8 ms·

I was expecting some allusion to _why_ you think ETG is damaging. For a consequentialist, the baseline logic is straightforward: what do you think the pitfalls

I was expecting some allusion to _why_ you think ETG is damaging. For a consequentialist, the baseline logic is straightforward: what do you think the pitfalls are? Or is your issue with consequentialism itself? The latter would seem to reject the fundamental premise of EA, not just ETG

zestyping 4y ago
The issue is primarily with motivated reasoning, not consequentialism, though naive consequentialism (also rampant in EA) can also be dangerous. ETG encourages people to think of the positive side of what they're doing (donating money) without considering the negatives (harmful careers). Being rich, and focusing on getting rich as a goal, distorts your thinking.
- tomp 4y ago
  The best paid careers are in HFT, which is far less harmful than e.g. ad optimisation (the business of most big tech)
  - zestyping 4y ago
    Interesting — could I hear your argument why?
    - tomp 4y ago
      The only people HFT “harms” are traders, i.e. voluntary participants in the “get rich” game who are likewise trying to win, but aren’t good enough. BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)
      - Dracophoenix 4y ago
        > BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case) Those who make the ads and those who view them are voluntarily exchanging their time and attention with each other. They're traders in the same way high-frequency traders are.
        tomp 4y ago
        maybe in theory, but in practice ads are everywhere and completely unavoidable in everyday life
AlexandrB 4y ago
Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices. You can't fully undo the damage of the former by giving a portion of your fortune away. Especially since you have less information about what would actually help than the people who are being exploited for that profit in the first place. I think ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others Wait, what? That's just not true. You can be very highly productive without exploiting anyone. Even if you happen to be in an industry where exploiting others is the status quo, you can do outsized amounts of good (rivaling the best outcomes of charity) by being even a bit less exploitive. Stated another way, social responsibility - even in profit-seeking enterprises - is quite compatible with EA.
  - zestyping 4y ago
    It depends. It's sometimes possible to increase profits without harming others, but _maximizing_ profits will eventually cause harm (by definition, it's optimizing for profit at the expense of other factors). Competing on the basis of profit in a field of competitors will naturally push you to maximize profit, i.e. to maximize efficiency and externalities. That's what corporations are — large, complex machines under steady selective pressure to maximize efficiency and externalities. If you're lucky, they will go the efficiency route. But if it's easier, or they're already pretty efficient, they will tend to maximize negative externalities instead. So guardrails are needed. Reasonable people disagree about where the guardrails should be. One thing that is hard to dispute, though, is that seeking profit, and continuing to focus your attention on increasing profit, will bias your thinking about where the guardrails should be.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  I don't see how working at an HFT exploits anyone more than a normal office job. I think a better argument is that earning to give emphasizes careers that produce the "most" value as measured by the market. But there are plenty of valuable careers that the market probably undervalues, like teaching.
nonameiguess 4y ago
It's not universalizable. I'll admit it's tricky to figure out when this really matters. On the margins, it is clearly the case for plenty of people, maybe even most people, that they can do more good by earning to give than they can by directly providing charitable services. But by earning to give, you're relying on and presupposing the existence of other people doing the direct service provision. If everyone becomes a stock broker and no one becomes a nurse, the world does not end up better off. And the line where that happens is nebulous and not necessarily at the 100% mark or even at a majority mark. A world with more stock brokers and fewer nurses gradually gets worse. I don't know where that point is, but maybe at least when a charitable organizations reaches some threshold where the bottleneck to providing more service is labor rather than money? "Pay more" to solve the labor problem doesn't necessarily work, either, because if you pay your employees a high salary, then Givewell will rank you as less efficient and all those charitable people will stop giving you money. This isn't true of all non-profits, of course. Employees of the University of Alabama Athletic Department and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art can earn 7 and even 8 figures and still receive massive donations, but real charities usually can't do that. To be clear, I'm sympathetic to the marginal focus. I don't vote. Why? Because obviously, one vote has never made a difference in any voting precinct I've ever lived in for any election. The vast majority of the time, a single vote will never make a difference in any election. But obviously, someone has to vote. And we're probably at a level of civic engagement in the US where the percentage of people who vote arguably leaves the country worse off, with an unrepresentative government and citizens who feel disconnected and ineffective and don't identify with or agree with the goals and mission of the their nation. For all those reason, even though I don't vote, I'm not going to start a campaign trying to convince people in general that they also shouldn't vote. Earning to give seems in a similar category. Go ahead and do it, but it feels dangerous to advocate for it in a general way implying that it is what all sufficiently intelligent and high-skill people should do. You're creating a class-divided society where anyone who directly cares for others is looked down on as low status and ineffective. This is unfortunately much harder to quantify than "how many malaria cases can I prevent in the next ten years," but we know at some point it becomes a real problem. Inability to quantify doesn't make it go away.
hannob 4y ago
If you get a high paying job you are very likely not looking rationally at the harm done by your job. My understanding of ETG is that people have the goal to earn as much money as possible so they can donate more. But if you take the idea of rationally deciding how to do most god, of course you have to balance the good you do with your donations against the bad you do in your job. And you are the worst person to evaluate that rationally.

