Michael Nielsen's "Notes on effective altruism"

The Michael Neilsen critique seems thoughtful, constructive, and well-balanced on first read, but I have some serious reservations about  the underlying ethos and its implications.

Look, any compelling new world-view that is outside the mainstream cultures' Overton window can be pathologized as an information hazard that makes its believers feel unhappy, inadequate, and even mentally ill by mainstream standards. Nielsen seems to view 'strong EA' as that kind of information hazard, and critiques it as such.

Trouble is, if you understand that most normies are delusional about some important issue, and you you develop some genuinely deeper insights into that issue, the psychologically predictable result is some degree of alienation and frustration. This is true for everyone who has a religious conversion experience. It's true for everyone who really takes onboard the implications of any intellectually compelling science -- whether cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, signaling theory, game theory, behavior genetics, etc. It's true for everyone who learns about any branch of moral philosophy and takes it seriously as a guide to action.

I've seen this over, and over, and over in my own field of evolutionary psychology. The usual 'character arc' of ev psych insight is that (1) you read Dawkins or Pinker or Buss, you get filled with curiosity about the origins of human nature, (2) you learn some more and you feel overwhelming intellectual awe and excitement about the grandeur of evolutionary theory, (3) you gradually come to understand that every human perception, preference, value, desire, emotion, and motivation has deep evolutionary roots beyond your control, and you start to feel uneasy, (4) you ruminate about how you're nothing but an evolved robot chasing reproductive success through adaptively self-deceived channels, and you feel some personal despair, (5)  you look around at a society full of other self-deceived humans unaware of their biological programming, and you feel black-pilled civilizational despair, (6) you live with the Darwinian nihilism for a few years, adapt to the new normal, and gradually find some way to live with the new insights, climbing your way back into some semblance of normie-adjacent happiness. I've seen these six phases many times in my own colleagues, grad students, and collaborators.

And that's just with a new descriptive world-view about how the human world works. EA's challenge can be even more profound, because it's not just descriptive, but normative, or at least prescriptive. So there's a painful gap between what we could be doing, and what we are doing. And so there should be, if you take the world in a morally serious way. 

I think the deeper problem is that given 20th century history, there's a general dubiousness about any group of people who do take the world in a morally serious way that deviates from the usual forms of mild political virtue signaling encouraged in our current system of credentialism, careerism, and consumerism. 

I wrote a long twitter thread with some replies here FWIW: https://twitter.com/albrgr/status/1532726108130377729

The "misery trap" section feels like it is describing a problem that EA definitely had early on, but mostly doesn't now?

In early EA, people started thinking hard about this idea of doing the most good they could. Naively, this suggests doing things like giving up things that are seriously important to you (like having children), illegibily make you more productive (like a good work environment), or provide important flexibility (like having free time), and the author quotes some early EAs struggling with this conflict, like:

> my inner voice in early 2016 would automatically convert all money I spent (eg on dinner) to a fractional “death counter” of lives in expectation I could have saved if I’d donated it to good charities. Most EAs I mentioned that to at the time were like ah yeah seems reasonable

I really don't think many EAs would say "seems reasonable" now. If someone said this to me I'd give some of my personal history with this idea and talk about how it turns out that in practice this works terribly for people: it makes you miserable, very slightly increases how much you have available to donate, and massively decreases your likely long-term impact through burnout, depression, and short-term thinking.

One piece of writing that I think was helpful in turning this around was http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html Another was https://www.benkuhn.net/box/

I think it's not a coincidence that the examples the author links are 5+ years old? If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.)

In case people are curious: Julia and I now have three kids and it's been 10+ years since stress and conflict about painful trade-offs between our own happiness and making the world better were a major issue for us.

Passage 5 seems to prove too much, in the sense of "If you take X philosophy literally, it becomes bad for you" being applicable to most philosophies, but I very much like Passage 4, the EA judo one.

While it is very much true that disagreeing over the object-level causes shouldn't disqualify one from EA, I do agree that it is not completely separate from EA - that EA is not defined purely by its choice of causes, but neither does it stand fully apart from them. EA is, in a sense, both a question and an ideology, and trying to make sure the ideology part doesn't jump too far ahead of the question part is important. 

"Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality."

I think this is a very key thing that many movements, including EA, should keep in mind. I think that what EA should be aiming for is "EA has some very good answers to the question of how we can do the most good, and we think they're the best answers humanity has yet come up with to answer the question. That's different from thinking our answers are objectively true, or that we have all the best answers and there are none left to find." We can have the humility to question ourselves, but still have the confidence to suggest our answers are good ones.

I dream of a world where EA is to doing good as science is to human knowledge. Science isn't always right, and science has been proven wrong again and again in the past, but science is collectively humanity's best guess. I would like for EA to be humanity's best guess at how to do the most good. EA is very young compared to science, so I'm not surprised we don't have that same level of mastery over our field as science does, but I think that's the target.

These are interesting critiques and I look forward to reading the whole thing, but I worry that the nicer tone of this one is going to lead people to give it more credit than critiques that were at least as substantially right, but much more harshly phrased.

