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Many altruistic endeavors seem overwhelmingly likely to be ineffective compared to what is possible. For instance building schools, funding expensive AIDS treatment, and raising awareness about breast cancer and low status.

For many other endeavors, it is possible to tell a story under which they are massively important, and hard to conclusively show that we don’t live in that story. Yet it is also hard to make a very strong case that they are better than a huge number of other activities. For instance, changing policy discourse in China, averting rainforest deforestation or pushing for US immigration reform.

There are also (at least in theory) endeavors that can be reasonably expected to be much better than anything else available. Given current disagreement over what fits in this category, it seems to either be empty at the moment, or highly dependent on values.

An important question for those interested in effective altruism is whether most of the gains from effectiveness are to come from people who support the obviously ineffective endeavors moving to plausibly effective ones, or from people who support the plausibly effective endeavors moving to the very probably effective ones.

One reason this matters is that the first jump requires hardly any new research about actual endeavors, while the second seems to require a lot of it. Another is that the first plan involves engaging quite a different demographic to the second, and probably in a different way. Finally, the second plan requires intellectual standards that can actually filter out the plausible endeavors from the very good ones. Such standards seem hard to develop and maintain. Upholding norms that filter terrible interventions from plausible ones is plenty of work, and probably easier.

My own intuition has been that most of the value will come from the second possibility. However I suspect others have the opposite feeling, or at least aim to exploit the first possibility more at the moment. What do you think? Is the distinction even just?

Sometimes people argue that pain and suffering should be expected to overwhelm the world because bad experiences are ‘stronger’ in some sense than good ones. People generally wouldn’t take five minutes of the worst suffering they have ever had for five minutes of the best pleasure (or so I’m told). An evolutionary explanation sometimes given is that the things that happen to animals tend to be mildly beneficial for them most of the time, then occasionally very bad. For instance, eating food is a bit good, but one meal won’t guarantee you evolutionary success. If on the other hand someone else eats you, you have lost pretty badly.

This seems intuitively plausible. Many processes have the characteristic that you can add more bricks and gradually reach your goal, but taking away a brick causes the whole thing to crumble. However good and bad outcomes are relative. If you see a snake and are deciding whether to go near it or not, there is a worse outcome of it biting you, and a better outcome of it not biting you. The good outcome here is super valuable, even if it doesn’t buy you immediate evolutionary success. It is just as important for you to get the good outcome as for you to not get the bad outcome. So what exactly do we mean by bad outcomes being worse than good outcomes are good? It seems we are judging outcomes relative to some default. So we need an explanation for why the default is where it is.

I think the most obvious guess is that the default is something like expectations, or ‘business as usual’. If you generally expect to go through your morning not being killed, then the avoiding being bitten by the snake option is close to neutral, whereas the being bitten option is very bad. But if the default is expectations, then the expected badness and the expected goodness should roughly cancel out – if suffering just tends to be stronger, then it should also tend to be rare enough to cancel. So on this model you shouldn’t expect life to be net bad especially.

At least on this model the badness and goodness should have cancelled out in the evolutionary environment. Our responses to good and bad situations don’t seem to change with our own expectations that much – even if you have been planning to go to the dentist for months, and it isn’t as bad as you thought, it can still be pretty traumatic. So you might think the default is fairly stable, and after we have been pushed far from our evolutionary environment, joy and suffering could be out of balance. Since we have been the ones pushing ourselves from the evolutionary environment, you might think we have been pushed basically in the direction of things we like (living longer, avoiding illness and harsh physical conditions, minimizing hard labor). So you might expect it is out of balance in the direction of more joy.

This story has some gaps. Why would we experience positive and negative emotions relative to rough expectations? Is the issue really expectations, or just something that looks a bit like that? To answer these questions one would seem to need a much better understanding of the functions of emotional reactions than I have. For now though, a picture where positive and negative emotions were roughly equal in some sense at some point seems plausible, and on that picture, I expect they are now net positive for humans, and roughly neutral for animals (by that same measure). This contribute to my lack of concern for both wild animal suffering, and the possibility that human lives are broadly not worth living.

There are many further issues unresolved. The notion that pleasure and pain should be roughly balanced for some reason is given much of its intuitive support by the observation that they are close enough that which is greater seems somewhat controversial. But perhaps net pleasure and pain only seem to be broadly comparable because humans are bad at comparing things, especially nebulous things. It is not uncommon to be both unclear on whether to go to school A or school B, and also unclear on whether you should go to school A with $10,000 or school B. Another issue is whether the measure by which there were similar amounts of pleasure and suffering actually align with your values. Perhaps positive and negative emotions use similar amounts of total mental energy, but mental energy translates to experiences you like more efficiently than to ones you don’t. Another concern is whether animals in general should be in such an equilibrium, or whether perhaps only animals that survive should, and all the offspring produced that die immediately don’t come into the calculus and can just suffer wantonly.

I think it is hard to give a conclusive account of this issue at the moment, but as it stands I don’t see how evolutionary considerations suggest we should expect bad feelings to dominate.

Matthew Yglesias a while back on Quine’s Word and Object:

It’s tempting (and conventional) to imagine language working neatly through such correspondences. Each word refers to some object in the world; each sentence describes a fact. Quine’s somewhat fanciful speculations on radical translation serve to undermine this account of meaning. Language is a social phenomenon, and languages are social practices with no guarantee of such direct correspondences. Quine observes that if we hear of a place where the local inhabitants describe pelicans as their half-brothers, it would be foolish to interpret this as a sign of profound genetic misunderstanding on their part. Instead, we see that their words don’t quite line up with ours, and a concept exists that somehow refers to half-brothers and pelicans alike.

