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The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make

The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. And in a lot of situations, quantification fails. The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. A theater may not show up in a balance sheet but it can have a massive effect. And it does concern me deeply that the flippant example for "non-effective altruism" is community theater. It reflects the attitude of SBF that a book is not worth reading. That is a profoundly destructive mindset.

JamesBarney 4y ago
Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa. But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree. If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
- hardwaregeek 4y ago
  Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that. Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater. But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for. So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      No. This ignores the effect of donating locally and helping local causes. Your comparison does not account for global differences in needs.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      But the theatre has a chance of spawning a future movie star who also has a chance of being an EA advocate. Directly through their $50million movie paycheques they will be saving 10,000 lives at a future date. Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in. Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do. “Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…” Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
      - awsdasdasd 4y ago
        Effective alturism vs luxury alturism?
        quickthrower2 4y ago
        Yes I guess!
      - xorfish 4y ago
        I think this is fitting in that context: Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    Pascal’s mugging is a popular thought experiment amongst rationalists and EA people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
- pavlov 4y ago
  This game can go on endlessly. What if hiring the teenagers mean they’re getting a salary, can help their families, and without the job they’d run off into the jungle to join the warlord who runs a murder cult army? Turns out the community theatre prevented a massacre and one of the kids wins the Nobel Prize for her plays in fifty years.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    I don't understand the purpose of your what if. Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives. It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters. It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - didibus 4y ago
      You did straw man the example though. It's very different to say that building the theater will kill the workers, as to say that the money could be used elsewhere to save someone in an immediately dire situation. Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many. It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
unmole 4y ago
> The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s
- hardwaregeek 4y ago
  ...when did this become an either/or? We can do both. In fact diversification of one's "ethics portfolio" seems like something an effective altruist would understand quite well.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    People have a finite amount of money to give, so every dollar is an either/or decision. Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives. Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
    - dagw 4y ago
      But much like with investing in stock I don't know for sure a priori which investment will bring the highest return. If I'm 80% sure that charity A is better than charity B (for my definition of 'better) I'll give 80% of my investment to charity A and 20% to charity B.
      - zdragnar 4y ago
        When comparing mosquito nets versus theater, I don't really think the stock diversification analogy fits at all.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Some of those things (investments) will give you the dollar back later, and might be considered better ideas on that basis. But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1]. That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2]. [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions#Lauren_Lee___20_000__ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... [2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf
- roenxi 4y ago
  I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. If they don't, that means: 1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences). 2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Mass prosperity -> too many entitled folks -> mass destruction of environment -> meta vr as alternative environment in post apocalyptic hellscape
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
radu_floricica 4y ago
Oh my god, it ENCOURAGES you to do something it believes is right and you don't. This is outright CRIMINAL. How do they dare do something so audacious? Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
- astrange 4y ago
  “A feeling someone is wrong” can easily be more correct than “doing the numbers”. Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No. This is called “the map is not the territory”.
ALittleLight 4y ago
So, if you had to choose between funding community theater and saving X lives, how large would X need to be before you'd abandon the theater? It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  The issue as I see it is that you cannot say that the first is ineffective unless you can quantify the ROI of the theater. If I knew that my donation will fund the next Romeo and Juliet, then I'd expect X to be really high before I deprive future generations of such an important work. Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
  - smallnamespace 4y ago
    I agree arts and culture are valuable. The obvious objection now is why not build 5 theatres in Africa? Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
    - didibus 4y ago
      A theater won't have the same impact everywhere. You likely don't know anything about the neighborhoods in Africa, and how impactful a theater there could be. You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well. And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
notahacker 4y ago
The other thing is that the actual standard of the "quantitative case" put forward is hugely variable anyway. With sufficiently inventive fantasy numbers, theatre enthusiasts could probably make an EA case of the form: "what if a person was so inspired by watching my amateur dramatic production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that they solved all Unfriendly AI problems?". Sure, it's unlikely, but the rewards benefit an almost infinite number of people! In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...

