Self-sacrifice is a scarce resource

Self-sacrifice is a scarce resource.

I frame it a little differently. "Self" is the scarce resource. Self-sacrifice can be evaluated just like spending/losing (sacrificing) any other scarce and valuable resource. Is the benefit/impact greater than the next-best thing you could do with that resource?

As you point out in your examples, the answer is mostly "no". You're usually better off accumulating more self (becoming stronger), and then leveraging that to get more result with less sacrifice. The balance may change as you age, and the future rewards of self-preservation get smaller as your expected future self-hours decrease. But even toward end-of-life, the things often visible as self-sacrifice remain low-impact and don't rise above the alternate uses of self.

you can’t make a policy out of self-sacrifice

Taking this from a Kantian-ish perspective: what would actually happen if many people adopted this policy? From third-person perspective, this policy would translate to: "The proper way to solve ethical problem is to kill those people who take ethics most seriously." I can imagine some long-term problems with this, such as running out of ethical people rather quickly. If ethics means something else than virtue signaling, it should not be self-defeating.

Like, if you’re in a crashing airplane with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander (or substitute your morally important figures of choice) and there are only two parachutes, then sure, there’s probably a good argument to be made for letting them have the parachutes.

This reminds me of something that happened when I joined the Bay Area rationalist community. A number of us were hanging out and decided to pile in a car to go somewhere, I don't remember where. Unfortunately there were more people than seatbelts. The group decided that one of us, who was widely recognized as an Important High-Impact Person, would definitely get a seatbelt; I ended up without a seatbelt.

I now regret going on that car ride. Not because of the danger; it was a short drive and traffic was light. But the self-signaling was unhealthy. I should have stayed behind, to demonstrate to myself that my safety is important. I needed to tell myself "the world will lose something precious if I die, and I have a duty to protect myself, just as these people are protecting the Important High-Impact Person".

Everyone involved in this story has grown a lot since then (me included!) and I don't have any hard feelings. I bring it up because offhand comments or jokes about sacrificing one's life for an Important High-Impact Person sound a bit off to me; they possibly reveal an unhealthy attitude towards self-sacrifice.

(If someone actually does find themselves in a situation where they must give their life to save another, I won't judge their choice.)

This is super important, and I'm curious what your process of change was like.

(I'm working on an analogous change- I've been terrified of letting people down for my whole adult life.)

If you find yourself doing too much self-sacrifice, injecting a dose of normative and meta-normative uncertainty might help. (I've never had this problem, and I attribute it to my own normative/meta-normative uncertainty. :) Not sure which arguments you heard that made you extremely self-sacrificial, but try Shut Up and Divide? [LW · GW] if it was "Shut Up and Multiply", or Is the potential astronomical waste in our universe too small to care about? [LW · GW] if it was "Astronomical Waste".

I greatly appreciate this post! Although Yudkowsky clearly supports the consideration of emotions in rational decision making (see Feeling Rational [LW · GW]), I find that a lot of the posts here idealize logic in the absence of emotion. Or at the very least, they are written in a style that has the same quirks and particularities as my intelligent friends who struggle more with emotional intelligence, emotional self-awareness, and more broadly interacting with other people because they don’t find these important (or perhaps they have the causation backwards - they don’t find these things “important” because they struggle to master them, and it is more comfortable to believe that where they excel is where it’s important to excel, and where they struggle is where it doesn’t matter anyway).

This post beautifully shows how applying overly stringent “rational” ideas can be incredibly harmful to those who do experience emotions unusually strongly. It would seem that mingyuan has emotions that are stronger than the average person. It takes a strong love of better outcomes for humanity to apply effective altruism so extremely; it takes a strong sense of guilt to want to take such a lifestyle to even greater extremes when already living off of stale oatmeal in a far too crowded apartment and overexerting oneself at a job. Most people, from what I have observed, are not able to feel such passion about the idea of helping people who they don’t personally know.

I think the post is a beautiful and vivid illustration of how the psychology of emotional well-being is too little discussed in many rationalist communities, even though understanding emotional well-being and one’s own limits is extremely important when trying to make effective, sustainable rational choices about how to live. Thank you so much for the thoughtful post.

If millions of trolleys are about and millions of people self-sacrifice to fix them then suicidal fixing can be a valid policy. Baneling ants exist and are selected for.