The point about ideologies being a minefield, with Nazis as an example, particularly stands out to me. I pattern match this to the parts of harsher critiques that go something like "look at where your precious ideology leads when taken to an extreme, this place is terrible!" Generally, the substantial mistake these make is just casting EA as ideologically purist and ignoring the centrality of projects like moral uncertainty and worldview diversification, as well as the limited willingness of EAs to bite bullets they in principle endorse much of the background logic of (see Pascal's Mugging and Ajeya Cotra's train to crazy town).

By not getting into telling us what terrible things we believe, but implying that we are at risk of believing terrible things, this piece is less unflattering, but is on shakier ground. It involves this same mistake about EA's ideological purism, but on top of this has to defend this other higher level claim rather than looking at concrete implications.

Was the problem with the Nazis really that they were too ideologically pure? I find it very doubtful. The philosophers of the time attracted to them generally were weird humanistic philosophers with little interest in the types of purism that come from analytic ethics, like Heidegger. Meanwhile most philosophers closer to this type of ideological purity (Russell, Carnap) despised the Nazis from the beginning. The background philosophy itself largely drew from misreadings of people like Nietzsche and Hegel, popular anti-semitic sentiment, and plain old historical conspiracy theories. Even at the time intellectual critiques of Nazis often looked more like "they were mundane and looking for meaning from charismatic, powerful men" (Arendt) or "they aesthetisized politics" (Benjamin) rather than "they took some particular coherent vision of doing good too far".

The truth is the lesson of history isn't really "moral atrocity is caused by ideological consistency". Occasionally atrocities are initiated by ideologically consistent people, but they have also been carried out casually by people who were quite normal for their time, or by crazy ideologues who didn't have a very clear, coherent vision at all. The problem with the Nazis, quite simply, is that they were very very badly wrong. We can't avoid making the mistakes they did from the inside by pattern matching aspects of our logic onto them that really aren't historically vindicated, we have to avoid moral atrocity by finding more reliable ways of not winding up being very wrong.

Trending on hacker news now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31609325

Thanks for link-posting, I enjoyed this!

I didn't understand the section about EA being too centralized and focused on absolute advantage. Can anyone explain? 

EA-in-practice is too centralized, too focused on absolute advantage; the market often does a far better job of providing certain kinds of private (or privatizable) good. However, EA-in-practice likely does a better job of providing certain kinds of public good than do many existing institutions.

And footnote 11: 

It's interesting to conceive of EA principally as a means of providing public goods which are undersupplied by the market. A slightly deeper critique here is that the market provides a very powerful set of signals which aggregate decentralized knowledge, and help people act on their comparative advantage. EA, by comparison, is relatively centralized, and focused on absolute advantage. That tends to centralize people's actions, and compounds mistakes. It's also likely a far weaker resource allocation model, though it does have the advantage of focusing on public goods. I've sometimes wondered about a kind of "libertarian EA", more market-focused, but systematically correcting for well-known failures of the market.↩

Don't global health charities provide private goods (bed nets, medicine) that markets cannot? Markets only supply things people will pay for and poor people can't pay much. 

X-risk reduction seems like a public good, and animal welfare improvements are either a public good of a private good where the consumers definitely cannot pay. 

I take it that centralization is in contrast to markets. But it seems like in a very real way EA is harnessing markets to provide these things. EA-aligned charities are competing in a market to provide QALYs as cheaply as possible, since EAs will pay for them. EAs also seem very fond of markets generally (ex: impact certificates, prediction markets). 

How is EA focused on absolute advantage? Isn't earning to give using one's relative advantage? 

Thanks for posting this. I also appreciated this thoughtful essay.

There was also this passage (not in your excerpts):

An alternate solution, and the one that has, I believe, been adopted by many EAs, has been a form of weak-EA. Strong-EA takes "do the most good you can do" extremely seriously as a central aspect of a life philosophy. Weak-EA uses that principle more as guidance. Donate 1% of your income. Donate 10% of your income, provided that doesn't cause you hardship. Be thoughtful about the impact your work has on the world, and consult many different sources. These are all good things to do! The critique of this form is that it's fine and good, but also hard to distinguish from the common pre-existing notion many people have, "live well, and try to do some good in the world".

My emphasis. (I'm not quite sure whether Nielsen endorses this - see his comment further down.)

I wouldn't agree with that. I think that one can increase one's impact very substantially over the baseline referred to in the bold sentence by, e.g. working directly on a high-impact cause, even if one doesn't donate a large fraction of one's income. 

(Fwiw I also wouldn't call that weak-EA.)

[Cross-posting from the comments]

I want to express two other intuitions that make me very skeptical of some alternatives to effective altruism.

As you write:

"By their fruits ye shall know them" holds for intellectual principles, not just people. If a set of principles throws off a lot of rotten fruit, it's a sign of something wrong with the principles, a reductio ad absurdum.

I really like this thought. We might ask: what are the fruits of ineffective altruism? Admittedly, much good. But also the continued existence, at scale, of extreme poverty, factory farming, low-probability high-impact risks, and threats to future generations, long after many of these problems could have been decimated if there had been widespread will to act.

