Authors: Joey Savoie and Tee Barnett

Before getting to know your local atheist, it’s very much worth rehashing the ABCs of non-belief that run the risk of remaining little known, especially now that the skeptic community has become more interested and active in charitable causes. Public intellectuals frequenting bestseller lists on our behalf are swift to go on the offensive, but there’s something to be said for shoring up the defense as well. A real uneasiness toward atheists and their intentions seems to flow from a very common and endlessly parroted assumption—that without belief in god, anything would be allowed. Divine reprimand and reward are ultimately credited with keeping us on the straight and narrow, and often said to have provided the moral foundation for our society. A charitable movement populated with skeptics and atheists would seem counterintuitive or even completely bananas then, but nonetheless, a number of causes under the umbrella of Effective Altruism (EA) are blossoming. How do we account for this? Should we credit our learned behavior to a society built on these heavenly mandates, or is it something else?

Spoiler alert: the answer is something else.

Whether it comes from the prosaic lips of Ivan Fyodorovitch of The Brothers Karamazov, in the more contemporary form of Dinesh D’Souza, or confronted you recently one way or another, the common argument sees morality as having originated from the outside. Without a punishing set of external pressures imposed from up high, so it goes, mankind will naturally veer off into a wilderness of undesirable behavior. If we care to reexamine the ABCs of atheism, we could start with what Elizabeth Anderson aptly describes as the atheist commitment to “the expansion and growth of the human mind.” Of course, this might seem obnoxiously smug. Who would march against personal growth?

Nobody

What Anderson is getting at is less about condescending to theists and more about illustrating where morality originates for atheists. Jean-Paul Sartre pre-empted her decades before by contending that morality comes from within and grows outwardly. Without wading too far into the philosophical thicket, we’ll leave you with Sartre illustrating how even personal decisions can radiate outwards, “In fashioning myself I fashion man.” Within each of us, overlapping and intertwining motivations help us fashion ourselves and our morals, and much of the time we would like to see the rest of the world follow suit. Have we met nudists that only want for the whole of humanity to shed these rags we affix to ourselves on the regular? Absolutely. Transplant this model onto an aversion to human suffering and now we’re talking.

Skepticism as Solidarity

Something like this line of reasoning has been recycled and repurposed for as long as mankind has known anything. Intense personal feelings such as love, kinship and solidarity are unquestionably responsible for shaping moral values, and yet we struggle to exorcise this suspicion of non-believers. If anything, as Andrei Volkov points out, non-believers and skeptics may have incredibly compelling reasons for caring about others.

In this sense, the Effective Altruism movement, largely populated by the skeptical, secular, rational, and atheistic types, makes sense. The often principled and examined lives of this crowd, continually shaped and enriched by facts and new information, fit neatly within a charitable cause that are primarily evidence-based. The utilitarian bent of the movement, which advocates doing the most good for the greatest number, appeals to nearly everyone. And the insistence on making critical decisions with evidence and reason (e.g. randomized control trials, external evaluations) would motivate nearly everyone as well, and particularly the Skeptics For Charity submovement taking shape.

These developments carry practical weight when considering that Givewell, the flagship charity evaluator of the EA movement, is now moving more money than Charity Navigator.  Channeling science and skeptical inquiry into the most pressing problems facing humanity is itself a form of activism--a desire to see our exacting taste for evidence and accountability reflected back at us in charity. We want this for others because we would want it for ourselves. The demand for others to receive the same standards as we enjoy is as real as any other cause.

The same evidence and calculations used to determine the truth about our charitable efforts also reveals that we need not sacrifice our lifestyle to have an impact. Our currency has potentially 100x the spending power elsewhere which means we can simply leverage scientific techniques to effect massive-scale social change without losing what we have. Skeptics For Charity is currently running a pledge initiative that allows everyone to make a massive ripples in global poverty that can be found here. The adage (mis)attributed to Dostoevsky “without belief in god, anything is permitted” likely reads differently to an Effective Altruist and Skeptic For Charity than most. Absent the assumption of god and all the mandated morality that follows, we are freer to form a values system based on human solidarity and a commitment to ensuring that we’re truly making the impact we want for others.

