Debate between 80,000 hours and a socialist

He knows he was restating the prisoner's dilemma. He was saying "personal ethical advisor" as a way of trying to specify a choice uncorrelated with other agents' choices.

I can advise someone against voting now even if I would advise them otherwise once fewer people were doing it.

Consider a travel advisor. They suggest you visit remote location X because the people there like foreigners but it's not too touristy. To one person, this is good advice. To enough people it is bad advice because once they get there they will find that actually it is quite touristy.

The reason that "sound ethical advice directed at an individual is irresponsible when directed at the aggregate" has some truth to it is that it's very hard to carefully explain the complexity of how in the current circumstance something (not voting, professional philanthropy) is the right choice for one more person to do but that if a bunch more people do it then other choices do better.

Didn't you just re-state the prisoner's dilemma?

Prisonner's dilemma for N players is more complex than for 2 players.

For iterated 2 player's dilemma, you cooperate when the other player cooperates, and defect when the other player defects. Always cooperating is not the best strategy; you need to respond to the other player's actions.

When you have 100,000,000 player's prisonner's dilemma, where 60,000,000 players defect and 40,000,000 players cooperate, what exactly are you supposed to do? To make it even more difficult, cooperation has non-zero costs (you have to do some research about political candidates), and it's not even obvious whether the expected payoff is greater than this.

The traditional answer is that it is proper to reward doing "good" things socially, but they should not be enforced legally. One will be celebrated as a hero for saving people from a burning house, but one will not be charged with murder for not saving people from a burning house.

You're conflating two different questions here:

1. What interval of quantified goodness (utility) should the Law actively promote, by distributing punishments or rewards to agents? What are the least good good deeds the Law should care about, and what are the most good good deeds?

2. Restricting our attention to deeds the Law actively promotes or discourages, how ungood does an act have to be before the Law should discourage it via positive punishment, as opposed to just discouraging it by withholding a reward or by rewarding a somewhat-less-bad alternative action?

You start off speaking as though you're answering the first question -- when should the state be indifferent to supererogation? -- but then you only list punishment (and extremely harsh punishment, at that!) as the mechanism by which Laws can incentivize behavior. This is confusing. Whether the Law should encourage people (e.g., with economic inventives) to save their neighbors from burning houses is quite a different question from whether the Law should punish people who don't save their neighbors, and that in turn is quite a different question from whether such a punishment should be as harsh as that for, say, manslaughter! A $100 fine is also a punishment. (And a $100 reward is also an incentive.)

If two groups disagree about the baseline, they have moral disagreement even if they use the same utility function. They disagree about whether choosing worse B instead of better A should be punished.

I don't agree with this. If two rational and informed people disagree about whether enacting a certain punishment is a good idea, then they don't have the same utility function -- assuming they have utility functions at all.

I think the core problem is that you're conceiving the Law as a utilometer. You input the goodness or badness of an act's consequences. (Or its act-type's foreseeable consequences.) The Law, programmed with a certain baseline, calculates how far those consequences fall below the baseline, and assigns a punishment proportional to the distance below. (If it is at or above the baseline, the punishment is 0.) The Law acts as a sort of karmic justice system, mirroring the world's distribution of utility. (We could have a similar system that rewards things for going above the baseline, but never mind that.)

In contrast, I think just about any consistent consequentialist will want to think of the Law as a non-map tool. The Law isn't a way of measuring an act's badness and outputting a proportional punishment; it's a lever for getting people to behave better and thereby making the world a more fun place to live in. Questions 1 and 2 above are wrong questions, because the ideal set of Laws almost certainly won't consistently respond to acts in proportion to the acts' foreseeable harm. Rather, the ideal set of Laws will respond to acts in whichever way leads to the best outcome. If act A is worse than act B, but people end up overall much better off if we use a harsher punishment against B than against A, then we should use the harsher punishment against B. (Assuming we have to punish both acts at all.)

So no Schelling point is needed. The facts of our psychology should determine how useful it is to rely on punishment vs. reward in different scenarios. It should also determine how useful it is to rely on material rewards vs. social or internal ones in different contexts. Laws are (ideally) a way of making the right thing happen more often, not a way of keeping tabs on exactly how right or wrong individual actions are.

Possibly. Or possibly he's deciding to go after the weaker claim, or is personally too cowardly to accept the lifestyle consequences of full-on consequentialism, or you should accept at face value his arguments that even on consequentialist grounds high-paying finance jobs are likely to destroy as much as they create. I'm mostly speculating based on my experiences among the kommie krowd and what I like to imagine (though don't we all) is a developed sympathetic understanding of other tribes as well. This shouldn't be read as a strong claim or even really a claim at all about Mills specifically. (From your summary it sounds like you found yourself confused by Mills' arguments, so either it is hopelessly confused, or you might benefit from giving it another go, or there's simply too much inferential distance at this moment.)

I'm sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn't help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I've noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn't seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author's confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can't make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.

This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There's only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn't a terrible strategy. When I'm trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone's argument though, the heuristic needs to be actively suppressed. I need to ignore the signals that the person isn't all that smart or well-informed and engage with the argument under the working assumption that the person is very smart, so that an inability to understand is an indication of a failure on my part. Only if concentrated effort is insufficient to produce an interpretation that I think makes sense do I conclude that the argument is genuinely bad.

