So you say you're an altruist...

[-]Paul Crowley17y260

The practical answer is that most people would indeed put their neck in the noose for those other 10 strangers, because they and they alone can save them. However, if the King were instead to go out onto the marketplace and say "I will hang ten people today unless one person steps up to take their place", no-one would volunteer. This makes little sense from a consequentialist point of view; it's just a fact about human psychology.

One consequence is that if you're ever being attacked on the street while passers by walk on, don't just shout for help: select a particular passer by and ask them for help as specifically as you can.

-1David_Gerard15y

I fear my first thought would be that they were confederates and this was a 419-like scam. (This is London, of course people try 419-like scams face to face.)

0Paul Crowley15y

Anyone running such a scam would be well advised to wait until the mark is the only person nearby before starting their performance.

-1Lawliet17y

Even better to address as many as possible, making them all feel like they are being specifically targeted "Hey you with the dark hair"

[-]Paul Crowley17y110

I suspect that would be counterproductive - people would rather hang onto the idea that someone else is being targeted.

[-]NancyLebovitz15y240

It seems to me that if you set the price of virtue too high, a lot of people will say "Fuck virtue, I'm not bothering at all"-- and if you aren't supposed to feel like a good person unless you give all your disposable income to charity, that's setting the price too high.

Stable religions seem to set the price of virtue (in terms of giving to charity) at 10% of income. Anyone know whether that's just the Abrahamic religions?

[-]PhilGoetz17y210

I hold the "wound-healing" theory of charity, which I by coincidence made up earlier today.

Suppose you have a nasty wound on your leg. Suppose your body isn't very smart, and you have to direct the platelets yourself to begin healing it. Judging from how we go about international aid, most people would direct them to the center of the wound. That wouldn't work. The platelets would die and shed, and the wound would never heal.

You heal a wound from the outside in. You begin healing the parts that just border the healthy, solid parts, and gradually work your way to the center.

Likewise, if you want to help people, you shouldn't throw money into the most unstable, unproductive, screwed-up part of the world. You should find a population that is barely self-sufficient, and help them be more self-sufficient.

7Lawliet17y

I dont know much about charity, but I dont contest that this was made up in a day. "Never fix the worst problem first, because thats the way skin heals"

[-]PhilGoetz17y290

You can't fix the worse problem first. You'll get nowhere if you look at this as a collection of individual problems. You won't find a country that has a high standard of living, high employment, and a good educational system, but can't get mosquito nets for their beds.

You can't even begin to think about the issue unless you understand some complex-system domain, preferably economics or ecology. As a crude analogy, an economy is like the framework of a large and complicated tent. If the tent has fallen, you can't pick up individual pieces and put them back in place. It will fall down again as soon as you let go.

Trying to "fix the worst problem first" is the philosopher's solution. A philosopher looks for the biggest questions, tackles them directly, and never solves them. A scientist looks for questions that are solvable. Science also proceeds at its edges.

3DanielLC14y

You throw money where it makes the biggest difference. This is not going to be the neediest person in the world, but I'm not sure exactly how bad they'll be. Judge the charities on a case-by-case basis, and see what works best. Once you do that, you will spot patterns, and you can work from there. Don't assume it works the same as healing a wound.

2Annoyance17y

Bootstrapping, in other words. Starting with what works and amplifying it, rather than going straight to what's not working and trying to fix it.

[-]Nominull17y160

The thing is, I could just as easily be one of the ten as the eleventh (actually, ten times as easily), so it's in my interests to support a norm where the eleventh sacrifices for the good of the ten. I am in very little danger of starving to death in Africa.

It's not pleasant, but it is true.

[-]Lawliet17y150

Teach everyone else to cooperate then defect

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky17y190

Congratulations, you've written the most horrifying sentence I've read all day.

5Lawliet17y

Tricking the other player is never justified? Did I miss something?

[-][anonymous]17y110

This site is supposed to be about rationality, but it's covertly about altruism.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky17y150

Not that covert, really.

7John_Maxwell17y

Which is just the opposite of what you'd expect--If I recall correctly, students who took game-theory-oriented economics classes became less altruistic, not more.

