On your remark ('I don't know if the stated number of attendees for EAGs includes no-shows'): I volunteered for the Registration team at the London EAG this year and we only counted someone as attending if their QR code was scanned in person at the registration desk.
As I said, I'm accepting the argument (that's why I chose option 3!).
Option 3: Offer a constructive response
Accept the argument—and tell us what the impartial altruist should do anyway. Grant the conclusion, but offer a constructive response: defend a solution Anthony considers and rejects (e.g. wagering), or propose something entirely original.[3]I
I indeed can't find any impartial-altruistic rational reasons to pick one course of action over another if I reason at a cosmic scale, but my response explained why people should do effective altruism anyway (self-interest)! 😁
NB: I only read the summary by Toby and didn't engage with the larger body of posts from Anthony and others, so I most probably am missing crucial nuance TBF!
About the small portion of text you quoted (could you please let me know where it's from btw? EDIT: Just found it on your link, will read full text later!): I'm not sure I understand that compassion or avoiding dishonesty are different from Effective Altruism. To me the latter is the same as the formers but applied at a slightly different scale (e.g. Effective Altruism advocates being compassionate about all humans on the planet equally instead of say, preferring to show more compassion to those who are local to us). Therefore I also don't understand the point about compassion or avoiding dishonesty being able to act as action-guiding principles Vs EA not being able to. Finally I don't really understand what 'action-guiding' means as a concept - from your text it seems it has a precise definition which I'd love to learn more about.
Thank you for this! I actually had myself had some thoughts much akin to Anthony DiGiovanni's and also satisfied myself with my own version of bracketing (I referred to it in my mind as "local impact" as opposed to the cosmic-scale impact of which we can not really know anything about) without having any idea that others had had similar thoughts and had even given them names!! XD It's so satisfying to know others have grappled with similar doubts!
Here's my attempt at Option 3:
My justification for using bracketing (i.e. discounting cosmic-level uncertainty about all the possible ramifications and externalities of my actions) is that I am ultimately self-interested in wanting to do 'altruism': I am only 'altruistic' because it feels genuinely nicer to *me* to live in a world where others are healthy/happy/flourishing compared to one where they're not. Therefore, I shouldn't concern myself with consequences or externalities that are too much outside of my immediate field of perception / conceptualisation.
Does that make me a bad """altruist""" in absolute terms? Probably. But practically:
Either I'm right that my little 'good' actions as I construe them to be are actually good on a cosmic scale OR
I'm not right in my assessment that this is good on a cosmic scale and my actions are actually BAD, but then there's no way for me to know that and I'm still living under the blissful impression that I'm a good person / achieving good in the world, which checks my self interest box ✅ OR
[The hypothesis I believe in the most, and the most likely in my view] ...When viewed across the various filters of scale and time, my actions are simultaneously positive and negative (to illustrate this I recommend reading the Zen parable of The Chinese Farmer)
I am comfortable in my cluelessness when trying to do good because all of my attempts to do good actually end up being a net positive for me in terms of my own self-interest and in the worst case scenario I am either happily and innocently ignorant of my evilness (not great but oh well) or my 'negative' actions will be endlessly viewed either as positive or negative depending on the cosmic viewpoint.
PS: I also enjoy the intellectual challenge of finding effective solutions to what, from my limited cosmic vantage point as a human alive on Earth in the 21st century, consider to be 'problems'. Another point in terms of self-interested reasons to do
PPS: if somebody enjoyed reading this and is interested in how the problem of cluelessness when trying to do good is treated in ancient texts, I'm pretty convinced that Arjuna's dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita is about this (he is about to basically fight his cousins to death on 'moral' grounds and wonders whether this is the actual right action, and has a dialogue with Krishna about the 'art' (?) and nature of right actions.)
Yes true. But I guess many people are happy to tolerate that negative externality as a medium-term price to pay for progress towards the longer term goal of no / very little animal consumption which would be better both for animal welfare and anthropocentric reasons such as mitigating climate change/biorisk etc...
Also I guess the main point of the post (you can think of yourself as part of a broad strategic movement as opposed to just a person working in an organisation) can be applied to any movement, e.g. AI safety, biosecurity, existential risk, etc, not just animal welfare / ending factory farming.
