Comment on Symbolic Gestures – Salutes For Effective Altruists To Identify Each Other

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 23:46:46 GMT

So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying: We can tell that EAs really value looking and feeling good rather than genuinely doing good, because if they genuinely valued doing good then they would focus on those very close to themselves rather than people far away.

It looks to me as if you are assuming that EAs share some opinions of yours that I don't think they generally do.

So let me ask a variant of my original question. How do you think the world would look, if EAs (1) were more interested in genuinely doing good than in looking and feeling good, and also (2) sincerely believed that they could do much more good per unit money spent in far-away places than "very close to themselves"?

Because it seems to me that the simplest interpretation of the available evidence is that #2 really is what most EAs believe; that it's not an obviously unreasonable thing for them to believe; and that, if they believe it, it explains their preference for sending money to (say) sub-Saharan Africa just as well as your hypothesis that what, deep down, matters to them most is looking and feeling good.

I guess you will reiterate that "they understand the complexities of the problems close to home", so "they purposely blind themselves [...] by seeking problems far away", etc. For sure, that's possible, but to me it's far from obviously true, which is why I am asking: what's your evidence? How would you expect the world to look different if they weren't doing that but were genuinely motivated by a desire to do as much good as possible?

(Let me say a few words about your last paragraph, restraining my temptation to get cross at your cack-handed attempts at psychoanalysing people you haven't met. There aren't actually any really bad neighbourhoods very near me, and AIUI what characterizes "really bad neighbourhoods" is not just extreme poverty but violence and criminality; if you go to a "really bad neighbourhood" the chances are that a lot of the people you see are criminals. Handing out money to them would not send it to the best places. But my guess is that a programme of going to very poor places near me -- in so far as they exist -- and trying to identify people in need of money and give it to them would, despite various obvious difficulties, probably do a fair bit of good. However, not only is there a shortage of really "bad" places near where I live; in the whole country where I live there is scarcely any poverty as extreme as is found all over the place in some parts of the world. The effectiveness of money in relieving the ills of poverty is, very crudely, proportional to how severe the poverty is; I therefore expect a given amount of money to do more good in poorer places. This will be counterbalanced somewhat by the greater difficulties in getting the money to effective places at a distance, but I see no reason to expect the latter to outweigh the former. I don't, of course, think that sending money to these very poor places will solve all their problems. In fact, if it were going to then we could almost certainly do better by sending some of the money somewhere else. And I don't, of course, think that the mere fact of sending money somewhere guarantees doing good; you have to find interventions that actually help, and look at the evidence that they do; there is in fact some fairly decent evidence for this in the case of the interventions performed by e.g. GiveWell's preferred charities. -- Now, of course I may be wrong about any of that. But please explain to me why I'm so obviously wrong that you can be confident that my actual reason for liking these interventions is that I want to look good and feel good and deliberately blind myself to their complexities.)

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