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SaidAchmiz comments on 2014 Survey of Effective Altruists - Less Wrong
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I've now checked out the survey, and have a couple of comments (which I put into the comments field and am reposting here). #1 is important, #2 less so:
On moral philosophy: "Consequentialist/utilitarian" should be broken up into something like "Utilitarian" and "Other consequentialist (not utilitarian)", because I am a consequentialist and (probably) not a utilitarian, and that disagreement is one of my main points of contention with the EA movement.
I had no idea how to answer the "political views" question. Are these positions ("left", "centre", etc.) supposed to be on the American (U.S.) political spectrum? That'd be my default assumption, but the British/Canadian spelling suggests otherwise... in any case, at least offer as many options as e.g. the Lesswrong survey did.
Those are good points. It would confound things too much to change midstream, but now we'll know better for next year.
I'd rather see 'consequentialist' supplemented or replaced by specific questions that get at substantive ethical or meta-ethical disputes in EA and philosophy. 'Utilitarian' and 'deontologist' mean lots of different things to different people, and on their strictest definitions they don't entail a lot of their most interesting or widely cited ideas. Perhaps have an exploratory question one year asking non-utilitarians to write in their main objection to utilitarianism, then convert that into a series of questions the following year.
This was something I suggested to Tom because I'd be interested too. But ultimately we thought that only a small group of EAs would really have substantive ethical opinions and we thought to trim things for survey length. We added a box asking for clarifications at the end of the survey to provide more of this outlet.
One of the main objections to utilitarianism, it seems to me, is skepticism about the possibility (or even coherence of the notion) of aggregating utility across individuals. That's one of my main objections, at any rate.
Skepticism about the applicability of the VNM theorem to human preferences is another issue, though that one might be less widespread.
Edit: The SEP describes classic utilitarianism as actual, direct, evaluative, hedonistic, maximizing, aggregative (specifically, total), universal, equal-consideration, agent-neutral consequentialism. I have definite issues with the "actual", "direct", "hedonistic", "aggregative", "total", and "equal-consideration" parts of that. (Though I expect that my issues with "actual" will be shared by a significant portion of those who consider themselves utilitarians here, and my issues with "hedonistic" and "direct" may be as well. That leaves "aggregative"+"total", and "equal-consideration", as the two aspects most likely to be sources of philosophical conflict.)
Those sound like objections to preference utilitarianism but not hedonistic utilitarianism. Although it's not technically possible yet, measuring the intensity of the positive and negative components of an experience sounds something that ought to be at least possible in principle. And the applicability of the VNM theorem to human preferences becomes irrelevant if you're not interested in preferences in the first place.
I don't see how having a quantitative, empirical measure which is appropriate for one individual helps you with comparisons across individuals. Do we really want to make people utility monsters because their neural currents devoted to measuring happiness have a higher amperage?
I was assuming that the measure would be valid across individuals. I wouldn't expect the neural basis of suffering or pleasure to vary so much that you couldn't automatically adapt it to the brains in question.
Well yes, hedonistic utilitarianism does make it possible in principle that Felix ends up screwing us over, but that's an objection to hedonistic utilitarianism rather than the measure.
I mean, the measure is going to be something like an EEG or an MRI, where we determine the amount of activity in some brain region. But while measuring the electrical properties of that region is just an engineering problem, and the units are the same from person to person, and maybe even the range is the same from person to person, that doesn't establish the ethical principle that all people deserve equal consideration (or, in the case of range differences or variance differences, that neural activity determines how much consideration one deserves).
It's not obvious to me that all agents deserve the same level of moral consideration (i.e. I am open to the possibility of utility monsters), but it is obvious to me that some ways of determining who should be the utility monsters are bad (generally because they're easily hacked or provide unproductive incentives).
Well it's not like people would go around maximizing the amount of this particular pattern of neural activity in the world: they would go around maximizing pleasure in the-kinds-of-agents-they-care-about, where the pattern is just a way of measuring and establishing what kinds of interventions actually do increase pleasure. (We are talking about humans, not FAI design, right?) If there are ways of hacking the pattern or producing it in ways that don't actually correlate with pleasure (of the kind that we care about), then those can be identified and ignored.
Depending on your view of human psychology, this doesn't seem like that bad a description, so long as we're talking about people only maximizing their own circuitry. (Maximizing is probably wrong, rather than keeping it within some reference range.)
That's what I had that in mind, yeah.
My core objection, which I think lines up with SaidAchmiz's, is that even if there's the ability to measure people's satisfaction objectively (so that we can count the transparency problem as solved), that doesn't tell us how to make satisfaction tradeoffs between individuals.
Yes, true enough[1]; I did not properly separate those objections in my comment. To elaborate:
I object to hedonistic utilitarianism on the grounds that it clearly and grossly fails to capture my moral intuitions or those of anyone else whom I consider not to be evading the question. A full takedown of the "hedonistic" part of "hedonistic utilitarianism" is basically (at least) all of Eliezer's posts about the complexity of value and so forth, and I won't rehash it here.
