Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately

I'm amused and relieved to have finally followed the "shut up and multiply" link - dozens of prior allusions left me puzzled at the advice to multiply in the biblical sense. I'd always felt it a bit cultish to win by having more (indoctrinated) babies :)

Today I overhead a man in the supermarket telling his wife that maybe they should buy some lottery tickets, and I was reminded of Eliezer's "opening doors for little old ladies" line (which he repeated in his recent video answers).

Isn't buying lottery tickets also a form of purchasing warm fuzzies? I'm not sure that opening doors for little old ladies is any more defensible for a utilitarian than buying lottery tickets is for a rationalist.

Kiva.org has the distinct honor of being the only charity that has ensured me maximum utilons for my money with an unexpected bonus of most fuzzies experienced ever. Seeing my money being repaid and knowing that it was possible only because my charity dollars worked, that the recipient of my funds actually put the dollars to effective use enough to thrive and pay back my money, well, goddamn it felt good.

This is probably too late to be read by anyone, but here is a column by Steven Landsburg, my favorite economist, which says essentially the same thing; he simply phrases it as "don't diversify your charity 'portfolio': shut up, multiply, and give your whole charity budget to the most deserving one".

"Utilons" isn't quite the right word: utilons are all I purchase. My utility function is a sum of components: I can decompose it into a local part to do with my happiness and the happiness of those close to me (and thus status, warm fuzzies and the like) and a global part to do with things like the lives of strangers and the future of humanity. I try to strongly mark the boundary between those two, so I don't for example value the lives of people in the same country as me more than those in different countries.

You're saying I can more optimally spend resources on efforts that clearly serve one or the other than on efforts that try to do both and do neither well, and I agree, I'd just phrase it differently: purchase big-picture utility and small-picture utility separately.

By coincidence, I already do this - donating two hours a week to a local charity for children with learning difficulties, and donating cash to the Gates foundation (they seem much better qualified than me to calculate the expected return on charity investement), and a portion of the charity donations from my upcoming wedding is earmarked for the "establishement at which Eliezer works". I actually did it following the logic of this post, so it wan't a coincidence either.

This may be the good reaction for rationalists, but how do you feel about it, Eliezer, from your position in the non-profit sector? Do you think you should be teaching people to divide up their fuzzies and utilons, or making your non-profit more fuzzy?

Man doesn't live by warmth, status and altruism alone however.

For a more comprehensive list of things that may contribute to efficacy I would suggest Aristotle's Ethics or Tim Ferris' blog and 4 Hour Work Week.

Worth pointing out that one probably has to mix up the warmth and status generating activities quite a bit to avoid diminishing returns too. The first large check you give away will surely be very effective, after the fifth, maybe not. Tipping generously when its appropriate will always buy status and warmth with Prospect Theory's predicted effective multiplier for small numbers around a reference point.

Do you view this more as "Your true utility isoclines are concave in the plane of utilons vs. fuzzies", or, "You are not a rational utility-maximizer"?

I would have made this into a longer post, but it works much better appended to this one:

It's clear that you can't just make willpower appear with a snap of your fingers, so I consider fuzzies to be utilons for many human utility functions. However, utilitarians have it even better -- if they get fuzzies by giving fuzzies to someone else, they get to count all of the fuzzies generated as utilons. I urge people focused on being effective utilitarians to keep this in mind if they feel like they're running low on fuzzies.

Thanks, Eliezer!

This one was actually news to me. Separately is more efficient, eh? Hmmm... now I get to rethink my actions.

I had deliberately terminated my donations to charities that seemed closer to "rescuing lost puppies". I had also given up personal volunteering (I figured out {work - earn - donate} before I heard it here.) And now I'm really struggling with akrasia / procrastination / laziness /rebellion / escapism.

