Agreeable ways to disable your children

Posted on August 7, 2010 | 37 comments

Should parents purposely have deaf children if they prefer them, by selecting deaf embryos?

Those in favor argue that the children need to be deaf to partake in the deaf culture which their parents are keen to share, and that deafness isn’t really a disability. Opponents point out that damaging existing children’s ears is considered pretty nasty and not much different, and that deafness really is a disability since deaf people miss various benefits for lack of an ability.

I think the children are almost certainly worse off if they are chosen to be deaf.  The deaf community is unlikely to be better than any of the millions of other communities in the world which are based mainly on spoken language, so the children are worse off even culture-wise before you look at other costs. I don’t follow why the children can’t be brought up in the deaf community without actually being deaf either. However I don’t think choosing deaf children should be illegal, since parents are under no obligation to have children at all and deaf children are doing a whole lot better than non-existent children.

Should children be brought up using a rare language if a more common one is available?

This is a very similar question: should a person’s ability to receive information be severely impaired if it helps maintain a culture which they are compelled to join due to the now high cost of all other options? The similarity has been pointed out before, to argue that choosing deaf children is fine. The other possible inference is of course that encouraging the survival of unpopular languages is not fine.

There are a few minor differences: a person can learn another language later more easily than they can get their hearing later, though still at great cost. On the other hand, a deaf person can still read material from a much larger group of hearing people, while the person who speaks a rare language is restricted to what is produced by their language group. Nonetheless it looks like they are both overwhelmingly costs to the children involved. It may be understandable that parents want to bring up their children in their own tiny language that they love, but I’m appalled that governments, linguists, schools,  organizations set up for the purpose, various other well meaning parties, and plenty of my friends, think rescuing small languages in general is a wonderful idea, even when the speakers of the language disagree. ‘Language revitalization‘ seems to be almost unanimously praised as a virtuous project.

Continue reading →

37 Comments

Posted in 1

Tagged , ,

Is cryonicists’ selfishness distance induced?

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 11 comments

Tyler‘s criticism of cryonics, shared by others including me at times:

Why not save someone else’s life instead?

This applies to all consumption, so is hardly a criticism of cryonics, as people pointed out. Tyler elaborated that it just applies to expressive expenditures, which Robin pointed out still didn’t pick out cryonics over the the vast assortment of expressive expenditures that people (who think cryonics is selfish) are happy with. So why does cryonics instinctively seem particularly selfish?

I suspect the psychological reason cryonics stands out as selfish is that we rarely have the opportunity to selfishly splurge on something so far in the far reaches of far mode as cryonics, and far mode is the standard place to exercise our ethics.

Cryonics is about what will happen in a *long time* when you *die*  to give you a *small chance* of waking up in a *socially distant* society in the *far future*, assuming you *widen your concept* of yourself to any *abstract pattern* like the one manifested in your biological brain and also that technology and social institutions *continue their current trends* and you don’t mind losing *peripheral features* such as your body (not to mention cryonics is *cold* and seen to be the preserve of *rich* *weirdos*).

You’re not meant to be selfish in far mode! Freeze a fair princess you are truly in love with or something.  Far mode livens our passion for moral causes and abstract values.  If Robin is right, this is because it’s safe to be ethical about things that won’t affect you yet it still sends signals to those around you about your personality. It’s a truly mean person who won’t even claim someone else a long way away should have been nice fifty years ago.  So when technology brings the potential for far things to affect us more, we mostly don’t have the built in selfishness required to zealously chase the offerings.

This theory predicts that other personal expenditures on far mode items will also seem unusually selfish. Here are some examples of psychologically distant personal expenditures to test this:

  • space tourism
  • donating to/working on life extension because you want to live forever
  • traveling in far away socially distant countries without claiming you are doing it to benefit or respect the locals somehow
  • astronomy for personal gain
  • buying naming rights to stars
  • lottery tickets
  • maintaining personal collections of historical artifacts
  • building statues of yourself to last long after you do
  • recording your life so future people can appreciate you
  • leaving money in your will to do something non-altruistic
  • voting for the party that will benefit you most
  • supporting international policies to benefit your country over others

I’m not sure how selfish these seem compared to other non-altruistic purchases. Many require a lot of money, which makes anything seem selfish I suspect. What do you think?