[Joey Savoie is the Executive Director of Charity Science and Tee Barnett is the Programs and Educational Officer at Charity Science]

(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, for the reasons discussed in this thread, and as Scott Alexander gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)

Scott recently wrote a post called No Time Like The Present For AI Safety Work. It makes the argument for the importance of organisations like MIRI thus, and explores the last two premises:

1. If humanity doesn’t blow itself up, eventually we will create human-level AI.

2. If humanity creates human-level AI, technological progress will continue and eventually reach far-above-human-level AI

3. If far-above-human-level AI comes into existence, eventually it will so overpower humanity that our existence will depend on its goals being aligned with ours

4. It is possible to do useful research now which will improve our chances of getting the AI goal alignment problem right

5. Given that we can start research now we probably should, since leaving it until there is a clear and present need for it is unwise

I placed very high confidence (>95%) on each of the first three statements – they’re just saying that if trends continue moving towards a certain direction without stopping, eventually they’ll get there. I had lower confidence (around 50%) on the last two statements.

Commenters tended to agree with this assessment; nobody wanted to seriously challenge any of 1-3, but a lot of people said they just didn’t think there was any point in worrying about AI now. We ended up in an extended analogy about illegal computer hacking. It’s a big problem that we’ve never been able to fully address – but if Alan Turing had gotten it into his head to try to solve it in 1945, his ideas might have been along the lines of “Place your punch cards in a locked box where German spies can’t read them.” Wouldn’t trying to solve AI risk in 2015 end in something equally cringeworthy?

As always, it's worth reading the whole thing, but I'd be interested in the thoughts of the LessWrong community specifically.

(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, as discussed in this thread, and as Scott Alexander gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)

Scott recently wrote a post called Bicameral Reasoning. It touches on epistemology and scope insensitivity. Here are some excerpts, though it's worth reading the whole thing:

Delaware has only one Representative, far less than New York’s twenty-seven. But both states have an equal number of Senators, even though New York has a population of twenty million and Delaware is uninhabited except by corporations looking for tax loopholes.

[...]

I tend to think something like “Well, I agree with this guy about the Iraq war and global warming, but I agree with that guy about election paper trails and gays in the military, so it’s kind of a toss-up.”

And this way of thinking is awful.

The Iraq War probably killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people. If you think that it was unnecessary, and that it was possible to know beforehand how poorly it would turn out, then killing a few hundred thousand people is a really big deal. I like having paper trails in elections as much as the next person, but if one guy isn’t going to keep a very good record of election results, and the other guy is going to kill a million people, that’s not a toss-up.

[...]

I was thinking about this again back in March when I had a brief crisis caused by worrying that the moral value of the world’s chickens vastly exceeded the moral value of the world’s humans. I ended up being trivially wrong – there are only about twenty billion chickens, as opposed to the hundreds of billions I originally thought. But I was contingently wrong – in other words, I got lucky. Honestly, I didn’t know whether there were twenty billion chickens or twenty trillion.

And honestly, 99% of me doesn’t care. I do want to improve chickens, and I do think that their suffering matters. But thanks to the miracle of scope insensitivity, I don’t particularly care more about twenty trillion chickens than twenty billion chickens.

Once again, chickens seem to get two seats to my moral Senate, no matter how many of them there are. Other groups that get two seats include “starving African children”, “homeless people”, “my patients in hospital”, “my immediate family”, and “my close friends”.

[...]

I’m tempted to say “The House is just plain right and the Senate is just plain wrong”, but I’ve got to admit that would clash with my own very strong inclinations on things like the chicken problem. The Senate view seems to sort of fit with a class of solutions to the dust specks problem where after the somethingth dust speck or so you just stop caring about more of them, with the sort of environmentalist perspective where biodiversity itself is valuable, and with the Leibnizian answer to Job.

But I’m pretty sure those only kick in at the extremes. Take it too far, and you’re just saying the life of a Delawarean is worth twenty-something New Yorkers.

Thoughts?

