5 ms·

This has been studied again and again. Our motivation to help is because we know the neighbour, because someone is in trouble, because I would like someone to d

This has been studied again and again. Our motivation to help is because we know the neighbour, because someone is in trouble, because I would like someone to do it for me in the same situation... and other things like that. At the moment you impersonalize this, all the game changes. But the worst part of this game is that there are a group of "well-intentioned" people that tell you what is good or bad not for your neighbour, but for human kind or the like. These people are usually the worst of all because they play this game with personal incentives to manage the lives/wealth of others. There is a very big difference between "helping others" and "helping your neighbour", where the latter is, surprisingly, quite better than the former. When you think everyone should "help others" what we do is to delegate responsibility in impersonal organizations, often the state, and we feel no responsibility for it, after all, we already do our job by paying taxes. I assert this is the wrong approach: we have to go back to thinking on helping our immediate environment. Why? Because if all of us do that, we have a bit better world and by human nature we do have more incentive to help in this way than through a central organization that often does not want to help, but that it is also very inefficient in helping. If we all delegate, we skip responsibility and the people who are responsible for it, for them you are just a number and they have their own incentives. Also let me tell you that I do not think they are really worried about helping, but about benefiting themselves more than anything else with a custom of good will on top of them. There are even experiments about these things. Human nature has incentive. If you change the incentives, you change the behaviors. This is one of the fundamental reasons why I am against taxes or, more in general, making others paying the price of the decisions of others, not necessarily taxes.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization. If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money). Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.
- germandiago 4y ago
  > Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.
thinkharderdev 4y ago
> This has been studied again and again. Our motivation to help is because we know the neighbour, because someone is in trouble, because I would like someone to do it for me in the same situation... and other things like that. Not sure what studies you are referring to but this strikes me as obviously untrue. The vast majority of charitable giving is to help people who aren't your neighbors.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think you are confusing two: topics charitable giving in general versus willingness to help an individual. I think this is a common mistake and both points are correct. People are more willing to help an single individual they know than a single stranger. They may also give more to stranger(s) in aggregate than people that they know, but there hey hell of a lot more strangers in the world than people you know. for example, I would give a lot of time and money to help a sick family member, but I wouldn't give that to a single stranger. I you want to talk about willingness to help individuals, I also think your numbers on charitable giving are incorrect. Charitable numbers are defined and biased to measure giving to strangers, as they look at tax deductable donations. If you wanted to look at all financial help given, a more appropriate measure would be money given to strangers versus family. For the latter, you'd have to measure all the money parents spend on children and inheritance. I strongly suspect that people give their family spouses and children much more money over the course of their lives and at time of death. This is where people usually object to strong utilitarian giving. Most people strongly react to the idea that they should spend more money on strangers than their children, because it would do more good for the strangers. The strong utilitarian position is that the moral action would be to save lives in the third world instead of giving your kids birthday presents, paying for their schooling, or giving them your house when you die. From a certain perspective they are right. the problem is that utilitarians often make the good the enemy of the perfect. Sub optimal help still leads to a better world. doing good, but imperfectly is not immoral.
  - germandiago 4y ago
    > doing good, but imperfectly is not immoral It is not this that is immoral. What is immoral is that a guy that has nothing to offer except extracting resources from the effort of others coactively decides where the money goes without you being involved in the process and paying no penalty for the bad decisions. This is not a good system. It is the worst possible system. It is much better to dive in your own money, literally and say "what am I doing with all this?" -> going to open a factory in the 3rd world and hire people. Because in this case there is mutual cooperation, something strong, solid, that will not break easily: people improve their lives, both sides benefit. This kind of state charity in a loop of we always need more for the poor is a failure, many times it does not solve the problem, and it creates an incentive to have poor people, needless to say some policies that perpetuate people receiving them there. I always say that a social help is not a success, it is the reflect of a failure. The fewer we need, the better we are doing. But for that you need individuals with a minimal level of self-reliance and ambition.
xorcist 4y ago
Helping your neighbor builds culture. You help build a culture where we don't just accept some bad things than can be avoided, and that will reciprocate back on you in the long run. Humans are herd animals. Each individual has a limited life, but together we build cultures that transcend millennia. That is what people refer to when they call on someone to leave the world better than they found it. We should not accept for others to die of cancer where it is preventable, for example. But the effective way to achieve that is not for everyone to find a well paying day job and donate to cancer treatments for others. That's where the political undertones of EA leads them astray. The more effective way is to build a society where cancer research and care in general is regarded as one of the more important things we do, and something to strive for. That it is something that should be given the resources it requires to achieve the goal, and that taking part of that is considered a fundamental right. That is where taxes come in. That doesn't mean taxes are good, or that it is necessarily the only way to implement such a system, only that it is the most effective method we have found. Humanity can certainly eradicate malaria, for example, if the whole society decided it was the most important thing to do. The hard part is to nudge culture in that direction.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I don't think you really supported your idea that collectivism and taxes are the most effective method. Why do you think that everyone taking personal responsibility to maximize the good they do is inferior to taxes and government directed good. I believe the opposite. Relying on the government is used as an excuse for personal inaction - essentially outsourcing altruism to 3rd party. People think, I shouldnt have to help anyone or do something as simple as pick up litter, because I already payed taxes for someone else to do that. I would argue that it is better for people to work well paying jobs, take individual responsibility to support actions they believe have the most benefit. The inverse is that people dont optimize income, pay the minimum tax, and have no individual control or responsibility over what it is spent on or how effectively it is.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    That's because I said nothing of the sort. Collectivism and government direction are your words, not mine. The cancer treatment example was meant to show that culture is what matters in the long run, as the donation model is clearly less effective in this case. Taxes are mere implementation. They follow, they do not lead. They are not relevant to the example.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization. If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money). Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.

