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As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to

As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future." For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.

goatlover 3y ago
Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all. > All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
  - _0ffh 3y ago
    That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches. Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)
    - imtringued 3y ago
      The difference is that normal utilitarians want to have high certainty that what they are doing is a net good while longtermists actually don't care if the outcome will be reached or not, essentially allowing a loophole for negative utility to slip in.
      - _0ffh 3y ago
        That certainly looks like a problem. Personally, I wouldn't go near anything like that anyway. On one hand it seems prudent to me to consider the likely consequences of your actions, even long term, although such projections should be suitably discounted for their rapidly increasing uncertainty. On the other hand I find the idea that you can quantify utility and do calculations with it to compare societal outcomes philosophically wrong, even naive. Should the outcomes of these calculations then be used to justify overriding the personal life choices of others, for the greater good™, it becomes outright evil. My personal ethics is more of a deontological one.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    Sounds like an argument against utilitarianism in general. If you're forcing people to make train trolley kind of choices, then every ethical position is going to sound unappealing. I still don't see where effective altruists and longtermists are advocating for more sweat shops and slaving away in cotton fields.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Some of them have said that we should ignore poor countries and only focus on people in rich countries.
trefoiled 3y ago
I agree with your fundamental point, but I find this quote somewhat confusing when applied to this conversation. Surely there are people who would have an equally great negative impact on humanity were they not working in a sweatshop, too?
- wolfgang42 3y ago
  "Thomas Midgley Jr. could've been thwarted by worse labor conditions" is certainly an interesting take.
  - trefoiled 3y ago
    That’s a particularly hilarious way to frame it but also an interesting person to pick considering he was born into a family of inventors and had the resources to attend an ivy league. Quite literally humanity might be much better off had he not had an opportunity to innovate. To clarify my point, it just feels odd to hear a purely utilitarian argument against slavery, which hinges on some kind of implied rule of nature that equality can only result in more altruistic geniuses benefitting the greater good -without taking into account all the very intelligent people who, with the best of intentions, have set us on our supposed course towards apocalypse. Because the argument is utilitarian, it can be dismissed with theoretically advantageous results of slavery, which is beyond the pale for me personally.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      There were people at the time who pushed back against Midgley and his employer with respect to leaded gasoline. The power differential overwhelmed their criticisms for decades until years after Patterson definitely proved how bad it was. A utilitarian argument in favor of a flatter power landscape is that such a landscape may have stopped tetraethyl lead, at least for automobiles and house paints. Whether or not this would have caught CFCs, I don't know.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  Sure but the trouble in applying that is that we need a level of precognition of people's future activities that's just not possible. Better to give everyone a path out of horrible labor conditions and deal with the bad eggs down stream of that where we actually know who they are through either structuring society so they don't have the pressures to commit crimes or through whatever version of incarceration and rehabilitation we can figure out.
phkahler 3y ago
>> As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects. I see this philosophy more as "I am so self important that I think I can positively influence the course of humanity over the timescale of the universe". The irony of thinking like that while talking about the insignificance of things like WWII is telling. Like dude, you and your philosophy are damn near irrelevant like the rest of us - get some therapy for your existential angst.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects. "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, Boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
  - oxfeed65261 3y ago
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias: Ozymandias By Percy Byesshe Shelley I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
    - epiccoleman 3y ago
      I met a traveller from way the hell off who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot all damn covered in words “yo ozymandias here, this my shit” “better than your shit, get fucked buddy” not much else tho, just sand shitloads of sand all over the place
chr-s 3y ago
The GiveWell Top Charities Fund directed $104M of donated funds to improve global health and fight poverty in 2022 [0]. This is effective altruism. [0] https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Does "fighting poverty" mean to fight the people who profit from slave labor? Because in my experience, "fighting poverty" is often translated to "let's educate all people and at the end no one will have to work on a cotton field". While wearing and eating slave labor products. In German there is a quote that says "a society can't make a living by everyone giving each other a haircut". While I don't think that the answer is to subsidize manufacturing of goods (that's the context of the original quote IIRC), I think that this equally applies to what we call "skilled labor".
tpoacher 3y ago
That said, one should be interested in the weights and convolutions of Einstein's brain, instead of ignoring them for the sake of virtue-signalling about the people in the cotton fields and sweatshops, to the extent that said convolutions may well be in fact the very thing that could have lifted people of equal talent from the very cotton fields and sweatshops they lived and died in instead. In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  They didn't lift Einstein out of cotton fields and sweatshops. If one is interested in the contribution of weights and convolutions of brains to being lifted out of cotton fields and sweatshops, one should measure the brains of people who lifted themselves out of cotton fields and sweatshops, not someone who didn't. Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  The point isn't to 'think of the children' but that the only way to address these injustices is to do literally that, there is no way around ethics by way of intellect or dwelling on abstract issues. Some of the worst camps humans have been shoved in have been during modernity, using modern tools conceived of by people with very big brains. People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau: "Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  I think that if we lifted billions of people out of childhood poverty and they had access to quality food, healthcare, and education starting at a young age, we would have 100x more people producing top-tier scientific output. So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.
_hypx 3y ago
Agreed. Long-termism isn't real and is just an excuse to ignore currently existing problems.
timeagain 3y ago
[flagged]

goatlover 3y ago

Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?