JamesBarney 4y ago

Let me preface this with I know this is a mugging, I think community theater is great, and I don't think it's good to divert all societal resources to nets in Africa. But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree. If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?

hardwaregeek 4y ago
Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that. Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater. But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for. So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    No. This ignores the effect of donating locally and helping local causes. Your comparison does not account for global differences in needs.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    But the theatre has a chance of spawning a future movie star who also has a chance of being an EA advocate. Directly through their $50million movie paycheques they will be saving 10,000 lives at a future date. Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in. Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do. “Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…” Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
    - awsdasdasd 4y ago
      Effective alturism vs luxury alturism?
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Yes I guess!
    - xorfish 4y ago
      I think this is fitting in that context: Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Pascal’s mugging is a popular thought experiment amongst rationalists and EA people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
pavlov 4y ago
This game can go on endlessly. What if hiring the teenagers mean they’re getting a salary, can help their families, and without the job they’d run off into the jungle to join the warlord who runs a murder cult army? Turns out the community theatre prevented a massacre and one of the kids wins the Nobel Prize for her plays in fifty years.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  I don't understand the purpose of your what if. Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives. It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters. It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - didibus 4y ago
    You did straw man the example though. It's very different to say that building the theater will kill the workers, as to say that the money could be used elsewhere to save someone in an immediately dire situation. Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many. It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?

unmole 4y ago

> The arts have an immense value in developing philosophical, emotional, empathetic values. Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s

hardwaregeek 4y ago
...when did this become an either/or? We can do both. In fact diversification of one's "ethics portfolio" seems like something an effective altruist would understand quite well.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  People have a finite amount of money to give, so every dollar is an either/or decision. Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives. Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
  - dagw 4y ago
    But much like with investing in stock I don't know for sure a priori which investment will bring the highest return. If I'm 80% sure that charity A is better than charity B (for my definition of 'better) I'll give 80% of my investment to charity A and 20% to charity B.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      When comparing mosquito nets versus theater, I don't really think the stock diversification analogy fits at all.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Some of those things (investments) will give you the dollar back later, and might be considered better ideas on that basis. But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> The example of a community theater highlights another issue I have with effective altruism. It effectively encourages you to only donate to things you can make a quantifiable case for. Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1]. That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2]. [1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions#Lauren_Lee___20_000__ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... [2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf

roenxi 4y ago
I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. If they don't, that means: 1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences). 2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Mass prosperity -> too many entitled folks -> mass destruction of environment -> meta vr as alternative environment in post apocalyptic hellscape
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > I am not sure exactly what people miss, but taking a stab in the dark - human emotions have evolved over millions of years to try and guide people in the direction of making rational decisions more often than not. The expected situation is that the rational option and the emotional option align. I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.

radu_floricica 4y ago

Oh my god, it ENCOURAGES you to do something it believes is right and you don't. This is outright CRIMINAL. How do they dare do something so audacious? Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.

astrange 4y ago
“A feeling someone is wrong” can easily be more correct than “doing the numbers”. Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No. This is called “the map is not the territory”.

ALittleLight 4y ago

So, if you had to choose between funding community theater and saving X lives, how large would X need to be before you'd abandon the theater? It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.

probably_wrong 4y ago
The issue as I see it is that you cannot say that the first is ineffective unless you can quantify the ROI of the theater. If I knew that my donation will fund the next Romeo and Juliet, then I'd expect X to be really high before I deprive future generations of such an important work. Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
- smallnamespace 4y ago
  I agree arts and culture are valuable. The obvious objection now is why not build 5 theatres in Africa? Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
  - didibus 4y ago
    A theater won't have the same impact everywhere. You likely don't know anything about the neighborhoods in Africa, and how impactful a theater there could be. You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well. And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.

notahacker 4y ago

The other thing is that the actual standard of the "quantitative case" put forward is hugely variable anyway. With sufficiently inventive fantasy numbers, theatre enthusiasts could probably make an EA case of the form: "what if a person was so inspired by watching my amateur dramatic production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that they solved all Unfriendly AI problems?". Sure, it's unlikely, but the rewards benefit an almost infinite number of people! In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...