If this theory is correct, does it mean cryonics is unfairly slighted because of a silly quirk of psychology? No. Your desire to be ethical about far away things is not obviously less real or legitimate than your desire to be selfish about near things, assuming you act on it. If psychological distance really is morally relevant to people, it’s consistent to think cryonics too selfish and most other expenditures not. If you don’t want psychological distance to be morally relevant then you have an inconsistency to resolve, but how you should resolve it isn’t immediately obvious. I suspect however that as soon as you discard cryonics as too selfish you will get out of far mode and use that money on something just as useless to other people and worth less to yourself, but in the realm more fitting for selfishness. If so, you lose out on a better selfish deal for the sake of not having to think about altruism. That’s not altruistic, it’s worse than selfishness.

11 Comments

Tagged , , , ,

Are meaningful careers a cover story?

Posted on June 16, 2010 | 17 comments

It is more respectable to have a non-altruistic hobby than to have a non-altruistic job. If I say to a public servant that their career doesn’t make the world a better place, I’m being offensive. If I say to a chess player that their hobby doesn’t make the world a better place, they will likely agree. It’s no accusation.

People also like to have jobs that make the world a better place, whereas they don’t usually care about whether their hobbies do. A few people volunteer or create things for the enjoyment of others of course, but it’s not much of a negative if a hobby doesn’t achieve altruistic goals. People rarely worry ‘I must get out of this hockey; it’s so draining to think all my efforts aren’t helping anyone, and when I die there will be nothing to show for it’.

At first this may seem unsurprising. Jobs are where you exchange socially beneficial work for money, while hobbies are where you enjoy yourself. But why must they be grouped that way? By definition jobs are where you get money, and pleasing others will tend to get you money, but if you are already making money without seemingly making the world a better place, why try so hard to add your dose of altruism there? It should often be easier to change to a more altruistic hobby than a more altruistic job, since you don’t need to find someone to pay you for it. And if you take up an altruistic hobby, you don’t displace anyone.

Here’s a hypothesis for why altruism matters more in jobs than hobbies. Humans are sensitive about receiving money, and about others receiving it. We intuitively feel that material wealth should be divided fairly amongst the tribe and are suspicious of people who accumulate it without sharing. We allow inequality if it’s deserved in return for other socially beneficial actions, but we monitor this closely. We can’t believe the rich really deserve it, nor the welfare dependent, and this suspicion of cheating colors all our dealings with them. When we are given money then, we must feel and look like we deserved it or we risk deep shame. So the very fact that employment gives you money means you need a clear, tellable justification about altruism.

On the other hand we don’t crave justice in enjoyment of leisure time. The fact that someone is having a really interesting conversation with a friend without apparently deserving it doesn’t make the rest of us feel cheated and suspicious. Why don’t our fairness instincts kick in with leisure?  I expect because leisure has always been too hard to count and measure and not directly useful enough to survival to redistribute, unlike concrete goods. So you don’t need any altruistic justification for having fun. Notice that if people wanted altruistic jobs mostly due to direct desire for altruism we would see a different pattern; they would be similarly interested in altruism in other pursuits.

From a conversation with Robin Hanson

17 Comments

You might be population too

Posted on June 13, 2010 | 27 comments

I recently attended a dinner forum on what size the population should be. All of the speakers held the same position: small. The only upsides of population mentioned were to horrid profit seeking people like property developers. Yet the downsides to population are horrendous – all our resource use problems multiplied! As one speaker quoted “The population can’t increase forever, and as a no brainer it should stop sooner rather than later”. As there are no respectable positives in the equation, no need for complicated maths. Smaller is better.