(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, as discussed in this thread, and as Scott gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)

Scott Alexander recently posted about growth mindset, with a clarificatory followup post here. He discussed some possible weaknesses of its advocates - as well as their strength. Here's a quote outlining the positions discussed:

[Bloody Obvious Position]: innate ability might matter, but that even the most innate abilityed person needs effort to fulfill her potential. If someone were to believe that success were 100% due to fixed innate ability and had nothing to do with practice, then they wouldn’t bother practicing, and they would fall behind. [...]

[Somewhat Controversial Position]: The more children believe effort matters, and the less they believe innate ability matters, the more successful they will be. This is because every iota of belief they have in effort gives them more incentive to practice. A child who believes innate ability and effort both explain part of the story might think “Well, if I practice I’ll become a little better, but I’ll never be as good as Mozart. So I’ll practice a little but not get my hopes up.” A child who believes only effort matters, and innate ability doesn’t matter at all, might think “If I practice enough, I can become exactly as good as Mozart.” Then she will practice a truly ridiculous amount to try to achieve fame and fortune. This is why growth mindset works.

[Very Controversial Position]: Belief in the importance of ability directly saps a child’s good qualities in some complicated psychological way. It is worse than merely believing that success is based on luck, or success is based on skin color, or that success is based on whatever other thing that isn’t effort. It shifts children into a mode where they must protect their claim to genius at all costs, whether that requires lying, cheating, self-sabotaging, or just avoiding intellectual effort entirely. When a fixed mindset child doesn’t practice as much, it’s not because they’ve made a rational calculation about the utility of practice towards achieving success, it’s because they’ve partly or entirely abandoned success as a goal in favor of the goal of trying to convince other people that they’re Smart.

 

Carol Dweck unambiguously believes the Very Controversial Position. 

Like many Less Wrong readers, I greatly enjoy Slate Star Codex; there's a large overlap in readership. However, the comments there are far worse, not worth reading for me. I think this is in part due to the lack of LW-style up and downvotes. Have there ever been discussion threads about SSC posts here on LW? What do people think of the idea occasionally having them? Does Scott himself have any views on this, and would he be OK with it?

Update:

The latest from Scott:

I'm fine with anyone who wants reposting things for comments on LW, except for posts where I specifically say otherwise or tag them with "things i will regret writing"

In this thread some have also argued for not posting the most hot-button political writings.

Would anyone be up for doing this? Ataxerxes started with "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"

LessWrongers who like GiveWell recommended charities may be interested in taking part in or donating to a new fundraiser called Experience Poverty. As well as deworming hundreds of children, it's an unusually good opportunity to find people who are interested in cost-effective charity and start conversations with them - something it's rare to find an excuse to do. Dozens of people and many effective altruist groups around the world are going to take part. Here are the details:

What: Spend only $2.50 a day on food for three days. Get sponsored to raise money to fight poverty.
Why: Half of the world spends $2.50 or less on food each day. This reflects income levels at which people often can’t afford basic health care. All money raised goes to buy medicines that cost only 50 cents. It is so cheap to us, but people still cannot afford it.
Who: People who want to do something to help the global poor and get a sense of what poverty's like.
When: April 22-24, 2015. If those dates don’t work for you you can set your own. For example, if you're at a US university you can choose to do it on April 6-8, when some American college groups are doing it.
What you can vary: Any of this: the amount you spend, the number of days and the date. For example, see below for the ‘challenge mode’ of spending only $1.50.
How: Sign up via these links for the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Eurozone. Then ask friends and family to sponsor you. We’ll send you guides, pointers, and we can even do a one-on-one Skype to help you help the most people possible. Just contact us at info@charityscience.com with “Experience Poverty Skype” as the subject line.


Left: What a typical American family eats in a week. Right: What a typical family in Chad (an African country) eats in a week.

Where does the money go? SCI

The money raised goes to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI for short). Experience Poverty is a partnership between Charity Science and SCI. SCI gives out medicine that cures children who have parasitic worms (including those that cause the disease schistosomiasis). These parasites live inside your body and suck your blood. The effects include fatigue, bloody diarrhoea, fever, chills, and other such lovely symptoms. Rather understandably, being so ill leads to many sick days from school and work. In fact, this is why deworming is arguably one of the most cost-effective ways to give children an education, among other things (Miguel and Kremer 2004 found that it led to a 25% reduction in school absenteeism, although this is a difficult effect to pin down; for more details, see this from GiveWell).

