Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora.
That’s a lot closer to the truth than you might think. There are plenty of lines going from the Fabian society (and from Trotsky, for that matter) into the rationalist diaspora. On the other hand, there is very little influence from eg. Henry Regnery or Oswald Spengler.
“A real charter city hasn’t been tried!” I reply.
Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is close enough, surely.
“Real socialism hasn’t been tried either!” the Effective Samaritan quips back. “Every attempt has always been co-opted by ruling elites who used it for their own ends. The closest we’ve gotten is Scandinavia which now has the world’s highest standards of living, even if not entirely socialist it’s gotta count for something!”
This argument sounds a lot more Trotskyist than Fabian to me, but it is worth noting that said ruling elites have both been nominally socialist and been widely supported by socialists throughout the world. The same cannot be said in the case of charter cities and their socialist oppositions.
For every logical inference I make, they make the opposite. Every thoughtful prior of mine, they consider to be baseless prejudice. My modus ponens, their modus tollens.
Because your priors are baseless prejudices. The Whig infighting between liberals and socialists is one of many cases where both sides are awful and each side is almost exactly right about the other side. Your example about StarCraft shows that you are prone to using baseless prejudices as your priors, and other parts of your post show that you are indeed doing the very same thing when it comes to politics.
Of all the possible intellectuals I was exposed to, surely it is suspicious that the ones whose conclusions matched my already held beliefs were the ones who stuck.
Your evaluation of both, as well as your selection of opposition (Whig opposition in the form of socialism, rather than Tory opposition in the form of eg. paleoconservatism), shows that your priors on this point are basically theological, or more precisely, eschatological. You implicitly see history as progressing along a course of growing wisdom, increasing emancipation, and widening empathy (Peter Singer’s Ever-Expanding Circle). It is simply a residue from your Christian culture. The socialist is also a Christian at heart, but being of a somewhat more dramatic disposition, he doesn’t think of history as a steady upwards march to greater insight, but as a series of dramatic conflicts that resolve with the good guys winning.
(unless of course he is a Trotskyist, in which case we are perpetually at a turning point where history could go either way; towards communism or towards fascism)
Yet, the combined efforts of our charity has added up to exactly nothing! I want to yell at the Samaritan whose efforts have invalidated all of mine. Why are they so hellbent on tearing down all the beauty I want to create? Surely we can do better than this.
Sure, I can tell you how to do better: focus your efforts on improving institutions and societies that you are close to and very knowledgeable about. You can do a much better job here, and the resultant proliferation of healthy institutions will, as a pleasant side effect, spread much more prosperity in the third world than effective altruism ever will.
This is the position taken by sensible people (eg. paleocons), and notably not by revolutionaries and utopian technocrats. This is fortunate because it gives the latter a local handicap and enables good, judicious people to achieve at least some success in creating sound institutions and propagating genuine wisdom. This fundamental asymmetry is the reason why there is any functional infrastructure left anywhere, despite the utopian factions far outnumbering the realists.
We both believe in doing the most good, whatever that means, and we both believe in using evidence to inform our decision making.
No, you actually don’t. If your intentions really were that good, they would lead you naturally into the right conclusions, but as Robin Hanson has pointed out, even Effective Altruism is still ultimately about virtue signalling, though perhaps directed at yourself. Sorta like HJPEV’s desperate effort to be a good person after the sorting hat’s warning to him. This is a case of Effective Altruists being mistaken about what their own driving motives actually are.
For us to collaborate we need to agree on some basic principles which, when followed, produces knowledge that can fit into both our existing worldviews.
The correct principle is this: fix things locally (where it is easier and where you can better track the actual results) before you decide to take over the world. There are a lot of local things that need fixing. This way, if your philosophy works, your own community, nation, etc. will flourish, and if it doesn’t work, it will fall apart. Interestingly, most EA’s are a lot more risk averse when it comes to their own backyard than when it comes to some random country in Africa.
To minimize the chance of statistical noise or incorrect inference polluting our conclusions, we create experiments with randomly chosen intervention and control groups, so we are sure the intervention is causally connected to the outcome.
This precludes a priori any plans that involve looking far ahead, reacting judiciously to circumstances as they arise, or creating institutions that people self-select into. In the latter case, using comparable geographical areas would introduce a whole host of confounders, but having both the intervention and control groups be in an overlapping area would change the nature of the experiment, because the structure of the social networks that result would be quite different. Basically, the statistical method you propose has technocratic policymaking built into its assumptions, and so it is not surprising that it will wind up favouring liberal technocracy. You have simply found another way of using a baseless prejudice as your prior.
