9 ms·

Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion

34 points by shaftoe444 4y ago

SunghoYahng 4y ago
Looking for someone to summarize the content for those who don't want to hear the audio
- shaftoe444 4y ago
  There is a transcript here: https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-effective-altruism-utilitarianism-and-the-repugnant-conclusion/#audio-highlights https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-effective-altruism-uti...
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I feel I'm missing a logical leap they're making, where they criticize utilitarianism for maximizing the number of people living, presumably not only by preventing deaths and improving existing lives, but by maximizing childbirths to the point of impairing lives (which I wouldn't do and wouldn't expect utilitarians to either).
    - greenpresident 4y ago
      You might need to read up on the repugnant inclusion. It compares a small population of high individual welfare with a large population of lower welfare. If you assume the desirability of each option to be the product of individual welfare and population size, each population of high welfare has an equally appealing alternative population of many people living just above the point of not wanting to exist. Utilitarianism requires additional assumptions to decide between many people in subsistence and few people living carefree. You are introducing (I suspect) such an addictional constraint, comparable to the Pareto criterion that forbids making individuals worse off in a trade off. However, accepting/demanding/proscribing such trade offs that accept making someone worse off are central to most utilitarian theories.
    - the8472 4y ago
      There isn't One True Utilitarianism anyway because you still have to specify a utility function and the aggregation of it that you want to maximize. And that's an AGI-hard problem. So in practice you can only do vastly simplified approximations of utility and then occasionally check whether the outcomes make sense in an intuitive way. https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768 https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768 > Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.
      - lupire 4y ago
        20 years of MCU and thousands of years of religious myths have taught me that we can't trust gods.
    - probably_wrong 4y ago
      You are talking about the "mere addition paradox" [1] (aka the "repugnant conclusion" mentioned in the article). The point, as I understand it, is that whenever you maximize a metric it ceases to be a good metric, and optimizing for "people living" you reach a bunch of bad conclusions such as the one you mention where the more lives the better. You say that you wouldn't do something like that, but the core of the question is "why?": what would be the utilitarian argument against going that way? You could argue that "happiness" should be a measure, at which point you need to contend with the problem of an "utility monster" [2]: what if it turns out that (say) Americans enjoy a dollar more than shell-shocked Ukranian refugees? Should we optimize the happiness of the Americans? How about those people with negative happiness, should we simply euthanize them? The fault, according to the interview, is that you can't treat happiness and well-being as a matter of sums and averages. If you kill a man to open an ice-cream factory, no amount of happy children should absolve you of that crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
      - refurb 4y ago
        This is probably the best summary in this entire thread. The argument is basically effective altruism, taken to its conclusion, leads to some pretty morally questionable actions. It's not arguing being altruistic is bad. It's just that effective altruism has a bunch of pretty big holes in it. Another good example is the framework used to determine cost-effectiveness of drugs. At first glance it makes sense - just calculate [benefit]/[cost]. But then you realize that for some diseases, the cost baseline is really low because, well, people die when they are babies. So the model falls apart for some real life situations where the model says the ideal outcome is to just let people die because it's "cost effective"
      - lupire 4y ago
        That's just the result of bad math and bad utility models.
        wnkrshm 4y ago
- gampleman 4y ago
  Seems like this is based on this essay: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-al...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dbuder 4y ago
  Why would i spend my time explaining this to you when i could spend that time consulting and then use that money to buy mosquito nets for people in Africa?