1Larks14y

Possibly not the case - the studies you're probably thinking of used charities that did things like lobby for lower tuition and so on - exactly the sort of things you'd expect altruistic economists to oppose. See for example Steven Landsburg on the subject

3Vladimir_Nesov17y

You also have to deceive them into believing that you, personally, won't defect. For humans, who almost never really face one-off decision problems, your strategy isn't supposed to work both because the other people shouldn't cooperate for high stakes without having a way of getting the strong knowledge that the opponent will cooperate given that they cooperate (some kind of publicly announced externally controlled commitment), and because you have too few shots at defecting before you get bad reputation.

[-]Scott Alexander17y160

There's an objection to be made that you can't be sure how useful charity is, but it's not a very strong objection. Last I heard there was pretty good evidence converging around $1000 or so being enough to save a person's life.

I accept this argument as valid and have for some time. I doubt I could donate everything to charity, but ~50% seems like a good compromise between human weakness and inhuman mathematics. We'll see how far I follow through on this when I get an income.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky17y210

You need to choose a very carefully targeted charity that takes into account knock-on effects like displacing local production, before you should accept any such claim. It is now being suggested that the majority of aid is actually counterproductive and destroys local industry in exchange for giving Westerners a warm fuzzy feeling. Hence Africa staying poor despite (because of?) hundreds of billions spent.

Frankly, if you're going to put in that much work into buying expected utilons at the cheapest available price, you shouldn't be considering any mainstream charity targets like aid to developing countries. Let Bill Gates worry about it, if that's the limit of his creativity.

[-]Scott Alexander17y210

I've done some research into this, and found a few targeted charities that I trust.

However, I'm a bit skeptical of the "aid is naturally counterproductive" claim (which I admit is stronger than what you're saying here, although I have heard some people say it). There are definitely some cases where it's true (you don't just send in random goods for free!), but the claim that you can't help poor people so you might as well keep all your money is just too convenient.

Take the claim from the OB post that it would take $3000 per person to raise per capita income $3. Unless they are referring to some specific, especially stupid kind of aid, this is clearly false. Simply invest the $3000 at 5% interest, and give the $150/year to the Africans and you've raised per capita income 50x as much. Not that this is a good idea, but it does seem to show there's something fishy about the calculation.

Jeffrey Sachs writes some interesting responses to the claim that Africa is too corrupt to be able to handle aid. If anyone has seen a specific counterargument to Sachs' claims, please link me to it.

Before I went back to school and lost my income, my favorite charities were microfinance, iodine supplementation (see Raising the World's IQ ) and yes, the Singularity Institute. Although I will be very disappointed if you guys (or anyone) still need money by the time I'm in my prime donating years.

7Eliezer Yudkowsky17y

to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power Fixed that for you. As P. J. O'Rourke says, speaking of something like a total of $200,000(?) per poor person spent by the American welfare system, it's a flabbergasting phenomenon that appears to be real: You can't fix poverty by giving people money. I'd love it if the Singularity Institute had an endowment by the time you get out of school, but I wouldn't count on it if I were me.

[-]Scott Alexander17y150

"to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power"

Note the reference to Jeffrey Sachs in my comment. If you haven't read The End of Poverty, he demolishes the "It's all warlords stealing the money" argument pretty darned thoroughly.

I was thinking of my prime giving years as late middle age, two or three decades down the line, and I was hoping less that you would have an endowment than that, you know, you would control the world and dazzle the few remaining people who hadn't advanced to a Stross-ian Economy 2.0 by transforming small asteroids into giant gold nuggets. But I guess an endowment would be nice too.

6Eliezer Yudkowsky17y

Haven't read The End of Poverty, but I'm willing to accept that it's other forms of economic displacement, not just the warlords stealing. However, it really doesn't look like ending African poverty is remotely as simple as giving them a bunch of money. You'd think it would be. I wish it were. But it doesn't appear to be.

