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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Residing in the US and taking part in US society (eg by pursuing a career) is deeply problematic from an ethical point of view. Altruists should seriously consider either migrating or scaling back their career ambitions significantly.
Interesting. This is in contrast to which societies? To where should altruists emigrate?
If anyone cares, the effective altruism community has started pondering this question as a group. This might work out for those doing direct work, such as research or advocacy: if they're doing it mostly virtually, what they need the most is Internet access. If a lot of the people they'd be (net)working with as part of their work were also at the same place, it would be even less of a problem. It doesn't seem like this plan would work for those earning to give, as the best ways of earning to give often depend on geography-specific constraints, i.e., working in developed countries.
Note that if you perceive this as a bad idea, please share your thoughts, as I'm only aware of its proponents claiming it might be a good idea. It hasn't been criticized, so it's an idea worthy of detractors if criticism is indeed to be had.
Fundamentally the biggest reason to have a hub and the biggest barrier to creating a new one is coordination. Existing hubs are valuable because a lot of the coordination work is done FOR you. People who are effective, smart, and wealthy are already sorted into living in places like NYC and SF for lots of other reasons. You don't have to directly convince or incentivize these people to live there for EA. This is very similar to why MIRI theoretically benefits from being in the Bay Area: They don't have to pay the insanely high a cost to attract people to their area at all, vs to attract them to hang out with and work with MIRI as opposed to google or whoever. I think it's highly unlikely that even for the kind of people who are into EA that they could make a new place sufficiently attractive to potential EAs to climb over the mountains of non-coordinated reasons people have to live in existing hubs.
If I scale back my career ambitions, I won't make as much money, which means that I can't donate as much. This is not a small cost. How can my career do more damage than that opportunity cost?
I would suggest ANZAC, Germany, Japan, or Singapore. I realized after making this list that those countries have an important property in common, which is that they are run by relatively young political systems. Scandinavia is also good. Most countries are probably ethically better than the US, simply because they are inert: they get an ethical score of zero while the US gets a negative score.
(This is supposed to be a response to Lumifer's question below).
That's a very curious list, notable for absences as well as for inclusions. I am a bit stumped, for I cannot figure out by which criteria was it constructed. Would you care to elaborate why do these countries look to you as the most ethical on the planet?
I don't claim that the list is exhaustive or that the countries I mentioned are ethically great. I just claim that they're ethically better than the US.
Hmm... Is any Western European country ethically worse than the USA from your point of view? Would Canada make the list? Does any poor country qualify?
In my view Western Europe is mostly inert, so it gets an ethics score of 0, which is better than the US. Some poor countries are probably okay, I wouldn't want to make sweeping claims about them. The problem with most poor countries is that their governments are too corrupt. Canada does make the list, I thought ANZAC stood for Australia, New Zealand And Canada.
Modern countries with developed economies lacking a military force involved and/or capable of military intervention outside of its territory. Maybe his grief is with the US military so I just went with that.
Which is to say they engage in a lot of free riding on the US military.
For reference, ANZAC stands for the "Australia and New Zealand Army Corps" that fought in WWI. If you mean "Australia and New Zealand", then I don't think there's a shorter way of saying that than just listing the two countries.
"the Antipodes"
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate, with the other available options perhaps? What should I do instead?
To be more specific, what's morally problematic about wanting to be a more successful writer or researcher or therapist?
The issue is blanket moral condemnation of the whole society. Would you want to become a "more successful writer" in Nazi Germany?
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
...yes? I wouldn't want to write Nazi propaganda, but if I was a romance novel writer and my writing would not significantly affect, for example, the Nazi war effort, I don't see how being a writer in Nazi Germany would be any worse than being a writer anywhere else. In this context, "the lie" of Nazi Germany was not the mere existence of the society, it was specific things people within that society were doing. Romance novels, even very good romance novels, are not a part of that lie by reasonable definitions.
ETA: There are certainly better things a person in Nazi Germany could do than writing romance novels. If you accept the mindset that anything that isn't optimally good is bad, then yes, being a writer in Nazi Germany is probably bad. But in that event, moving to Sweden and continuing to write romance novels is no better.
The key word is "successful".
To become a successful romance writer in Nazi Germany would probably require you pay careful attention to certain things. For example, making sure no one who could be construed to be a Jew is ever a hero in your novels. Likely you will have to have a public position on the racial purity of marriages. Would a nice Aryan Fräulein ever be able to find happiness with a non-Aryan?
You can't become successful in a dirty society while staying spotlessly clean.
So? Who said my goal was to stay spotlessly clean? I think more highly of Bill Gates than of Richard Stallman, because as much as Gates was a ruthless and sometimes dishonest businessman, and as much as Stallman does stick to his principles, Gates, overall, has probably improved the human condition far more than Stallman.
The question was whether "being a writer in Nazi Germany would be any worse than being a writer anywhere else".
If you would be happy to wallow in mud, be my guest.
