My deontology module would complain if I spent money trying to get other people to sacrifice their own hedons for utilons, without being willing to do the same myself. It would complain so much that the guilt would feel worse than just eating unpleasant food all the time. And then with a vague goal of “probably donating enough to make up for eating meat” I would probably end up alieving that I had started eating meat just because I felt like it and the thing about saving money to donate was a rationalization, which would ruin my self-image as an altruist, and probably make me do less altruistic things in the future.
Givewell finds good charities for helping humans, but I think you can help a lot more animals per dollar, so if you are among the few who care about animals, you have a “comparative advantage” (stretching the meaning of term, I know, because it’s not that others can’t help animals with as small an opportunity cost as you, but that they won’t) in helping animals. Lowhangingfruit in improving animal lives have not been picked.
But I still do occasionally argue with people I know in favor of vegetarianism. I’ve been somewhat successful. Of the people I have argued with in person for longer than an hour, one has agreed with me “eating meat is wrong,” but said they would continue to do it anyway (and declined to watch the videos I suggested), one said they couldn’t stop eating meat because they need it to continue being competitive at the athletics they do, but was pretty shaken (and also agreed “eating meat is wrong”) (also declining the videos), one went from long-lapsed vegetarian to most-of-the-time-vegan, and one went from full omnivore to flexitarian, following my advice (based on theseposts) to eat beef instead of chicken, eggs and fish. Edit: left out one, who as far as I know, is still eating meat and eggs unabated.
If I was actually capable of self-modification like that, and the only other part of me trying to control what I did was my consequentialist module, I would do it, But really, that would increase the willpower costs of taking/not taking actions my consequentialist module wants to take/not take anyway, and make me less moral overall as a greater fraction of my motivations became selfish ones.
If I was actually capable of self-modification like that
On our current hardware, you’re not: removing the “deontology module” isn’t really an option. However, you probably are capable of removing or changing the rules that your “deontology module” (probably not an actual module) is following. In order to feel guilty about things, you have to have experiences of guilt that have been associated to patterns of behavior, and such experiential memories are pretty open to being manipulated after the fact.
That aside, though, the reasoning you’re using in your deontology appears to be based on faulty assumptions:
sacrifice their own hedons for utilons
What evidence do you have that they’ll be sacrificing anything?
without being willing to do the same myself
This is assuming you are sufficiently similar for such an ethic to be meaningful.
In both cases, the bit you’re not taking into consideration is that trades can be non-zero-sum—a win for you and the other person both—in the case where you and your trading partner are sufficiently different in situation, values, motivations, etc. In fact, it might be unethical (in a strict utilitarian sense) for you to not make the trade, if you are sufficiently complementary to your potential trading partner.
So what you’re dealing with here isn’t so much deontology in a true moral sense, it’s just cached guilt based on a simplistic idea of fairness (and perhaps a cached assumption that if you’re getting something out of it, it’s probably hurting someone and you should feel bad).
make me less moral overall as a greater fraction of my motivations became selfish ones.
Yeah… that part really raises my probability estimate for a cached guilt-tripping pattern. One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of people is that they’re actually raised in such a way as to end up believing that they don’t have any motivations of their own that aren’t “bad”, and then believe they need rules to make themselves behave properly.
The flaw in this logic is that if you aren’t a good person, then why are you motivated to follow the rules?
This pattern is extremely common in self-defeating behaviors: we get taught our intrinsic motivations are bad, and that so we must follow some set of rules in order to have any chance of being a good person. Following these (usually extreme) rules, however, doesn’t actually get all our basic human needs met, in part because we’ve learned those needs are evidence of our evilness or selfishness, so we don’t even think of them as “needs”!
Then, because the needs don’t get met, we experience strong and increasing intrinsic motivation to meet them in whatever way possible, until self-control fails… which then seems to confirm the original belief that our essential nature is bad and needs to be controlled.
But if the needs were recognized as valid and part of the same entity that desires to be good in the first place, none of this would be a problem: you could have good stuff for you and other people, now and in the future. (That is, your notion of utility would include terms for other people and for your future selves, not just the present-moment one who would like to indulge in something harmful to others or your future.)
In other words, our desire to be a “good person” (whatever definition we have for that) is just as much a part of our consequentialist brains’ motivation as our desire for short-term treats at the expense of others or our long-term goals. Forcing all your conscious decisions to pass through admonitions to “be good” just proves this point, because if you didn’t want to be good, there’d be no reason to admonish yourself.
That is, actually using this strategy proves that there’s an error in a key factual assumption: that you don’t intrinsically want to be a good person and desire to good things of your own, unrestrained free will.
Come to think of it, this is actually a bit like Friendly AI, in the sense that this particular kind of self-admonishment is like thinking yourself an UnFriendly AI that thus needs to be kept under restraint in order not to do something bad. However, if you were actually unfriendly, you would have no desire to restrain yourself!
