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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or a serious attempt at critiquing Effective Altruism. Can anyone disentangle this (word salad) for me?

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My best guess:

One proponent of EA did something different from what another proponent of EA suggests is correct (i.e. held a lavish funeral for a family member rather than something more sustainable).

This is a demonstration that when EA creates an internal conflict between what our natural impulses say are correct and the deductions of EA's tenants say are correct, the former is destined to win.

TL;DR those who aim for rationally-directed good behavior end up doing things (i.e. expending resources that could have gone to something more-beneficial) that don't fit their rational-good framework—when they run into these seemingly deeper impulses and urges toward right-behavior, they can't or don't resist them in favor of their rational framework. In the passage's language, an effective-altruist is born with one "root" (I suppose the author would argue one that's very similar for most everyone) but create another with reason, which leads to tension when the two are in conflict.

(I have no dog in this fight, this is the best I can do to sort out the meaning of the post, I'm not necessarily interested in defending its argument)

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an article about this called 'purchase fuzzies and utilons separately' that I think both explains and dissolves the apparent contradiction.

https://www.readthesequences.com/Purchase-Fuzzies-And-Utilon...

(I do not by any means endorse all of EY's opinions but that specific article resonates with me)

Yudkowsky tries to explain the hypocrisy, but he doesn't do anything to address the metaethical question, which TFA also hammers on. You can try to ground ethics naturalistically, as utilitarians do and Mencius did,* but once you do that, you're on the hook to make sure the outcomes connect to your ground, which EA completely fails to do.

The ground of ethics in Mencius is natural sentiment. You nurture your seeds of naturally good sentiments, and so grow into an ethical person who has mature sentiments. At the end of the process of maturation, you still have your seeds of desire intact and flowering in their fullest form.

The ground of ethics in EA/utilitarianism/Mohism is pleasure/pain/utility functions. That seems to make sense on the surface, but then the whole thing falls apart once you dig into it. The root of the thing is my instinct that I want my own utility function to be satisfied. Nothing in that root compels me to care about anyone else's utility. The logical thing to do is to just rewrite your own utility function to be happy with whatever happens and then stop trying to be a utilitarian or anything else! Why on earth should I rewrite it to "expand the circle" to use Singer's term or embrace "universal love" to use Moh's term? And if I could rewrite my utility function to care about others, why shouldn't we all just rewrite our functions to desire annihilation or whatever? The universe is already full of utility monsters. Am I supposed to slay them or let them slay me?

The fact that all the EA people end up being hypocrites is interesting just because it shows that end of the day they're not really able to put into practice the idea that their own utility is just one drop in a sea of cosmic utility. No one can.

* Mencius also appeals to Heaven as the source of our natural sentiments, so it's not a totally naturalistic system of ethics, but the system is pretty close to naturalistic, and you can choose to take that element of his system or leave it when you modernize him.

I regard EA as a means to operationalise an already chosen ethical foundation - and Yudkowsky's article as explaining how to do that while still being human.

I don't find 'grounding ethics' to be a particularly fruitful thing to attempt, and having looked at efforts to do so that clearly involved far more intellectual investment than I've put into it, the obvious holes therein suggest there are better things for me to spend my thinking time on.

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