That's a lot of rotten fruit.

In practice, by letting intuition lead, ineffective altruism systematically overlooks distant problems, leaving their silent victims to suffer and die in masses. So even if strong versions of EA are too much, EA in practice looks like desperately needed corrective movement. Or at least, we need something different from whatever allows such issues to fester, often with little opposition.

Lastly, one thing that sometimes feels a bit lost in discussions of effectiveness: "effective" is just half of it. Much of what resonates is the emphasis on altruism (which is far from unique, but also far from the norm)--on how, in a world with so much suffering, much of our lives should be oriented around helping others.

A useful piece of context. When asked about recommendations on charitable giving Michael Nielsen writes:

Same answer as @TheZvi's earlier, I'm afraid. I'm pretty Hayekian; I wish there were good price signals here! In some ways I view that as what EA is doing: it is trying to use community argument and institutions to price public goods (& the like) appropriately.

Nielsen's critique is humble, well-written, and actually quite compelling. I also encourage people not to skip the footnotes.

I'm still relatively new to the large body of historic EA discussion, so I apologize in advance for retreading any ground that the community has already covered.

Recently I've been thinking more and more about the idea that individual altruism is simply not a scalable and sustainable model to improve the world. We have to achieve systemic change that re-aligns incentives across society. I sense a little bit of this between the lines of this article.

There really is nothing an individual can do alone in terms of personal sacrifice of resources that will fix the world simply with that transfer of resources. What we need is systems of government that redistribute resources at scale, taking the burden of such choice away from individuals. Besides this being the only way to alleviate human suffering at scale, it's also the only way to reliably account for externalities.

Imagine an anarchic society that relied solely on individual altruism to help the needy. Would we sit here debating how much individuals should give, or would we be advocating for some sort of government to centralize and formalize the process of resource allocation? Similarly, 10% or 20% is not the issue -- it's about fixing a society that has to rely on individual good will rather than a (better) built-in system of redistribution according to need.

Is the "final form" of EA simply radical, much-more-inclusive democracy?

(Crossposting)

This is a wonderful critique - I agreed with it much more than I thought I would.

Fundamentally, EA is about two things. The first is a belief in utilitarianism or a utilitarian-esque moral system, that there exists an optimal world we should aspire to. This is a belief I believe to be pretty universal, whether people want to admit it or not.

The second part of EA is the belief that we should try to do as much good as possible. Emphasis on “try” - there is a subtle distinction between “hope to do the most amount of good”(the previous paragraph) and “actively try to do the most amount of good”. This piece points out many ways in which doing the latter does not actually lead to the former. The focus on quantifying impact leads to a male/white community, it leads to a reliance on nonprofits that tend to be less sustainable, it leads to outsourcing of intellectual work to individual decision-makers, etc.

But the question of “does trying to optimize impact actually lead to optimal outcomes?” is just an epistemic one. The critiques mentioned are simply counter-arguments, and there are numerous arguments in favor that many others have made. But this is a question on which we have some actual evidence, and I feel that this piece understates the substantial work that EA has already done. We have very good evidence that GiveWell charities have an order of magnitude higher impact than the average one. We are supporting animal welfare policy that has had some major victories in state referenda. We have good reason to believe AI safety is a horribly neglected issue that we need to work on.

This isn’t just a theoretical debate. We know we are doing better work than the average altruistic person outside the community. Effective Altruism is working.

(I have crossposted the comments below here.)

Thanks for this article! Below are some comments.

Perhaps we need a Center for Effective Effective Altruism? Or Givewellwell, evaluating the effectiveness of effectiveness rating charities.

Note there are some external evaluations of EA-aligned organisations and recommendations made by them. Some examples:

• 2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?.
• Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations.
• A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform.
• Type Checking GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost Effective Analysis.
• Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Again: if your social movement "works in principle" but practical implementation has too many problems, then it's not really working in principle, either. The quality "we are able to do this effectively in practice" is an important (implicit) in-principle quality.

I think this is an important point.

This is a really big problem for EA. When you have people taking seriously such an overarching principle, you end up with stressed, nervous people, people anxious that they are living wrongly. The correct critique of this situation isn't the one Singer makes: that it prevents them from doing the most good. The critique is that it is the wrong way to live.

In practice, it is unclear to me how different the 2 critiques are. I would say doing the most good is most likely not compatible with "living in a wrong way", because too much stress etc. are not good (for yourself or other).

Furthermore, the notion of a single "the" good is also suspect. There are many plural goods, which are fundamentally immeasurable and incommensurate and cannot be combined.

"The" good is a very complex function of reality, but why would it be fundamentally immeasurable and incommensurate?

Indeed, the more illegibility you conquer, the more illegibility springs up, and the greater the need for such work.

I am not sure I fully understand the concept of illegibility, but it does not seem to be much different from knowledge about the unknow. As our knowledge about what was previously unknown increases, knowledge about what is still unknown also increases. Why is this problematic?

Some of what Michael is talking about reminds me of the well known "savior complex" that's fairly common among "change the world" types, a category which would include many EA members methinks. How common is that complex in the EA community? Is there any data or surveys on EA mental health?