  - lvass 4y ago
    Whoa, calm down. Subsidizing afghan plumbers may be 0.5% more effective than those nets.
  - SunghoYahng 4y ago
    You never know what your explanation will lead to. - Maybe a future billionaire -
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    Mosquito nets and deworming pills were on the better side of it: >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 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions#Lauren_Lee___20_000__ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
    - lupire 4y ago
      This is the same intellectual laziness that says Muslims are terrorists, white people are slavers, and black people are criminals.
m0llusk 4y ago
This is awful. He starts with people giving away money and wanting it to do the most good rather than be wasted and goes from there to trollies running over people, leaving drowning kids to die, butchering people for their organs, and bulldozing cities. This appears to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities of chaos and uncertainty. Just to point out two very real examples that run counter to this thinking: Recent studies of benefit programs that give college scholarships to top academic performers it was found that these programs are entirely dominated by girls with essentially zero male participation. This was unexpected, unintended, and raises some major issues regarding gender balance and equity. But in the context set up in this talk both of these outcomes are essentially the same and not differentiable. This is also all hovering near the issue of how best to execute philanthropy. One of the big issues in this space is how much workers involved should be paid. Currently dominant thinking is that charity work as good and wholesome and no money should be wasted and so pay for charity workers tends to be a fraction of what people with similar skills would make at the same or similar jobs in industry. However, experimentation has shown that paying charity workers similar amounts to what people earn in industry jobs results in increased productivity and mission successes. So there is a very interesting open question about exactly how much charity workers should be paid. It seems that in this piece the argument is being made that the entire issue is fundamentally grotesque and immoral. So the issues related to making philanthropy are real and do not in general involve trollies, drowning children, people as potential organ banks willing or not, or the bulldozing of cities. This is really just another sad and tired example of philosophers completely missing the point of pragmatic action.
- scandox 4y ago
  Surely the very point he is making is that it is the Effective Altruists who are ignoring the real complexity? I don't really understand your critique of what he's saying - it seems to me you're agreeing.
Tenoke 4y ago
Hey, maybe when dealing with a runaway trolly or when deciding what worlds to bring into existence you can really nitpick the details but I don't really need to have that sorted out to tell that I prefer 10 people's lives saved compared to 5 or compared to a puppy getting surgery. If someone can do the math and tell me this charity would on average save X lives while that will save Y with your money, that already helps me a lot compared to just donating to Red Cross or whoever because I saw their ad without considering strong alternatives.
- graphpapa 4y ago
  The point of the speaker is that /in general/ these types of comparison amount to equivocation of the incommensurable, and this characteristic leads to progressively more unintuitive results as the breadth of application expands. The fact that the trolley problem intuitively suggests the opposite (it just makes sense!) is kind of the jumping off point for the interesting conversation. This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’. The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle. I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
  - boxed 4y ago
sweetheart 4y ago
Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating all your excess money to organizations to end malaria? It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world. It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals. You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world. If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  > You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. I most certainly don't know that. The more local, the more immediate, the less distance between action and effect, the less unintended consequences, the better.
  - sweetheart 4y ago
    How do you come to that conclusion?
    - throw_pm23 4y ago