[…] Those of us who try to describe the world for a living aren’t just poor handmaidens of those who try to uncover the truth about it… Rather, the process of description is the process of discovery. Language and science are, together, a joint process of discovery. Quine uses the phrase “ontic decision” to bypass the traditional question of what kinds of things are “real” as opposed to merely nominal. As he puts it, “The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality.” To paraphrase loosely — no doubt a bit too loosely for the tastes of one of the most precise writers I’ve ever read — a writer’s search for better, clearer, more concise descriptions of what we know is fundamentally of a piece with the searches for new knowledge.

I agree that a writers’ choosing concepts to describe things is in some ways basically similar to the part of science which involves ‘explaining’, or finding simple theories to describe the complexity we see. Both activities can be about spotting regularities in the messy world and re-describing what’s left of the mess with those patterns factored out. However it seems to me that writers’ efforts along these lines are badly constrained by conflicting rules. A scientist might notice that everything falls at the same rate, so they might name this ‘gravity’ and in future just say that all the stuff they describe falls with gravity, instead of describing each trajectory individually. A social commentator might notice many situations have in common an “irresistible force that draws you back to bed, or toward any mattress, couch, or other soft horizontal surface”, after which they need only mention ‘bed gravity‘. Or more poetically, a writer may notice a similar pattern in the behavior of a certain man and that of a disease, and say “He is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad”.

Notice that ‘more poetic’ here goes with a much narrower categorization. One man’s behavior is like a disease, whereas ‘bed gravity’ links a large range of familiar situations. ‘Gravity’ is an even more widespread pattern. This points to what I think is a difference between writers and scientists: scientists are actually looking for patterns that apply most generally, whereas a writer is cliched or dull if they aim to use the same metaphor again and again. Or worse, to re-use metaphors many others have used before them. They often can’t even use the same word or phrase their recent self has used before them without it sounding weird.

If writers were in charge of science they would say ‘you can’t put this whirlpool down to the coriolis effect too! You just used it for the jet streams and boundary currents. And it’s so hackneyed already!’ Some writers do what scientists do, and look for ways to describe reality concisely. But usually I think this is a topic for their writing: to say it is part of writing is like saying that gardening is a part of writing by virtue of there being books about it.

This is all mostly for novel categorizations and phrases. Writers do get away with re-using English words and common phrases. And using words presumably involves a bit of changing the meanings of the concepts around the edges as one goes. This is similar to the part of science where a scientist sees a particular flower and says, ‘ah, that’s a marigold’, perhaps ever so gradually thereby shifting exactly what it means to be a marigold.

As mentioned previously, pointing out obvious things seems embarrassing to me. However, it also often seems very valuable. That might seem obvious to you. Even so, this post will elaborate on this obvious point.

The set of things an intellectual would like to claim are obvious will tend to be much larger than the set that is reliably casually inferable by a random person with three minutes to devote to the issue. It is probably even much larger than the set of things reliably inferable by that intellectual earlier in their life. Many questions have obvious answers, while the questions themselves are not obvious. Many questions are obviously important once you notice them, but were not salient beforehand. Many points are obvious intellectually, yet not automatically integrated into one’s worldview and actions. And arguably, the more important and true and valuable a point, the more likely it is to look obvious once you know it.

I sometimes think of considerations that are so obvious to me now that I can barely articulate the converse, yet which it seems I must have been unaware of when younger. In general, if something is too incoherent to articulate, this seems like a strong mark against its appropriateness as a focus of discussion. It’s falsity is probably obvious. So I’m not very inclined to write blog posts about such topics. Yet it would usually have been very valuable for my younger self to read such a post – I’d guess more than hundreds of times as valuable as it is costly for me to write such posts, which is much worse again than the cost to more knowledgeable readers of seeing a discussion of something they already knew. And unless I am unusually dense (in which case my blogging strategy seems unimportant), others probably make similar errors to the ones I seem to have made. So it seems probably socially beneficial to write posts about points as obvious as those.

If writing obvious things is costly to the author, does it matter much that it is socially beneficial? It makes more difference than you might suppose: if the author endorses writing socially beneficial obvious things, then when others see the author writing obvious things, they should less infer that the author thought the point was non-obvious (as long as endorsing this coincides at all with writing things that seem obvious, which appears plausible). On that note then, I just wanted to say how important I think writing obvious things is.

Suppose you want to figure out what the best things to do are. One approach is to start by prioritizing high level causes: is it better broadly to work on developing world health, or on technological development? Then you can work your way downwards: is it better to work on treating infectious diseases or on preventative measures? Malaria or HIV? Direct bed-net distribution or political interventions? Which politician? Which tactic? Which day?

This should work well if the landscape of interventions is kind of smooth – if the best interventions are found with the pretty excellent interventions, which are in larger categories with the great interventions, etc. This approach might work well for finding a person who really likes hockey for instance. The extreme hockey lovers will be found with the fairly enthusiastic hockey lovers, who will probably ultimately be in countries of hockey lovers. It should not on the other hand work very well for finding the reddest objects in your house – the most red thing is not likely to be in the room which has the most overall red. Which of these is more similar to finding good altruistic interventions?

This method would work well for finding the reddest things in your house if the redness of things was influenced a lot by color of the lights, and you had very different colored lights throughout your house. Similarly, if most of the variation in value between different altruistic interventions comes from general characteristics of high level causes, we should expect this method to work better there. You might also expect it to work well if the important levels could be mixed and matched – if the best high level cause could be combined with the best generic method of pursuing a cause, and done with the best people. These things seem plausible to me in the case of altruistic interventions, but I’m not really sure. What do you think?