But this is the most telling paragraph:
Like my beliefs about Starcraft, it seems so arbitrary. Had my initial instinct been the opposite, maybe I would have breezed past Hanson’s contrarian nonsense to one day discover truth and beauty reading Piketty.
Read both. The marginal clarity you will get from immersing yourself still deeper into your native canon is enormously outshadowed by the clarity you can get from familiarising yourself with more canons. Of course, Piketty is really just another branch of the same canon, with Piketty and Hanson being practically cousins, intellectually. Compare Friedrich List, to see the point.
My initial instinct was social democracy. Later I became a communist, then, after exposure to LessWrong, I became a libertarian. Now I’m a monarchist, and it occurs to me in hindsight that social democracy, communism, and libertarianism are all profoundly Protestant ideologies, and what I thought was me being widely read was actually still me being narrowminded and parochial.
That does not even come close to cancelling out the reduced ability to get a detailed view of the impact, let alone the much less honest motivations behind such giving.
And lives are not of equal value. Even if you think they have equal innate value, surely you can recognise that a comparatively shorter third-world life with worse prospects for intellectual and artistic development and greater likelihood of abject poverty is much less valuable (even if only due to circumstances) than the lives of people you are surrounded with, and surely you will also recognise that it is the latter that form the basis for your intuitions about the value of life.
By giving your “charity” (actually, the word “charity” stems from Latin caritas meaning care, as in giving to people you care about, whereas “altruism” is cognate with alter, meaning basically otherism, and in practice meaning giving to people you don’t care about) to less worthwhile recipients, you behaving in an anti-meritocratic way and cheapening your act of giving.
Moreover, people obviously don’t have equal innate value, and there is a distinct correlation between earning potential and being a utility monster, which at least partially cancels out the effect of diminishing marginal utility.
And the whole reason people care so much about morality is because the moral virtues and shortcomings of your friends and associates are going to have a huge impact on your life. If you’re redirecting the virtue by giving money to random foreigners, you are basically defaulting on the debt to your friends. One of your closest friend could wind up in deep trouble and need as much help as he can possibly get. He will need virtuous friends he can rely on to help him, and any money you have given to some third worlders you will never meet is money you cannot give to a friend in need. Therefore, any giving to Effective Altruism is inherently unjust and disloyal. By all means, be charitable and give what you can. But not to strangers.
This sounds a lot like Ayn Randian selfishness but applied to the level of a friend group rather than an individual. “Potential obligations to friends and one’s self are more important than the present suffering of strangers” is a consistent point of view that I rarely see eloquent arguments for, but it’s certainly not one I agree with.
It is part Ayn Rand, part Curtis Yarvin. Ultimately it all comes from Thomas Carlyle anyway.
And there is no need to limit yourself to potential obligations. Unless you have an exceedingly blessed life, then there should be no shortage of friends and loved ones in need of help.
That’s a lot closer to the truth than you might think. There are plenty of lines going from the Fabian society (and from Trotsky, for that matter) into the rationalist diaspora. On the other hand, there is very little influence from eg. Henry Regnery or Oswald Spengler.
Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is close enough, surely.
This argument sounds a lot more Trotskyist than Fabian to me, but it is worth noting that said ruling elites have both been nominally socialist and been widely supported by socialists throughout the world. The same cannot be said in the case of charter cities and their socialist oppositions.
Because your priors are baseless prejudices. The Whig infighting between liberals and socialists is one of many cases where both sides are awful and each side is almost exactly right about the other side. Your example about StarCraft shows that you are prone to using baseless prejudices as your priors, and other parts of your post show that you are indeed doing the very same thing when it comes to politics.
Your evaluation of both, as well as your selection of opposition (Whig opposition in the form of socialism, rather than Tory opposition in the form of eg. paleoconservatism), shows that your priors on this point are basically theological, or more precisely, eschatological. You implicitly see history as progressing along a course of growing wisdom, increasing emancipation, and widening empathy (Peter Singer’s Ever-Expanding Circle). It is simply a residue from your Christian culture. The socialist is also a Christian at heart, but being of a somewhat more dramatic disposition, he doesn’t think of history as a steady upwards march to greater insight, but as a series of dramatic conflicts that resolve with the good guys winning.
(unless of course he is a Trotskyist, in which case we are perpetually at a turning point where history could go either way; towards communism or towards fascism)
Sure, I can tell you how to do better: focus your efforts on improving institutions and societies that you are close to and very knowledgeable about. You can do a much better job here, and the resultant proliferation of healthy institutions will, as a pleasant side effect, spread much more prosperity in the third world than effective altruism ever will.