To be honest, hedonistic utilitarianism seems to me to be so obviously wrong that I'm not even all that interested in having this sort of moral philosophy debate with an effective altruist (or anyone else) who holds such a view. I mean, to start with, my hypothetical interlocutor would have to rebut all the objections raised to hedonistic utilitarianism over the centuries since it's been articulated, including, but not limited to, the aforementioned Lesswrong material.
I object to preference utilitarianism because of the "aggregation of utility" and "possibility of constructing a utility function" issues[2]. I think this is the more interesting objection.
[1] I'm not sure "intensity of the positive and negative components of an experience" is a coherent notion. There may not be a single quantity like that to measure. And even if we can measure something which we think qualifies for the title, it may be measurable only in some more-or-less absolute terms, while leaving open the question of how this hypothetical measured quantity matches up with anything like "utility to this particular experiencer". But, for the sake of the argument, I'm willing to grant that such a quantity can indeed be usefully measured, because this is certainly not my true rejection.
[2] These are my objections to the "preference" component of preference utilitarianism; my objection to classical utilitarianism also includes objections to other components, which I have enumerated in the grandparent.
Two replies:
1) Even if hedonistic utilitarianism would ultimately be wrong as a full description of what a person values, "maximize pleasure while minimizing suffering" can still be a useful heuristic to follow. Yes, following that heuristic to its logical conclusion would mean forcibly rewiring everyone's brains, but that doesn't need to be a problem for as long as forcibly rewiring people's brains isn't a realistic option. HU may still be the best approximation of a person's values in the context of today's world, even if it wasn't the best description overall.
2) The arguments on complexity of value and so on establish that the average person's values aren't correctly described by HU. This still leaves open the possibility of someone only approving of those of their behaviors that serve to promote HU, so there may definitely be individual people who accept HU, due to not sharing the moral intuitions which motivate the objections to it.
On 1): I am skeptical of replies to the effect that "yes, well, X might not be quite right, but it's a useful heuristic, therefore I will go on acting as if X is right". For one thing, a person who makes such a reply usually goes right back to saying "X is right!" (sans qualifiers) as soon as the current conversation ends. Let's get clear on what we actually believe, I generally think; once we've firmly established that, we can look for maximally effective implementations.
For another thing, HU may be the best approximation etc. etc., but that's a claim that at least should be made explicitly, such that it can be examined and argued for; a claim of this importance shouldn't come up only in such tangential discussion branches.
For a third thing, what happens when forcibly rewiring people's brains becomes a realistic option?
On 2): I think there's two issues here. There could indeed be people who accept HU because that's what correctly describes their moral intuitions. (Though I should certainly hope they do not think it proper to impose that moral philosophy on me, or on anyone else who doesn't subscribe to HU!)
"Only approving of those behaviors that serve to promote HU" is, I think, a separate thing. Or at least, I'd need to see the concept expanded a bit more before I could judge. What does this hypothetical person believe? What moral intuitions do they have? What exactly does it mean to "promote" hedonistic utilitarianism?
Why would this be improper? Don't that it doesn't follow from any meta-ethical position.
If you say "all that matters is pain and pleasure", and I say "no! I care about other things!", and you're like "nope, not listening. PAIN AND PLEASURE ARE THE ONLY THINGS", and then proceed to enact policies which minimize pain and maximize pleasure, without regard for any of the other things that I care about, and all the while I'm telling you that no, I care about these other things! Stop ignoring them! Other things matter to me! but you're not listening because you've decided that only pain and pleasure can possibly matter to anyone, despite my protestations otherwise...
... well, I hope you can see how that would bother me.
It's not just a matter of us caring about different things. If it were only that, we could acknowledge the fact, and proceed to some sort of compromise. Hedonistic utilitiarians, however, do not acknowledge that it's possible, or that it's valid, to care about things that are not pain or pleasure. All these people who claim to care about all sorts of other things must be misguided! Clearly.
I agree that it would often be good to be clearer about these points.
At that point the people who consider themselves hedonistic utilitarians might come up with a theory that says that forcible wireheading is wrong and switch to calling themselves supporters of that theory. Or they could go on calling themselves HUs despite not forcibly wireheading anyone, in the same way that many people call themselves utilitarians today despite not actually giving most of their income away. Or some of them could decide to start working towards efforts to forcibly wirehead everyone, in which case they'd become the kinds of people described by my reply 2).
By this, I meant to say "only approve of whatever course of action HU says is the best one".
Yeah, I meant that as a normative "what then", not an empirical one. I agree that what you describe are plausible scenarios.
Can you suggest some? These could go into next year's survey, though we're keeping that short - more likely they'd go into a followup that Ben Landau-Taylor of Leverage Research is running.
