Curiosity – Effective Altruism Hurts People Who Donate Too Much

Elliot Temple
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Hello, I though I’d be answering here.

That was an interesting post, I appreciate that you are looking out for me. This is kind of you.
Plus, it was useful to help seeing how different our worldviews are ! Human minds have an impressive way of giving wildly different results depending on the input.

Now here’s the point where I’d deny being in a cult, but of course it’s impossible to convince anybody that you’re not in a cult. Doing so would make me look on the defensive, and it rarely appears convincing. Especially on the internet and not in a “in-person” conversation.

So instead I’ll just point out that what I’m doing is pretty unusual, even by EA standards. EA recommends giving about 10% of one’s revenues to charities - so me giving 50% is quite a stretch. I rarely ever mention that to other EAs, so this would be a pretty poor way to “fit in”.

Plus, I already have some savings. I’m certainly not giving to the point where I’d put myself in danger. That would be counterproductive if that were the case, you’re right.

Another VERY important point: you make it appear like donating so much is hurting me. However, from experience, quite the opposite happened.

You’ll have to trust me on this one but here I go: I’m quite good at knowing what makes me happy. This wasn’t the case 4 years ago, when I spent most of my time playing video games and watching series (before I started meditation).

As it turns out, I noticed that spending money for myself is a pretty poor way of having more happiness. I recommend the following links:

Instead, donating to others, and feeling that I can help others, are much more efficient at providing happiness. It allows me to align with my morals. As I did more meditation, I learned that my happiness mostly depends on my expectations. So I spent quite some time lowering my expectations - learning to be happy with what I already have. Turns out it works! Requires some training though (especially Vipassana meditation).
Plus, by giving away what I don’t really need, I send to my brain the message “I have more than enough”. Since I’m happier than ever, I don’t think on a bad path :)

So why am I giving 50%, anyway? There are several reasons (because, I insist, this is quite unusual in EA):

Of course, this is the result on my personal research - you’ve certainly read very different stuff than me on that topic, and that’s probably why we disagree on, say, the value of capitalism. I spent little time looking at theoretical economic stuff (I have a limited interest in theory, because most of the time it differs from what actually happens). I was more interested in fields that see the economy from a biophysical standpoint, like ecological economics.

Note: I could give the $20 for the forum access if I believed this could have a strong impact on myself. It’s just that in our conversation, you made some initial good points and I expected to learn a lot (hence why I spent time on it). But as the conversation went on, I realized I learned less than I expected (I probably was seeking for more practical advice). Anyway, it’s kind of you to give access out of concern for me!
(by the way, will this comment appear in Curiosity – Effective Altruism Hurts People Who Donate Too Much ?)

So in the end, the real question is rather: does donating to EA causes create more bad than good ? That would be quite serious if that were the case, I agree.

You said:

“As my considered, long-held philosophical opinion, I don’t believe that animals are capable of suffering, so all the animal welfare charity work is misguided.”

Ok, this seems to lead to wildly different assumptions about what’s important in the world, compared to what I think. I’ll focus on this point, we can debate the rest later.

Just a question that would help me calibrate. Imagine you are given a puppy, and told you’d receive an incentive of $10 (or whatever sum seems worth your time) if you were to cut down the puppy’s ear with a pair of scissors. And then to add salt to the wound. And then to break the puppy’s legs. And then to walk on the legs. And then to let the puppy in a garbage dump so that it dies of hunger. Would you do it ?

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As context, I’ve read this Notes on Effective Altruism

See the section:

“Bad” EAs, caught in a misery trap

I already believed that EA had some significant issues with this stuff affecting a fair amount of people.

I should have included this link in my article. I’ll edit it into the end.

Just a question that would help me calibrate. Imagine you are given a puppy, and told you’d receive an incentive of $10 (or whatever sum seems worth your time) if you were to cut down the puppy’s ear with a pair of scissors. And then to add salt to the wound. And then to break the puppy’s legs. And then to walk on the legs. And then to let the puppy in a garbage dump so that it dies of hunger. Would you do it ?

Absolutely not.

I skimmed your post and haven’t read most of it yet.

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What for? I didn’t claim EA was a cult. I wrote “I don’t think EA is a cult”. I just said it had a few similarities and merited the comparison.

Is this imprecision by you? Or is it an assumption that I was being imprecise, dishonest or purposefully under-stating what I believe (as many people would do, but I wasn’t)? Or something else?

I think meditating and avoiding the “rat race” and high-consumption consumerist culture is fine.

