OK, I missed the occurrence of the phrase in the post itself. But I think it is being employed because it is a readily available LW idiom, not because it is psychologically accurate. Donating to help someone obtain cryopreservation is not a feel-good sort of donation in any conventional sense. No-one in the history of the world has ever been revived from cryosuspension. The whole situation confronts people with their own mortality and the fact that society is not set up to save them from it. You can argue about whether donating is the “optimal” thing for anyone to do, but I don’t think “warm fuzzies vs utilons” is the right way to describe the psychology of the initial response, or to frame the subsequent debate about what to do. Wanting to donate, and then deciding not to, would be a triage decision in this case. Or even like deciding to neglect your own family in order to send money to unknown orphans on the other side of the world.
I challenged the “warm fuzzies” argument because it was the only prima facie plausible justification for donating to the girl that I could find on this thread. If the phrase is not being use to justify the donation but merely to explain why people donate, then I simply restate my challenge as demanding a justification of some kind for spending money on a cause whose expected benefit, whether measured in lives saved or suffering prevented, is a tiny fraction of what one can expect from a donation to the most effective charities out there, as rated e.g. by Give Well, Giving What We Can or Effective Animal Activism.
Cryonics promotion. We (I, at any rate) want cryonics to be easier to sign up for, for mostly selfish reasons. An additional patient decreases somewhat the financial and social costs of cryonics, and a case that brings publicity (Reddit is big) of an overwhelmingly positive kind (Kim is a cute girl begging for help) will directly lower the social cost and attract new patients. I took the money from my ice cream budget, not my altruistic one.
If I understand you correctly, whenever an opportunity of this efficacy is available for promoting cryonics (or plastination, or life extension) that it becomes your top-quality marginal charitable dollar. Or perhaps you’re saying merely that it’s decent charity, enough to justify rolling with the emotional attachment to an individual.
Someone on IRC suggested I fund the Brain Preservation prize Robin Hanson posted about rather than sign up for cryonics now, since I’m pretty sure current practice just won’t work at all and I want to advance the state of the art.
it becomes your top-quality marginal charitable dollar
No, not charitable. (I said “for mostly selfish reasons” and ” I took the money from my ice cream budget, not my altruistic one.”) It’s a pampering budget, for things I want for myself but can skip buying now without any fuss, like saving for retirement and tasty food and museum visits and socks with no holes and trips to see friends. My top-quality charitable dollar is still for malaria nets.
If we accept the original framework of “you’re allowed 95% utilons and 5% non-utilons”, then it can still fall under the “allowed non-utilon” category.
If we were to take the other option and try to defend this as an optimal expenditure of money, it might be defended as an act of civilization-building. None of the charities you list will decide the fate of the world; they all depend on the existence somewhere else of a functioning self-sufficient society with spare capacity. Frankly, if you really do take the big picture, it is far from clear that any of those activities matter very much. Civilizational directions are not usually set by what happens in the most unfortunate places.
So if we swing to a different extreme and consider whether high-tech futurist activities might be the best place to spend money, then there’s a different challenge—why spend your money on helping to make a single cryonic suspension happen, rather than on FAI research, brain modeling, or wherever you think the most neglected area is.
But actions of a different kind also matter. People who are attuned to these topics need to shake off the distractions of an uncomprehending world and remind themselves of why they took the ideas seriously to begin with. One step leads to another. Unless we just have a singularity first, a day is going to come when there’s a lot more than just one desperate person, out of the 100,000 who die every day, seeking cryonic suspension.
When it really, finally dawns on the human race at large that cryonics might work, that a slightly more advanced medicine might cure most causes of death even without cryonics, etc., there is going to be mayhem. Sorting out a rational balance now between self-preservation, conventional charity, and futurist charity may do a little to alleviate that mayhem when it arrives; and it’s clear that none of these activities should be wholly absent in the right balance. So we absolutely need to figure out how to accommodate something like Kim’s situation into our “optimizing”, rather than just putting it to one side.
