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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Every so often in the EA community, someone will ask what EA volunteer activities one can do in ones spare time in lieu of earning to give. Brian Tomasik makes an interesting case for reading social science papers and contributing what you learn to Wikipedia.
I agree that adding content to Wikipedia is worthwhile.
In addition to Wikipedia I think that StackExchange pages can often be very worthwhile.
Often when I come across an interesting claim on the internet where I don't know whether it's true, I post it on Skeptics.StackExchange or a subject specific site in the StackExchange network.
On the topic of popularization, I think the ratio of idealistic people interested in alleviating global poverty to people who are aware of the concept of meta-charities that determine the optimal way to do so is shockingly low.
That seems like one of those "low hanging fruits" - dropping it into casual conversations, mentioning it in high visibility comment threads, and on. There's really no excuse for Kony to be more well known than Givewell.
People actually interested in alleviating global poverty, or people who are interested in signaling to themselves and their social circle that they are caring and have appropriate attitudes?
By the way, saving lives (which Givewell focuses on) and "alleviating global poverty" are two very different goals.
I don't think that it's fair to say that GiveWell only focuses on lives saved. Their reports about charities are long. It's just that they focus on the number of "saving lives" when they boil down the justification to short paragraphs.
Frankly who cares? If someone wants to signal, then fine we can work with that. Life saving is an archetypal signal of heroism. Start a trend of wearing necklaces with one bead for each life you saved to remind everyone of the significance of each life and to remind you that you've given back to this world. That would be pretty bad ass, I'd wear it. Imagine you feel sad, then look down and remember you've added more QALYs to this world than your entire natural lifespan, that you've added centuries of smiles. Perhaps too blatant a boast for most people's tastes?
Point is, even if it was all signalling, you could boast more if you knew how to get qalys efficiently. (I saved 2 lives sounds way better than i spent 10000 dollars)
If people are actually interested in signaling to their social circle, they will ignore geeky Givewell and do a charity walk for a local (for-profit) hospital instead.
I would consider anyone who would do this (based on the dollar amount of donation) to be terribly pretentious and, frankly, silly.
I do have a parallel thought process which finds it pretentious, but I ignore it because it also said that the ice bucket was pretentious. And the ice bucket challenge was extremely effective. I think the dislike is just contrarian signalling, and is why our kind can't cooperate. That or some kind of egalitarian instinct against boasting.
Isn't "pretentious" just a negative way to say "signalling"? Of course that idea might not be effective signalling but abstractly, the idea is that EA is well suited for signalling so why isn't it?
I'd consider value in doing a local hospital. Local community strengthening and good feelings is its own thing with its own benefits, and there's a special value in the aid coming from local people who know what's what - as a natural extension of the idea that aid is better coming from parents to children than from distant government to children. I'm talking about the global poverty crowd here.
That I find something pretentious is my moral/aesthetic judgement. Evaluating the effectiveness of dark arts techniques is an entirely different question.
Speaking of signaling, pretentiousness means you tried to signal and failed.
Why is it dark? Doesn't it have to be a drawback in order to be dark? (agreed about pretentiousness=signal failure)
All actions have a drawback, in at least the form of opportunity costs.
It's dark because it's manipulation. You are pushing buttons in other people's minds to achieve a certain outcome.
All interactions involving people involve pushing buttons for outcomes.
Negative-connotation-Manipulation is when you do it in ways that they would not approve of it if they realized exactly what you were doing. The ice bucket challenge for example does exactly what it says on the tin - raise awareness, raise money, have social activity.
It's signaling more status than the people around you want to give you.
"Pretentious" might be signalling of high status [1]that's irritating to receive, which leads to a large new topic. When is signalling fun vs. not fun? Is it just a matter of what's a positive signal in the recipient's group?
[1] Signalling about sports teams isn't pretentious, even when it's annoying. I don't think there's a word for the annoyingness of middle-to-low status signaling. "Vulgar" covers some cases, but not most of them.
Why?
I do not accept that a dollar is a unit of caring.
I do not think that contributing money to an organization which runs programs which statistically save lives can be legitimately called "I saved X lives". Compare: "I bought some war bonds so I can say I personally killed X enemy soldiers".
I think that strutting one's charitable activities is in very poor taste.
What would you use "I saved X lives" to mean if not "compared to what I would have done otherwise, X more people are alive today"?
(I don't at all like the implied precision in giving a specific number, though.)
There are two issues here.
One is tracking of individual contributions. When a charity says "A $5000 donation saves one life" they do not mean that your particular $5000 will save one specific life. Instead they divide their budget of $Z by their estimate of Y lives saved and produce a dollars/life number. This is an average and doesn't have much to do with you personally other than that you were one data point in the set from which this average was calculated.
"I contributed to the common effort which resulted in preventing Y deaths from malaria" is a more precise formulation which, of course, doesn't sound as good as "I saved X lives".
Two is the length of the causal chain. If you, with your own hands, pull a drowning kid out of the water, that's one life saved with the causal chain of length 1. If you give money to an organization which finances another organization which provides certain goods for the third organization to distribute with the help of a bunch of other organizations, the causal chain is long and the longer it goes, the fuzzier it gets.
As always, look at incentives.Charity fundraising is effectively advertising with greater social latitude to use emotional manipulation. One strand in that manipulation is to make the donor feel an direct emotional connection with "direct" being the key word. That's why you have "Your donation saves lives!" copy next to a photo of an undernourished black or brown kid (preferably a girl) looking at the camera with puppy eyes.
If someone is saying "I saved 10 lives" because they gave $500 to a charity that advertises a cost per life saved of $50, then yes, that's very different from actually saving lives. But the problem is that charities' reports of their cost effectiveness are ridiculously exaggerated, and you just shouldn't trust anything they say.
What we want are marginal costs, not average costs, and these are what organizations like GiveWell try to estimate.
Yes, this is real. But we're ok with assigning credit along longish causal chains in many domains; why exclude charity?
Beware, envy lives here. Cloaked in the robes of social decency, he whispers:
“Imposters, all of them. They don’t deserve praise…you do.”
Huh?
If I were you, I would consider the possibility that I am envious of those who signal and receive praise, and that I am rationalizing my feelings by claiming to uphold the social standard of "good taste".
It's not intended as a unit of caring - it's a unit of achievement, a display of power, focused on outcomes. Consequences over virtue ethics, utils over fuzzies.
Don't get me wrong, I do see the ugliness in it. I too have deeply held prejudices against materialism and vanity, and the whole thing bites against the egalitarian instinct for giving even more status to the wealthy. But helping people is something worthy of pride, unlike the mercedes or thousand dollar suits or flashy diamonds and similar trifles people use for the same purpose.
My point is, you said they were signalling. I'm not approving of signalling so much as saying, why not signal productively, in a manner that actually does what you've signaled to do?
Some people think otherwise.
How about buying status signals with the the minor side-effect of helping people?
Of course they do. "So much money, so little taste" is a common attitude. "Unnecessarily large houses" are known as McMansions in the US.
Agree. (The EA community is already very well aware of "spreading EA" as a valuable volunteer activity, but I'd seen less discussion of Tomasik's proposal.)