The question of how much morality could one maintain while being successful in an oppressive society is an old and very complex one. Ask Russian intelligentsia for details :-/
Lack of representation isn't the worst thing in the world.
if you could write romance novels in Nazi Gernany (did they have romance novels?) and the novels are about temporarily and engagingly frustrated love between Aryans with no nasty stereotypes of non-Aryans, I don't think it's especially awful.
What a great question! I went to wikipedia which paraphrased a great quote from NYT
which suggests that they are a recent development. Maybe there was a huge market for Georgette Heyer, but little production in Germany.
One thing that is great about wikipedia is the link to corresponding articles in other languages. "Romance Novel" in English links to an article entitled "Love- and Family-Novels." That suggests that the genres were different, at least at some point in time. That article mentions Hedwig Courths-Mahler as a prolific author who was a supporter of the SS and I think registered for censorship. But she rejected the specific censorship, so she published nothing after 1935 and her old books gradually fell out of print. But I'm not sure she really was a romance author, because of the discrepancy of genres.
What do your lovers find attractive about each other? It better be their Aryan traits.
Well, there is the inconvenient possibility of getting bombed flat in zero to twelve years, depending on what we're calling Nazi Germany.
Considering the example of Nazi Germany is being used as an analogy for the United States, a country not actually at way, taking allied bombing raids into account amounts to fighting the hypothetical.
Is it? I was mainly joking -- but there's an underlying point, and that's that economic and political instability tends to correlate with ethical failures. This isn't always going to manifest as winding up on the business end of a major strategic bombing campaign, of course, but perpetrating serious breaches of ethics usually implies that you feel you're dealing with issues serious enough to justify being a little unethical, or that someone's getting correspondingly hacked off at you for them, or both. Either way there are consequences.
It's a lot safer to abuse people inside your borders than to make a habit of invading other countries. The risk from ethical failure has a lot to do with whether you're hurting people who can fight back.
I'm not sure I want to make blanket moral condemnations. I think Americans are trapped in a badly broken political system, and the more power, prestige, and influence that system has, the more damage it does. Emigration or socioeconomic nonparticipation reduces the power the system has and therefore reduces the damage it does.
It seems to me you do, first of all by your call to emigrate. Blanket condemnations of societies do not extend to each individual, obviously, and the difference between "condemning the system" and "condemning the society" doesn't look all that big..
Do you follow some kind of utilitarian framework where you could quantify that problem? Roughly how much money donated to effective charities would make up the harm caused by participating in US society.
Thanks for asking, here's an attempt at an answer. I'm going to compare the US (tax rate 40%) to Singapore (tax rate 18%). Since SG has better health care, education, and infrastructure than the US, and also doesn't invade other countries or spy massively on its own citizens, I think it's fair to say that 22% extra of GDP that the US taxes its citizens is simply squandered.
Let I be income, D be charitable donations, R be tax rate (0.4 vs 0.18), U be money usage in support of lifestyle, and T be taxes paid. Roughly U=I-T-D, and T=R(I-D). A bit of algrebra produces the equation D=I-U/(1-R).
Consider a good programmer-altruist making I=150K. In the first model, the programmer decides she needs U=70K to support her lifestyle; the rest she will donate. Then in the US, she will donate D=33K, and pay T=47K in taxes. In SG, she will donate D=64K and pay T=16K in taxes to achieve the same U.
In the second model, the altruist targets a donation level of D=60, and adjusts U so she can meet the target. In the US, she payes T=36K in taxes and has a lifestyle of U=54K. In SG, she pays T=16K of taxes and lives on U=74K.
So, to answer your question, the programmer living in the US would have to reduce her lifestyle by about $20K/year to achieve the same level of contribution as the programmer in SG.
Most other developed countries have tax rates comparable or higher than the US, but it's more plausible that in other countries the money goes to things that actually help people.
this is the point where alarm bells should start ringing
The comparison is valid for the argument I'm trying to make, which is that by emigrating to SG a person can enhance his or her altruistic contribution while keeping other things like take-home income constant.
This is just plain wrong. Mostly because Singapore and the US are different countries in different circumstances. Just to name one, Singapore is tiny. Things are a lot cheaper when you're small. Small countries are sustainable because international trade means you don't have to be self-sufficient, and because alliances with larger countries let you get away with having a weak military. The existence of large countries is pretty important for this dynamic.
Now, I'm not saying the US is doing a better job than Singapore. In fact, I think Singapore is probably using its money better, albeit for unrelated reasons. I'm just saying that your analysis is far too simple to be at all useful except perhaps by accident.
Things are a lot cheaper when you're large. It's called "economy of scale".
Yes, both effects exist and they apply to different extents in different situations. A good analysis would take both (and a host of other factors) into account and figure out which effect dominates. My point is that this analysis doesn't do that.
I think given the same skill level the programmer-altruist making 150K while living in Silicon Valley might very well make 20K less living in Germany, Japan or Singapore.
I don't know what opportunities in Europe or Asia look like, but here on the US West Coast, you can expect a salary hit of $20K or more if you're a programmer and you move from the Silicon Valley even to a lesser tech hub like Portland. Of course, cost of living will also be a lot lower.