      1) I prefer what I can verify, understand, and immediately experience to what I cannot. 2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if. 3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible. EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.
plants 4y ago
I didn’t listen to this, but the essay is full of straw men and contrived arguments about how utilitarianism is a bad moral philosophy. While utilitarianism is not perfect, this essay just regurgitates others’ criticisms of it and provides no useful alternative. As an aside that bothered me (but not related to the content directly), the tone of the article also wants to be scholarly so badly, which made it really long-winded and hard to read. >> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month. I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.
- refurb 4y ago
  What you call strawmen are just example of where the philosophy falls apart. i mean, how else do you test a philosophy other than throwing all possibly scenarios at it and see what comes out?
refurb 4y ago
Russ Robert's Econtalk podcast is fantastic. He brings on all sorts of authors and discusses their books, challenges their theories, gets challenged back. He's had Michael Pollen on about psychedelics and I thought he was pretty fair and engaged considering he's a conservative Jewish guy in his 60's that leans more right than left (though with libertarian beliefs, but mostly economic ones). It's a very academic podcast (Russ is an economics professor at the Hoover Institute), but his podcasts on the financial crisis (I think there are over a dozen) are really good if you want to understand how all the stuff works under the hood. He had former heads of the Fed on, numerous professors who are globally recognized as monetary experts, etc. And the podcast archives go back to like 2006.
circular_lights 4y ago
Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.
- Joeboy 4y ago
  Deracinated nerd here, but I find your perspective at least a lot more understandable than the people who at appalled by the idea of using rich people's money to save poor people's lives, from a robustly anti-capitalist standpoint.
  - circular_lights 4y ago
    Totally - instincts are powerful and attempting to collapse their multidimensional information space into words and rationality forces people into absurdities (and the nerds get immense joy at seeing their betters squirm at their toy games). I side with the "appalled", but that's because I know they are soft and polite people clumsily trying to catch up to the high-IQ* nerds. I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world". * EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds
- naasking 4y ago
  > Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?
drdrek 4y ago
Philosophical frameworks can be useful when you know their limits. A single formula cannot possibly give you the answer to any human interaction. Physicists (successful ones anyway) do not try to use a single equation for all problems. Only fanatics think a single moral framework can solve all problems, no need to give them any mind.
dale_glass 4y ago
Every single moral system leads to repugnant conclusions if you push it just right. So okay, you don't like utilitarianism. Let's try deontology for size. Deontology works effectively to following a set of rules and duties, consequences be damned. So if our rules say you don't steal, then you don't. Don't murder. Etc. But the snag is that since you don't care about the consequences, any consequences, of any size are irrelevant. So for instance, if contraception is deemed bad, then no amount of negative consequences has any relevance. Families are brought down to crushing poverty, orphanages are overflowing, starving children are wandering on the streets? Absolutely not a reason to change that rule. Also, where utilitarianism can make iffy tradeoffs (eg, this particular person would be better dead because we'd benefit from it), there's usually some practical limit to that. If you ever can do that under deontology you can do it on an unlimited scale. If you ever work out that "those people" aren't really people legally speaking and you can just kill one of them, then you can kill them all you want, any time you want, on any scale you want. Point being, most any system followed indiscriminately has problems because people are people and will look for loopholes and ways to exploit any rules to benefit.
- boxed 4y ago
  From what I understand Utilitarianism doesn't really have this problem. Why? Because if you say "if you do x a lot it causes bad thing y", well then that's a part of the utility function and the consequence. You only end up with absurdities if you actually don't think through it too far.

