These extremely short responses discarding the bulk of my content feel less like you’re attempting to understand, and more like you’re attempting to get me to draw bright lines on a space I have repeatedly indicated is many different shades of grey. Disconnecting from the discussion for now.
I don’t mean to butt in. Hopefully this interjection is not unfriendly to your relative communicative intentions… but I found the back-and-forth personally edifying and I appreciate it!
Also, I do love bright lines. (I like weighing tests better, but only if the scales are well calibrated and whoever is weighing things is careful and has high integrity and so on.)
In places, it seemed like there was a different gestalt impression of “how morality and justification even works” maybe? This bit seemed evocative in this way to me:
Your example also reads to me like a classic justification for ‘everyone having guns’: “but what if I’m attacked by a rabid dog? If I have my gun I can protect myself! See, guns are ok to have!” Just because it’s possible to point out a positive use case, doesn’t mean that the remainder of the field is also positive.
Then this bit also did:
The point is that the target gets to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t, not the… publisher, [or] advertiser, the distinction does not matter. The point is that the target does not get to decide.
For me, both of these feel like “who / whom” arguments about power, and exceptional cases, and how the powerful govern the powerless normally, and the justifications power uses, and the precedent of granting such power, and how precedents can cascade weirdly in black swan events, and how easy or difficult it is to resist seemingly-non-benevolent exercises of power, and to what degree appeals are possible, and so on.
I read Jeff as trying to break the question of “ads” down into a vast collection of cases. Some good some bad. Some fixable, some not. Some he might be personally able to change… some not?
Then he constructed at least one case that might be consistent with, and revelatory of, an essentially acceptable (and not unbenevolent?) exercise of a certain kind of power. One case could exist that was good for everyone in that one case… because it is full of puppies and roses for everyone (or whatever).
The “power” here is basically “the power to choose at the last second what some parts of a website (that in some sense ‘has been asked for by the person the website copy will be sent to’) might look like”?
If you object even to this one quickly constructed “best possible use” of such a website editing power, despite the puppies and roses… that would mean that it isn’t “the results as such”, but (groping here...) more like “who or how are the results decided”?
Which… maybe who and how any economic event is decided is more important than what the result in particular is for that event? Or not?
But if that’s the crux then it seems useful to know, and the example did suggest to me that this might be close to the crux. If the “best possible ad” is actually “bad because of who/whom structural factors”, then… well… that’s interesting?
However also this makes the larger logical case less likely to be something where an answer can be found that any sane person would obviously agree to. It seems likely that humans will dispute about structural stuff “forever”?
The entire effective altruism movement is sort of (epistemically) “humble” here, and takes as a sort of premise that it is uniquely EFFECTIVE (compared to other, plausibly “lesser” ways of being altruistic) because it actually uses evidence and clear thinking to figure out specific local positive cheap ways to measurably “do the most good for others” (thereby helping many people, one life at a time, with specific local plights, despite limited resources).
Gather data. Run numbers. Do single local “likely best” intervention. Update. Repeat.
By contrast to obviously locally improving little tragic problems in the world one case at a time… the “structural who/whom stuff” is notoriously hard to reason about in a clear and universally convincing way.
One thing maybe to say is that I admire Jeff’s seemingly very honest commitment to giving money away to help others efficiently.
Separately, I admire his search for flaws in the way he makes the money being donated. And I upvoted Dentin’s original comment early on, because it seemed central to Jeff’s search for critical takes on his current professional work.
Behaviorally, if you and he both continued to work in ads at Google, I don’t think I would personally judge either of you (much?) worse. If you stop with ads. If Google stops with ads… I think still “the ads will flow” in the economy by some method or other no matter what? And when I worked at Google, I worked on weirder things, and every time I met someone in ads I tried to thank them for giving me the opportunity to not hew too directly to instantaneous market signals.
Google’s non-ad contribution to the lives of generic humans is plausibly sort of staggeringlypositive (search, email, and maps plausibly generate almost $30k/yr/person in consumer surplus!) compared to HOW LITTLE it extracts from most people. If Martians were going to copy the Earth 1000 times and delete either “Google+Bing” or “the Fed”, or both, or neither, as an experiment, I think my life would be sadder in copies without a decent search engine than in the copies without the Fed. I think?
If neither of you personally solve all of the inchoate structural problems inherent in the global information economy of earth in 2021… that’s not surprising, and I don’t think it makes you much worse than everyone else who is also not solving those problems. And donating a lot to actually effective charities is obviously relatively rare, and relatively great. If someone is going to Be Part Of A Structural System which causes me to sometimes see dildo ads on the internet (which might inevitable so long as the 1st amendment exists (and I don’t want to give up the 1st amendment)), I’d rather it was people who can have pangs of conscience, and seek to minimize harm, and who are proud that “At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.”