There isn't really a single figure which gives a good sense of SCI's strength - the closest would an estimate of its cost per QALY, but I believe GiveWell sees extant estimates of this as problematic. (In our own marketing we use the figure for the cost of the drugs - around 50 cents - but this is purely to maximise the amount raised.) By far the strongest reason to raise money for SCI is that it's been picked as one of the world's most effective charities by GiveWell, the most reliable and empirical charity evaluator by a long way. For more information see GiveWell's detailed review, or Charity Science's simpler summary. 

How do you join? - Click Here

Click here then follow the prompts. You set your goal for how much you’d like to raise (we suggest setting it as $500 or more), write about why you’re doing it, and then it’s as simple as asking your friends and family to sponsor you. Most people will be touched by your dedication to helping those less fortunate and will be happy to help you out.

Or you can just donate to the campaign! 50 cents gives a treatment to a child, so just $20 treats 40 children.

If you'd like to use a currency other than US dollars, you can use our pages for Canada, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Eurozone.

What could you possibly eat for only $2.50 a day?

Not much. But that’s kind of the point. It’s to get a sense of how limiting $2.50 is. It’s like running a marathon for charity, but a lot more related.

However, it’s not all abstinence. (That’s reserved for the people taking the challenge mode who will spend only $1.50 a day.) Here’s a few cheap meals people have tried in the past:

• Rice, beans, and spices or soy sauce
• Butternut squash pasta
• Ramen noodles (always a guilty pleasure anyway)
• Oatmeal with chopped banana

Things you’ll have to give up:

• Starbucks or buying coffee out
• Restaurants
• Alcoholic drinks

What are the rules?

The spirit of the event involves getting a (very rough) experience of poverty, and to ultimately make it so that fewer people have to have similar experiences. As long as it is done in this spirit, do what works for you. If you need to spend a bit more money, you can set your own amount. If you can’t do it on April 22-24, do a different time. If you lapse during your three days, it’s OK. You might even want to mention it on Facebook, talking about how difficult it was. It will help people understand how hard poverty is.

Why $2.50?

Half of the world lives on less than $1,368 a year. Around 65% of that is spent on food, which means $2.43 a day. We rounded to $2.50 a day because round numbers are nicer, but you can spend only $2.43 if you’d like.

You might have traveled to a poor country and know that you can buy more for $2.50 overseas. This is a good point, which is why the $2.43 figure is adjusted to how much $2.43 could buy in the USA in 2005. That’s not much. Now imagine that you have to use the remaining $1.75 per day on shelter, transport, healthcare, and entertainment. That’s why we’re running this campaign. Because that’s just too little and we want to change it.

Challenge Mode: live on $1.50

Yawn. $2.50? You already did that in college. Well worry not my frugal friend, there is a challenge mode! $1.50 a day is roughly the international poverty line, so why not try to live on only that for 3 days?

Why do the challenge mode?

• People raise more when they suffer more. Yes, they did a study on this, and yes, people are strange creatures.
• You’ll get a better sense of what extreme poverty is like.
• You’ll get an e-high five from the Experience Poverty team.

What if I live outside the US?

We have separate pages with different currencies for the following countries:

• The US
• Canada
• The UK
• Australia
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• The Eurozone

If you don’t live in any of those countries then you can either join the US page which will let your friends donate in dollars or you can email us to see if we can add your country. Donations are tax-deductible in the US and Canada and SCI will get GiftAid in the UK.

For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?

I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:

What is Less Wrong?

Less Wrong is an online community for discussion of rationality. Topics of interest include decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future.

However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.

How frequently do you think you *should* check email? You can also say how frequently you do in comments.

Personally I'm sold on thinking you should check it around once a day, not necessarily without fail. That increases focus on both email and non-email, and minimises getting sucked into distractions. But some people I know disagree. Some believe in getting notifications whenever a new email comes in.

For anyone who'd like to check email less often and uses GMail, I recommend using http://inboxpause.com/ and this full screen compose link: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&shva=1

Edited to add: I'd recommend everyone at least try checking only once a day, at least for a few days, to see if you find it more productive and/or relaxing. That'd be a big enough win to make experimenting worthwhile.