On the other hand, I think most people should save more than they do to help their kids start businesses, go to college, buy homes, etc. And to have more protection against bad luck like becoming ill or disabled. And to have more protection against inflation (and other societal changes that screw with your planning), losing your job, choosing a new job that pays less, etc., facing ageist hiring managers when you’re older, etc. And to have more flexibility to homeschool if you realize the school system is awful, even though that generally means one parent has to work a lot less or not work.

What if you have a young adult kid who works at a cash register and doesn’t like it and doesn’t know how to become skilled at a better job and find an awesome career? He could easily find his job miserable but need the money. That’s a common situation. You having more money could really help.

Do you have insurance which will pay you millions of dollars if you become unable to work? Your bio said you work in computing. People in that field often have millions of dollars of future earnings potential but no insurance policy to protect it.

There are just a few examples of how there are worthwhile uses of money that are different than e.g. conspicuous consumption or cluttering up your home with expensive junk.

This means I don’t want to bet on solutions that would only pay off on the very long-term (like investing in capital or improving the rationality of everyone on Earth).

There are many millions of people who think they have the right causes and it’s time to go ahead and take action. Many millions of them cancel out the efforts of many millions of other people. This is a very bad overall situation. What differentiates you? Why are you so confident that your causes are the right ones? And even if your causes are right, what are you doing to help resolve the disharmony where people work against each other, rather than just trying to make your side win?

Of course, this is the result on my personal research - you’ve certainly read very different stuff than me on that topic, and that’s probably why we disagree on, say, the value of capitalism. I spent little time looking at theoretical economic stuff (I have a limited interest in theory, because most of the time it differs from what actually happens). I was more interested in fields that see the economy from a biophysical standpoint, like ecological economics.

So if you haven’t read Ludwig von Mises (the deceased but top economist from the Austrian school of thought) and don’t know of anyone who did read Mises and wrote convincing refutations, and a lot of your views and actions contradict Mises, why be confident that you’re right and you’re actually doing something good?

If you don’t resolve disagreements before acting, shouldn’t your default expectation be that there’s a 50% chance you’re on the wrong side? Actually the odds are worse than that because sometimes there are more than conflicting two sides, and sometimes there are two sides but they’re both wrong. Even when there are basically two sides and one is right, there are often 100 different approaches to how to advocate for that side, what actions to take, etc. and many of those are bad despite being on the right side.

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Ok, you would not hurt a puppy. Good to know.
Why, though? If animals cannot suffer, this shouldn’t be a problem, no?

(let’s say nobody knows about this so you don’t have to worry about the social consequences. Let’s also assum disgust in not a main factor)

I didn’t claim EA was a cult. I wrote “I don’t think EA is a cult”. I just said it had a few similarities and merited the comparison.

Oh, that’s right, you wrote that. I just had forgotten about this sentence by the end of the article. My bad.
I should have written “This is when I should deny being in a situation comparable to being in a cult”. But this sentence is less straightforward.

On the other hand, I think most people should save more than they do to help their kids start businesses, go to college, buy homes, etc. And to have more protection against bad luck like becoming ill or disabled.

Don’t worry, I said I have savings. I take into account these things.

Do you have insurance which will pay you millions of dollars if you become unable to work?

Damn, the US seems like a rough place. I’m from France fortunately, so I have to worry less about these kind of things.

What differentiates you? Why are you so confident that your causes are the right ones? And even if your causes are right, what are you doing to help resolve the disharmony where people work against each other, rather than just trying to make your side win?

I am not that confident. I certainly wouldn’t be sure that what I’m doing is good if I focused my efforts on uncertain stuff like overthrowing capitalism or solving wild animal welfare.

That’s why I try to choose “low-risk” causes that are likely to be useful in any case. Giving people tactics that help being more happy (and to consume less), like meditation. Lowering the amount of animals that are suffering in factory farms (picture that by imagining a reduction in the number of puppies that are subjected to the treatment above). Improving food security by trying to find new food sources that need less energy.

As to why I take the energy depletion problem seriously, let’s say I’ve find several really good experts who warned about the problem, and upon inspecting what they said I didn’t find any big mistake. But to go futher on this topic we’ll need to get into specifics (The great energy descent (short version) - An important thing EA might have missed - EA Forum).

A for Mises, I might read it, it could be interesting. However, I’ve looked into his view on resource depletion. And I’m a bit disappointed. It’s basically that there will be “enough prospective abundance so that the macroeconomic does not impinge on the microeconomics of human action”, and that “in a hundred or five hundred years people will resort to other methods of producing heat and power”.
I understand it made sense at the time, but it is a bit outdated given the problems we face now - especially when the International Energy Agency announced a peak of fossil fuels within 5 years, wind and solar are far from being able to provide the needs of all of humanity, and there still is no absolute decoupling between energy and GDP at the global level (meaning that less energy leads to a decline in GDP).

