Shut Up and Divide?

how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist?

A very, very large portion.

When I was a child, I read a tract published by Inter-Varsity Press called "The salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer". It's a story about a Christian who tries to actually live according to Christian virtues. Eventually, he concludes that he can't; in a world in which so many people are starving and suffering, he can't justify spending even the bare minimum food and money on himself that would be necessary to keep him alive.

It troubled me for years, even after I gave up religion. It's stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you're killing someone. (It's even more stressful now that I can actually afford to do these things regularly.)

You can rationalize that allowing yourself little luxuries will enable you to do enough more good to make up for the lives you could have saved. (Unlikely; the best you can do is buy yourself "offsets"; but you'd usually save more lives with more self-denial.) You can rationalize that saving lives today inevitably leads to losing more lives in the future. (This carried me for a long time.) But ultimately, the only way I find to cope is not caring.

Recently, Michael Vassar told me I was one of the nicest people he knows. And yet I know that every day, I make decisions that would horrify almost everyone in America with their callousness. Other people act the same way; they just avoid making the decisions, by not thinking about the consequences of their actions.

I'm not a nice person inside, by any stretch of the imagination. I just have less of a gap between how nice my morals tell me to be, and how nice I act. This gap, in most people, is so large, that although I have morals that are "worse" than everyone around me, I act "nicer" than most of them by trying to follow them.

You speak a little as if Eliezer is literally a quadrillion times more concerned about the future of humanity than he is about a single sick child he meets on a train. This would be absolutely impossible for a human being. Though recognising the error of scope insensitivity will and should change the extent of your emotional reaction some, "shut up and multiply" can't sensibly be an injunction to actually scale them to match. We can't feel these numbers, but we can and should think them.

I haven't read the other comments here and I know this post is >10yrs old, but…

For me, (what I'll now call) effective-altruism-like values are mostly second-order, in the sense that a lot of my revealed behavior shows that a lot of the time I don't want to help strangers, animals, future people, etc. But I think I "want to want to" help strangers, and sometimes the more goal-directed rational side of my brain wins out and I do something to help strangers at personal sacrifice to myself (though I do this less than e.g. Will MacAskill). But I don't really detect in myself a symmetrical second-order want to NOT want to help strangers. So that's one thing that "Shut up and multiply" has over "shut up and divide," at least for me.

That said, I realize now that I'm often guilty of ignoring this second-orderness when e.g. making the case for effective altruism. I will often appeal to my interlocutor's occasional desire to help strangers and suggest they generalize it, but I don't symmetrically appeal to their clearer and more common disinterest in helping strangers and suggest they generalize THAT. To be more honest and accurate while still making the case for EA, I should be appealing to their second-order desires, though of course that's a more complicated conversation.

I (unfortunately) keep misreading "Shut up and multiply" to instead say "Shut up and procreate", to significant humorous (at least to me) effect.

Personally, I think the correct thing to do is to recognize that a simple abstraction like "number of people involved" isn't the only thing that is relevant to deciding whether a course of action is appropriate.

Note that the behavior consequences of "shut up and multiply" and "shut up and divide" are largely the same in this particular case... both argue that one should ignore Amanda's situation because she's only one person and based on raw numbers she (as well as you, and I, and pretty much every individual person on the planet) don't really matter relative to the rest of the world in aggregate.

The big behavioral consequence of the two paths (multiplication versus division) seems to be the distinction between taking one's personal selfishness (say, the objective fact that you'd cry more if a fingernail were ripped off than if you heard of the death of 1000 strangers on the far side of the planet) to mean that you really would or should choose to preserve your fingernail over the people, if the choice was somehow actually presented to you in reality. That is, the theories have different consequences only in one's behavioral orientation towards "the big picture".

If this distinction is the case, then maybe it makes more sense to limit yourself to thinking about the right thing to do for big picture questions? (Note that if you were going to truly apply a the division principle across all human circumstances this would apply to yourself just as much as Amanda... and I'm not sure if you're also advocating self-disregard or not.)

In the meantime, I personally think that it is important to pay attention to more than the number of people involved. In my case, I pay a lot of attention to my "responsibility" in terms of my actual literal ability to respond. This causes me to focus on my degree of knowledge and proximity to other people (or groups of people) when I try to decide if I can effectively improve a situation.