7[anonymous]17y

It's not particularly surprising that ending poverty isn't that simple. Most developed economies were brought to their current stage through hundreds of years of innovation, investment, protectionism, and use of inexpensive raw materials and labor from the global South (among other things), and the ones that industrialized more quickly (like Singapore) often had unique geographical or political characteristics that aided this. The development of a stable, diverse economy (and correspondingly high standards of living for a population) depends on far more things than a simple infusion of capital. For that matter, poor African states are usually poor for very different reasons. Congo's poor despite its great natural resource wealth because the Belgians systematically sabotaged its ability to rule itself before independence even arrived, in the early '60s, and then it got stuck with corrupt dictators who robbed it blind for four decades. Rwanda's poor because the genocide destroyed everything it had built, and even the stable, non-corrupt government that's in power today can't overcome such odds in a generation (and has virtually no natural resources to help it along). Botswana's actually not that poor, because it has a competent government that's used its diamond wealth well. Rather like different aid organizations are differently competent, different African governments are better- and worse-positioned to benefit from A) aid or B) participation in the global economy in general.

1wedrifid14y

I don't usually expect comments that have plus five votes and no negative reception to be retracted! Interesting.

3arundelo14y

Even weirder: It's from 2009 (before the retraction feature was added). Edit: Maybe the strikethrough is just because the account was deleted.

1wedrifid14y

Aha. Good theory.

1jefftk12y

There are other comments like this one that are from the same time period and were not retracted when the account was deleted. My guess is the user went through and retracted all of their comments before deleting their account.

1Aurini17y

Re [i]The End of Poverty[/i]: Can't say I recommend it. I picked it up about a year back. I made it about a third of the way through, and he was still discussing 1st year microeconomics and political theory. I really meant to finish it, and I might at some point, but there is a lot of unnecessary filler. The book's written to be popular and easily accessible. You, sir, have better things to do with your time. Edit: I fail at the magic of javascripting...

7[anonymous]14y

Citation so very needed. 200,000 dollars to do what? And how often? And by what agencies? "The American Welfare system" is an enormous patchwork of state, federal and local organizations with different mandates and populations served. It also does not tend to transfer much money at all. I've lived on Social Security Disability for years and it pays a little over 7k a year (try "bootstrapping" yourself on that budget). I make another 40 dollars monthly in food stamps. I am receiving the maximum amount possible from SSDI; the max for Food Stamps is about 120 dollars monthly. I am highly suspicious of the claim that for my annual income of ~7600 USD, it takes ~192,400 USD just to get it to me, affecting no other welfare recipients in the country.

7jefftk14y

Total yearly welfare spending in the usa is $700 billion [1]. This includes federal, state, and local spending. This is being spent on around 50 million people [2] (that's 1/6th of the population). So $14K/person. To get $200K/person you'd need there to be only 3 million poor people in the usa (1%) which is way to low. This sounds like maybe 50% overhead, not 500% overhead.

4David_Gerard15y

Per year? If so, that is evidence mostly that your system is ridiculous. When I worked for the Department of Social Security in Australia (who do most welfare payments) in 1991, our running costs were 2% of benefits disbursed (so we were told by our managers). In this case, I really think a cite for precisely what he was claiming, and his source for it, would be needed.

3Nick_Beckstead14y

What is your p that I can't find a charity that (1) gives money to people in Africa and (2) the majority of the donated funds doesn't go to warlords? How about this one: http://givedirectly.org/?

1wedrifid14y

The p that is more relevant is that of a charity that (1) will be giving money to people in Africa in the counterfactual in which the 10% donations are done by all the wealthy people and (2) the majority of the donated funds doesn't go to warlords. The more money that is floating around the harder it is to avoid corruption. Incentives.

3NancyLebovitz15y

I'd be curious about how much of that is going for administrative costs to people who haven't taken a vow of near-poverty themselves, assuming that the number is accurate. Is it per year?

