5 ms·

Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? I've yet to see any kind of rigorous argument in favour, yet seems like a funda

Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? I've yet to see any kind of rigorous argument in favour, yet seems like a fundamental requirement if one is going to expend such incredible resources into attempts to maximise this value. The reason I ask is that, when I first discovered Effective Altruism, finding the premise to be deeply compelling, I ended up staying up all night watching videos trying to reconcile / assimilate it into my world view. In one video, various trolley problem scenarios were enumerated, and the EA guests were advocating sparing a lamborghini to the detriment of a child's life so that the car could be sold off and the money donated to saving multiple children in the developing world. Furthermore, there was some suggestion of a threshold where the altruism of sparing X domesticated animals was 'higher' than sparing Y humans, which definitely felt like it fell into [citation needed] territory.

karlkeefer 4y ago
It seems like suggesting there is _no such threshold_ is even more in need of citation. Boundlessness means that X could be all domesticated animals, and Y=1 human. Surely that seems like not the right call, given that it would ultimately kill even more humans.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  There are definitely scenarios where an X big enough to cause broad ecological consequences would encounter little rhetorical friction to overwhelm Y=1. [Admittedly this is all error-prone hazy recollection, but] From what I understood, the original scenario in question was about a case where X was large, but not of critical strategic consequence to the availability of the animal(s) in question
concordDance 4y ago
> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? Given a moral compass, yes. EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).
- hderms 4y ago
  Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have value equal to our own, but how can we hope to assess how many of them there may be or what aspects of the realities of human life will change over the next century even? This is like trying to predict the future by reading tea leaves, except you have to pledge 10% of your income to whichever leaf talks about the risk of general AI the loudest. So should everyone be forced to value all future human lives as being as concretely valuable as our own? In order to put them into a total ordering of morality one is forced to make a judgement call on how many people we think are likely to exist in the future as well as how relevant our musings of today actually capture what life will be like in that future. Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future? It just reeks of hubris to me. To be a really effective altruist you must first create a time travel device.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future? Not in my experience and all the time respectively.
  - moistly 4y ago
    > the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future Better to save a life today, than a billion lives a century from now, because the unstoppable planet-killer asteroid is going to hit us in 99 years.

karlkeefer 4y ago

It seems like suggesting there is _no such threshold_ is even more in need of citation. Boundlessness means that X could be all domesticated animals, and Y=1 human. Surely that seems like not the right call, given that it would ultimately kill even more humans.

ShroudedNight 4y ago
There are definitely scenarios where an X big enough to cause broad ecological consequences would encounter little rhetorical friction to overwhelm Y=1. [Admittedly this is all error-prone hazy recollection, but] From what I understood, the original scenario in question was about a case where X was large, but not of critical strategic consequence to the availability of the animal(s) in question

concordDance 4y ago

> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? Given a moral compass, yes. EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).

hderms 4y ago
Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have value equal to our own, but how can we hope to assess how many of them there may be or what aspects of the realities of human life will change over the next century even? This is like trying to predict the future by reading tea leaves, except you have to pledge 10% of your income to whichever leaf talks about the risk of general AI the loudest. So should everyone be forced to value all future human lives as being as concretely valuable as our own? In order to put them into a total ordering of morality one is forced to make a judgement call on how many people we think are likely to exist in the future as well as how relevant our musings of today actually capture what life will be like in that future. Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future? It just reeks of hubris to me. To be a really effective altruist you must first create a time travel device.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future? Not in my experience and all the time respectively.
- moistly 4y ago
  > the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future Better to save a life today, than a billion lives a century from now, because the unstoppable planet-killer asteroid is going to hit us in 99 years.