Ineffective Altruism

Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.

If only someone would invent a time machine so we can see what effects our actions have on the far future...

We communicated via SMS instead of AirBnb’s website because AirBnb’s website has an algorithm that scans our messages for keywords and punishes hosts it thinks did a poor job—regardless of the star rating a customer like me provides.

I was skeptical of this after reading (from one of your comment replies) that you only heard about this from the host, but some searching turned up a report in the NYT (confirming an original report in the WSJ) that's even worse:

Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”

As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.

Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.

I think this is true, and close to my deepest concern about the EA movement. I would like someone to articulate this clearly and with concrete detail, in EA's own term.

I intend to write that post myself, but if someone else beat me too it, or wrote a better one, I would be grateful.

Most people are disconnected from reality, most of the time. This is most noticeable to me when it manifests itself in scope insensitivity, but it appears in other ways too. In this case, you choosing to spend two hours walking to save costs is not a “keep in touch with reality” measure, it is a “lsusr is wasting his time” measure. Two hours of your time could be spent on things that really matter to you. Don’t quit Robotics Club if you like Robotics Club, but recognize that you do it for fuzzies and not for utils.

The average person in a developed country is probably net-neutral or even slightly net-positive to humans as a whole. I agree with you that evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict on other people. But your opportunity costs are real actual costs too. If you make decisions (like quitting a project) that affect lots of people because you’re constrained on not having enough hours in a day, and then waste some of the hours in a day that you do have on a misguided idea of “staying in touch with reality,” you have failed to stay in touch with reality.

Still, I think parts of your core message are really important. Evil does happen when you separate yourself from the pain you inflict, because it’s very easy to abstract it away. This is how child slavery and other moral atrocities continue. Also, it’s actually important to stay in touch with reality and not become the “longtermist Chad” or something. You stay in touch with reality by being careful about the decisions you make, being cognizant of what you’re giving up and trading off against, and yes, by being willing to be the boots on the ground whenever it’s needed. But you gain no points by doing it when it’s not, when it’s actively harmful, when your time is limited and you have more valuable things to do.

I think the OP's overarching concern is something like a narrow utilitarianism whose decision algorithm takes EV over only a limited number of horizons and decision sizes. There is unknown EV in exploring the world more personally and in reproducing knowledge and skills. My hunch is that such optimization of human life takes these different aspects at least multiplicatively.

Expected value calculations have limits for decisions which will affect your worldview, i.e. exploration. Or decisions along the axis of goods which you don't have a good model for, i.e. education.

This is one of the most morally powerful things you have ever written. Thanks.

Not that AirBnb didn't try. We communicated via SMS instead of AirBnb's website because AirBnb's website has an algorithm that scans our messages for keywords and punishes hosts it thinks did a poor job—regardless of the star rating a customer like me provides.

Where'd you find that out?

Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.

No, no it doesn't.

Consider the trolley problem, where you have to hurt 1 person to save 5. Does it work better if you feel all the pain of the one person being run over by a trolley? You might argue that feeling their pain still serves the purpose of making sure you think carefully before deciding that sacrificing the 1 person really is necessary, but the problem with that reasoning is that pain is not well calibrated for getting people to make subtle, situational, decisions. It's just "I can't stand this much pain, run from it".

You might further try to save the idea by suggesting that that only fails because we can't feel pain caused by inaction, but I can't believe that it would be good to feel pain caused by inaction--everyone who doesn't donate as much as he can afford to to save people (and not just 10%, either) would be feeling horrible pain all the time.

You also get problems with the pain equivalent of utility monsters (in this case, beings who feel exceptionally pained at slight injuries) and people who feel pain at good things (like a religious person who feels pain because heretics exist).