Why are you taking the effective altruists survey?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k60/2014_survey_of_effective_altruists/avgo
I think it'd be interesting to know more about the specific ethical views of ethically-minded EAs, but the majority of EAs are not well-versed enough to make Utilitarianism vs. Other Consequentialism distinctions. It's good to make a big survey like this as easy to fill out as possible.
Same thing about the "political views" point, although there are standards for left vs. right across countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_politics
I think that's a problem! (I discuss in this comment some reasons why.)
Whether or not it's a problem, a survey is not a good place to address it. You have to ask questions people will be able to easily answer if you want to get useful data.
That's true, but it is also an inherently problematic approach if (as will almost certainly be the case when it comes to issues of ethics, politics, etc.) the things you really want to know are not easily elicited by questions that people will be able to easily answer, and vice versa — the questions that people can easily answer don't actually tell you what you really want to know about those people's views, attitudes, etc.
In any case, what I meant wasn't that "EAs are not well-versed enough in moral philosophy" is a problem for the survey — what I meant was that it's a problem for the EA movement.
I agree about consequentialism. Also, at that level of detail I can't see a way it's action-relevant (whereas if most EAs say they have no knowledge of ethical theories, that suggests a non-philosophical audience is more receptive than some have thought).
We should have explained that political terms were what you'd naturally describe yourself as in your country. Do people think most will have interpreted them thus? If so, we can cross-tabulate them against country.
If not, would this make many people more than one point out along the spectrum? I'd have thought that an American who describes themselves as 'left' is at least 'centre left' in Europe, and so on.
Quite possibly. At least in Finland, the word "left" refers to people who tend to have at least a rough familiarity with actual Marxist theories and still endorse many of them, and tend to use the word "capitalism" as a negative term. It also includes actual outright communists who want to go to a planned economy, though they're a fringe group even here and mostly dying out. Still, it's my impression that "Left" means something very much more to right in the US.
I've frequently heard it said that the average American leftist would be considered a clear right-winger in Finland, though I don't have enough familiarity with the exact positions of American leftists to be able to tell whether that's true.
It's hard to say anything coherent about the U.S. "left" and "right" without antagonizing both groups, but my $0.02:
I'd characterize the typical U.S. leftist as not really having the foggiest clue about Marx beyond his having some vaguely important relationship to Soviet-style communism, and as not having a clear stance regarding communism or capitalism... either because they actively support a mixed economy, or because they are confused about economics. (I don't mean to imply here that Americans who do have a clear stance aren't confused.)
While outright communists are generally considered "left" in the U.S., much as outright fascists are generally considered "right" (though some disagree), neither group is terribly relevant; they exist mostly as extremes to rhetorically compare our political opponents to. "So-and-so is a communist/fascist" gets said a lot, but if one were to respond to that claim by discussing various points of non-congruence with communism or fascism this would likely be seen as sophistry rather than on-point analysis.
The "left" tends to support government intervention to enforce equal treatment of some genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations, to enforce wealth distribution, and to provide communal access to various goods (of which the most fractious right now is health insurance, which has become a proxy for health care). Domestically, this intervention is usually framed in terms of government-regulated markets rather than straight-up government control of the means of production or distribution, although there are exceptions.
Also, the "left" is generally associated with minimizing restrictions on abortion and contraception, maximizing restrictions on firearms, unionizing labor, increasing the political influence of feminism (and "social justice" more generally), and decreasing the political influence of Christianity (and religion more generally), and decreasing support for the military, while the "right" is generally associated with the opposites, though to my mind these are more like historical accidents that could have gone either way.
The Democratic Party is seen as "left" and more popular in high-density urban areas; the Republican Party is seen as "right" and popular in more rural areas. There's a substantial group of "independent" voters but they tend to support one party over the other.
I think this is true, but with the caveat that a lot of the memes circulating among educated leftists in the US are basically Marxian in their approach to class and economics. Usually not orthodox Marxist, though, and they fall well short of cohering into a complete Marxian analysis anywhere outside of sociology departments and the odd punk show.
Joe Left is generally not aware of this. Joe Right probably has a confused idea of the relation ("communist" is a dirty word in the US, so right-wing news outlets don't miss opportunities to use it), but is unaware of the Marxian/Marxist distinction and thinks it makes Joe Left an outright commie.
I don't know enough about Marxianism (either orthodox or heterodox) to have a useful opinion about how popular Marxian memes are among the US left (or, for that matter, the US right), but I certainly agree that that's a different question than how well informed J Left is about Marx, and an interesting one.
I'm not so sure, in terms of their actual policies I hear the British Conservatives are pretty close to the US Democrats. They're cutting services for the poor, but to a level above that found in the US. That does typically show inclinations similar to those of US Republicans, but it could also reflect a view about the optimal end level of services similar to some Democrats. So I guess it depends on what it shows most often, and whether those inclinations are most informative for the purposes of understanding people (eg in this survey).