I suggested to my table what I saw as an obvious omission in this model: I at least am enjoying the population being big enough to have me in it, so I would at least consider putting a big positive value on human lives. My table seemed to think this an outlandish philosophical position. I suggested that if resource use is the problem, we fix externalities there, but they thought this just as roundabout a way of getting ‘sustainability’, whereas cutting the population seems straightforward and there’s nothing to lose by it. I suggested to the organizer that the positive of human existence deserved a mention (in a multiple hour forum), and he explained that if we didn’t exist we wouldn’t notice, as though that settles it.

But the plot thickened further. Why do you suppose we should keep the population low? “We should leave the world in as good or a better condition as we got it in” one speaker explained. So out of concern for future generations apparently. Future people don’t benefit from being alive, but it’s imperative that we ensure they have cheap water bills long before they have any such preferences. Continue reading →

27 Comments

Tagged , , , , , ,

Heuristics for a good life

Posted on June 11, 2010 | 9 comments

I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding:

Let’s assume pure marginalist act utilitarianism, namely that you choose a career and get moral credit only for the net change caused by your selection.  Furthermore, I’ll rule out “become a billionaire and give away all your money” or “cure cancer” by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher.

And answered:

What first comes to mind is “honest General Practitioner who has read Robin Hanson on medicine.”  If other countries are fair game, let’s send that GP to Africa.  No matter what the locale, you help some people live and good outcomes do not require remarkable expertise.  There is a shortage of GPs in many locales, so you make specialists more productive as well.  Public health and sanitation may save more lives than medicine, but the addition of a single public health worker may well have a smaller marginal impact, given the greater importance of upfront costs in that field.

I’m not convinced that the Hansonian educated GP would be much better than a materialism educated spiritual healer. Tyler’s commenters have a lot of suggestions for where big positives might be too – but all jobs have positives and many of them seem important, so how to compare? Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial?

Here some ideas, please extend and criticize:

  • Low displacement: if someone had to be hired, you only add the difference between your ability and the second best candidate (plus the second best candidate’s efforts to another job at random). The same goes for what you produce. Even if creating beautiful music doesn’t knock another musician out of business, people listen to your new song instead of older songs, which are not seemingly any worse.
  • Big gains to a marginal person being better: careers that fail the above can still rate highly if this is so. This is a hard route because if candidate quality matters more there will generally be stronger selection so you will be more average for who they let in. Your best bet here might be in something important to you which usually attracts people with poor abilities.
  • Goal discretion: one way a displacing person can make a relatively big difference is to have a better purpose than the person they displace in a position where that matters. This is more likely in jobs that aren’t meant to be altruistic. e.g. if you head an NGO for delivering fresh water to poor households, you only add to the cause to the extent that you are better at it than the alternative guy. If you are an academic with some choice in research topics and no imperative to be altruistic, you can add a person’s worth of effort to an important topic at the expense of an unimportant topic without having to be any better at researching. Similar for shop owners and heads of state.
  • Profits: if you are making huge profits, it’s probably good.
  • Positive externalities: same.
  • Ongoing effects: usually a kind of positive externality. Nice cake lasts minutes whereas nice ideas last a long time (though someone else would have thought of them eventually).
  • Negative externalities
  • Fueling status races or other zero sum games: arguably things people buy to look better than other people do not cause any overall benefit, so you shouldn’t read too much into the profitability of selling such things. Similar for weapons in at least some situations. Same for selling any other negative externalizing capabilities.
  • Speeding trends: culturesome things tend to cycle through new variants continually. Contributing a song, movie, or meme variant for a current trend certainly makes a lot of people like you (briefly). But it’s not clear what people value here: each new item while it is new, or being up to date with the current trends in general. If the former you are doing them a service by adding your bit of culture, if the latter you are just making it more expensive for them to keep up.
  • Effects on galaxy colonization chances and speed: this matters so much you can ignore all the other things.

What jobs do well on most of these things?

9 Comments

Posted in 1

Tagged ,