The impulse to value self-sacrife might come form the default position that people are very good at looking after their own interest. So at a coarse level any "self-detrimenal" effect is likely to come from a complicated or abstract moral reasoning. But then there is the identity blind kind of reasoning. If you think that people that help others should not be tired all the time, if person A helps others and is tired you should arrange for their relaxation. This remains true if person A is yourself. But the basic instinct is to favour giving yourself a break becuase it is hedonistically pleasing. But the reasoning of persons in your position should arrange their stuff in a certain way is a kind of "cold" basis for possibly the same outcome.

A policy that good people should suicide just becuase they are good is very terrible policy. But the flip side is that some bad people will pay unspeakble costs to gain real survivalship percentages. People have a right to life even in an extended "smaller things than life-and-death" way. But life can be overvalued and most real actions carry a slight chance of death.

Then there is the issue of private matters versus public matters. If there is a community of 1000 people that has one shared issue involving the life and death of 100 people and each has private matter involving 1 different person, then via one logic everybody sticking to their own business saves 1000 people vs 100 and via another way a person doing public work over private work saves 100 people vs 1 person. However if 100 persons do public work at the cost of their private work then it is a choice of between 100 vs 100 people. Each of those can think they are being super efficient 100:1 heroes. And those that choose a select few close ones can seem like super ineffcient 1:100 ones.

Curated. I resonate with many of the examples in this, and have made a lot of similar mistakes (including before I met the rationalist and the EA communities). This essay described those thinking patterns and their pathologies pretty starkly and helps me look at them directly. I expect to reference this post in future conversations when people I know are making big decisions, especially where I feel they're not understanding how much they're sacrificing for this one decision, with so many decisions still ahead (i.e. your framing about policies vs one-shot).

One hesitation I have is that, while I strongly inside-view connect to this post, perhaps I am typical-minding on how much other people share these thinking patterns, and people might find it a bit uncomfortable to read. But I do think a lot of people I respect have thoughts like this, so expect it will strongly help a lot of people to read it. (Also it's a well-written essay and quite readable.)

How did you meet your roommates? I would like to surround myself with similar people (perhaps less extreme).

I think there is one important negative of of self-sacrifice that you are missing here, or at least of self-sacrifice that is apparent to anyone but yourself.

Even though it's a cliche quote, Zarathustra puts it best:

What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!

It is extremely hard to criticize the choices of someone that seems to be sacrificing a lot, or at least who seems to have that impression of themselves and whom others have that impression of. For you are afraid of disturbing whatever "holiness" lead the them there, and even if not, you are afraid of other people seeing it that way and thus shunning you for the criticism given.

I think perhaps, as humans, we want morality and happiness to overlap when this is rarely the case. Self-sacrifice is definitely a limited resource, but if most people believed it to be a moral duty, the human race would likely be better off. The problem with the self-sacrificial strategy is the problem of defection in any game.

If we could convince a sufficient amount of people to sacrifice their personal resources and time, then the average cost of self-sacrifice could go down enough that more people would be willing to do it and we would all be better off. But there will always be those that defect for personal gain. In the modern world, we have little incentive to give more than a small amount.

Even if we're good people we have to choose whether to maximize happiness and optimize goodness or the reverse. I think the key advantage of maximizing happiness and optimizing morality is that we can still do good, though less than we might have otherwise, while having an attractive enough life for others to want to do the same.

I think that the most effective strategies in altruism are those that can coerce systems into rewarding those that would have otherwise defected—like somehow making good people cooler, richer, or happier. So, perhaps it is those strategies that make you happy while helping others at the same time that are the most likely to do the most good in the long run.

So, essentially, I'm agreeing with you, but from a slightly different perspective.

At the risk of stating very much the very obvious:

Trolley problem (or the fat man variant) is a wrong metaphor for near any ethical decision, anyway, as there are very few real life ethical dilemmas that are as visceral and require immediate action from very few limited set of options and whose consequences are nevertheless as clear.