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that would be incredibly traumatic and disgusting. it’s not cool to even bring that up. you want to use very provocative, baiting, emotional examples (and without forewarning). that’s a terrible place to start to get understanding and resolve disagreements. it’s the desperate activist way of pulling you into a cause. Elliot thinks that you’ve got some wrong philosophical premises, which are pretty deep and generically bear upon animal rights issues, and you want to jump right into talking about maiming puppies?

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You’re right that this is hard to read (and was hard to write), I hadn’t though of other readers. Sorry I caused you unnecessary mental anguish, I didn’t think you were reading, I feel kinda bad you had to picture that.

It’s just that the position “I don’t believe that animals are capable of suffering”, which I personally find downright terrifying because of its implications.
It is a position that (in my opinion) serves as a justification for a lot of harm. I’ve seen many people use it to not have to care about factory farming, so it tends to upset me.

I felt like kind of an urge to see if this was really the position Elliot held, or not. It’s provocative and emotional, I agree, and I normally don’t use such appeals, but it was in reaction to the extremely strong statement that animals could not suffer. I feared that if I didn’t include emotional statements, the debate would revolve around whether roombas can suffer or stuff really removed from the very real nature of the topic. Not really reasonable on my side, I know, I got carried away.

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I’ve been asked questions similar to this before and I don’t think it’s the most productive way to approach the topic.

I didn’t even know about that Mises comment on energy; it’s not what I mentioned him for, and I didn’t mean to bring energy up.

I’d talk about animals or energy, but I don’t want to do both at once. If you prefer energy we can switch, though I’m guessing you prefer animals. To me, those two topics are about equally good. Either one can serve as an example of an EA cause, so it’s relevant to whether EA is actually getting causes wrong or not.

For animals, what I’d like to do next is tell you a short story/summary about my previous attempts to debate with animal rights people and vegans. Does that sound OK as a way to steer the conversation?

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AG, you’re right that the example was baiting.

I wasn’t baited though. I’m a calm philosopher. Ask Yourself used a worse example with me on voice chat (he doesn’t like debating in text) and then yelled at me a bunch for my answer before banning me from his Discord server for refusing to give a direct yes-or-no answer to a question I tried to explain was ambiguous, misleading or based on a false premise (I forget exactly what it was). That did not traumatize me. I wasn’t even upset. He didn’t add flourishes like salting wounds though. It’s more typical, IME, to ask like “Would you torture a puppy?” instead of giving details of the torture. But anyway I’m fine.

You (AG), on the other hand, were baited and then rude. You thought he was rude, so then you were rude back to him (maybe not consciously on purpose, but also this is way ruder than your usual writing).

I think AG and CB are both caught up in problematic dynamics related to how the sides fight with each other. Productive activism should find other approaches which don’t cause lots of fighting and offend and alienate many people. I think many people advocating many causes are way too willing to fight and way too OK with fighting as an outcome. See Curiosity – Controversial Activism Is Problematic

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That’s interesting. My position is compatible with the society we live in. That is, my claim (that animals can’t suffer) doesn’t imply our current society is bad or needs major changes.

On the other hand, CB’s position implies that large changes to society are needed, which would potentially have large negative impacts on humans.

As a first approximation, it’s the claim that somewhat threatens Western civilization which should potentially terrify (or concern) people, not the claim that says the status quo isn’t so bad.

If you want to make dramatic changes to the world and advocate for that, you should have some awareness of what you’re doing. You shouldn’t find it terrifying to encounter people who think the current world is reasonably OK in some way. You shouldn’t be terrified by ideas which threaten your ability to dramatically change the world; you shouldn’t be so emotionally hostile to anything which threatens your activist cause.

I assume what’s actually going on is you’re imagining a totally different world which I didn’t advocate for. Maybe you would start torturing animals if you thought they couldn’t suffer? Maybe you see no reason not to? If so, don’t project that onto me. When you encounter philosophical claims that you don’t know a lot about, you should respect that you don’t immediately know their meaning or consequences, and working that out can be complicated. If you jump to conclusions about their implications, you’ll likely be wrong.

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(Don’t want to get in the way of the discussion here. Brief acknowledgement: The comment was rude because it had an indignant, punitive tone. I believe that I would have been more alerted to this fact had I actually been emotional while writing it. However, since I wasn’t emotional, I didn’t expect to be rude, and I presume that the tribally-split way of talking emerged out of habit and exposure. Very broadly speaking, that is another kind of reminder to check one’s programming and understand the reasons why you’re saying things/how you’re saying them.)

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I prefer that you post what you want to say, not try to avoid being distracting

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Elliot Temple and Corentin Biteau Discussion