I'd be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this. Don't spoil it by reading the comments first.
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I'd be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this. Don't spoil it by reading the comments first.
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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.
I suspect that would be counterproductive - people would rather hang onto the idea that someone else is being targeted.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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/
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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).
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...
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...
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...
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).
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...
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).
This site is supposed to be about rationality, but it's covertly about altruism.
Not that covert, really.