Here is a couple of a bit more realistic matter of life and death. There are many stories (probably I could find factual accounts, but I am too lazy to search for sources) of soldiers who make the snap decision to save the lives of rest of their squad by jumping on a thrown hand grenade. Yet I doubt very few would cast much blame on anyone who had a chance of taking cover, and did that instead. (I wouldn't.) Moreover, the generals who demand prisoners (or agitate impressionable recruits) to clear a minefield without proper training or equipment are to be much frowned upon. And of course, there are untold possibilities to commit a dumb self-sacrifice that achieves nothing.

It general, a military force can not be very effective without people willing to put themselves in danger: if one finds oneself agreement with existence of states and armies, some amount of self-sacrifice follows naturally. For this reason, there are acts of valor who are viewed positively and to be cultivated. Yet, there are also common Western moral sentiments which dictate that it is questionable or outright wrong to require the unreasonable of other people, especially if the benefactors or the people doing the requiring are contributing relatively little themselves (sentiment demonstrated here by Blackadder Goes Forth). And in some cases drawing a judgement is generally considered difficult.

(What one should make of the Charge of the Light Brigade? I am not a military historian, but going by the popular account, the order to charge was stupid, negligent, mistake, or all of the three. Yet to some people, there is something inspirational in the foolishness of soldiers fulfilling the order; others would see such vies as abhorrent legend-building propaganda that devalues human life.)

In summary, I have not much concrete conclusions to offer, and anyway, details from one context (here, military) do not translate necessarily very well into other aspects of life. In some situations, (some amount of) self-sacrifice may be a good option, maybe even the best or only option for obtaining some outcomes, and it can be good thing to have around. On the other hand, in many situations it is wrong or contentious to require large sacrifices from others, and people who do so (including also extreme persuasion leading to voluntary self-sacrifice) are condemned as taking unjust advantage of others. Much depends on the framing.

As reader may notice, I am not arguing from any particular systematic theory of ethics, but rehashing my moral intuitions what is considered acceptable in West, assuming there is some signal of ethics in there.

Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that me jumping in front of the trolley will stop it. So I do that, and boom, six lives saved. But if the trolley problem is a metaphor for any real-world problem, there are millions of trolleys hurtling down millions of tracks, and whether you jump in front of one of those trolleys yourself or not, millions of people are still going to die.

This really got me thinking about something. You mentioned that sacrificing yourself will result in the train being stopped with one casualty and six people saved. The most common decision made in the Trolley problem is to sacrifice one person to save the other five. Any one of these two scenarios (either sacrificing yourself or the person on the track) will result in exactly one casualty. However, the number of people saved will be different. Sacrificing yourself (or any outside person really) will save more people than pulling the lever. I feel confident in saying that most people will prefer one casualty and six saved over one casualty and five saved (simple math right?). 

This would imply that the "solution" to the Trolley problem (from a very simple and utilitaristic standpoint) is not to pull the lever, nor to just stand there, but to sacrifice a completely innocent bystander...

This also fits into to question of how an AI would deal with the Trolley problem. If, for example, an AI is given the instruction to "save the most people", it's not unreasonable to assume it could make a very different decision than an "ethical" human being, or something even scarier; A decision we didn't even consider. 

I’m very interested in your perspective. Mostly, because I find it so alien from my own. A little background- I work in law enforcement, and before that served in the American military. In these backgrounds I have come to see human suffering as the norm, and not a problem to be fixed. If I were to make a big-picture worldview of things, I would say that the ‘natural’ state of the universe is randomness and chaos. Human beings are a thing that make shaky structures-sometimes literally, but most often some sort of society that breeds more citizens then it can either feed or make use of. A very few of these shaky structures are sturdier than others. Classical virtue ethics have lasted a while. The sort of altruism/communal-ism found in Christ or the Buddha still makes an impact. But chaos is always there, and inescapable.

My reaction to this has been either to protect the perimeter of the things/people/ideas I care about, or to tend the garden of the place I want to be at. I do not want to give money to cure malaria, because I see no evidence at all that curing malaria will help anyone I might actually meet in the first world nation I live in, and I do not care about the lives of the animals I eat from the factory, other than how it might affect my personal health.

I find the idea that rationality can effect altruistic belief a fantasy that seems mostly to be shared by the sorts of people who have won at the current rules of meritocracy. This sounds much harsher than I intend it to- intelligent rational people indulging in flights of whimsy can produce wonderful things! But I do not believe this sort of thought is anything but that. Your story seems like a journey from foolishness to experience.