Yesterday, Shreyas published their “meander around the topic of altruism” whose aim is to “describe [their] complicated opinion on altruism”. The piece starts:
The earlier draft was a long-winded diatribe against effective altruism (EA) […] I softened my stance after a chat I had with an hardcore effective altruist.
As the ‘hardcore effective altruist’ who chatted with Shreyas, I want to share my response to the article. I focus on the points I disagree with, which will likely make this post sound harsh or overly critical. Not sure what to do about that. I could give a bunch of caveats about how I respect that Shreyas has even engaged with ideas and is grappling with them for themselves and sharing their thoughts publically, but that could come across as patronizing. Or worse, like the dreaded feedback sandwich.
First, some words on the chat we had. It was short, with Shreyas sharing their thoughts on EA, and me giving a quick response. I am always keen to hear why people disagree with EA thinking, but am wary because most disagreements are weak. Unfortunately, I found Shreyas’ disagreements weak, and directly said so. The high level points I raised were:
- Their disagreements felt like they are arguing against a straw-man or naive version of EA.
- What concretely do they think I should do differently?
- Why can’t people do both the things Shreyas consider to be good – e.g. helping people in their immediate social circles – and what EA considers to be good?
Second, a crucial caveat. I am one random person on the internet. Do not jump to the conclusion that what I say is the be-all and end-all of EA. I would be surprised if many people in the EA world would substantially disagree with what I write, but also, a community with over 10,000 people – more than 10,000 people have taken the Giving Pledge – will have a large variation of opinions.
Onto the article itself. I respond directly to specific points Shreyas writes.
EA at best is a flawed philosophy with GOOD intentions. Now that this has been converted into a form of pseudo-religion […]
This already gets alarm bells ringing. This is charged language. Saying “at best” implies Shreyas thinks EA is less than a flawed philosophy with good intentions. EA is a “pseudo-religion” is not flattering. I have a strong preference to use more neutral language and to focus on concrete facts of the matter, rather than packing multiple implicit judgements and claims into a single sentence. But on the other hand, it does provide a visceral sense of how Shreyas feels/felt about EA.
Say if you had $5000 as cash at hand, EA would tell you that the best use of that money for altruistic purposes would be then distribute roughly 900 anti-malarial bednets at around $6 each, so that you could effectively prevent ~1 expected death.
EA would say that this is a good or excellent use of that money, not necessarily the best. The challenge EA makes is that if you do something else with that $5000 dollars – with altruistic intentions – you implicitly believe that it is better than distributing 900 bednets.
And if I do give that homeless person £10, why would I do that? That £10 could have gone somewhere else. The £5 coffee, or the €20 donation to the local friends charity, could have gone somewhere else. Once morality is phrased as an optimisation problem, everything acquires an opportunity cost. In this framing, genuine generosity starts producing guilt.
Yes, everything does have an opportunity cost. This is just the way things are. And sure, this is likely to produce guilt in many people. But one of the solutions EA provides is to pre-commit a part of your budget to effective altruistic causes – say 10% – and then do whatever you want with the rest of your budget, which can include the kinds of generosity that EA might consider inefficient. I occasionally do feel guilt by the fact I could easily donate a higher percentage of my income, and I do think it is immoral that I do not increase my percentage donations. Is this incoherent or hypocritical? Maybe. But as of now, I am comfortable with this ‘level of immorality’. The thing I would recommend is that on some regular basis, say every year, you reflect on your life situation, make a decision you’re comfortable with, and then live the rest of the year buying as much over-priced coffee as you want, guilt-free.
Alternatively, you can read through and adapt the mindset in The Overcoming Guilt series – something I still intend to do. Or, you can practice radical acceptance/mindfulness/Zen and experience the guilt without it crippling you.
Illegibility for EA folks, is viewed rather as something to be conquered and minimized. The bureaucrat’s war cry becomes: okay, this thing is difficult to measure? let’s figure out how to measure it!
[…]
The fact that EA is not “illegible” also brings forth a lot more side effects.
[Then ideas from James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Read Shreyas post if you are not familiar]
I do not have a sense of what other EAs think about this, and I am confused about this myself. My current belief is that by looking at what is legible and measurable reveals low-hanging fruit and provides a benchmark by which altruistic efforts should be compared against.
But I am highly uncertain on what actions or efforts or frameworks lead to long-term positive improvements. Things that look good on 5 or 10 or 20 year timescales can turn out to be bad on 50 or 100 or 10,000 year timescales in unpredictable ways.