[-]Douglas_Knight15y120

Eliezer implies it's pretty much all administrative costs. But it's not clear that this is a fair measure "giving people money." European welfare systems are less resentful of their recipients and more focused on direct transfers. I'm sure that they are more efficient than the US system, though I don't have any numbers. A stipend that was not means-tested could be more efficient still. A negative income tax might not need to be more complicated than the income tax system itself. The US version is not terribly complicated by income tax standards, but I think a lot of people fail to exploit it out of ignorance. That's a type of inefficiency that doesn't show up in this kind of number.

[-]Rings_of_Saturn17y130

Also, as I know you are aware because you linked to it once at OB, Eliezer, there is the work of Gregory Clark, which suggests a double reason refuting this essay's line of argument. Not a response directly to your comment then, but as an add on I mention it here.

I suppose this line of reasoning is not new to most here, but since I don't see it explicitly mentioned....

1) Most controversial, and almost an aside to the main argument that Clark makes but of course the claim that gets the most ink: that there is something in the culture or even genes of certain societies that keeps them from effectively industrializing.

2) The core claim: That throughout history, temporarily increasing the food supply (through minor technical innovation, or through some other windfall) in a non-industrialized population just leads to more births, creating more people living at the subsistence level. The next food or money shock around the corner puts all these people at death's door. An increase in their numbers just strains the subsistence system even more, inviting an even more horrible catastrophe. Only large, across-the-board increases in the efficiency of economic agents can provide anything othe... (read more)

2Multiheaded14y

That almost sounds like some sort of a subtle hint, EY...

0Normal_Anomaly15y

Are the charities reccommended by Givewell, specifically VillageReach, good or counterproductive? Also, what exactly does the Singularity Institute spend its money on? If I knew, I'd be more willing to direct my money there.

7gwern15y

I've answered this before directly, so I'll try a different tack. What action could you take to find this out? What information is already available?

[-]gwern15y100

Since no one bit my Socratic lure, my sequence of answers would have been to point out that SIAI is a charity, charities are nonprofit corporations, corporations keep records of spending, and often make them public; as an IRS-recognized charity, SIAI is obligated to make reports public, and some googling then turns up GuideStar as a source, at which point it's easy to download their PDFs from SIAI and finally answer the question - what does SIAI spend its money own?

I did this earlier for salary information: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/2ywt There are a lot of interesting things in the filings; I once wrote an essay on what I found in the filings for Girl Scouts: http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance (See also Discussion post.)

EDIT: for an analysis of SIAI, see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5fo/siai_fundraising/

[-]Nebu17y120

So I imagined myself at this person's speech, and found it fairly predictable for the most part. When he said he wanted to ask a few questions before the speech, I knew that the questions would actually be "part of" the speech, and I felt I should put the effort to try to answer them honestly (at least internally, if I were too embarrassed to admit the true answers publicly), as he probably chose the questions to trigger some insight later on.

When he asks if I was 50% confident I would kill myself to save 10, I was pretty torn, and I suspect I would not have resolved the question (and thus not raised my hand) by the time he moved on to the next question.

When he asks if I'm 95% confident I would kill myself to save 10, this was a much easier question. I know I'm not 95% confident and thus did not even consider raising my hand.

When he asks if I would spend 20 years in jail to save 10, my first gut instinct was to raise my hand, and I think I would have raised my hand. But, with my hand still in the air, I think I would immediately start regretting it, as I know that I, personally, am terrible at intuiting time duration, and started to wonder "how long is 20 years, real... (read more)

[-]jhuffman17y90

Can you imagine a world where everyone followed this advice? I don't really know what would happen but it seems possible if all disposable income is given to people who don't have an income in regions that don't have an economy that this would choke economies and bringing the entire world population down to a subsistence level.

[-]juliawise14y210

That's like imagining a world in which everyone became nurses and we had no other professions, or where everyone decided not to have children and the population crashed. We shouldn't discourage people from becoming nurses or not having children just because it would be bad if everyone did. If economies really started crashing because everyone gave away lots of money (or we had too many nurses or not enough babies), people would adjust their behavior.

Organizations like Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save advocate those of us in the developed world giving between 1% and 10% of our income. That would easily end the worst of world poverty, and (I believe) would not destroy economies.