Assuming basically competent adults are involved, other adults can probably take care of themselves better than other people can take care of them, and if their self-help abilities are limited they may still think of attempts to help more as "meddling interference". The utility of assistance will thus be reduced by the transaction costs imposed by attempts to coordinate with the person or people being helped. If they're hostile and resistive to help, it may tragically be a case where leaving them to their own unfortunate circumstances is the best way to achieve good in the world. If they're falsely signaling greater need than they actually experience, that's also something I don't want to support.

In the meantime, if you've developed a good set of cooperative understandings with other people it can make more sense for you to continue to cooperate with those people even in the presence of more needy third parties, just because you don't know much about them and don't have cooperation protocols worked out.

When I saw komponisto's initial post about Amanda Knox I did stop and think about it for a while. My first impression based on 10 minutes of reading was that a miscarriage of justice was probably happening based on prosecutorial and investigative confirmation biases compounded by subsequent public commitment and unwillingness to lose political credibility. I estimated something like a 20% chance that she'd committed the crime (though obviously she was formally "guilty" because notionally legitimate legal forms had been followed to apply a legal status of "guilty" to Amanda).

The reason I worried about it in the first place was possibility that I'd someday be trapped in a foreign country, not having committed a crime, but subject to a crazy and xenophobic justice system, and I would be relying on moral compatriots to intervene on my behalf. The thing that prevented me from either posting my estimates in that thread or becoming politically involved in Amanda's actual case was the recognition that there were other people already in a better position to do the right thing than myself.

I divide likewise.

In fact, I'm more disgusted by people who care about small groups but not large groups than I am by the mass suffering of large groups itself.

Shut up? Maybe not. Divide? Yes: divide labor.

We don't all care about exactly the same things; we may have, as some philosopher has doubtless put it, different "moral tastes". But these tastes probably vary continuously, and there's bound to be enough overlap to make effective cooperation possible.

There probably isn't anybody else here who cares about the Knox case to quite the same extent that I do; but there are a fair number who care about it enough to have had a discussion about it. And I expect that even those (such as yourself) who don't care about it at all would prefer, all else being equal, to live in a world where such things did not happen -- so, I'm guessing, they (you) don't really mind too much if others do care. A situation like this allows effective, cooperative moral action: I write a post, others discuss it, and still others allow said discussion to coexist in the same space where they discuss what they care about. Hopefully, some net benefit to the world is achieved. (Then, later, the roles switch, and the favors are reciprocated, resulting in some other, different benefit.)

I would like to raise the possibility that what's really going on here is not that you've made a decision to dilute all of your caring, but rather that you don't care about the exact same things that I do: a simple difference of personality. While I am hardly able to stop thinking about the Knox case, you are inclined to expend your psychological resources elsewhere (whether on other "moral causes", or other activities in general). So long as we are able to cooperate effectively and avoid negative-sum conflicts, this may not pose any serious problem.

I have, I think, a rather unusual psychological makeup. For some reason, I am susceptible to being moved by the plight of someone like Amanda Knox, to whom I don't have any known personal connection, to a greater degree than most people. But I don't particularly dislike this fact about myself. In fact, I think it's quite nice that there are a certain number of people like this out there, so that someone like Amanda doesn't have to rely only on those close to her to champion her cause. If it were me in that situation, I would certainly hope that some people other than friends and relatives would care.

Being this way doesn't interfere with my ability to shut up and multiply; indeed, I have already mentioned, in the discussion that you linked to, how it helps me to care more about humanity's problems in general than I otherwise would. So I actually think it's a pretty good way to be. But if others are differently constituted, or just have different particular interests, let us divide up the moral labor and cooperate to the extent possible.

I don't know what kind of person this makes me but I was interested in the Knox case because it was a fun puzzle that involved sex, drugs, murder, conspiracy, abuse of power, and Satanic orgies.

More on what you're actually asking, once I process it.

I think I'm with Wei in his analysis - resolving the inconsistency from the top down, not from the bottom up.

