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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too?

Any effort to alleviate suffering on a global scale, to truly expand your circles of concern is, I believe to lead to the people who have expanded their moral circles to get taken advantage of and extirpated by those who haven't. Albanians on Westminster bridge situation, really. Self defeating lunacy.

Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation

(more at the link)

Also, those who expanded their moral circle of concern after the example of Dickens's "Mrs. Jellyby

" seem to care less about those closest to them. I suspect this is a survey artefact and if I put a gun to their head and made them decide their mother and some random mother from another continent..

I feel all these are exploits against the human mind that lead to bad outcomes. E.g. all the food aid to Africa ended up with ever more people starving. Drowned refugee kid led to rape-murders in Europe, increase in crime and loss of social capital. etc.

It's all wrong. Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.

And that information channels that can be used to exploit this need to be closed.

Not that we shouldn't offer aid to foreigners, but it should be done deliberately and thoughtfully.

That's literally the point of EA. We shouldn't donate to causes with the best marketing, the most touching pictures of starving children, and so on; we should evaluate them objectively to see which ones actually help.

EA failure modes are rather more esoteric - what I had in mind was the knee jerk political reactions.

And so on and so forth.

Isn't it all a matter of tradeoffs though?

What I mean is, do you think it's possible to make policy decisions that don't have undesirable side effects?

Take business as an example. You can't spend too much time on thoughtful deliberation, because you must react to multiple competing inputs and try to respond to them in line with your strategy as much as possible. You must make choices that are really only bets about the state of the world now and what you think is the future. Then, tomorrow, you can only hope you'll be perceptive and fast-thinking enough to avoid making the mistakes you made yesterday.

Except in terms of national policy, "tomorrow" might mean "next year". It's a big ship, hard to turn around, especially because it's captained by consensus.

Well EA (at least in theory) is designed to deliberately and thoughtfully think of the best ways to offer aid to foreigners. One of the main ways they do this is by supporting and advertising programs like GiveWell (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities). Which is a program designed to properly evaluate the effectiveness of given charity based on metrics like QALYs (Quality of Life Years: https://www.healthanalytics.com/expertise/what-is-a-quality-adjusted-life-year-qaly/). The system then ranks the top charities based on how much good they do based on these rigorous statistics. It's system's like these that EA is really about here, using math and the tools of rationality to find the best ways to give aid to the world at large.

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