Obviously, people in the developed world are not leaping to give away 50% of their income. Until they start, I'll continue trying to make up for them.

[-]MichaelVassar15y110

I'm pretty sure that if everyone did what their explicit morality told them to we would have endless global religious wars, but that doesn't mean that a world where people who build sane explicit moralities for themselves wouldn't make the world better by following those moralities in so far as they can.

0jhuffman15y

Well I had to reread the original article as it was written more than a year ago... But what the speaker was suggesting was if people agree to his scenario where giving up all but subsistence income to save 10 lives, then they should in fact now give every dollar they make beyond a basic subsistence level to charities that would distribute it to places were people want for food or clean water. So it was not proposing a "middle-ground"; at least in my reading of it. You could almost extrapolate that he believes it immoral to posses above a subsistence level if there are people in the world still starving. My point was that some people starve because they live in broken economies, and funneling money out of functioning economies into broken ones may not be very optimal in its performance against the speaker's assumed preferences. ETA: I shouldn't say that is actually the speaker's viewpoint. I think he was trying to challenge his audience's beliefs about their own morality more than suggest a particular one.

4lessdazed14y

Can you imagine a world where everyone followed any advice based on how they imagined the world to be if everyone followed that advice?

4Paul Crowley17y

You think that if most people in privileged countries suddenly made maximising the total worldwide good their true goal in life, it would be a bad thing? I'd like to believe this to justify my own small extravagances, but I doubt it.

2PhilGoetz17y

He gave a justification; you didn't. Point: jhuffman.

2Normal_Anomaly15y

It is only necessary to give up to the point where the problem is fixed. If everyone giving all their surplus would be non-optimal, there is some amount less than "all" for each person to give that would be optimal. However, most people are not giving anywhere near this amount, so in the here and now the world will be better if you give all your surplus. If the world were different, the principles that led to this advice would lead to different advice that would be optimal in that situation.

1jhuffman15y

My entire point was that the problem cannot be fixed in this way. Pouring money into a region that doesn't have a functioning economy doesn't create an economy, in fact it may even make a self-sustainable economy impossible. Meanwhile, it takes money out of an economy that is functioning which amounts to a net loss to world productivity.

7Caesium14y

This is a fairly common and important criticism of aid; it is part of the hypothesis of Dambisa Moyo. Whilst a valid criticism against certain types of aid, it certainly does not apply to all of them. For example, public health interventions such as increased vaccinations, or combating infectious diseases, require little in the way of a local functioning economy. Furthermore, such items are generally considered to be both quasi-public goods (due to herd immunity) and merit goods -- so, there is a strong economic argument that they will be under provisioned, especially in a country lacking an effective government. But, yes, development aid has a very checquered record.

0Normal_Anomaly15y

That makes more sense. I don't have the economics knowledge to answer it either way.

0Technologos17y

I agree--in fact, we're seeing some of this right now, with the financial crisis. It's related to the paradox of thrift: if everybody saves, the economy collapses and we're all in trouble. Similarly, if instead of spending money on consumption and local goods, I sent it all to the poorest people I could find, a whole variety of other people would have no means of income. Remember that spending on consumption goods doesn't destroy the money (or more to the point, prevent charity from being done), since somebody else still gets it. As an offset, of course, we might expect the poorest countries to become legitimate markets and thus increase total wealth.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky17y80

Please remember that we're supposed to be able to submit links, not just original essays. Anyone downvoting on that basis (rather than dislike of the link itself) is making an error about Less Wrong posting policies. A link like this wouldn't be promoted to the front page but it's okay to vote up if you like the content.

3Lawliet17y

Why cant linked articles be promoted? Do they have to be original content written specifically for LessWrong? Can they be cross posted elsewhere?

5Eliezer Yudkowsky17y

Really good linked articles could be promoted, or crossposted ones. But because the amount of possible content of this sort is so high, the general policy, I think, should be to not promote anything that isn't really good, while being highly tolerant of links that are genuinely interesting.

2BrandonReinhart17y

There may be a bug in that this article shows up as a "top" scoring one although when I viewed the article it had zero points assigned.