zestyping 4y ago

The issue is primarily with motivated reasoning, not consequentialism, though naive consequentialism (also rampant in EA) can also be dangerous. ETG encourages people to think of the positive side of what they're doing (donating money) without considering the negatives (harmful careers). Being rich, and focusing on getting rich as a goal, distorts your thinking.

tomp 4y ago
The best paid careers are in HFT, which is far less harmful than e.g. ad optimisation (the business of most big tech)
- zestyping 4y ago
  Interesting — could I hear your argument why?
  - tomp 4y ago
    The only people HFT “harms” are traders, i.e. voluntary participants in the “get rich” game who are likewise trying to win, but aren’t good enough. BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)
    - Dracophoenix 4y ago
      > BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case) Those who make the ads and those who view them are voluntarily exchanging their time and attention with each other. They're traders in the same way high-frequency traders are.
      - tomp 4y ago
        maybe in theory, but in practice ads are everywhere and completely unavoidable in everyday life

AlexandrB 4y ago

Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices. You can't fully undo the damage of the former by giving a portion of your fortune away. Especially since you have less information about what would actually help than the people who are being exploited for that profit in the first place. I think ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.

zozbot234 4y ago
> Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others Wait, what? That's just not true. You can be very highly productive without exploiting anyone. Even if you happen to be in an industry where exploiting others is the status quo, you can do outsized amounts of good (rivaling the best outcomes of charity) by being even a bit less exploitive. Stated another way, social responsibility - even in profit-seeking enterprises - is quite compatible with EA.
- zestyping 4y ago
  It depends. It's sometimes possible to increase profits without harming others, but _maximizing_ profits will eventually cause harm (by definition, it's optimizing for profit at the expense of other factors). Competing on the basis of profit in a field of competitors will naturally push you to maximize profit, i.e. to maximize efficiency and externalities. That's what corporations are — large, complex machines under steady selective pressure to maximize efficiency and externalities. If you're lucky, they will go the efficiency route. But if it's easier, or they're already pretty efficient, they will tend to maximize negative externalities instead. So guardrails are needed. Reasonable people disagree about where the guardrails should be. One thing that is hard to dispute, though, is that seeking profit, and continuing to focus your attention on increasing profit, will bias your thinking about where the guardrails should be.
tylerhou 4y ago
I don't see how working at an HFT exploits anyone more than a normal office job. I think a better argument is that earning to give emphasizes careers that produce the "most" value as measured by the market. But there are plenty of valuable careers that the market probably undervalues, like teaching.

nonameiguess 4y ago

It's not universalizable. I'll admit it's tricky to figure out when this really matters. On the margins, it is clearly the case for plenty of people, maybe even most people, that they can do more good by earning to give than they can by directly providing charitable services. But by earning to give, you're relying on and presupposing the existence of other people doing the direct service provision. If everyone becomes a stock broker and no one becomes a nurse, the world does not end up better off. And the line where that happens is nebulous and not necessarily at the 100% mark or even at a majority mark. A world with more stock brokers and fewer nurses gradually gets worse. I don't know where that point is, but maybe at least when a charitable organizations reaches some threshold where the bottleneck to providing more service is labor rather than money? "Pay more" to solve the labor problem doesn't necessarily work, either, because if you pay your employees a high salary, then Givewell will rank you as less efficient and all those charitable people will stop giving you money. This isn't true of all non-profits, of course. Employees of the University of Alabama Athletic Department and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art can earn 7 and even 8 figures and still receive massive donations, but real charities usually can't do that. To be clear, I'm sympathetic to the marginal focus. I don't vote. Why? Because obviously, one vote has never made a difference in any voting precinct I've ever lived in for any election. The vast majority of the time, a single vote will never make a difference in any election. But obviously, someone has to vote. And we're probably at a level of civic engagement in the US where the percentage of people who vote arguably leaves the country worse off, with an unrepresentative government and citizens who feel disconnected and ineffective and don't identify with or agree with the goals and mission of the their nation. For all those reason, even though I don't vote, I'm not going to start a campaign trying to convince people in general that they also shouldn't vote. Earning to give seems in a similar category. Go ahead and do it, but it feels dangerous to advocate for it in a general way implying that it is what all sufficiently intelligent and high-skill people should do. You're creating a class-divided society where anyone who directly cares for others is looked down on as low status and ineffective. This is unfortunately much harder to quantify than "how many malaria cases can I prevent in the next ten years," but we know at some point it becomes a real problem. Inability to quantify doesn't make it go away.

hannob 4y ago

If you get a high paying job you are very likely not looking rationally at the harm done by your job. My understanding of ETG is that people have the goal to earn as much money as possible so they can donate more. But if you take the idea of rationally deciding how to do most god, of course you have to balance the good you do with your donations against the bad you do in your job. And you are the worst person to evaluate that rationally.