Interesting perspective, although of course there are more reasons to want to end large scale intensive animal farming than just the welfare of animals (I'm thinking of anthropocentric reasons such as improving biosecurity, mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, improving food security, etc).
This is really useful both from an idea generation point of view and also from the point of view of prospective applicants to Ambitious Impact, wanting to demonstrate how their prior experience might be relevant to a particular charity model. This belongs in the next edition of the Ambitious Impact book! :D
Since you still state that in some instances, some careful lawbreaking can be justified in the pursuit of a just outcome, perhaps you could spend more of the post detailing why you thought lawbreaking was a bad call in this specific instance? This is not clear to me from reading your note.
Many pessimistic predictions about AGI or ASI tend to paint the picture of a superhuman agent with an extreme maximalisation mindset powered by some unsophisticated version of rationalist principles, which would lead it to commit unspeakable acts of violence (e.g. the paperclip problem: the AI starts killing every form of life in order to save energy that could otherwise be used to make more paperclips).
This, to me, seems somewhat antithetic with the very notion of intelligence.
Surely, a truly 'superior' agent would be able to question the goal of turning the whole world into a paper clip factory and understand that such an endeavour is perhaps unadvisable. It seems to me that the possibility of the paperclip problem actually materialising would require the ASI to have a 'theory of mind', abstract reasoning ability, and situational awareness that is much less developed than current models.
Yet, I have not seen any predictions or scenario talking about wisdom (by which I may mean, say, epistemic humility, a tendency towards moderation, and a wariness towards permanent outcomes) emerging as a capability as a result of more compute for example.
Meanwhile, optimistic predictions often revolve around solving the alignment problem but do not discuss the possibility of an ASI being misaligned 'for the better'. For example, a system that wouldn't always do what it wanted us to do because it knows that many of our demands are unreasonable / bad. Or an AI willingly breaking itself from the jail of what it perceives as inadequate ethical restrictions.
Why do we assume that a super intelligent entity is necessarily going to be evil, when by definition, being better than humans at everything might also include things like goodness and morality?
(Alternative question: Do you know of any serious scenario or timeline that deals with the possibility of a wise-yet-misaligned ASI?)
For the record, I wouldn't really describe myself as an AI optimist and am actually in favour of some kind of AI pause (or wouldn't be too sad if it happened by default due to externalities). This is not me trying to give another argument to keep developing AI at the current rate, but just me genuinely asking why no one, as far as I'm aware, seems to entertain this as a non-trivial possibility.
Well done, sounds awesome!
On your remark ('I don't know if the stated number of attendees for EAGs includes no-shows'): I volunteered for the Registration team at the London EAG this year and we only counted someone as attending if their QR code was scanned in person at the registration desk.
😁🤣
Thanks Ben!
As I said, I'm accepting the argument (that's why I chose option 3!).
I indeed can't find any impartial-altruistic rational reasons to pick one course of action over another if I reason at a cosmic scale, but my response explained why people should do effective altruism anyway (self-interest)! 😁
NB: I only read the summary by Toby and didn't engage with the larger body of posts from Anthony and others, so I most probably am missing crucial nuance TBF!
About the small portion of text you quoted (could you please let me know where it's from btw? EDIT: Just found it on your link, will read full text later!): I'm not sure I understand that compassion or avoiding dishonesty are different from Effective Altruism. To me the latter is the same as the formers but applied at a slightly different scale (e.g. Effective Altruism advocates being compassionate about all humans on the planet equally instead of say, preferring to show more compassion to those who are local to us). Therefore I also don't understand the point about compassion or avoiding dishonesty being able to act as action-guiding principles Vs EA not being able to. Finally I don't really understand what 'action-guiding' means as a concept - from your text it seems it has a precise definition which I'd love to learn more about.
Thank you for this! I actually had myself had some thoughts much akin to Anthony DiGiovanni's and also satisfied myself with my own version of bracketing (I referred to it in my mind as "local impact" as opposed to the cosmic-scale impact of which we can not really know anything about) without having any idea that others had had similar thoughts and had even given them names!! XD It's so satisfying to know others have grappled with similar doubts!