-6thomblake17y

[-]dlrlw11y70

This whole speech makes me mad. The same people who urge us to not have kids, because of overpopulation, are urging us to spend all of our disposable income in supporting 'poor people', because they are in misery. And why are they in misery? Because they had more kids than they could afford to take care of. And their parents did. And their parents before them.

You on the other hand, are descended from a long line of prudent people. Who though about the consequences of their actions and decided that the short term pleasure wasn't worth the long... (read more)

[-]Lawliet17y70

If you could gave me a magic button to kill 10 people and make me rich, without any tricky business (like risk of being punished) then I would push it.

I should also hope that nobody else would, and by the sound of things many wouldn't.

7Jonathan_Graehl17y

If you weren't so lazy and risk-averse, you could start your illegal toxic waste dumping business immediately :) I'm glad that your button isn't readily available. If it chose its victims without any intent to cause personal regret, then I can't see any less than 10% of people opting for wealth - goodbye human race.

5Annoyance17y

I wouldn't push the button if it picked people at random, although I might consider the risk of killing a valuable person worthwhile if the payoff is big enough. I guess the real question is: what is the value of other people? It does not seem to be a trivial matter.

2thomblake17y

The trick there is that you can't easily disconnect who you are from what you do. If you're the sort of person who would really push that button, then people will be able to tell; it will show up in your other actions. Your other virtues will decline as well, and you will be less successful at making friendships, doing business, and having a good life.

6Lawliet17y

I don't go around telling people, and if I was in the audience I would raise my hand with everybody else.

2fubarobfusco14y

... and you're using Tor, or you're confident that the site admins won't develop a habit next week of tracking people down ...

0DanielLC14y

Are you allowed to donate the money to charity? If so, I'd definitely push it.

[-]dlrlw11y60

The real question is, is the ultimate value maximizing the number of human-years? How about the quest for knowledge? Improvement of the species?

Is saving 10 people from starvation (ie, funding the continued existence of 10 people, engaging in the typical activities of a subsistence agriculturist, and experiencing the normal pleasures/pains of a subsistence agriculturist's life, of greater value than, say, funding one person working to figure out how to increase human being's peak IQ? [although, of course, fill in here the research question t... (read more)

0Good_Burning_Plastic11y

The former may be more terminally valuable for certain value systems, but as far as I can tell the latter is more instrumentally valuable for pretty much all reasonable human value systems.

[-]jimrandomh17y60

The linked article presents a situation where the ten people you could save were chosen at random by a king. However, the people who you could save by giving to food aid charities are not random. They are specifically those who for some reason cannot produce enough to feed themselves. A few hundred years ago, feeding them would have prevented deaths in the short term, but caused an equal or greater number of deaths a generation later due to excess population. It also eliminates selection effects which would make future generations more productive. It may b... (read more)

8John_Maxwell17y

Yes, but there are ways to save people for not very much money. See http://givewell.net/psi

3Eliezer Yudkowsky17y

Anna or Carl or Vassar: was Givewell one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?

[-]AnnaSalamon17y120

One of the good guys. Givewell isn't a specific charity; it's a serious attempt to research and publicize means of effective giving, in the sense of figuring out how to get the most {lives saved / education / other specific goals} per dollar.

5NancyLebovitz15y

They may be people who produce enough to feed themselves, but who can't keep it, whether it's because they don't have the facilities to preserve what they make from rot and insects, or because they live in a society where much of the value they create is likely to be stolen.

[-]thomblake17y60

Wow, I'm glad I don't say I'm an altruist.

I'm also glad I don't easily fall prey to arguments based on bad economics.

[-]Paul Crowley17y30

BTW your edit is a spoiler - I recommend turning it into a comment...

[-]JulianMorrison17y20

Personally I'd keep myself alive, accept 20 years jail, but refuse permanent poverty which I consider a worse-than-death (those preferences make sense since I hope to live a very long time). And I don't think that "not maintaining life" is the same as killing - any more than I think "not creating life" is the same as killing. Other people's survival is not automatically my problem, and I am certainly not obligated to beggar myself to keep a hundred war-impoverished Africans in rice. They had better look out for themselves.