What might probably put an inkling of doubt on the premise of EA is the question on whether doing “most good” is indeed the right way to do things. My spicy take here is that this doesn’t make sense at all. To me, “some good” is better than “most good”, as the moment you tend to look at maximising the “most good”, you tend to look less at doing less of the “living good”. You could be this evil power hungry boss, who is making your employees work like slaves, but still donate 90% of your income to the most noble causes that do the “most good”. There is something deeply strange about a philosophy under which this “evil boss” could theoretically become a moral superstar without becoming a nicer person.
This is straightforwardly not a counter-example to trying to do the most good. I – and I assume most EAs – would not consider this person to be a moral superstar. Here are three hypothetical people:
- A. Evil power hungry boss who does not donate any of their income
- B. Evil power hungry boss who donates 90% of their income to noble causes
- C. Nice, charismatic, motivating boss who donates 90% of their income to noble causes
I assume Shreyas would agree with me that C is better than B is better than A. And presumably it boils down to fact that C is doing more good stuff than B is doing more good stuff than A.
If you want a spicy take, it would be that it is actually not clear which of A,B and C are better for long-term welfare in the world. Fleshing out why there is uncertainty here is worth having a blogpost in and of itself, but one ingredient is that employees have the power to leave the job and work elsewhere.
If your inner life, and your outer life is not synchronous to the altruistic values you stand for, you feel like shit (which also explains why many hardcore EAs have a crash after practising for 7-10 years and become epistemically lonely).
Agreed. But, there is value in thinking about what “perfect” or “better” morality looks like for you, and using that as a guiding north star.
But does feeling become morally irrelevant?
No. One’s feelings are morally relevant. EA thinking says that the feelings and experiences of those you intend to help are also morally relevant, and, that the number of people/beings you help is morally relevant.
The utilitarian calculus sitting behind the EA worldview also starts generating increasingly strange outputs the more seriously you take it. Why give $5 to your local opera when the same $5 could contribute towards saving a child in Bengal? Okay. Why give money to museums? Why spend government money restoring old buildings? Why maintain a library? Why spend money on flowers in public parks?
The classic defence here is that EA does not pre-suppose utilitarianism. But, it is hard to deny that utilitarian thinking is common amongst EAs. My tentative defence is:
- Many actions EA’s recommend are robust under many ethical frameworks. Or at least, we should strive for that.
- EA encourages you to be effective according to your ethical values. If you really believe that donating to museums is better than donating to save a child in Bengal, you better know why. I think people who have coherent rebuttals to EA are able to articulate why they think it is better to donate locally, rather than just having vague feelings of ick.
- Maybe consequentalism is just right?? Note that consequentialism is not the same as utilitarianism.
Say you had to choose between preventing one person from being slowly eaten by sharks, or preventing a googolplex number of people from experiencing a hiccup. If a hiccup has any negative utility whatsoever, there must theoretically be some sufficiently enormous number of hiccups whose summed disutility becomes greater than the shark attack. Another case of repugnance.
But perhaps good and evil do not form a single well-ordered set in the first place. Some goods are comparable, while others are not, and can’t be put under the same set. £10 versus £100 given to the same intervention, fine. Saving ten lives versus saving twelve comparable lives, perhaps fine. But warm socks, beautiful music, friendship, hiccups?
I am confused about this, and essentially avoid thinking about it given it is unlikely I will make any progress. But the good thing about EA-thinking is that it encourages you to confront these questions, rather than denying that the tradeoff exists. One interesting proposal is we should have a ‘long reflection’ in which humanity should spend significant time – 100s or 1000s or 1,000,000s of years – carefully thinking through ethics.
Consider also the decision to have a child. You can make a spreadsheet. Less disposable income, less sleep, less free time, more stress, nappies, school fees, childcare, climate impact, one more human consuming resources. Why would you then even go for a child?
I feel uncomfortable with this kind of reasoning. But just because I find it uncomfortable does not make it necessarily bad. Nevertheless, I have not looked at any such reasoning and my gut-feeling is that most attempts will be flawed and are naive attempts at trying utilitarian reasoning.
Note that EAs are not the only people who do this – many people choose not to have kids because of their future carbon footprint. Or at least, that’s what they say.
Which brings another axis missing from the utilitarian ruler: meaning.
I disagree. Meaning is a part of utility, at least how I conceive of utility.
What I’m trying to get at is that if you take enormous care of a single specific person and do that for the rest of your life, you would still “feel” good about it, and also make this conclusion that what you’ve done is right
Would you conclude that what you’ve done is right? If so, on what basis? Presumably it depends on what alternatives you had available.
The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. We’re narrative creatures, and it doesn’t feel right when we try outsourcing judgement to a game of numbers (eg. the EA leaderboard)
EA often frames itself as combining the head with the heart, not rejecting the heart.