This is the position taken by sensible people (eg. paleocons), and notably not by revolutionaries and utopian technocrats. This is fortunate because it gives the latter a local handicap and enables good, judicious people to achieve at least some success in creating sound institutions and propagating genuine wisdom. This fundamental asymmetry is the reason why there is any functional infrastructure left anywhere, despite the utopian factions far outnumbering the realists.
No, you actually don’t. If your intentions really were that good, they would lead you naturally into the right conclusions, but as Robin Hanson has pointed out, even Effective Altruism is still ultimately about virtue signalling, though perhaps directed at yourself. Sorta like HJPEV’s desperate effort to be a good person after the sorting hat’s warning to him. This is a case of Effective Altruists being mistaken about what their own driving motives actually are.
The correct principle is this: fix things locally (where it is easier and where you can better track the actual results) before you decide to take over the world. There are a lot of local things that need fixing. This way, if your philosophy works, your own community, nation, etc. will flourish, and if it doesn’t work, it will fall apart. Interestingly, most EA’s are a lot more risk averse when it comes to their own backyard than when it comes to some random country in Africa.
This precludes a priori any plans that involve looking far ahead, reacting judiciously to circumstances as they arise, or creating institutions that people self-select into. In the latter case, using comparable geographical areas would introduce a whole host of confounders, but having both the intervention and control groups be in an overlapping area would change the nature of the experiment, because the structure of the social networks that result would be quite different. Basically, the statistical method you propose has technocratic policymaking built into its assumptions, and so it is not surprising that it will wind up favouring liberal technocracy. You have simply found another way of using a baseless prejudice as your prior.
But this is the most telling paragraph:
Read both. The marginal clarity you will get from immersing yourself still deeper into your native canon is enormously outshadowed by the clarity you can get from familiarising yourself with more canons. Of course, Piketty is really just another branch of the same canon, with Piketty and Hanson being practically cousins, intellectually. Compare Friedrich List, to see the point.
My initial instinct was social democracy. Later I became a communist, then, after exposure to LessWrong, I became a libertarian. Now I’m a monarchist, and it occurs to me in hindsight that social democracy, communism, and libertarianism are all profoundly Protestant ideologies, and what I thought was me being widely read was actually still me being narrowminded and parochial.
I disagree that it’s easier and/or more effective to try to improve local conditions; diminishing marginal utility is a real thing.
That does not even come close to cancelling out the reduced ability to get a detailed view of the impact, let alone the much less honest motivations behind such giving.
And lives are not of equal value. Even if you think they have equal innate value, surely you can recognise that a comparatively shorter third-world life with worse prospects for intellectual and artistic development and greater likelihood of abject poverty is much less valuable (even if only due to circumstances) than the lives of people you are surrounded with, and surely you will also recognise that it is the latter that form the basis for your intuitions about the value of life.
By giving your “charity” (actually, the word “charity” stems from Latin caritas meaning care, as in giving to people you care about, whereas “altruism” is cognate with alter, meaning basically otherism, and in practice meaning giving to people you don’t care about) to less worthwhile recipients, you behaving in an anti-meritocratic way and cheapening your act of giving.
Moreover, people obviously don’t have equal innate value, and there is a distinct correlation between earning potential and being a utility monster, which at least partially cancels out the effect of diminishing marginal utility.
And the whole reason people care so much about morality is because the moral virtues and shortcomings of your friends and associates are going to have a huge impact on your life. If you’re redirecting the virtue by giving money to random foreigners, you are basically defaulting on the debt to your friends. One of your closest friend could wind up in deep trouble and need as much help as he can possibly get. He will need virtuous friends he can rely on to help him, and any money you have given to some third worlders you will never meet is money you cannot give to a friend in need. Therefore, any giving to Effective Altruism is inherently unjust and disloyal. By all means, be charitable and give what you can. But not to strangers.
This sounds a lot like Ayn Randian selfishness but applied to the level of a friend group rather than an individual. “Potential obligations to friends and one’s self are more important than the present suffering of strangers” is a consistent point of view that I rarely see eloquent arguments for, but it’s certainly not one I agree with.
It is part Ayn Rand, part Curtis Yarvin. Ultimately it all comes from Thomas Carlyle anyway.
And there is no need to limit yourself to potential obligations. Unless you have an exceedingly blessed life, then there should be no shortage of friends and loved ones in need of help.
These days, “a shortage of friends and loved ones” in general is not as uncommon as one might hope. :/