1Lawliet17y

Do you mean you would rather commit one stranger to poverty than kill ten people, or that you being in poverty is worse than ten strangers dying, but a stranger in poverty is not?

2JulianMorrison17y

The scenario was quite contrived - truly permanent poverty, enforced by a king. Every non-coerced form of poverty has at least the hope of benefiting by economic improvement, and most forms of poverty are something you can work your way out of (allowing for difficulties with time, energy, education and lowered IQ). Ordinary poverty is not a worse-than-death.

0John_Maxwell17y

Yep, there is definitely a difference between killing and not saving. However, I think a reasonable definition of an asshole is someone whose coefficient modifying the experiences of others in their decision-making is below some threshold. (An example of how to compute the coefficient: Let's say I want a car. If n is the number of people like me such that I would be indifferent between giving a car to all those people and giving a car to myself, then my coefficient is 1/n.) So it's possible to be an asshole without breaking any specific moral rules. Also, presumably in a society where you lived a very long time, problems like starvation, AIDS, and malaria would have been solved.

6PhilGoetz17y

If you gave everyone in the world a car except me, my standard of living would go down dramatically. I'm not just indifferent to that; I see it as negative utility. So on your scale I am infinitely assholic.

[-]James Willmus6y10

It essentially boils down to what people do with power and it is the song of choice that is being sung. Americans choose to keep the wealth and power that they have partly out of ignorance. After all, it's easy to forget about the rest of the world when you have a family, a mortgage, and a healthy community in a mid-size suburb. That, I would say, explains why many Americans choose to keep the wealth and power they have to better themselves even if it is at the cost of other people. But that isn't the whole story.

Other people have all they ... (read more)

[-]candyfromastranger13y00

I don't agree that the selfish option on the third choice is murder. There's a difference between killing people because you're being coerced using your money and killing people of your own free will in order to take their money.

If the facts about poverty there are true and one agrees that being unwilling to make the third sacrifice is murder (which I don't), then yes, his conclusion that most of the people there were being hypocritical would be logical. If you consider yourself altruistic but put your own comfort before the lives of others, I don't think that your actions logically follow from your morals. I didn't feel conflicted by his conclusion, though, because I'm not an altruist.

[-]Aurini17y-10

Implicit premise, that I haven't seen anyone point out:

It is assumed that while charity has a variable utility anywhere between 0 and X, selfish spending has a utility which is less than 0. This may be true in most cases, given that many people waste their money on disposable, consumerist garbage, but when considering somebody who spends frugally, their monetary utility will be in the positive sums (though arguably, less than any given charity).

3DanielLC16y

He never said selfish spending has zero utility or less. He just implied it was less than charity. If you find a really good charity, it tends to be orders of magnitude better than keeping the money. For example, for $25 you could either see a couple of movies, or allow someone else to see the rest of their life. http://www.hollows.org/ There's nothing wrong with watching a movie. It's just not nearly as good as being able to see in general.

3pjeby17y

Also, note that rich people have a tendency to engage in charity anyway; this suggests that once you have enough money to buy whatever you and/or your family might want, you gain more utility by giving it away than you can obtain by buying more stuff. Conversely, if you don't have enough for things you want or feel you need, the idea of giving it away to other people might be of lower utility. (This assumes that utility is both relative and personal, of course, as otherwise it is impossible for two persons to profit from trading with each other.)

[-]Jonnan17y-10

I am what I like to call a "Greedy Progressive", inasmuch as my liberal instincts are not based in the guilt theory that a lot of conservatives and some liberals associate with liberalism, but on an implicit assumption that others doing well helps my life get better - and after a certain point, indeed helping others helps my quality of life in more immediately helpful ways than even spending money on myself or my family, though exactly where this point is at is subject to argument.

However, fundamentally the point is that I am not a progressive be... (read more)

5Vladimir_Nesov17y

You are not supposed to be as important to yourself as everybody else is to yourself, you can easily be more important. The point of helping the people in poor countries is exactly that supposedly you can help much more people per buck than in a developed country.