GiveWell have just announced their latest charity recommendations! What are everyone’s thoughts on them?

A summary: all of the old charities (GiveDirectly, SCI and Deworm the World) remain on the list. They're rejoined by AMF, as the room for more funding issues that led to it being delisted have been resolved to GiveWell's satisfaction. Together these organisations form GiveWell's list of 'top charities', which is now joined by a list of other charities which they see as excellent but not quite in the top tier. The charities on this list are Development Media International, Living Goods, and two salt fortification programs (run by GAIN and ICCIDD).

As normal, GiveWell's site contains extremely detailed writeups on these organisations. Here are some shorter descriptions which I wrote for Charity Science's donations page and my tool for donating tax-efficiently, starting with the new entries:

GiveWell's newly-added charities

Boost health and cognitive development with salt fortification

The charities GAIN and ICCIDD run programs that fortify the salt that millions of poor people eat with iodine. There is strong evidence that this boosts their health and cognitive development; iodine deficiency causes pervasive mental impairment, as well as stillbirth and congenital abnormalities such as severe retardation. It can be done very cheaply on a mass scale, so is highly cost-effective. GAIN is registered in the US and ICCIDD in Canada (although Canadians can give to either via Charity Science, which for complex reasons helps others who donate tax-deductibly to other charities), allowing for especially efficient donations from these countries, and taxpayers from other countries can also often give to them tax-deductibly. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed reviews of GAIN and ICCIDD.

Educate millions in life-saving practices with Development Media International

Development Media International (DMI) produces radio and television broadcasts in developing countries that tell people about improved health practices that can save lives, especially those of young children. Examples of such practices include exclusive breastfeeding. DMI are conducting a randomized controlled trial of their program which has found promising indications of a large decrease in children's deaths. With more funds they would be able to reach millions of people, due to the unparalleled reach of broadcasting. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed review.

Bring badly-needed goods and health services to the poor with Living Goods

Living Goods is a non-profit which runs a network of people selling badly-needed health and household goods door-to-door in their communities in Uganda and Kenya and provide free health advice. A randomized controlled trial suggested that this caused a 25% reduction in under-5 mortality among other benefits. Products sold range from fortified foods and mosquito nets to cookstoves and contraceptives. Giving to Living Goods is an exciting opportunity to bring these badly needed goods and services to some of the poorest families in the world. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed review.

GiveWell's old and returning charities

Treat hundreds of people for parasitic worms

Deworm the World and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) treat parasitic worm infections such as schistosomiasis, which can cause urinary infections, anemia, and other nutritional problems. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed review, or the more accessible Charity Science summary. Deworm the World is registered in the USA and SCI in the UK, allowing for tax-efficient direct donations in those countries, and taxpayers from other countries can also often give to them efficiently.

Make unconditional cash transfers with GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly lets you empower people to purchase whatever they believe will help them most. Eleven randomized controlled trials have supported cash transfers’ impact, and there is strong evidence that recipients know their own situation best and generally invest in things which make them happier in the long term. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed review, or the more accessible Charity Science summary.

Save lives and prevent infections with the Against Malaria Foundation

Malaria causes about a million deaths and two hundred million infections a year. Thankfully a $6 bednet can stop mosquitos from infecting children while they sleep, preventing this deadly disease. This intervention has exceptionally robust evidence behind it, with many randomized controlled trials suggesting that it is one of the most cost-effective ways to save lives. The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is an exceptional charity in every respect, and was GiveWell's top recommendation in 2012 and 2013. Not all bednet charities are created equal, and AMF outperforms the rest on every count. They can distribute nets cheaper than most others, for just $6.13 US. They distribute long-lasting nets which don’t need retreating with insecticide. They are extremely transparent and monitor their own impact carefully, requiring photo verification from each net distribution. For more information, read GiveWell's detailed review, or the more accessible Charity Science summary.

How to donate

To find out which charities are tax-deductible in your country and get links to give to them tax-efficiently, you can use this interactive tool that I made. If you give this season, consider sharing the charities you choose on the EA Donation Registry. We can see which charities EAs pick, and which of the new ones prove popular!