"You could, of course, reply that you don't trust selfish acts that are supposed to be other-benefiting as an "ulterior motive" ". That's a poisonous meme that runs in my brain. But I consciously declare that to be nonsense. I don't ever want to discuss "pure altruism" ever again! I applaud ulterior motives, "Just so long as people get helped." If you can figure out your ulterior motives, use them! Put them in harness. You might as well, they aren't going away.

But if that's the defense, then my act can't be defended as a good deed, can it? For these are self-directed benefits that I list.

I'm glad I'm an egoist and don't have to worry about stuff like this.

Maybe relevant to this post: the googolplex dust specks issue seems to be settled by nonlinearity/proximity.

Other people's suffering is non-additive because we value different people differently. The pain of a relative matters more to me than the pain of a stranger. A googolplex people can't all be important to me because I don't have enough neural circuitry for that. (Monkeysphere is about 150 people.) This means each subsequent person-with-dust-speck means less to me than the previous one, because they're further from me. The infinite sum may converge to a finite value that I feel is smaller than 50 years of torture.

It seems that to shut up and multiply, an altruist/rationalist needs to accept a non-obvious axiom that each person's joy or suffering carries equal weight regardless of proximity to the altruist. I for one refuse to accept this axiom because it's immoral to me; think about it.

I may be straying from your main point here, but...

Could you really utilize these 60 seconds in a better, more specialized way? Not any block of 60 seconds - these specific 60 seconds, that happened during your walk.

Had you not encountered that open trunk, would you open your laptop in the middle of that walk and started working on a world changing idea or an important charity plan? Unlikely - if that was the case you were already sitting somewhere working on that. You went out for a walk, not for work.

Would you, had you not encountered that open trunk, finish your walk 60 seconds earlier, went to sleep 60 seconds earlier, woke up 60 seconds earlier, started your workday 60 seconds earlier, and by doing all that moved these 60 seconds to connect with your regular productivity time? This is probably not the case either - if it was, that would mean you intentionally used that hard earned fuzz as an excuse to deliberately take one minute off your workday, and that would take small mindedness you do not seem to possess.

No - that act was an Action of Opportunity. Humans don't usually have a schedule to tight and so accurate that every lost minute messes it up. There is room for leeway, where you can push such gestures without compromising your specialized work.

I follow the virtue-ethics approach, I do actions that make me like the person that I want to be. The acquisition of any virtue requires practice, and holding open the door for old ladies is practice for being altruistic. If I weren't altruistic, then I wouldn't be making myself into the person I want to be.

It's a very different framework from util maximization, but I find it's much more satisfying and useful.

My plan to get myself to purchase utilons is to find the most efficient fuzzy cause I can, then say "This is how important it is for me to save my money." Then when the time comes to purchase utilons, I can say "You know that all-important fuzzy cause? Turns out there are even better causes out there, although they might not make you feel quite so warm inside."

Try to wean yourself off the need for warm fuzzies instead.

EDIT: No, don't try to wean yourself off the warm fuzzies, but get the warm fuzzies from friends and family, not from people in distress in need of charity. Feel good about yourself because you are achieving your goals, including altruistic ones. (end of edit)

Carl Rogers, founder of person centred counselling, theorised that there is an "organismic self", with all the attributes and abilities of the human organism within its own skin, and a "self-concept" built up from what the individual saw it was desirable to be. The conscious part of the human being builds up a map of how that human being's unconscious motivations and desires are. Part of this map is mere falsehood, lies told to make the person feel better about himself, because he has introjected the idea that this is the way he ought to be. Disparity between the map and the territory causes cognitive dissonance, and may make the need for warm fuzzies: cognitive dissonance is painful, pretending to be your own self-concept gives a warm fuzzy.

If you can make your self-concept, your map of yourself, match your organismic self, the actual territory which you may be strongly motivated to deny, then your need for warm fuzzies may reduce.

You will be more efficient if instead of buying warm fuzzies, you spend energy on utilons or signaling.