I accept that our feelings of empathy and compassion are something evolution came up with in order to make us function decently in small groups. I accept that this empathy works only for small groups, and cannot scale to groups that are too large for everyone to keep track of each other. Maintaining cohesion and functionality in larger groups requires formal mechanisms such as hierarchy and money, and empathy is at best of marginal value, or at worst sabotages a constructive order. Universal empathy is, if not outright impossible, at least very difficult to reconcile with the things we do to other creatures for convenience.

Of abstract things related to humanity, my top values are creativity and prosperity, not individual people. My perception is that a relatively small proportion of people contribute the vast majority of that which I value. On the other hand, a relatively large proportion of people are having disruptive or destructive effects.

I therefore do not value human life in general, just like I don't value bacteria in general, but I value that human life (and that bacteria) which contributes towards the creativity and prosperity I want to see. People who undermine that, I have no compassion for, and I would in fact prefer them to not exist.

The only way failing to save lives can be equated with killing people is by subscribing to pure utilitarianism. But by that philosophy, contraception is also equivalent to killing people: the end result is that fewer people are alive than in the counterfactual case where you had children. The counterargument that contraception is not immoral because you aren't obliged to have children is fine, but it also applies to the other case: you aren't obliged to give your money away either. In other words, we don't actually subscribe to pure utilitarianism, so we shouldn't pretend we do.

That having been said, my guess as to the best way to help people in the Third World -- the way with the highest expected utility, as well as the most assurance of positive rather than negative utility once all the consequences have worked themselves out -- is to support economic development in poor countries, to help them get to the point where they aren't poor countries anymore. In other words, to buy goods and services produced in the Third World.

Counterintuitive? Perhaps, but remember what our intuition evolved for: the gain of social status by giving donations, thereby establishing ourselves as having higher status than the ones to whom we give. To engage in a mutually beneficial transaction is to acknowledge the other party as our equal; no wonder it doesn't trigger the altruism instincts. So if our goal is to actually do the most good, we should expect the method to be counterintuitive.

The problem with the Amanda Knox case is not scale, but distance. The farther away something is, the less influence I have over it, and the less influence it can have over me. Amanda Knox is far away in every sense - it's in a different country, a different time (the court case is already over), and a different language. It's like watching a year old YouTube video of an already-fired policeman from a town I've never heard of abusing his power - lots of people do it, but it's just getting riled up for no reason.

On the other hand, the point of the original Less Wrong Amanda Knox article wasn't that we should care about the real event, but as a rationality test case. A similar fictional story would've worked just as well, but using a real news story guaranteed that it'd be free of the distortions that come with writing fiction.

This is a form of cognitive dissonance, where you notice your actions and your values are incongruent, and the resulting discomfort motivates you to reduce the gap between them. You can change your actions and leave your values the same, leave your actions the same and change your values, or somewhere in between.

Other people much, much prefer you change your actions - this is because your values are the guilt-free way of manipulating you. If I want Albert to make a paperclip, and I know Albert also wants to make a paperclip, then I can motivate Albert by making a case that his actions negative impact further paperclip production. I wouldn't like it if I said, "Albert, this doesn't help paperclip production," and he responded, "Yeah, you're right. Well, paperclips are overrated."

Basically, I want Albert to want something he doesn't already have, because then I can manipulate him without threatening him, which has large social consequences for me. If the only things Albert wants are things he already has, then I'm boned - I can either threaten him or give up.

SU&M is when you want something you don't have. SU&D is when you have everything you want.

Nietzsche wrote about this. "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things... I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation." This is about as SU&D as you can get.

I wonder if this is resolvable by biting the bullet that we don't care equally about all humans. "shut up and multiply" should more properly be called "shut up and sum".

You can't just divide the sum equally either - you have to realize that your preferences are different for different segments of the population.

I'm not bothered by my scope insensitivity.

The title of this post jumped out at me. From a comment of mine, long ago:

Maximize happiness in the individual ... I say, "in the individual", in strong opposition to dust specks. I remain puzzled by why the "shut up and multiply" maxim would not be accompanied by "shut up and divide". (That is, 3^^^3 specks / 3^^^3 individuals = no pain.) I remain open to good arguments to the contrary - I haven't read one yet.