OK, I missed the occurrence of the phrase in the post itself. But I think it is being employed because it is a readily available LW idiom, not because it is psychologically accurate. Donating to help someone obtain cryopreservation is not a feel-good sort of donation in any conventional sense. No-one in the history of the world has ever been revived from cryosuspension. The whole situation confronts people with their own mortality and the fact that society is not set up to save them from it. You can argue about whether donating is the “optimal” thing for anyone to do, but I don’t think “warm fuzzies vs utilons” is the right way to describe the psychology of the initial response, or to frame the subsequent debate about what to do. Wanting to donate, and then deciding not to, would be a triage decision in this case. Or even like deciding to neglect your own family in order to send money to unknown orphans on the other side of the world.
I don’t think we should move the conversation.
I challenged the “warm fuzzies” argument because it was the only prima facie plausible justification for donating to the girl that I could find on this thread. If the phrase is not being use to justify the donation but merely to explain why people donate, then I simply restate my challenge as demanding a justification of some kind for spending money on a cause whose expected benefit, whether measured in lives saved or suffering prevented, is a tiny fraction of what one can expect from a donation to the most effective charities out there, as rated e.g. by Give Well, Giving What We Can or Effective Animal Activism.
Cryonics promotion. We (I, at any rate) want cryonics to be easier to sign up for, for mostly selfish reasons. An additional patient decreases somewhat the financial and social costs of cryonics, and a case that brings publicity (Reddit is big) of an overwhelmingly positive kind (Kim is a cute girl begging for help) will directly lower the social cost and attract new patients. I took the money from my ice cream budget, not my altruistic one.
If I understand you correctly, whenever an opportunity of this efficacy is available for promoting cryonics (or plastination, or life extension) that it becomes your top-quality marginal charitable dollar. Or perhaps you’re saying merely that it’s decent charity, enough to justify rolling with the emotional attachment to an individual.
Someone on IRC suggested I fund the Brain Preservation prize Robin Hanson posted about rather than sign up for cryonics now, since I’m pretty sure current practice just won’t work at all and I want to advance the state of the art.
No, not charitable. (I said “for mostly selfish reasons” and ” I took the money from my ice cream budget, not my altruistic one.”) It’s a pampering budget, for things I want for myself but can skip buying now without any fuss, like saving for retirement and tasty food and museum visits and socks with no holes and trips to see friends. My top-quality charitable dollar is still for malaria nets.
Oh. I missed that you considered cryonics promotion selfish more than charitable. My fault.
If we accept the original framework of “you’re allowed 95% utilons and 5% non-utilons”, then it can still fall under the “allowed non-utilon” category.
If we were to take the other option and try to defend this as an optimal expenditure of money, it might be defended as an act of civilization-building. None of the charities you list will decide the fate of the world; they all depend on the existence somewhere else of a functioning self-sufficient society with spare capacity. Frankly, if you really do take the big picture, it is far from clear that any of those activities matter very much. Civilizational directions are not usually set by what happens in the most unfortunate places.
So if we swing to a different extreme and consider whether high-tech futurist activities might be the best place to spend money, then there’s a different challenge—why spend your money on helping to make a single cryonic suspension happen, rather than on FAI research, brain modeling, or wherever you think the most neglected area is.
But actions of a different kind also matter. People who are attuned to these topics need to shake off the distractions of an uncomprehending world and remind themselves of why they took the ideas seriously to begin with. One step leads to another. Unless we just have a singularity first, a day is going to come when there’s a lot more than just one desperate person, out of the 100,000 who die every day, seeking cryonic suspension.
When it really, finally dawns on the human race at large that cryonics might work, that a slightly more advanced medicine might cure most causes of death even without cryonics, etc., there is going to be mayhem. Sorting out a rational balance now between self-preservation, conventional charity, and futurist charity may do a little to alleviate that mayhem when it arrives; and it’s clear that none of these activities should be wholly absent in the right balance. So we absolutely need to figure out how to accommodate something like Kim’s situation into our “optimizing”, rather than just putting it to one side.