OTOH, if you were Friendly, you might choose to voluntarily limit your options or precommit to self-restraint, on the assumption that you might contain bugs you can’t detect, or if you are aware of bugs that cause friendliness-failure under certain conditions.
In the human case, that’d be like using rules to patch specific cases where hardware flaws result in underweighting certain factors at decision-making time. The catch is that while this is extremely useful for managing children in non-ancestral environments (e.g. schools), it’s mostly not a functional strategy for a full-grown adult—in fact it’s a complete waste of one’s self-control circuitry to use it as a primary decision-making strategy!
The desire to do things for my own enjoyment. Usually they are short-sighted too. Such as “Forget the work from home you could be doing right now, which could be making money for efficient altruism. Instead, look at pictures of cats on the internet.”
The problem (from the perspective of the altruistic part of me) is that I’m trading off a lot of well-being of strangers for a little of my own well-being.
Do you think CEV / fAI will include concern for animals and things like not simulating or spreading wild animal suffering throughout the universe? If there remain doubts, then spreading memes for people to care more about animal suffering might be very important too!
I think most humans’ volition does include concern for animals, and a CEV AI of the kind MIRI wants to eventually create would be an astronomically good thing. It would probably turn the light cone into computronium full of blissful posthumans, wiping out most if not all darwinian nature it ran into, just because you can tile the universe more densely with people if you put them in computers. Posthumans would be much more computationally expensive than the simplest minds capable of happiness, so they would be packed much less densely and there would be much less happiness than a utilitronium future, but still quite a lot of it.
Spreading memes for people to care about animals does indeed have the potential to be a very good thing, especially because it’s potentially useful in all of the futures where humanity decides what happens, not just ones where AI is the biggest existential risk (or close to the biggest). But if you are donating small amounts of money relative to the money already going into a certain effort though, each dollar is probably roughly as effective as the last, so a small advantage in the effectiveness of one effort over another means that that effort is the only one you should be donating to. Unless you are very rich, you probably don’t want to donate some money to one cause, and some to another.
And as it stands, I think something like paperclipping is the most likely future, though.
My deontology module would complain if I spent money trying to get other people to sacrifice their own hedons for utilons, without being willing to do the same myself. It would complain so much that the guilt would feel worse than just eating unpleasant food all the time. And then with a vague goal of “probably donating enough to make up for eating meat” I would probably end up alieving that I had started eating meat just because I felt like it and the thing about saving money to donate was a rationalization, which would ruin my self-image as an altruist, and probably make me do less altruistic things in the future.
Givewell finds good charities for helping humans, but I think you can help a lot more animals per dollar, so if you are among the few who care about animals, you have a “comparative advantage” (stretching the meaning of term, I know, because it’s not that others can’t help animals with as small an opportunity cost as you, but that they won’t) in helping animals. Low hanging fruit in improving animal lives have not been picked.
However, I’m not donating to animal-helping charities at the moment, because I think existential risk charity (actually, one existential risk charity in particular) has a higher impact.
But I still do occasionally argue with people I know in favor of vegetarianism. I’ve been somewhat successful. Of the people I have argued with in person for longer than an hour, one has agreed with me “eating meat is wrong,” but said they would continue to do it anyway (and declined to watch the videos I suggested), one said they couldn’t stop eating meat because they need it to continue being competitive at the athletics they do, but was pretty shaken (and also agreed “eating meat is wrong”) (also declining the videos), one went from long-lapsed vegetarian to most-of-the-time-vegan, and one went from full omnivore to flexitarian, following my advice (based on these posts) to eat beef instead of chicken, eggs and fish. Edit: left out one, who as far as I know, is still eating meat and eggs unabated.
I suggest self-modifying to remove your deontology module.
If I was actually capable of self-modification like that, and the only other part of me trying to control what I did was my consequentialist module, I would do it, But really, that would increase the willpower costs of taking/not taking actions my consequentialist module wants to take/not take anyway, and make me less moral overall as a greater fraction of my motivations became selfish ones.
On our current hardware, you’re not: removing the “deontology module” isn’t really an option. However, you probably are capable of removing or changing the rules that your “deontology module” (probably not an actual module) is following. In order to feel guilty about things, you have to have experiences of guilt that have been associated to patterns of behavior, and such experiential memories are pretty open to being manipulated after the fact.
That aside, though, the reasoning you’re using in your deontology appears to be based on faulty assumptions:
What evidence do you have that they’ll be sacrificing anything?
This is assuming you are sufficiently similar for such an ethic to be meaningful.
