[charia]

This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.

People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.

The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?

Different people approach giving back to society in different ways. The EA way to approach the above is to crunch numbers and find what they think is the place where their limited resources can have have the largest impact.

My best friend's family does their part by joining their church to volunteer at food kitchens in poorer neighborhoods and hosting fundraisers for various causes throughout the year.

A Vietnamese coworker of mine used to give back by donating to a charity that gave scholarship opportunities to high achieving low income students in Vietnam.

It's not that complex to understand that different people have different value systems and how they view their tribe, people and the world.

And yes I agree that lots of people find people who hold differing views incomprehensible, but that's also normal aspect of humanity and not unique to those in EA.

From political differences, to philosophical differences, to religious differences, to any topic, many people have a hard time comprehending the worldview of others.

You can even just take the perspective from this article. There are a whole swath of people I've known that could not comprehend the idea that someone would be willing to give their kidney to a total stranger. They might understand if its someone the person knows, but a total stranger? Some might say that's insane and irrational behavior.

Lots of people can't see past their own perspectives on things, but I think it's uncharitable to suggest that EA is not just like any other group with some portion of people like that.

[giraffe_lady]

> The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?

Not quuiiite. Many other groups would accept that value, framed that way, maybe even a majority of people. What differentiates EA isn't their intention to improve livelihood, but their belief that it is possible to know how to do that.

And in fact other groups also have high confidence in their understanding of how to achieve this goal. It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.

[nyssos]

> It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.

Ok, but that's not the competing option here. However good being a bodhisattva is, being a bodhisattva and saving someone from kidney failure is even better. And most people, of course, aren't going to become bodhisattvas at all: we're only choosing between being ordinary flawed people... and ordinary flawed people who also saved someone from kidney failure.

[giraffe_lady]

Do all EAs donate kidneys? Or even at higher rates than other groups? Everyone thinks their religion makes them better at being good. EAs might be uniquely positioned to demonstrate it statistically, if it's true.

[Crimson_Wool]

The number of people who altruistically donate kidneys per year in the USA is like 1-200, so the fact that Scott knows multiple EAs who did so (and that the kidney donor people are used to EAs) is pretty high-tier evidence that either there are a LOT more EAs than I thought, or they do it MUCH higher rates than the general population.

[scarmig]

Scott alone donating would probably set the rate of altruistic kidney donation at a higher rate among EAs than the general population, at least for this year; there'd have to be around 2M EAs in the USA to match the baseline rate, while the real number is almost certainly significantly lower.

[ajkjk]

> People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist.

I'm aware of this! I am fairly anti-utilitarian, and understand that the EA folks I've talked to are deeply utilitarian. What is so frustrating is that they don't seem to be able to understand me back. Any conversation about the ethics or character, duty, or virtue is translated back into utilitarianism, a framework in which non-utilitarian motives can't possibly be valid. Of course I'm not characterizing every EA-ascribing person, but it's ... very common in the community, to say the least, and it makes e.g. engaging with their forums / comment sections / subreddits agonizing.

> This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life.

"better impact life".... as determined by... numbers.

This is a group of people who look at the world and think that the best things to do are things like optimizing QALYs or the number of animal lives or, in extreme cases, their personal lifespan including cryogenic extension in the offchance it works, or "the number of humans who will die when a superintelligent AI Roko's Basilisks / Pascal-mugs them", or other sorts of things like that. And in a world where you are only capable of measuring worth by holding up numbers against each other and comparing them, those arguments become seductive.

But outside of that framework, for instance in a moral philosophy in which the best thing to do is not "the thing with the highest +EV" but "the most noble action", those stances are absurd. It's not, IMO, a person's job to single-handedly have a highest +EV on lifespans or net-suffering; it is (to some approximation) to live a good life and do the right thing in your local journey. I would reject the notion that a person is directly responsible for far-away people's suffering. I think the world is direly short of leadership, character, and compassion, and for me goodness is about those things.

When it comes to large institutions, like governments or large charities, I feel differently, and the calculus switches over to being more +EV --- but ultimately is still about the moral compass of the organization. Like I think SBF was a scumbag and totally wrong, and would still be wrong if his bets had worked out. It is not common that people are operating at a scale where utilitarianism starts to become morally appropriate, and even when it becomes appropriate it's never entirely appropriate, because actual leadership is ultimately about morality even if the organization is doing practical things.

If the human race was completely moral, and then eventually died out due to some X-risk, that is mostly a Fine Result to me and we would all be able to sleep well at night. (but if like, the dying out was because we didn't do our moral duty and handle e.g. climate change or AI or nuclear war or building an asteroid-defense system or dealing with our own in-fighting and squabbling, then that wasn't completely moral, was it?)

To be clear, I have a lot of respect for the kidney donation stuff, a slight amount of respect for giving money to charity, and massive disrespect for the hordes of smart people who have divested from the real world and instead smugly pat themselves on their backs that they're doing important work on AI safety.