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Lumifer comments on Supporting Effective Altruism through spreading rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (26)
That's a personal anecdote, not data. Do you have evidence?
It might, but the consequences are not obvious :-/ For example, I can easily see someone who, on realizing that his past charitable giving was all about sending signals to his social circle, decides just to stop doing it and spend the money on, say, self-learning resources.
Altruism is, basically, a value and rationality does not tell you which values you should have.
I think the clearer question might be - Does rationality lead to effective altruism?
An easy answer might be rationality applied to altruism might lead to effective altruism; but rationality applied to life might not lead to altruism - and might lead away from it.
I am not sure even about that -- the version of EA popular around here is quite utilitarinistic, if there's such a word, and tends to assume things (like the value of random humans somewhere in Africa) which do not directly follow from either rationality or altruism.
I certainly understand the questionable value of random humans.
However; If you assume the fixed presence of altruism (and rationality isn't going to consider doing something else as mentioned - i.e. self-learning resources). I still think that altruism can have a rationality applied to it and doing so would lead to at least a consideration of more effectiveness of altruism and only possibly to most effectiveness as the EA movement promote.
When applied: Giving $5 to the homeless person nearby may feel like an altruistic act, when questioned; giving $5 worth of food might be a more altruistically helpful act to the wellbeing of the person. (although debatably giving money might help more, and also giving clothes might help more depending on the situation, etc, etc...)
There is a place for rationality applied to altruism, but rationality applied to life may not yield altruism.
On a simple level - rationality being an achievement of "multiplicit winning at life"; a person's definition of winning at their life may not include helping others or altruistic purposes/processes.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, I think it's a fair statement.
Yes this about sounds like me and most people I know, except that we were not giving at all to begin with, but if we did, it would have been signalling.
I don't 100% understand the usual emotional reasons beyond charitable giving. I do get that in the US or parts of it, social pressure and status plays a role.
But probably a more scalable basis is feeling you have a surplus. To scale it up and out, to different cultures etc. you need to convince people they have a surplus they don't need.
One thing that would really help there is if it was really true.
Alternatively, low unit of measure charities. I.e. those who can do something useful with a unit as little as 5-10 dollars/euros. So that contributors feel they did not just add to the sum that makes something happen but they personally did a person something good.
Connect the dots to the widespread I-truly-believe Christianity in the US. A LOT of charitable giving in the US is driven by religion.
Yes, but at LW it is remarkable that a bunch of atheists did not even ask whether one should be altruist at all but went straight to how to do it effectively. It went without saying that you are still an altruist. Hypothesis:feeling of surplus.
If you give a nerd a sufficiently interesting optimization problem, in any domain, he will start trying to figure out how to optimize it without asking if that this the right thing to optimize. This is a special case of nerd sniping.
Regard whether spreading rationality contributes to EA directly, I do not have evidence in the sense of data, only in the sense of logic. From a probabilistic thinking perspective, getting people to think more rationally, in an evidence-based manner, about their charitable giving would be likely to lead them to give more effectively, and the EA movement is the best outlet for such charitable giving. I agree there is a danger of the kind you describe about social circle signaling, but we can't be sure without actually testing this with experiments and getting actual evidence about what the world looks like.
Furthermore, as Brian Tomasik describes in his essay, getting people to think more rationally would result in people having better lives overall and flourishing, which is the point of the EA movement as a whole.
So spreading rationality would certainly contribute to the outcome desired by the EA movement, of global flourishing and well-being. I'd also say it would be likely to contribute to the EA movement in particular itself, per my first statement above, but that's a matter of experimenting.