[-]Emile17y-10

The gap between what people say they'd do and what they actually do is an interesting topic.

However, in the example chosen here (starving people in third-world countries), there are too many other reasons for which people wouldn't make the choice to save lives, many of which have been given by other commenters.

And I expect that if you mounted a hypothetical scenario that was closer to the actual starving people one, including the factors like the impact that aid might have on the local economy, the overpopulation problems, etc. - then I expect that much le... (read more)

[-]quinsie14y-20

The correct moral response to the king's sadistic choice (in any of the 4 forms mentioned) is not sacrifice yourself OR to let the other 10 die instead. The correct answer is that you, knowing the king was doing this, should have founded/joined/assisted an organization devoted to deposing the evil king and replacing him with someone who isn't going to randomly kill his subjects.

So to with charity. The answer isn't to sacrifice all of your comforts and wealth to save the lives of others, but to assist with, petition for and otherwise attempt to inact sanct... (read more)

1wedrifid14y

Really? That sounds like it should mean we have a massive waste problem. Enough food to feed (entire world's population + everyone who is not being fed now) is constantly being discarded. In that counterfactual world we really should be using food leftovers to produce fuel.

[-]CarlShulman14y140

There actually is massive waste due to food spoilage, e.g. in India and other regions with poor transport infrastructure, but the big effect here is that crops go to feed meat animals (and, to a much lesser extent, biofuel) instead of humans, with low efficiency. If global income inequality were reduced (through increasing incomes of the current poor) this would bid up food prices and result in the current rich cutting back on meat consumption while the current poor increased plant (and to a lesser degree, meat) consumption.

Of course, with uneven development you get situations like massive increases in meat production in China while things become harder for those in the worst-off countries due to increased food prices (at least in the short-term).

-1[anonymous]14y

There's also the fact that formerly public land inhabited by people capable of producing food enough for their own needs winds up getting sold off to First World companies for agribusiness, displacing the people who used it and making it unavailable for locally-focused agriculture (as the crops involved go to market exports instead -- if you'd ever eaten a Dole pineapple, odds are good a lot of people wound up in urban shantytowns in order to rent that land to the company).

2satt14y

CarlShulman's mentioned food waste in developing nations, but there's non-negligible food waste elsewhere too. On a bigger scale, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy used to be infamous in the 70s and 80s for generating surplus beef & butter "mountains", although this is apparently a negligible problem now.

[-]billswift17y-30

There are several different fallacies and errors mixed together in this essay which is what makes it so bad.

First, and simplest, is the equating of non-sacrifice and murder. Just because the one person is not willing to sacrifice himself to save a few others is not the same as being willing to kill innocent others. "But morally speaking, that situation is exactly the same as this one."- vicious nonsense.

Second, everything I have read, except Leftist propaganda, says this "Within the next 50 years an absolute minimum of 500M people will sta... (read more)

[-]billswift17y-40

The linked essay is one of the most viciously stupid things I have read in a long time.

Thanks John_Maxwell_IV for gratuitously insulting all autists by calling them assholes. I have been annoyed enough by evo-psychs saying humans do this or humans do that when many non-neurotypicals don't; apparently evo-psychs don't consider autists as humans (more likely they're just sloppy thinkers).

1John_Maxwell17y

If you dislike my definition of asshole, please provide a new one. I'm genuinely interested to hear what you come up with. Remember, my definition applies only at the decision-making level: if you don't have a native capability to care for others but you emulate such a capability, you're no asshole in my book.

5Annoyance17y

"if you don't have a native capability to care for others but you emulate such a capability, you're no asshole in my book." Why should I want to emulate such a capability?

0John_Maxwell17y

To make the world a better place, perhaps?

3Annoyance17y

All right: why should my definition of 'better' involve caring for others?

5John_Maxwell17y

Well, if you really don't care at all for other people, I don't think there's much I can do to bring you around. All I can say is that suffering is suffering and pleasure is pleasure, even if you aren't the one experiencing it.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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So you say you're an altruist...

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