imposing intimacy on them - making yourself vulnerable and demanding they do the same
Yeah, this is pretty terrible. I (being on the autism spectrum) am definitely in favor of Ask culture over Guess culture — and I still find the quoted practice... somewhat repellent.
That depends on whether fetuses are people ...
If yes, the actual birth rate is around 80%. http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/Data_Stats/Abortion.htm
birth rate
I wouldn't consider abortion a "birth", per se.
“The birthrate in the United States is at an all-time low. Whereas our death rate is still holding strong at 100 percent.”
That's just not true. Death rate, as the name implies, is a rate - the population that died in this year divided by the average total population. If "death rate" is 100%, then "birth rate" is 100% by the same reasoning, because 100% of people were born.
For me it works in two steps: 1) Notice something that someone would appreciate. 2) Do it for them.
As seems to often be the case with rationality techniques, the hard part is noticing. I'm a Christian, so I try to spend a few minutes praying for my friends each day. Besides the religious reasons, which may or may not matter to you, I believe it puts me in the right frame of mind to want to help others. A non-religious time of focused meditation might serve a similar purpose.
I've also worked on developing my listening skills. Friends frequently mention things that they like or dislike, and I make a special effort to remember them. I also occasionally write them down, although I try not to mention that too often. For most people, there's a stronger signaling effect if they think you just happened to remember what they liked.
You seem to be talking about what I would call sympathy, rather than empathy. As I would use it, sympathy is caring about how others feel, and empathy is the ability to (emotionally) sense how others feel. The former is in fine enough state - I am an EA, after all - it's the latter that needs work. Your step (1) could be done via empathy or pattern recognition or plain listening and remembering as you say. So I'm sorry, but this doesn't really help.
(Sorry, I didn't see this until now.)
I'll admit I don't really have data for this. But my intuitive guess is that students don't just need to be able to attend school; they need a personal relationship with a teacher who will inspire them. At least for me, that's a large part of why I'm in the field that I chose.
It's possible that I'm being misled by the warm fuzzy feelings I get from helping someone face-to-face, which I don't get from sending money halfway across the world. But it seems like there's many things that matter in life that don't have a price tag.
I'll admit I don't really have data for this. But my intuitive guess is that ...
Have you made efforts to research it? Either by trawling papers or by doing experiments yourself?
students don't just need to be able to attend school; they need a personal relationship with a teacher who will inspire them.
Your objection had already been accounted for: $500 to SCI = around 150 people extra attend school for a year. I estimated the number of students that will have a relationship with their teacher as good as the average you provide at around 1:150.
But it seems like there's many things that matter in life that don't have a price tag.
That sounds deep, but is obviously false: would you condemn yourself to a year of torture so that you get one unit of the thing that allegedly doesn't have a price tag (for example a single minute of a conversation with a student where you feel a real connection)? Would you risk a one in a million chance to get punched on the arm in order to get the same unit? If the answer to these questions is [no] and [yes] respectively, as I would expect them to be, those are outer limits on the price range. Getting to the true value is just a matter of convergence.
Perhaps more to the point, though, those people you would help halfway across the world are just as real, and their lives just as filled with "things that don't have a price tag" as people in your environment. For $3000, one family is not torn apart by a death from malaria. For $3, one child more attends grade school regularly for a year because they are no longer ill from parasitic stomach infections. These are not price tags, these are trades you can actually make. Make the trades, and you set a lower limit. Refuse them, and the maximum price tag you put on a child's relationship with their teacher is set, period.
It does seem very much like you're guided by your warm fuzzies.
Related worry that I've been meaning to ask about for a while:
Given that is there is still plenty of controversy over which types of unusual human minds to consider "pathological" instead of just rare variants, how is MIRI planning to decide which ones are included in CEV? My skin in the game: I'm one of the Autistic Spectrum people who feel like "curing my autism" would make me into a different person who I don't care about. I'm still transhumanist; I still want intelligence enhancements, external boosts to my executive function and sensory processing on demand, and the ability to override the nastiest of my brain chemistry. But even with all of that I would still know myself as very different from neurotypicals. I naturally see the world in different categories that most, and I don't think in anything like words or a normal human language. Maybe more relevantly, I have a far higher tolerance---even a need---for sphexishness, than most people of comparable intelligence to me.
Fun theory for me would be a little different, and I think that there really are a lot of people who would consider what I did with eternity to be somewhat sad and pathetic, maybe even horrifying. I think it could be an empathic uncanny valley effect or just an actual basic drive people have, to make everybody be the same. I'm worried that this could be an actual terminal value for some people that would hold up under reflective equilibrium.
I'm not too freaked out because I think the consensus is that since Autistic people already exist and some are happy, we should have a right to continue to exist and even make more of ourselves. But I actually believe that if we didn't exist it would be right to create us, and I worry that most neurotypicals extrapolated volition would not create all the other variations on human minds that should exist but don't yet.
If it matters, up to $1000 for MIRI this year could be at stake in answering this concern. I say this in a blatant and open effort to incentivize Eliezer etc. to answering me. I hope that I'm not out of line for waving money around like this, because this really is a big part of my choice about whether FAI is good enough. I really want to give what I can to prevent existential threats, but I consider a singularity overly dominated by neurotypicals to be a shriek.
Did MIRI answer you? I would expect them to have answered by now, and I'm curious about the answer.
If you acctully think it's sad (Do you?), then you have a higher order set of values that wants you to want to care about others.
If you want to want to care, you can do things to change yourself so that you do care. Even more importantly, you can begin to act act *as if *you care, because "caring about the world isn't about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the amount of suffering in the world, it's about doing the right thing anyway."