34 points by shaftoe444 4y ago

SunghoYahng 4y ago

Looking for someone to summarize the content for those who don't want to hear the audio

shaftoe444 4y ago
There is a transcript here: https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-effective-altruism-utilitarianism-and-the-repugnant-conclusion/#audio-highlights https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-effective-altruism-uti...
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  I feel I'm missing a logical leap they're making, where they criticize utilitarianism for maximizing the number of people living, presumably not only by preventing deaths and improving existing lives, but by maximizing childbirths to the point of impairing lives (which I wouldn't do and wouldn't expect utilitarians to either).
  - greenpresident 4y ago
    You might need to read up on the repugnant inclusion. It compares a small population of high individual welfare with a large population of lower welfare. If you assume the desirability of each option to be the product of individual welfare and population size, each population of high welfare has an equally appealing alternative population of many people living just above the point of not wanting to exist. Utilitarianism requires additional assumptions to decide between many people in subsistence and few people living carefree. You are introducing (I suspect) such an addictional constraint, comparable to the Pareto criterion that forbids making individuals worse off in a trade off. However, accepting/demanding/proscribing such trade offs that accept making someone worse off are central to most utilitarian theories.
  - the8472 4y ago
    There isn't One True Utilitarianism anyway because you still have to specify a utility function and the aggregation of it that you want to maximize. And that's an AGI-hard problem. So in practice you can only do vastly simplified approximations of utility and then occasionally check whether the outcomes make sense in an intuitive way. https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768 https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768 > Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.
    - lupire 4y ago
      20 years of MCU and thousands of years of religious myths have taught me that we can't trust gods.
  - probably_wrong 4y ago
    You are talking about the "mere addition paradox" [1] (aka the "repugnant conclusion" mentioned in the article). The point, as I understand it, is that whenever you maximize a metric it ceases to be a good metric, and optimizing for "people living" you reach a bunch of bad conclusions such as the one you mention where the more lives the better. You say that you wouldn't do something like that, but the core of the question is "why?": what would be the utilitarian argument against going that way? You could argue that "happiness" should be a measure, at which point you need to contend with the problem of an "utility monster" [2]: what if it turns out that (say) Americans enjoy a dollar more than shell-shocked Ukranian refugees? Should we optimize the happiness of the Americans? How about those people with negative happiness, should we simply euthanize them? The fault, according to the interview, is that you can't treat happiness and well-being as a matter of sums and averages. If you kill a man to open an ice-cream factory, no amount of happy children should absolve you of that crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
    - refurb 4y ago
      This is probably the best summary in this entire thread. The argument is basically effective altruism, taken to its conclusion, leads to some pretty morally questionable actions. It's not arguing being altruistic is bad. It's just that effective altruism has a bunch of pretty big holes in it. Another good example is the framework used to determine cost-effectiveness of drugs. At first glance it makes sense - just calculate [benefit]/[cost]. But then you realize that for some diseases, the cost baseline is really low because, well, people die when they are babies. So the model falls apart for some real life situations where the model says the ideal outcome is to just let people die because it's "cost effective"
    - lupire 4y ago
      That's just the result of bad math and bad utility models.
      - wnkrshm 4y ago
gampleman 4y ago
Seems like this is based on this essay: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-al...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dbuder 4y ago
Why would i spend my time explaining this to you when i could spend that time consulting and then use that money to buy mosquito nets for people in Africa?
- lvass 4y ago
  Whoa, calm down. Subsidizing afghan plumbers may be 0.5% more effective than those nets.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  You never know what your explanation will lead to. - Maybe a future billionaire -
- sinenomine 4y ago
  Mosquito nets and deworming pills were on the better side of it: >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 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions#Lauren_Lee___20_000__ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
  - lupire 4y ago
    This is the same intellectual laziness that says Muslims are terrorists, white people are slavers, and black people are criminals.

m0llusk 4y ago

This is awful. He starts with people giving away money and wanting it to do the most good rather than be wasted and goes from there to trollies running over people, leaving drowning kids to die, butchering people for their organs, and bulldozing cities. This appears to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities of chaos and uncertainty. Just to point out two very real examples that run counter to this thinking: Recent studies of benefit programs that give college scholarships to top academic performers it was found that these programs are entirely dominated by girls with essentially zero male participation. This was unexpected, unintended, and raises some major issues regarding gender balance and equity. But in the context set up in this talk both of these outcomes are essentially the same and not differentiable. This is also all hovering near the issue of how best to execute philanthropy. One of the big issues in this space is how much workers involved should be paid. Currently dominant thinking is that charity work as good and wholesome and no money should be wasted and so pay for charity workers tends to be a fraction of what people with similar skills would make at the same or similar jobs in industry. However, experimentation has shown that paying charity workers similar amounts to what people earn in industry jobs results in increased productivity and mission successes. So there is a very interesting open question about exactly how much charity workers should be paid. It seems that in this piece the argument is being made that the entire issue is fundamentally grotesque and immoral. So the issues related to making philanthropy are real and do not in general involve trollies, drowning children, people as potential organ banks willing or not, or the bulldozing of cities. This is really just another sad and tired example of philosophers completely missing the point of pragmatic action.

scandox 4y ago
Surely the very point he is making is that it is the Effective Altruists who are ignoring the real complexity? I don't really understand your critique of what he's saying - it seems to me you're agreeing.

Tenoke 4y ago

Hey, maybe when dealing with a runaway trolly or when deciding what worlds to bring into existence you can really nitpick the details but I don't really need to have that sorted out to tell that I prefer 10 people's lives saved compared to 5 or compared to a puppy getting surgery. If someone can do the math and tell me this charity would on average save X lives while that will save Y with your money, that already helps me a lot compared to just donating to Red Cross or whoever because I saw their ad without considering strong alternatives.