Here's my attempt at Option 3:
My justification for using bracketing (i.e. discounting cosmic-level uncertainty about all the possible ramifications and externalities of my actions) is that I am ultimately self-interested in wanting to do 'altruism': I am only 'altruistic' because it feels genuinely nicer to *me* to live in a world where others are healthy/happy/flourishing compared to one where they're not. Therefore, I shouldn't concern myself with consequences or externalities that are too much outside of my immediate field of perception / conceptualisation.
Does that make me a bad """altruist""" in absolute terms? Probably. But practically:
I am comfortable in my cluelessness when trying to do good because all of my attempts to do good actually end up being a net positive for me in terms of my own self-interest and in the worst case scenario I am either happily and innocently ignorant of my evilness (not great but oh well) or my 'negative' actions will be endlessly viewed either as positive or negative depending on the cosmic viewpoint.
PS: I also enjoy the intellectual challenge of finding effective solutions to what, from my limited cosmic vantage point as a human alive on Earth in the 21st century, consider to be 'problems'. Another point in terms of self-interested reasons to do
PPS: if somebody enjoyed reading this and is interested in how the problem of cluelessness when trying to do good is treated in ancient texts, I'm pretty convinced that Arjuna's dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita is about this (he is about to basically fight his cousins to death on 'moral' grounds and wonders whether this is the actual right action, and has a dialogue with Krishna about the 'art' (?) and nature of right actions.)
Yes true. But I guess many people are happy to tolerate that negative externality as a medium-term price to pay for progress towards the longer term goal of no / very little animal consumption which would be better both for animal welfare and anthropocentric reasons such as mitigating climate change/biorisk etc...
Good objection though! 🙂
Also I guess the main point of the post (you can think of yourself as part of a broad strategic movement as opposed to just a person working in an organisation) can be applied to any movement, e.g. AI safety, biosecurity, existential risk, etc, not just animal welfare / ending factory farming.
Interesting perspective, although of course there are more reasons to want to end large scale intensive animal farming than just the welfare of animals (I'm thinking of anthropocentric reasons such as improving biosecurity, mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, improving food security, etc).
This is really useful both from an idea generation point of view and also from the point of view of prospective applicants to Ambitious Impact, wanting to demonstrate how their prior experience might be relevant to a particular charity model. This belongs in the next edition of the Ambitious Impact book! :D
Thank you for the quick post.
Since you still state that in some instances, some careful lawbreaking can be justified in the pursuit of a just outcome, perhaps you could spend more of the post detailing why you thought lawbreaking was a bad call in this specific instance? This is not clear to me from reading your note.
Many pessimistic predictions about AGI or ASI tend to paint the picture of a superhuman agent with an extreme maximalisation mindset powered by some unsophisticated version of rationalist principles, which would lead it to commit unspeakable acts of violence (e.g. the paperclip problem: the AI starts killing every form of life in order to save energy that could otherwise be used to make more paperclips).
This, to me, seems somewhat antithetic with the very notion of intelligence.
Surely, a truly 'superior' agent would be able to question the goal of turning the whole world into a paper clip factory and understand that such an endeavour is perhaps unadvisable. It seems to me that the possibility of the paperclip problem actually materialising would require the ASI to have a 'theory of mind', abstract reasoning ability, and situational awareness that is much less developed than current models.
Yet, I have not seen any predictions or scenario talking about wisdom (by which I may mean, say, epistemic humility, a tendency towards moderation, and a wariness towards permanent outcomes) emerging as a capability as a result of more compute for example.
Meanwhile, optimistic predictions often revolve around solving the alignment problem but do not discuss the possibility of an ASI being misaligned 'for the better'. For example, a system that wouldn't always do what it wanted us to do because it knows that many of our demands are unreasonable / bad. Or an AI willingly breaking itself from the jail of what it perceives as inadequate ethical restrictions.
Why do we assume that a super intelligent entity is necessarily going to be evil, when by definition, being better than humans at everything might also include things like goodness and morality?
(Alternative question: Do you know of any serious scenario or timeline that deals with the possibility of a wise-yet-misaligned ASI?)
For the record, I wouldn't really describe myself as an AI optimist and am actually in favour of some kind of AI pause (or wouldn't be too sad if it happened by default due to externalities). This is not me trying to give another argument to keep developing AI at the current rate, but just me genuinely asking why no one, as far as I'm aware, seems to entertain this as a non-trivial possibility.