EDIT: That last sentence is no longer true. I regard this comment by Eliezer as the best argument I've seen, and one that still confounds my moral intuitions on specks:

While some people tried to appeal to non-linear aggregation, you would have to appeal to a non-linear aggregation which was non-linear enough to reduce 3^^^3 to a small constant. In other words it has to be effectively flat. And I doubt they would have said anything different if I'd said 3^^^^3.

I've had both factors; a diminshed caring for individual cases, and an increased caring for humanity. Some sort of mixed divinding/multiplying going on here...

WRT to not caring about the Knox case, I think the reason I don't care is the fact that I don't have the cognitive facilities to care about everything I feel like I should care about.

That being the case, I don't see anything wrong with using things that I do care about as filters to bring things to the fore for me to care about.

For example, I care about various home-brew energy solutions for poor people in developing countries because those things are related to other things that I already care about and am interested in.

The Knox case, as far as I can tell, barely brushes things that I'm already interested in. It may be a very big injustice, but there's lots of those.

There is no general reason to be so concerned with your emotional consistency as to want to modify your emotions. You and Eliezer might simply be abnormally concerned with being consistent, or being perceived as such.

What ethical principles can we use to decide between "Shut Up and Multiply" and "Shut Up and Divide"?

Why do we have to decide between them? Long before I ever heard of "Shut Up and Multiply," I used a test that produced the same results, but worked equally well for "Shut Up and Divide." My general statement was, "Be consistent." I would put things in the appropriate context and make sure to apply similar value functions regardless of size or scope - or, perhaps to phrase it better, making sure my consistently applied value function definitely considered size and scope.

Why should we derive our values from our native emotional responses to seeing individual suffering, and not from the equally human paucity of response at seeing large portions of humanity suffer in aggregate? Or should we just keep our scope insensitivity, like our boredom?

From where should we derive our values? Well, we've got the option of using what's already there (the value function implemented in the human brain), or we have the option of appealing to something else, or we can just apply our reason and alter the function as needed. It seems to me that we don't really have access to that "something else," so I doubt we have a choice on this part. Our natural empathic hardwiring will shoot off all kinds of flares when we see suffering up close and personal, and will fail to activate when it should on the larger scale. We can still place arbitrary hacks into the value function to try and correct the scope insensitivity. The function was arbitrary in the first place, so there's no conflict other than ease of application.

And an interesting meta-question arises here as well: how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist?

How much of our values are from hardwiring as opposed to reasoned thought? Well, probably however much we haven't put thought into. For most people, I expect this to be a large portion. However, once we've thought about it, and applied our function to our functions, we can label them good or bad, and work at adding more arbitrary hacks to the arbitrary, evolution-designed, hardwired values. I see this in a particular way: a piece of the function, an item on the list of human morality, is "this list may change or update as needed," or, "this function is subject to revision based upon its output when ran against itself." Again, the ease of doing this is a more interesting debate, in my opinion.

And if many of our values are just the result of cognitive errors or limitations, have we lived with them long enough that they've become an essential part of us?

If by "essential" you mean, "someone without it would not be human," then I grant that it's possible. But if you mean, "we can't change it," then I would disagree. We can change our values, now and certainly in the future as we begin rewiring things on a more fundamental level. I see it as another question of definitions: if we change ourselves "for the better," are we "extincting the human race," or "continuing as human and more"? It seems that practical reality won't care either way.

I definitely agree to what you are trying to imply. This issues needs to be clarified and should be taken care of with the proper values but with but not in the extent that it would be senseless. We should really justify the means because it will definitely affect the ends of a certain thing or issues. Like large corporations do for their employees bu they are not credited as the best but the company itself. If you look at the track record over the last couple of decades, one begins to question the status of manyhttp://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2010/02/02/108-large-corporations/ as institutions. For one, the many defective and harmful products, worker abuse, and numerous bankruptcies past and pending – Eastman Kodak and US Airways are both heading there – and the largest financial institutions can't manage money at all, needing basically what amounts to payday loans from the public. Apparently, even Harvard MBA programs can't keep people from being incompetent. I'm starting to think bonuses don't reward a good performance – it's a reward for not screwing the pooch entirely.

Why do you people worry so much about human suffering while eating meat?