Boredom vs. Scope Insensitivity

When I contribute to charity, it's usually to avoid feeling guilty rather than to feel good as such... imagining myself as being the guy who doesn't rescue a drowning swimmer because he doesn't want to get his suit wet isn't a state I want to be in.

These charities can save someone's life for about $1,000. If you spend $1,000 on anything else, you've as good as sentenced someone to death. I find this to be really disturbing, and thinking about it makes think about doing crazy things, such as spending my $20,000 savings on a ten year term life insurance policy worth $10,000,000 and then killing myself and leaving the money to charity. At $1,000 a life, that's ten thousand lives saved. I suspect that most people who literally give their lives for others don't get that kind of return on investment.

Do we value saving lives independently of the good feelings we get from it? Some people seem to (or claim to), while others don’t (or claim not to). For those who do, some value (or claim to value) the lives saved linearly, and others don’t.

Perhaps (this is a descriptive and not a normative answer) we value believing we're good people. If we know that we're doing a sub-maximal amount of good in order to feel better, we won't feel like good people anymore. That is, a particular logical sort of person only gets the warm fuzzies when they know they're acting objectively rather than trying to maximize warm fuzzies.

Example: Sally can donate $100/month to charity. She likes dogs, so she donates it to help stray dogs, and feels like a good person. Then someone points out to her that unless she thinks animal lives are more important than human lives, she should donate it to help humans. Now if she donates to animal shelters just because she likes animals, she will feel like a bad person because she knows she's more interested in fuzzy feelings than in actually doing good. Therefore, she donates to human-oriented charities. Now she knows that she's really helping other people instead of just feeling good about herself, and so she feels good about herself. Since she feels good about herself, she keeps doing it.

"Shut up and multiply" doesn't assume specifically total utilitarianism, you can value lives sublinearly and still hold important the principle of not just relying on intuition.

I expect that one source of the problem is seen in equating these two situations. On one hand you have 100 copies of the same movie. On the other hand, you have 100 distinct humans you could pay to save. To draw a direct comparison you would need to treat these as 100 copies of some idealized stranger. In which case the scope insensitivity might (depending on how you aggregate the utility of a copy's life) make more sense as a heuristic.

And this sort of simplification is likely one part of what is happening when we naively consider the questions:

How much would you pay to save a random stranger’s life? How much would you pay to save 100 strangers?

I wonder how this experiment would change if you presented lists of names? If you encouraged a different model for the 100 strangers.

I'd guess that the people who arguing for linearity are more extrapolating from their horror at the thought of their own death, rather than the pleasure of saving other peoples lives.

(Eliezer sometimes treats scope insensitivity as a simple arithmetical error that the brain commits, like in this quote: “the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with”. Considering that the brain has little trouble multiplying by eight in other contexts and the fact that scope insensitivity starts with numbers as low as 2, it seems more likely that it’s not an error but an adaptation, just like boredom.)

Arithmetic is a relatively late cognitive technology that doesn't appear by its own (1). We can to a certain degree train ourselves to use exact numbers instead of approximate magnitudes in our reasoning, but that remains an imperfect art - witness the difficulty people have truly grasping numbers that are at all higher. An imprecise analog magnitude representation is the brain's native way for representing numbers (2.pdf) 3), and while there is evidence about that analog system indeed being capable of multiplication (4), I'd be careful about making claims concerning what low-level systems we have no introspective access to can or cannot multiply.

(Especially since we do know plenty of cases where a particular system in the brain doesn't share the capabilities other systems do - we might intuitively solve differential equations in order to predict a baseball's flight path, but that doesn't mean we can natively solve abstract equations in our head.)

[2](http://www.duke.edu/web/mind/level2/faculty/liz/Publications/Brannon%20\(2006\).pdf)

How much would you pay to save a random stranger’s life? How much would you pay to save 100 strangers?

If I have the chance to abstract the decision, $0. I expect decreased population to increase the chance of a desireable long term future (ie. One without human extinction.)

In most cases, I would suffer extreme akrasia when faced with such a decision. I have remarkably strong emotional impulses towards heroism. Not so much the 'being a hero' part. It's more like I experience wrath for whatever 'bad thing' (such as death) is occurring and would combat it even when it made me appear the villain.

Don't worry, the aforementioned akrasia and the rather low weight I place on the topic will prevent me from declaring a jihad on excess population.

Yes, it is good to distinguish altruism and cooperation in just the way you did. Cooperation, when done well, should have a rough linearity in lives saved, while feel-good altruism usually does not.

I have a question for everyone. What is the evolutionary function of "feelings about feelings"? Is there one, or is it more of a spandrel? It seems that our emotions are largely hardwired, and it wouldn't be very useful to feel bad about how they work.

Maybe it serves some signaling purpose if we discuss our feelings with others? (As in "I feel really bad that I don't love you anymore.") But why should others take these signals seriously?

Yes, utilons aren't the same as warm fuzzies.

I'm also more in favor of cooperation than altruism, but I want to encourage altruists to displace their natural boredom-prone diminishing-returns pleasure seeking for more rational utility boosting. Surely there's some enlightened satisfaction to be had in achieving a "high score" on actual benefits caused, like the Gates' foundation.

The popular programming-advice site stackoverflow quantifies your "altruistic" contribution in a number (more meaningful somehow than on a mere discussion site such as this; you're actually helping individuals achieve real goals). Many people are extremely addicted to increasing this number. If utility could be as reliably quantified, then altruists would certainly pursue it in the same game-like fashion.

I quit using stackoverflow after a few weeks of achieving nearly the maximum possible daily score; boredom (in theproblems I was solving) was a factor, but equally I was disgusted by the habitual nature (easily an hour a day at times) of my reward-seeking.

Re: Do we value saving lives independently of the good feelings we get from it?

Sure: there's the issues of rewards, reputation and status to consider. The effect of saving lives on the former may scale somewhat linearly - but the effect on the others certainly does not.

The reason saving lives is ~linear while watching the same movie is not, is about where you are on your utility curve.

Let's assume for a minute that utility over movies and lives are both a square root or something. Any increasing function with diminishing returns will do. The point is that we are going to get this result even if they are exactly the same utility curve.

Watching the movie once gives 1 utilon. Watching it 100 times gives 10 utilons. Easy peasy.

Saving lives is a bit different. We aren't literally talking about the difference between 0 people and n people, we are talking about the difference between a few billion and a few billion+n. Any increasing function with diminishing returns will be linear by this point, so for small games, shut up and multiply.

By this same argument, the fact that lives are locally linear is not much evidence at all (LR = ~1) that they are globally linear, because there aren't any coherent utility functions that aren't linear at this scale at this point. (unless you only care about how many lives you, individually save, which isn't exactly coherent either, but for other reasons.)

(I think the morally proper think to talk about is people dieing, not people living, because we are talking about saving lives, not birthing babies. But the argument is analogous; you get the idea.)

I hope this helps you.

You asked for corrections:

"Cooperation" doesn't necessarily imply behaviour conditional on reciprocation.

See the dictionary: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cooperation