And (though I might be engaging in cognitive dissonance and just trying to end on a positive note) maybe people in the world can also fix “the structures” too, somehow, perhaps a bit at a time, with similar sorts of the (relatively humble) kinds of reasoning as is used to fight polio and malaria and so on?
These extremely short responses discarding the bulk of my content feel less like you’re attempting to understand, and more like you’re attempting to get me to draw bright lines on a space I have repeatedly indicated is many different shades of grey. Disconnecting from the discussion for now.
I don’t mean to butt in. Hopefully this interjection is not unfriendly to your relative communicative intentions… but I found the back-and-forth personally edifying and I appreciate it!
Also, I do love bright lines. (I like weighing tests better, but only if the scales are well calibrated and whoever is weighing things is careful and has high integrity and so on.)
In places, it seemed like there was a different gestalt impression of “how morality and justification even works” maybe? This bit seemed evocative in this way to me:
Then this bit also did:
For me, both of these feel like “who / whom” arguments about power, and exceptional cases, and how the powerful govern the powerless normally, and the justifications power uses, and the precedent of granting such power, and how precedents can cascade weirdly in black swan events, and how easy or difficult it is to resist seemingly-non-benevolent exercises of power, and to what degree appeals are possible, and so on.
I read Jeff as trying to break the question of “ads” down into a vast collection of cases. Some good some bad. Some fixable, some not. Some he might be personally able to change… some not?
Then he constructed at least one case that might be consistent with, and revelatory of, an essentially acceptable (and not unbenevolent?) exercise of a certain kind of power. One case could exist that was good for everyone in that one case… because it is full of puppies and roses for everyone (or whatever).
The “power” here is basically “the power to choose at the last second what some parts of a website (that in some sense ‘has been asked for by the person the website copy will be sent to’) might look like”?
If you object even to this one quickly constructed “best possible use” of such a website editing power, despite the puppies and roses… that would mean that it isn’t “the results as such”, but (groping here...) more like “who or how are the results decided”?
Which… maybe who and how any economic event is decided is more important than what the result in particular is for that event? Or not?
But if that’s the crux then it seems useful to know, and the example did suggest to me that this might be close to the crux. If the “best possible ad” is actually “bad because of who/whom structural factors”, then… well… that’s interesting?
However also this makes the larger logical case less likely to be something where an answer can be found that any sane person would obviously agree to. It seems likely that humans will dispute about structural stuff “forever”?
The entire effective altruism movement is sort of (epistemically) “humble” here, and takes as a sort of premise that it is uniquely EFFECTIVE (compared to other, plausibly “lesser” ways of being altruistic) because it actually uses evidence and clear thinking to figure out specific local positive cheap ways to measurably “do the most good for others” (thereby helping many people, one life at a time, with specific local plights, despite limited resources).
Gather data. Run numbers. Do single local “likely best” intervention. Update. Repeat.
By contrast to obviously locally improving little tragic problems in the world one case at a time… the “structural who/whom stuff” is notoriously hard to reason about in a clear and universally convincing way.
One thing maybe to say is that I admire Jeff’s seemingly very honest commitment to giving money away to help others efficiently.
Separately, I admire his search for flaws in the way he makes the money being donated. And I upvoted Dentin’s original comment early on, because it seemed central to Jeff’s search for critical takes on his current professional work.
Behaviorally, if you and he both continued to work in ads at Google, I don’t think I would personally judge either of you (much?) worse. If you stop with ads. If Google stops with ads… I think still “the ads will flow” in the economy by some method or other no matter what? And when I worked at Google, I worked on weirder things, and every time I met someone in ads I tried to thank them for giving me the opportunity to not hew too directly to instantaneous market signals.
Google’s non-ad contribution to the lives of generic humans is plausibly sort of staggeringly positive (search, email, and maps plausibly generate almost $30k/yr/person in consumer surplus!) compared to HOW LITTLE it extracts from most people. If Martians were going to copy the Earth 1000 times and delete either “Google+Bing” or “the Fed”, or both, or neither, as an experiment, I think my life would be sadder in copies without a decent search engine than in the copies without the Fed. I think?
If neither of you personally solve all of the inchoate structural problems inherent in the global information economy of earth in 2021… that’s not surprising, and I don’t think it makes you much worse than everyone else who is also not solving those problems. And donating a lot to actually effective charities is obviously relatively rare, and relatively great. If someone is going to Be Part Of A Structural System which causes me to sometimes see dildo ads on the internet (which might inevitable so long as the 1st amendment exists (and I don’t want to give up the 1st amendment)), I’d rather it was people who can have pangs of conscience, and seek to minimize harm, and who are proud that “At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.”
And (though I might be engaging in cognitive dissonance and just trying to end on a positive note) maybe people in the world can also fix “the structures” too, somehow, perhaps a bit at a time, with similar sorts of the (relatively humble) kinds of reasoning as is used to fight polio and malaria and so on?