If you think a debate is worth reporting on (for purposes other than mockery of one side), then it is worth engaging in this manner. Part of what makes your paraphrase tendentious is that I get the sense you are so convinced that Mills is out of his depth here (which might well be true) that you haven't tried to read his arguments with care to see if there's an important point you might be missing. I've posted my own attempt at a charitable reading of Mills' argument elsewhere in the thread, but I think CuSithBell and Khoth have pointed out important lacunae in your presentation. Just including the points they articulate would make Mills come across as much less of an analytic incompetent than he does in your post.

"I refuse to accept replaceability because it conflicts with my politics" is hardly a fair representation of his point, for a start.

I think his point here along the lines of that although if you don't become a banker someone else will, if you do become a banker, nobody will become a political activist in your place (and for various reasons it's extremely hard to be both a banker and a socialist activist). And if you're a successful political activist, you increase the chance that society will be reformed so that there aren't a load of bankers.

Regarding your example, I think what Mills is saying is probably a fair point - or rather, it's probably a gesture towards a fair point, muddied by rhetorical constraints and perhaps misunderstanding of probability. It is very difficult to actually get good numbers to predict things outside of our past experience, and so probability as used by humans to decide policy is likely to have significant biases.

Upon further thought, 50% may be too high for kidney donation. I was estimating that you'd only be giving your kidney to someone who would die otherwise (there are many more people who need kidney transplants than are available, so the replaceability effect should be absent.), and it had a 50% chance of working. While people who get a donated kidney do live longer than ones who stay on dialysis (and get to stop having to go in for dialysis) they tend to only live an extra 10-15 years.

As the lives of people with major kidney problems are worse than those without, maybe count each year as only 75% when quality weighting? So 50% chance of working 10-15 years 75% gives a very rough estimate of 4-6 QALYs per kidney donation. Still much better than blood, but with deworming at around $100/QALY donating $1K does more good than donating a kidney.

The expected utility of giving blood is currently very small, at least in the USA, because people are not being refused transfusions due to lack of blood. If that started happening blood drives would expand hugely and you'd know about it.

I have heard statistics (from sources that aren't the red cross) that the supply of blood in the US is nearly always quite low. Running out rarely happens, although I did hear that lack of adequate blood reserves did cause a problem on 9/11. My impression is that the Red Cross typically has enough reserves for a few average days, but if something major happens, that supply can get used up pretty quickly.

I wasn't trying to say anything deep, really. If the replaceability argument works for investment bankers, then it works for henchmen of an oppressive regime, too. In my country, many people actually used the replaceability argument, without the fancy name. And in hindsight people in my county agree that they shouldn't have used the argument. So yeah, maybe it's the modus tollens. But maybe it's simpler than that: maybe these people misjudged being completely replaceable. In the eighties more and more people dared to say no to the Hungarian secret service, with less and less consequences.

By the way, the apparently yet-unpublished part 2 of jkaufman's link will deal with this issue.

As Douglas_Knight shows, my comment wasn't really well thought out. However, the idea is that a reflective decision theory agent considers the implications of the fact that whatever her decision is, similar agents will reach a similar decision. This makes them cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemma - Tragedy of the Commons situations where "if all of us behaved so selfishly, we would be in big trouble". The thing is sometimes called superrationality.

You know, this is sort of WAD. It's much easier to get people to do good if it happens to nearly coincide with something they wanted to do anyway. If you have someone who was already planning to become a banker, then it's much easier to persuade them to keep doing that, but give away money, than it is to persuade them to become a peniless activist. As it happens, this may be hugely effective, and so a massive win from a consequentialist point of view.

I like to think of it more on the positive front: as a white, male, privileged Westerner with a high-status education you basically have economic superpowers, so you can quite easily do a lot of good by doing pretty much what you were going to do anyway. Obviously, most of this is due to your circumstances, but it's still a great opportunity.

The amusement or absurdity value should be irrelevant in evaluating such decisions. I feel really angry when I consider remarks like these (not angry at someone or some action in particular, but more vaguely about the human status quo). The kind of spectacle where tickets are purchased in dead child currency.

This has been my concern. I'm not involved with 80k but I travel in Effective Altruism circles, which extend beyond 80k and include most of their memes.

What is incredibly frustrating is that none of this actually proves anything. It is still true that a wealthy banker is probably able to do more good than a single aid worker. Clearly we DO need to make sure there's an object-level impact somewhere. But for the near future, unless their memes overtake the bulk of the philanthropy world, it is likely that methods 80k advocates are sound.

Still, the whole thing smells really off to me, and your post sums up exactly why. It is awful convenient for a movement consisting of mostly upper-middle-class college grads that their "effective" tools for goodness award them the status and wealth that they'd otherwise feel entitled to.

Is this actually meant to be an argument against 80k hours' style of effective altruism or are you just joking around?

Some of the links you make aren't sound (lots of people are already trying to get the seriously wealthy to donate, so it might not be where you can have the greatest impact, there's not a good reason to think that you would be more effective than the people who currently run the IMF and WorldBank) but the overall idea seems good to me: look for where you can most improve the world and go there.

Assuming that we run on corrupted hardware, how much should we trust explanations: "I should get a lot of money and power, because I am a good person, so this will help the whole society"?

Also, if I tried to convert you to a money-making cult, such as Amway, I would start by describing the good things you could do after you become super-rich. Not because we are at LW where we signal that we care about saving the world, but because this is the standard recruitment tactic.

(This does not prove that "80,000 hours" is a bad thing. I just explain how it pattern-matches and creates a negative vibe.)

EDIT: Also, be wary of convenient clever arguments for doing something you'd probably want to do anyway.

Maybe it reminds him of Breast Cancer advertising?