All I know is that I want to the sort of person who cares. So, I act as that sort of person, and thereby become her.
you can do things to change yourself so that you do care.
Would you care to give examples or explain what to look for?
I'm sympathetic to the effective altruist movement, and when I do periodically donate, I try to do so as efficiently as possible. But I don't focus much effort on it. I've concluded that my impact probably comes mostly from my everyday interactions with people around me, not from money that I send across the world.
For example: - The best way for me to improve math and science education is to work on my own teaching ability. - The best way for me to improve the mental health of college students is to make time to support friends that struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. - The best way for me to stop racism or sexism is to first learn to recognize and quash it in myself, and then to expose it when I encounter it around me.
Changing my own actions and attitudes is hard, but it's also the one area where I have the most control. And as I've worked on this for the past few years, I've managed to create a positive feedback loop by slowly increasing the size of my care-o-meter. Empathy is a useful habit that can be trained, just as much as rationality can be.
I realize that it's hard to get an accurate sense of the impact a donation can have for someone on the other side of the world. It's possible that I'm being led astray by my care-o-meter to focus on people near at hand. I do in principle care equally about people in other parts of the world, even if my care-o-meter hasn't figured that out yet. So if you'd like to prove to me that I can be more effective by focusing my efforts elsewhere, I'd be happy to listen. (I am a poor grad student, so donating large amounts of money isn't really feasible for me yet, although I do realize I still make far more than the world average.) For now, I'm doing the best that I can in the way that I know how.
To conclude, I wouldn't call myself an effective altruist, but I do count them as allies. And I wouldn't want to convert everyone to my perspective; as others have mentioned already, it's good to have a wide range of different approaches.
(separated from the other comment, because they're basically independent threads).
I've concluded that my impact probably comes mostly from my everyday interactions with people around me, not from money that I send across the world.
This sounds unlikely. You say you're improving the education and mental health of on-the-order-of 100 students. Deworm the World and SCI improve attendance of schools by 25%, meaning you would have the same effect, as a first guess and to first order at least, by donating on-the-order-of $500/yr. And that's just one of the side-effects of ~600 people not feeling ill all the time. So if you primarily care about helping people live better lives, $50/yr to SCI ought to equal your stated current efforts.
However, that doesn't count flow-through effects. EA is rare enough that you might actually get a large portion of the credit of convincing someone to donate to a more effective charity, or even become an effective altruist: expected marginal utility isn't conserved across multiple agents (if you have five agents who can press a button, and all have to press their buttons to save one person's life, each of them has the full choice of saving or failing to save someone, assuming they expect the others to press the button too, so each of them has the expected marginal utility of saving a life). Since it's probably more likely that you convince someone else to donate more effective than that one of the dewormed people will be able to have a major impact because of their deworming, flow-through effects should be very strong for advocacy relative to direct donation.
To quantify: Americans give 1% of their incomes to poverty charities, so let's make that $0.5k/yr/student. Let's say that convincing one student to donate to SCI would get them to donate that much more effectively about 5 years sooner than otherwise (those willing would hopefully be roped in eventually regardless). Let's also say SCI is five times more effective than their current charities. That means you win $2k to SCI for every student you convince to alter their donation patterns.
You probably enjoy helping people directly (making you happy, which increases your productivity and credibility, and is also just nice), and helping them will earn you social credit which is more likely to convince them, so you could mostly keep doing what you're doing, just adding the advocacy bit in the best way you see fit. Suppose you manage to convince 2.5% of each class, that means you get around $5k/year to SCI, or about 100 times more impact than what you're doing now, just by doing the same AND advocating people to donate more effectively. That's six thousand sick people, more than a third of them children and teens, you would be curing extra every year.
Note: this is a rough first guess. Better numbers and the addition of ignored or forgotten factors may influence the results by more than one order of magnitude. If you decide to consider this advice, check the results thoroughly and look for things I missed. 80000hours has a few pages on advocacy, if you're interested.
I'm sympathetic to the effective altruist movement, and when I do periodically donate, I try to do so as efficiently as possible. But I don't focus much effort on it. I've concluded that my impact probably comes mostly from my everyday interactions with people around me, not from money that I send across the world.
For example: - The best way for me to improve math and science education is to work on my own teaching ability. - The best way for me to improve the mental health of college students is to make time to support friends that struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. - The best way for me to stop racism or sexism is to first learn to recognize and quash it in myself, and then to expose it when I encounter it around me.
Changing my own actions and attitudes is hard, but it's also the one area where I have the most control. And as I've worked on this for the past few years, I've managed to create a positive feedback loop by slowly increasing the size of my care-o-meter. Empathy is a useful habit that can be trained, just as much as rationality can be.
I realize that it's hard to get an accurate sense of the impact a donation can have for someone on the other side of the world. It's possible that I'm being led astray by my care-o-meter to focus on people near at hand. I do in principle care equally about people in other parts of the world, even if my care-o-meter hasn't figured that out yet. So if you'd like to prove to me that I can be more effective by focusing my efforts elsewhere, I'd be happy to listen. (I am a poor grad student, so donating large amounts of money isn't really feasible for me yet, although I do realize I still make far more than the world average.) For now, I'm doing the best that I can in the way that I know how.
To conclude, I wouldn't call myself an effective altruist, but I do count them as allies. And I wouldn't want to convert everyone to my perspective; as others have mentioned already, it's good to have a wide range of different approaches.
Empathy is a useful habit that can be trained, just as much as rationality can be.
Could you explain how? My empathy is pretty weak and could use some boosting.
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If you're on the autism spectrum and think Tell culture is a good idea, upvote this comment.