graphpapa 4y ago
The point of the speaker is that /in general/ these types of comparison amount to equivocation of the incommensurable, and this characteristic leads to progressively more unintuitive results as the breadth of application expands. The fact that the trolley problem intuitively suggests the opposite (it just makes sense!) is kind of the jumping off point for the interesting conversation. This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’. The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle. I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
- boxed 4y ago

sweetheart 4y ago

Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating all your excess money to organizations to end malaria? It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world. It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals. You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world. If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.

throw_pm23 4y ago
> You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. I most certainly don't know that. The more local, the more immediate, the less distance between action and effect, the less unintended consequences, the better.
- sweetheart 4y ago
  How do you come to that conclusion?
  - throw_pm23 4y ago
    1) I prefer what I can verify, understand, and immediately experience to what I cannot. 2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if. 3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible. EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.

plants 4y ago

I didn’t listen to this, but the essay is full of straw men and contrived arguments about how utilitarianism is a bad moral philosophy. While utilitarianism is not perfect, this essay just regurgitates others’ criticisms of it and provides no useful alternative. As an aside that bothered me (but not related to the content directly), the tone of the article also wants to be scholarly so badly, which made it really long-winded and hard to read. >> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month. I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.

refurb 4y ago
What you call strawmen are just example of where the philosophy falls apart. i mean, how else do you test a philosophy other than throwing all possibly scenarios at it and see what comes out?

refurb 4y ago

Russ Robert's Econtalk podcast is fantastic. He brings on all sorts of authors and discusses their books, challenges their theories, gets challenged back. He's had Michael Pollen on about psychedelics and I thought he was pretty fair and engaged considering he's a conservative Jewish guy in his 60's that leans more right than left (though with libertarian beliefs, but mostly economic ones). It's a very academic podcast (Russ is an economics professor at the Hoover Institute), but his podcasts on the financial crisis (I think there are over a dozen) are really good if you want to understand how all the stuff works under the hood. He had former heads of the Fed on, numerous professors who are globally recognized as monetary experts, etc. And the podcast archives go back to like 2006.

circular_lights 4y ago

Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.

Joeboy 4y ago
Deracinated nerd here, but I find your perspective at least a lot more understandable than the people who at appalled by the idea of using rich people's money to save poor people's lives, from a robustly anti-capitalist standpoint.
- circular_lights 4y ago
  Totally - instincts are powerful and attempting to collapse their multidimensional information space into words and rationality forces people into absurdities (and the nerds get immense joy at seeing their betters squirm at their toy games). I side with the "appalled", but that's because I know they are soft and polite people clumsily trying to catch up to the high-IQ* nerds. I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world". * EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds
naasking 4y ago
> Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?

drdrek 4y ago

Philosophical frameworks can be useful when you know their limits. A single formula cannot possibly give you the answer to any human interaction. Physicists (successful ones anyway) do not try to use a single equation for all problems. Only fanatics think a single moral framework can solve all problems, no need to give them any mind.

dale_glass 4y ago

Every single moral system leads to repugnant conclusions if you push it just right. So okay, you don't like utilitarianism. Let's try deontology for size. Deontology works effectively to following a set of rules and duties, consequences be damned. So if our rules say you don't steal, then you don't. Don't murder. Etc. But the snag is that since you don't care about the consequences, any consequences, of any size are irrelevant. So for instance, if contraception is deemed bad, then no amount of negative consequences has any relevance. Families are brought down to crushing poverty, orphanages are overflowing, starving children are wandering on the streets? Absolutely not a reason to change that rule. Also, where utilitarianism can make iffy tradeoffs (eg, this particular person would be better dead because we'd benefit from it), there's usually some practical limit to that. If you ever can do that under deontology you can do it on an unlimited scale. If you ever work out that "those people" aren't really people legally speaking and you can just kill one of them, then you can kill them all you want, any time you want, on any scale you want. Point being, most any system followed indiscriminately has problems because people are people and will look for loopholes and ways to exploit any rules to benefit.

boxed 4y ago
From what I understand Utilitarianism doesn't really have this problem. Why? Because if you say "if you do x a lot it causes bad thing y", well then that's a part of the utility function and the consequence. You only end up with absurdities if you actually don't think through it too far.