I am strongly motivated to altruism. I have decided to stop asking whether this is selfish or not. Yes, it is selfish, it fulfils My goals. No, it is not selfish, it fulfils the goals of others too. Is it "good" or "bad"? Don't know that either. I have decided that does not matter. It is what I want, perhaps merely for signalling purposes.

I'm posting here because I just saw a Facebook campaign to raise awareness of child abuse via profile pictures and chain letters. It takes little effort, and the marginal utility seemed extremely low, but I understand now that it is actually very good at generating fuzzies. As a side effect, the fuzzies provide an incentive, and it does generate a little bit of utility, so it's not entirely a bad thing unless it causes people to fall into the "I've done my bit for the world" mindset.

Just a note: The established term for "a hypothetical unit of utility" is "util" or "utile" (typically pronounced "yootle").

Why is it acceptable overhead to cater to primate impulses to the tune of $110,000?

I get that part of rationality is making the most of the faulty brain you have, but I'm not clear on the right way to decide which instincts to fight against, and which to placate.

And why does having more money justify spending SO more on fuzzies or status? wouldn't it be cheaper to have a social circle of non-billionaires, and have top-dog status by being the first with a macbook air? (which you would have bought anyway)

Does anyone really track the marginal utility of their possible investment this way? Utilons - sure. But ROI on status? ROI on "warm fuzzies"?

Also, this assumes we have good estimates of the ROI on all our options. Where do these estimates come from? In the real world, we often seem to spread our bets - constantly playing a game of multi-armed bandit with concept drift.

There are more basic desires as well. The warm fuzzy feeling may go towards attracting the opposite sex. I had my testosterone reduced, first through drugs, and then through castration. Did I overcome biases and become "less wrong"? Yes, I did. Any questions are welcome.

But in my own case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises as to whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others.

You're assuming that time, rather than stamina, is the limiting factor to the amount of work you can get done in a given day, but if that's so then sleeping is the hugest time waste ever. (Or that telling someone that their trunk is open costs as much stamina as the same amount of time spent on your day job.)

(And then there are acausal effects: if you hold doors open for people, then people sufficiently similar to you will hold doors open for you, and the overall time spent on walking through doors will go down. Where I come from everybody holds doors open for pretty much everybody else all the time, and if someone didn't I'd assume they were in a hurry, didn't see me, or were a foreigner.)

I wouldn't state the motivation for a "diverse charity portfolio" as positively desiring warm fuzzies-- rather, I think the aversion to a mixed set (note that I doubt we would usually want an only-hands-on set of charities-- too much work and would feel like pushing a boulder up a hill) is about potential exhaustion at repeatedly doing the one "most efficient" thing to the point that you're not taking 60 seconds of mental refreshment. Psychological viability is the missing element here, causing us to intuitively sense that the proposal isn't actually best, utility calculation be as it may (the actual calc would not have such problems).

the concentrated euphoria of being present in person when you turn a single human's life around

Should read "when you try to turn a single human's life around".

I have no idea what the actual percentage is, but I know there are people that are damned to suffering no matter how many helping hands they get. For reference, look at lottery winners who blow it all & end up back in poverty, or even in debt.

All this is quite right, but misses an essential point:

How can we align those three goals more effectively?

How can we use the human desire for status and warm fuzzies to maximize utilons?

And on the topic, I saved a sheep Friday. I felt all warm and fuzzy, and not just from the wool, but as I rode away I noted that most of what I know about such animals involves eating them!

Is the value of an action determined from the recipient or the giver? Using the example of telling someone their trunk is open, your cost in the action is 60 seconds and the benefit to them was... what? I suppose that would depend on the rest of the context. (Was it about to rain? Valuables in the car?) The example with the lawyer has more numbers available but the starting point of "worth" needs to be determined before the correct action can be determined.

This is only slightly relevant to this post, however. If warm fuzzies are the desired benefit, the cost/benefit ratio can completely ignore the recipient. (Technically, you are the recipient?) The same goes for status.