This is another reason why the “altruism leaderboard” feels morally repugnant to me. Not because ranking interventions is always useless, ranking is obviously useful when allocating constrained resources, but because the ranking starts pretending to have fundamental moral status. Who knows what could topple this board? Is it AI-safety related p-doom risk? Should we all just put more money into AI safety to save more people’s lives?
I do not understand what Shreyas is trying to say here.
Imagine if the universal gravitational constant kept changing depending on whether you were in Manchester, Bangalore or Alpha Centauri. You wouldn’t preserve the theory by adding increasingly elaborate footnotes: “gravity is universal except Tuesdays in Manchester, where use equation B”. At some point, you probably need a different theory.
Actually, this is how physics and science works. Dark matter and dark energy are such hacks, and there will be many more I do not know about. There’s a Nobel prize waiting for you if you find a better theory.
So if effective altruism is dicey philosophy which still works mostly, we need to replace the philosophy with a better one. Ideology should also be subjected to falsification, like science.
Yes.
I think the maximalism in EA — the phrase “as much as possible” — is where much of the trouble originates. I’m much more interested in two other questions: what ought I do, irrespective of whether I am excited by it? And what altruistic things am I unusually excited to do, such that I might happily carry them for 10 years?
These two questions do not necessarily contradict EA thinking. But also, it pre-supposes that what one finds exciting is fixed in stone.
You do not read Dostoevsky because RCTs demonstrate that Russian novels produce 0.03 additional units of moral enlightenment per hour. Beyond a certain point, you don’t give two shits about whether there is any peer-reviewed published science that corroborates your actions
If you really could robustly measure the long-term benefits of reading different novels – where benefits includes the vague things that are traditionally hard to measure – then I would give two shits about the published science.
Maybe the correct architecture looks more like a barbell. Keep one part deliberately boring, legible and effective. Donate 1%, 5%, 10%, whatever amount you can sustain, to highly effective organisations. Let GiveWell do spreadsheet things. Let somebody calculate mosquito-net coverage, vaccination effectiveness, cash-transfer multipliers etc. This is useful machinery and we should probably use it. And then keep another part deliberately illegible. Help your neighbour. Teach somebody something. Volunteer locally. Support an artist you love. Spend ridiculous amounts of time on a cause which you have no RCT proving will work, but which you cannot stop thinking about.
This is what I would recommend to most people. But also worth taking into account effectiveness in the things you love. When you help your neighbour, actually do things that help you neighbour. Or, think outside the box and see if there are better ways you can help your neighbour, rather than just sticking to what is normal or safe.
A world in which nobody ever donated to a museum because mosquito nets always rank higher would eventually become a very strange world. A world without useless mathematics, experimental poetry, cathedrals, obscure archives, weird instruments, regional dances, philosophy departments, restoration projects, public gardens, old libraries etc would ALSO be a strange world.
Strange is not necessarily bad. But I bet the Shreyas who lived in the parallel universe where effectiveness was normal would say that our world is strange. Be wary of status quo bias.
There is also something suspicious about EA’s hostility towards proximity. The child in front of you matters more than a statistically identical child 5,000 miles away.
Does the child in front of you matter more? That’s a bold claim. If you take this reasoning seriously, it is hard to argue against most forms of discrimination, e.g. racism. If you really believe that the child who is near you is morally more relevant than a child far away, on what basis do you argue that racism is bad?
Also, EA’s are not inherently hostile towards proximity. The fact that donating bednets to developing countries is highly recommended is a consequence of treating all lives as equally morally relevant and looking at what actions are available to us. If there were equally effective interventions in developed countries, EA’s would recommend it.
Furthermore, EA’s have and do look at local interventions. For example, Coefficient Giving has donated more than $130,000,000 to criminal justice reform efforts in the USA.
With your child, impartial utilitarianism would be psychopathic. If your daughter needs £20 for school shoes, you don’t open GiveWell to check whether another child somewhere else has a higher marginal utility for the same £20. You buy the shoes. This is your daughter. Nobody would do that.
I wouldn’t do this, but actually try to imagine a world in which this kind of thinking was the norm. Every child in the world would have shoes.
So perhaps some good > most good, but only in the strange sense that some good sustainably woven into your life may be better than permanently trying and failing to optimise every moral decision. A person donating 10% for forty years, helping neighbours, caring for family, making art and being a decent colleague might do considerably more good than someone who spends three years trying to become morally optimal, burns out, becomes a husk, and never wants to hear the word altruism again.
It’s easy to miss, but if you read carefully, it sounds like Shreyas does believe in doing the most good. ;)
