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khafra comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Quotes from the Screwtape Letters have not been terribly well-received in this thread. So, perversely, I decided I had to take a turn:
-- The demon Screwtape, on how best to tempt a human being to destruction.
The existence of souls notwithstanding, Screwtape is clearly right: if you are charitable to almost everybody--except for those your see every day!--then you are not practicing the virtue of charity and are ill-served to imagine otherwise. You cannot fantasize good mental habits into being; they must be acted upon.
Who does more good with their life--the person who contributes a large amount of money to efficient charities while avoiding the people nearby, or the person who ignores anyone more than 100 miles away while being nice to his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train?
If he actually donates the money then the charity is not constrained to fantasy. By the miracle of the world banking network, people thousands of literal miles away can be brought as close as the sphere of action. Those concentric rings are measured in frequency and impactfulness of interaction, not physical distance.
What Screwtape is advocating is that he simply intend to donate the money once Givewell publishes a truely definitive report (which they never will). Or better, that he feel great compassion for people so many steps removed that he could not possibly do anything for them (perhaps the people of North Korea, who are beyond the reach of most charities due to government interdiction).
A tricky question.
The obvious, and trivially true, answer is that he who does both does more good than either. But that's not what you asked.
So. It can be hard to compare the two options when considering the actions of a single person, since the beneficiaries of the actions do not overlap. Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.
So, the first option; everyone (who can afford it) makes large donations to efficient charities, while everyone avoids those nearby and is unpleasant when forced to deal with someone else directly.
If I make a few assumptions about the effectiveness (and priorities) of the charities and the sum of the donations, I find myself considering a world where everyone is sufficiently fed, clothed, sheltered, medically cared for and educated. However, the fact that everyone is unpleasant to everyone else leads to everyone being grumpy, irritated, and mildly unhappy.
Considering the second option; charitable donations drastically decrease, but everyone is pleasant and helpful to everyone they meet face-to-face. In this possible world, there are people who go hungry, naked, homeless. But probably fewer than in our current world; because everyone they meet will be helpful, aiding if they can in their plight. And because everyone's pleasant and tries to uplift the mood of those they meet, a large majority of people consider themselves happy.
This assumption seems trivially false to me, and despite being labeled as a mere 'heuristic', it is the crucial step in your argument. Can you explain why I should take it seriously?
Well, for most choices between "is this good?" and "is this bad?" the assumption is true. For example, is it good for me to drop my chocolate wrapper on the street instead of finding a rubbish bin? If I assume everyone were to do that, I get the idea of a street awash in chocolate wrappers, and I consider that reason enough to find a rubbish bin.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the aim here is not to produce an argument that one action is better than the other in a single, specific case; rather, it is to produce a general principle (whether it is generally better to be charitable to those nearby, or to those further away).
And if option A is generally better than option B, then I think it is very probable that universal application of A will remain better than universal application of B; and vice versa.
When you ask what it's like if everyone were to "do that", the answer you get is going to be determined by how you define "that". For instance, if everyone were to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of your annoying neighbor, you might be happy. So is it okay to drop the wrapper on your neighbor's lawn?
It's tempting to reply to this by saying "'doing the same thing' means removing all self-serving qualifiers, so the correct question is whether you would like it if people dropped wrappers wherever they wanted, not specifically on your neighbor's lawn". This reply doesn't work, because there are are plenty of situations where you want the qualifier--for instance, putting criminals in jail when the qualifier "criminal" excludes yourself.
(And what's your stance on homosexuality? If everyone were to do that, humanity would be extinct.)
I do need to be careful to define "that" as a generally applicable rule. In this case, the generally applicable rule would be, is it okay to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people one finds annoying?
So I need to consider the world in which everyone drops chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people they find annoying. Considering this, the chances of someone dropping a wrapper on my lawn becomes dependent on the probability that someone will find me annoying.
So, in short, I can put as many qualifiers on the rule as I like. However, I have to be careful to attach my qualifiers to the true reason for my formulation of the rule; I cannot select the rule "it is acceptable to drop chocolate wrappers on that exact specific lawn over there" without referencing the process by which I chose that exact specific lawn.
I can't attach a qualifier to a specific person; but I can attach a qualifier to a specific quality, like being annoying, when considering a proposal.
Yvain in these two old blog posts of his makes the case that it's not clear that a world with grumpy people is worse than a world with hungry people.
You are correct. It is by no means clear which is better.
Yeah, that's been confusing: I meant this principle of charity.