else. Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad. Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution. Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."

bmn__ 5y ago

If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument. I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive. I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.

nonameiguess 5y ago
That isn't how to evaluate a career choice. You evaluate it against all other choices, not in a vacuum. Choosing to work in advertising only comes out ahead if the excess of the good you do with the money you earn over the harm done by the job exceeds the excess good you could have done with money earned over harm of the job from any other job you could have chosen. Net good is better than net harm, but it's not better than even more net good. Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets. I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.
- composer 5y ago
  I like this argument and would like to strengthen it in sligthly diffent dimension... Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic; AND if more persons are rehabbed than addicted then the whole endeavour is a good thing; AND I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones. The point of the analogy is to share the perspective that "net offsetting" isn't automatically a good thing. Many times the fundamental nature of the initial thing to be offset, in this case advertising, must be given primacy over anything else. Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad. Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution. Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."