germandiago 4y ago
> Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.

thinkharderdev 4y ago

> This has been studied again and again. Our motivation to help is because we know the neighbour, because someone is in trouble, because I would like someone to do it for me in the same situation... and other things like that. Not sure what studies you are referring to but this strikes me as obviously untrue. The vast majority of charitable giving is to help people who aren't your neighbors.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
I think you are confusing two: topics charitable giving in general versus willingness to help an individual. I think this is a common mistake and both points are correct. People are more willing to help an single individual they know than a single stranger. They may also give more to stranger(s) in aggregate than people that they know, but there hey hell of a lot more strangers in the world than people you know. for example, I would give a lot of time and money to help a sick family member, but I wouldn't give that to a single stranger. I you want to talk about willingness to help individuals, I also think your numbers on charitable giving are incorrect. Charitable numbers are defined and biased to measure giving to strangers, as they look at tax deductable donations. If you wanted to look at all financial help given, a more appropriate measure would be money given to strangers versus family. For the latter, you'd have to measure all the money parents spend on children and inheritance. I strongly suspect that people give their family spouses and children much more money over the course of their lives and at time of death. This is where people usually object to strong utilitarian giving. Most people strongly react to the idea that they should spend more money on strangers than their children, because it would do more good for the strangers. The strong utilitarian position is that the moral action would be to save lives in the third world instead of giving your kids birthday presents, paying for their schooling, or giving them your house when you die. From a certain perspective they are right. the problem is that utilitarians often make the good the enemy of the perfect. Sub optimal help still leads to a better world. doing good, but imperfectly is not immoral.
- germandiago 4y ago
  > doing good, but imperfectly is not immoral It is not this that is immoral. What is immoral is that a guy that has nothing to offer except extracting resources from the effort of others coactively decides where the money goes without you being involved in the process and paying no penalty for the bad decisions. This is not a good system. It is the worst possible system. It is much better to dive in your own money, literally and say "what am I doing with all this?" -> going to open a factory in the 3rd world and hire people. Because in this case there is mutual cooperation, something strong, solid, that will not break easily: people improve their lives, both sides benefit. This kind of state charity in a loop of we always need more for the poor is a failure, many times it does not solve the problem, and it creates an incentive to have poor people, needless to say some policies that perpetuate people receiving them there. I always say that a social help is not a success, it is the reflect of a failure. The fewer we need, the better we are doing. But for that you need individuals with a minimal level of self-reliance and ambition.

xorcist 4y ago

Helping your neighbor builds culture. You help build a culture where we don't just accept some bad things than can be avoided, and that will reciprocate back on you in the long run. Humans are herd animals. Each individual has a limited life, but together we build cultures that transcend millennia. That is what people refer to when they call on someone to leave the world better than they found it. We should not accept for others to die of cancer where it is preventable, for example. But the effective way to achieve that is not for everyone to find a well paying day job and donate to cancer treatments for others. That's where the political undertones of EA leads them astray. The more effective way is to build a society where cancer research and care in general is regarded as one of the more important things we do, and something to strive for. That it is something that should be given the resources it requires to achieve the goal, and that taking part of that is considered a fundamental right. That is where taxes come in. That doesn't mean taxes are good, or that it is necessarily the only way to implement such a system, only that it is the most effective method we have found. Humanity can certainly eradicate malaria, for example, if the whole society decided it was the most important thing to do. The hard part is to nudge culture in that direction.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
I don't think you really supported your idea that collectivism and taxes are the most effective method. Why do you think that everyone taking personal responsibility to maximize the good they do is inferior to taxes and government directed good. I believe the opposite. Relying on the government is used as an excuse for personal inaction - essentially outsourcing altruism to 3rd party. People think, I shouldnt have to help anyone or do something as simple as pick up litter, because I already payed taxes for someone else to do that. I would argue that it is better for people to work well paying jobs, take individual responsibility to support actions they believe have the most benefit. The inverse is that people dont optimize income, pay the minimum tax, and have no individual control or responsibility over what it is spent on or how effectively it is.
- xorcist 4y ago
  That's because I said nothing of the sort. Collectivism and government direction are your words, not mine. The cancer treatment example was meant to show that culture is what matters in the long run, as the donation model is clearly less effective in this case. Taxes are mere implementation. They follow, they do not lead. They are not relevant to the example.