The Nonlinear Library EA - Wholesomeness and Effective Altruism by Owen Cotton-Barratt
Feb 29, 2024
15:07
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Wholesomeness and Effective Altruism, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on February 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is the second of a collection of three essays, '
On Wholesomeness'. In the first essay I introduced the idea of wholesomeness as a criterion for choosing actions. This essay will explore the relationship between acting wholesomely and some different conceptions of effective altruism.
Tensions
Apparent tensions
Acting wholesomely feels relatively aligned with traditional commonsense notions of doing good. To the extent that EA is offering a new angle on doing good, shouldn't we expect its priorities to clash with what being wholesome suggests? (It would be a suspicious convergence if not!)
Getting more concrete:
It feels wholesome to support our local communities, but EA suggests it would be more effective to support others far removed from us.
It doesn't feel wholesome to reorient strategies around speculative sci-fi concerns. But this is what a large fraction of EA has done with AI stuff.
Surely there are tensions here?
Aside: acting wholesomely and commonsense morality
Although I've just highlighted that acting wholesomely often feels aligned with commonsense morality, I think it's important to note that it certainly doesn't equal commonsense morality. Wholesome action means attending to the whole of things one can understand, and that may include esoteric considerations which wouldn't get a look in on commonsense morality. The alignment is more one-sided: if commonsense morality doesn't like something, there's usually some reason for the dislike.
Wholesomeness will seek not to dismiss these objections out of hand, but rather to avoid such actions unless the objections have been thoroughly understood and felt not to stand up.
The shut-up-and-multiply perspective
A particular perspective which is often associated with EA is the idea of taking expected value seriously, and choosing our actions on this basis. The catch-phrase of this perspective might be "shut up and multiply!".
Taken at face value, this perspective would recommend:
We put everything we can into an explicit model
We use this to determine what seems like the best option
We pursue that option
Deep tensions between wholesomeness and straw EA
There's a kind of simplistic version of EA which tells you to work out what the most important things are and then focus on maximizing goodness there. This is compatible with using the shut-up-and-multiply perspective to work what's most important, but doesn't require it.
I don't think that this simplistic version of EA is the correct version of EA (precisely because it misses the benefits of wholesomeness; or for another angle on its issues see
EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous). But I do think it's a common thing to perceive EA principles as saying, perhaps especially by people who are keen to criticise EA[1]. For this reason I'll label it "straw EA".
There is a quite fundamental tension between acting wholesomely and straw EA:
Wholesomeness tells you to focus on the whole, and not let actions be dictated by impact on a few parts of things
Straw EA tells you to focus on the most important dimensions and maximize there - implicitly telling you to ignore everything else
Indeed when EA is introduced it is sometimes emphasised that we shouldn't necessarily focus on helping those close to us, which could sound like an instruction to forget whom we're close to
Wholesome EA
I don't think that these apparent tensions are necessary. In this section I'll describe a version of effective altruism, which I'll call "wholesome EA", which is deeply grounded in a desire to act wholesomely. Although the articulation is new, I don't think that the thing I'm proposing here is fundamentally novel - I feel like I've seen some version of t...
This is the second of a collection of three essays, '
On Wholesomeness'. In the first essay I introduced the idea of wholesomeness as a criterion for choosing actions. This essay will explore the relationship between acting wholesomely and some different conceptions of effective altruism.
Tensions
Apparent tensions
Acting wholesomely feels relatively aligned with traditional commonsense notions of doing good. To the extent that EA is offering a new angle on doing good, shouldn't we expect its priorities to clash with what being wholesome suggests? (It would be a suspicious convergence if not!)
Getting more concrete:
It feels wholesome to support our local communities, but EA suggests it would be more effective to support others far removed from us.
It doesn't feel wholesome to reorient strategies around speculative sci-fi concerns. But this is what a large fraction of EA has done with AI stuff.
Surely there are tensions here?
Aside: acting wholesomely and commonsense morality
Although I've just highlighted that acting wholesomely often feels aligned with commonsense morality, I think it's important to note that it certainly doesn't equal commonsense morality. Wholesome action means attending to the whole of things one can understand, and that may include esoteric considerations which wouldn't get a look in on commonsense morality. The alignment is more one-sided: if commonsense morality doesn't like something, there's usually some reason for the dislike.
Wholesomeness will seek not to dismiss these objections out of hand, but rather to avoid such actions unless the objections have been thoroughly understood and felt not to stand up.
The shut-up-and-multiply perspective
A particular perspective which is often associated with EA is the idea of taking expected value seriously, and choosing our actions on this basis. The catch-phrase of this perspective might be "shut up and multiply!".
Taken at face value, this perspective would recommend:
We put everything we can into an explicit model
We use this to determine what seems like the best option
We pursue that option
Deep tensions between wholesomeness and straw EA
There's a kind of simplistic version of EA which tells you to work out what the most important things are and then focus on maximizing goodness there. This is compatible with using the shut-up-and-multiply perspective to work what's most important, but doesn't require it.
I don't think that this simplistic version of EA is the correct version of EA (precisely because it misses the benefits of wholesomeness; or for another angle on its issues see
EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous). But I do think it's a common thing to perceive EA principles as saying, perhaps especially by people who are keen to criticise EA[1]. For this reason I'll label it "straw EA".
There is a quite fundamental tension between acting wholesomely and straw EA:
Wholesomeness tells you to focus on the whole, and not let actions be dictated by impact on a few parts of things
Straw EA tells you to focus on the most important dimensions and maximize there - implicitly telling you to ignore everything else
Indeed when EA is introduced it is sometimes emphasised that we shouldn't necessarily focus on helping those close to us, which could sound like an instruction to forget whom we're close to
Wholesome EA
I don't think that these apparent tensions are necessary. In this section I'll describe a version of effective altruism, which I'll call "wholesome EA", which is deeply grounded in a desire to act wholesomely. Although the articulation is new, I don't think that the thing I'm proposing here is fundamentally novel - I feel like I've seen some version of t...