surgical_fire 3y ago
This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all. > All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
- _0ffh 3y ago
  That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches. Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)
  - imtringued 3y ago
    The difference is that normal utilitarians want to have high certainty that what they are doing is a net good while longtermists actually don't care if the outcome will be reached or not, essentially allowing a loophole for negative utility to slip in.
    - _0ffh 3y ago
      That certainly looks like a problem. Personally, I wouldn't go near anything like that anyway. On one hand it seems prudent to me to consider the likely consequences of your actions, even long term, although such projections should be suitably discounted for their rapidly increasing uncertainty. On the other hand I find the idea that you can quantify utility and do calculations with it to compare societal outcomes philosophically wrong, even naive. Should the outcomes of these calculations then be used to justify overriding the personal life choices of others, for the greater good™, it becomes outright evil. My personal ethics is more of a deontological one.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Sounds like an argument against utilitarianism in general. If you're forcing people to make train trolley kind of choices, then every ethical position is going to sound unappealing. I still don't see where effective altruists and longtermists are advocating for more sweat shops and slaving away in cotton fields.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Some of them have said that we should ignore poor countries and only focus on people in rich countries.

trefoiled 3y ago

I agree with your fundamental point, but I find this quote somewhat confusing when applied to this conversation. Surely there are people who would have an equally great negative impact on humanity were they not working in a sweatshop, too?

wolfgang42 3y ago
"Thomas Midgley Jr. could've been thwarted by worse labor conditions" is certainly an interesting take.
- trefoiled 3y ago
  That’s a particularly hilarious way to frame it but also an interesting person to pick considering he was born into a family of inventors and had the resources to attend an ivy league. Quite literally humanity might be much better off had he not had an opportunity to innovate. To clarify my point, it just feels odd to hear a purely utilitarian argument against slavery, which hinges on some kind of implied rule of nature that equality can only result in more altruistic geniuses benefitting the greater good -without taking into account all the very intelligent people who, with the best of intentions, have set us on our supposed course towards apocalypse. Because the argument is utilitarian, it can be dismissed with theoretically advantageous results of slavery, which is beyond the pale for me personally.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    There were people at the time who pushed back against Midgley and his employer with respect to leaded gasoline. The power differential overwhelmed their criticisms for decades until years after Patterson definitely proved how bad it was. A utilitarian argument in favor of a flatter power landscape is that such a landscape may have stopped tetraethyl lead, at least for automobiles and house paints. Whether or not this would have caught CFCs, I don't know.
rtkwe 3y ago
Sure but the trouble in applying that is that we need a level of precognition of people's future activities that's just not possible. Better to give everyone a path out of horrible labor conditions and deal with the bad eggs down stream of that where we actually know who they are through either structuring society so they don't have the pressures to commit crimes or through whatever version of incarceration and rehabilitation we can figure out.

phkahler 3y ago

>> As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects. I see this philosophy more as "I am so self important that I think I can positively influence the course of humanity over the timescale of the universe". The irony of thinking like that while talking about the insignificance of things like WWII is telling. Like dude, you and your philosophy are damn near irrelevant like the rest of us - get some therapy for your existential angst.

surgical_fire 3y ago
> The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects. "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, Boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- oxfeed65261 3y ago
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias: Ozymandias By Percy Byesshe Shelley I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    I met a traveller from way the hell off who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot all damn covered in words “yo ozymandias here, this my shit” “better than your shit, get fucked buddy” not much else tho, just sand shitloads of sand all over the place

chr-s 3y ago

The GiveWell Top Charities Fund directed $104M of donated funds to improve global health and fight poverty in 2022 [0]. This is effective altruism. [0] https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund

moritzwarhier 3y ago
Does "fighting poverty" mean to fight the people who profit from slave labor? Because in my experience, "fighting poverty" is often translated to "let's educate all people and at the end no one will have to work on a cotton field". While wearing and eating slave labor products. In German there is a quote that says "a society can't make a living by everyone giving each other a haircut". While I don't think that the answer is to subsidize manufacturing of goods (that's the context of the original quote IIRC), I think that this equally applies to what we call "skilled labor".

tpoacher 3y ago

That said, one should be interested in the weights and convolutions of Einstein's brain, instead of ignoring them for the sake of virtue-signalling about the people in the cotton fields and sweatshops, to the extent that said convolutions may well be in fact the very thing that could have lifted people of equal talent from the very cotton fields and sweatshops they lived and died in instead. In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
They didn't lift Einstein out of cotton fields and sweatshops. If one is interested in the contribution of weights and convolutions of brains to being lifted out of cotton fields and sweatshops, one should measure the brains of people who lifted themselves out of cotton fields and sweatshops, not someone who didn't. Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.
Barrin92 3y ago
The point isn't to 'think of the children' but that the only way to address these injustices is to do literally that, there is no way around ethics by way of intellect or dwelling on abstract issues. Some of the worst camps humans have been shoved in have been during modernity, using modern tools conceived of by people with very big brains. People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau: "Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”
squirtlebonflow 3y ago
I think that if we lifted billions of people out of childhood poverty and they had access to quality food, healthcare, and education starting at a young age, we would have 100x more people producing top-tier scientific output. So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.

_hypx 3y ago

Agreed. Long-termism isn't real and is just an excuse to ignore currently existing problems.

timeagain 3y ago

[flagged]