Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism and Perfectionism
From a blog post I happened to come across:
For some people, getting involved in effective altruism is morally disorienting - once you start translating the objects and purchases around you into bednets, should you really have any of them? Should you skip a gruel diet so you can keep your strength up, work as an I-banker, and “earn to give” - funneling your salary into good causes? Ruminating on these questions can lead to analysis paralysis - a hefty serving of guilt.
My weak hypothesis is that effective altruism can feel more like a “purity” decision than other modes of thought people have used to date. You can be inoculated against moral culture shock by previous exposure to other purity-flavored kinds of reasoning (deontology, religion, etc), but, if not (and maybe if you’re also predisposed to anxiety), the sudden clarity about a bestmode of action, that is both very important, and very unlikely for you pull off everyday may trigger scrupulosity.
This seems to me like Brene Brown’s description of perfectionism. She says:
“Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought:”If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame."
– Perfectionism and Claiming Shame, Brene Brown
She also says perfectionism is different from “healthy striving” for excellence.
This definition also helps me get my head around the vast differences between perfectionism and healthy striving (when you’re striving to be better for yourself and for positive reasons, not to avoid shame, blame, and judgment). It also explains why perfectionism is the enemy of creative work and any other type of risk-taking.
Also, you start judging others (and yourself) for not being “effective” enough. You’re trying to be a doctor? That’s not good enough. You’re giving money to anti-malaria charities? What about catastrophic risks in the future? You’re being ineffective.
There are a lot of other corollaries here. Will get to them in the future.
Tentative Argument
Don’t accord status to effective altruists. Don’t do it because you will get respect from others, do it because it needs to be done. Why? Because you need to purchase fuzzies, status, and utilons separately.
Remove status from the effective altruist equation entirely. Effective altruism money or effort is a poor way to buy status (I feel).
And if you think you can inspire others to follow suit by assigning high status to effective altruists, then remember that they will face two options: donate what will seem like an uncomfortably large portion of their income to effective altruism in hopes of getting some status, or denigrate the movement so that the size of your contribution no longer causes respect (or disrespect). I suspect that people will call EAs as cultish or whatever to avoid having to do all the hard work to gain status. That’s my hypothesis and I need to test it against data.
(This is just like the “phoenix as a sign of goodness” problem in HPMOR - the bad guys kept disparaging it till you could no longer trust that signal.)
How Much Good You Can Do and Opportunity Costs
Thoughts from reading SSC’s Nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable.
What if you feel guilty about not doing all the things you could possibly do to help others? You could be donating money to Against Malaria, training in some particular fields to Earn to Give, work in poor regions, or raising awareness about effective altruism itself.
Some of these things exclude each other - you can’t be an investment banker and make tons of money while also working full-time in Africa. What do you do then? Do you sit and feel guilty and miserable because of your horrid behaviour?
No. You have finite resources. You can only do so much (that might be a lot, but it’s still not infinite). Simply invest your resources - your time, money, emotions, persuasive talks - in areas where you get better returns than anywhere else. If you’re best at investment banking, do that and donate how much ever you feel comfortable with, and then forget about it. You’ve done what you are able and willing to do. Feeling miserable about the branches you didn’t choose is pointless. You can never do better than your best.
(Though, of course, be aware of the “trying to try” trap - saying that you’re “trying” to do the best you can and then being satisfied with a token effort. For the above arguments to apply, you need to do your actual best, which I’ll admit I find hard to judge right now.)
Thoughts on Animal Rights
One of the founding beliefs of effective altruism is that when math tells you something weird, you at least consider trusting the math. If you’re allowed to just add on as many zeroes as it takes to justify your original intuition, you miss out on the entire movement.
Everyone has their own idea of what trusting the math entails and how far they want to go with it. Some people go further than I do. Other people go less far. But anybody who makes a good-faith effort to trust it even a little is, in my opinion, an acceptable ally worth including in the effective altruist tent. They have abandoned a nice safe chance to donate to the local symphony and feel good about themselves, in favor of a life of feeling constantly uncomfortable with their decisions, looking extremely silly to normal people, and having Dylan Matthews write articles in Vox calling them “white male autistic nerds”.
For example, I have this vague intuition that, no matter what, animals’ lives can’t possibly matter more than those of humans, even if it’s several billion of those animals. TODO
But I suspect that is untenable from a utilitarian point of view. There must be some number of animals whose value can outweigh that of one human. Or maybe there’s a sharp curve when it comes to humans - perhaps a human is far more valuable to us than animals.
Also, keep in mind that you’re talking about the best way to spend your limited resources, not the absolute values of the items. You need to talk about the opportunity cost of one dollar.
A Nameless Soldier in an Endless War
I used to wonder what made people join the army or other such vast organizations where their contribution was essentially unnoticeable. What kind of a difference did they think they could make? Similarly, why contribute to Wikipedia when practically nobody will ever credit you for your work? I felt like too much of an “individualist” to meld into such a mass.
Basically, I couldn’t imagine taking on a task where I wouldn’t get credit. What was the point, I thought, of putting in hours and years and decades into something if nobody applauded you for it?
Then I read SSC’s post, Fear And Loathing At Effective Altruism Global 2017:
Where the very existence of suffering, any suffering at all, is an immense cosmic wrongness, an intolerable gash in the world, distressing and enraging. Where a single human lifetime seems frighteningly inadequate compared to the magnitude of the problem. Where all the normal interpersonal squabbles look trivial in the face of a colossal war against suffering itself, one that requires a soldier’s discipline and a general’s eye for strategy.
All of these Effecting Effective Effectiveness people don’t obsess over efficiency out of bloodlessness. They obsess because the struggle is so desperate, and the resources so few. Their efficiency is military efficiency. Their cooperation is military discipline. Their unity is the unity of people facing a common enemy. And they are winning. Very slowly, WWI trench-warfare-style. But they really are.
I am someone who wants to be an effective altruist. But now I realize that that involves a “colossal war” waged over decades and centuries, one that will probably go on long after I’m dead. There’s practically nothing I can do that will make any sort of noticeable contribution in the long run. There are people who are way richer or way smarter, or way more driven - all of them together will have way more impact than me. And yet, despite all those reasons, I still want to dedicate my life to this war.
I guess I too am happy to be a nameless soldier. Sometimes the mission is too important for you to let personal credit get in the way.
Credit
Hypothesis: I think the problem comes down to credit. Can you act when there’s no possibility of credit or even direct feedback?
When you create a successful startup, you get credit and feedback in the form of the extra zeros on your bank balance.
But what happens when you contribute 10% of your income every year or add one more brick of research to the vast monument of science that will create future utilons? You can’t tell directly if you’ve improved things. You have to rely on your inner compass, your abstract “utility function”.
Hmm… That’s probably what we find hard, judging things by our values and not by the feedback we receive from outside. The task is to let your actions be decided by true values and not by whatever gives the most feedback. Lucrative jobs will give you a satisfying reward each month, and lots of respect from people every day. But they are probably not the ones that will give you maximum utilons.
Basically, can you take action even when it earns you disrespect? At least you get some sort of reaction from the world. What if it earns you no attention at all? What if you never see anything big happen in your lifetime from your monthly donation? Can you still keep going?
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