In both cases, the bit you’re not taking into consideration is that trades can be non-zero-sum—a win for you and the other person both—in the case where you and your trading partner are sufficiently different in situation, values, motivations, etc. In fact, it might be unethical (in a strict utilitarian sense) for you to not make the trade, if you are sufficiently complementary to your potential trading partner.
So what you’re dealing with here isn’t so much deontology in a true moral sense, it’s just cached guilt based on a simplistic idea of fairness (and perhaps a cached assumption that if you’re getting something out of it, it’s probably hurting someone and you should feel bad).
Yeah… that part really raises my probability estimate for a cached guilt-tripping pattern. One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of people is that they’re actually raised in such a way as to end up believing that they don’t have any motivations of their own that aren’t “bad”, and then believe they need rules to make themselves behave properly.
The flaw in this logic is that if you aren’t a good person, then why are you motivated to follow the rules?
This pattern is extremely common in self-defeating behaviors: we get taught our intrinsic motivations are bad, and that so we must follow some set of rules in order to have any chance of being a good person. Following these (usually extreme) rules, however, doesn’t actually get all our basic human needs met, in part because we’ve learned those needs are evidence of our evilness or selfishness, so we don’t even think of them as “needs”!
Then, because the needs don’t get met, we experience strong and increasing intrinsic motivation to meet them in whatever way possible, until self-control fails… which then seems to confirm the original belief that our essential nature is bad and needs to be controlled.
But if the needs were recognized as valid and part of the same entity that desires to be good in the first place, none of this would be a problem: you could have good stuff for you and other people, now and in the future. (That is, your notion of utility would include terms for other people and for your future selves, not just the present-moment one who would like to indulge in something harmful to others or your future.)
In other words, our desire to be a “good person” (whatever definition we have for that) is just as much a part of our consequentialist brains’ motivation as our desire for short-term treats at the expense of others or our long-term goals. Forcing all your conscious decisions to pass through admonitions to “be good” just proves this point, because if you didn’t want to be good, there’d be no reason to admonish yourself.
That is, actually using this strategy proves that there’s an error in a key factual assumption: that you don’t intrinsically want to be a good person and desire to good things of your own, unrestrained free will.
Come to think of it, this is actually a bit like Friendly AI, in the sense that this particular kind of self-admonishment is like thinking yourself an UnFriendly AI that thus needs to be kept under restraint in order not to do something bad. However, if you were actually unfriendly, you would have no desire to restrain yourself!
OTOH, if you were Friendly, you might choose to voluntarily limit your options or precommit to self-restraint, on the assumption that you might contain bugs you can’t detect, or if you are aware of bugs that cause friendliness-failure under certain conditions.
In the human case, that’d be like using rules to patch specific cases where hardware flaws result in underweighting certain factors at decision-making time. The catch is that while this is extremely useful for managing children in non-ancestral environments (e.g. schools), it’s mostly not a functional strategy for a full-grown adult—in fact it’s a complete waste of one’s self-control circuitry to use it as a primary decision-making strategy!
What exactly are selfish motivations?
The desire to do things for my own enjoyment. Usually they are short-sighted too. Such as “Forget the work from home you could be doing right now, which could be making money for efficient altruism. Instead, look at pictures of cats on the internet.”
What’s wrong with doing things for your own enjoyment if you value them more highly than the well-being of strangers?
The problem (from the perspective of the altruistic part of me) is that I’m trading off a lot of well-being of strangers for a little of my own well-being.
Isn’t the well-being of strangers a component of your well-being? (Assuming you care about them.)
WARNING: The links for ‘Low hanging fruit’ are to some graphic videos of animal abuse.
Mestroyer, please consider editing this post to include a warning, or including a warning in subsequent posts.
Do you think CEV / fAI will include concern for animals and things like not simulating or spreading wild animal suffering throughout the universe? If there remain doubts, then spreading memes for people to care more about animal suffering might be very important too!
I think most humans’ volition does include concern for animals, and a CEV AI of the kind MIRI wants to eventually create would be an astronomically good thing. It would probably turn the light cone into computronium full of blissful posthumans, wiping out most if not all darwinian nature it ran into, just because you can tile the universe more densely with people if you put them in computers. Posthumans would be much more computationally expensive than the simplest minds capable of happiness, so they would be packed much less densely and there would be much less happiness than a utilitronium future, but still quite a lot of it.
Spreading memes for people to care about animals does indeed have the potential to be a very good thing, especially because it’s potentially useful in all of the futures where humanity decides what happens, not just ones where AI is the biggest existential risk (or close to the biggest). But if you are donating small amounts of money relative to the money already going into a certain effort though, each dollar is probably roughly as effective as the last, so a small advantage in the effectiveness of one effort over another means that that effort is the only one you should be donating to. Unless you are very rich, you probably don’t want to donate some money to one cause, and some to another.
And as it stands, I think something like paperclipping is the most likely future, though.