The Nonlinear Library EA - EA "Worldviews" Need Rethinking by Richard Y Chappell
Mar 18, 2024
05:54
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: EA "Worldviews" Need Rethinking, published by Richard Y Chappell on March 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I like Open Phil's worldview diversification. But I don't think their current roster of worldviews does a good job of justifying their current practice. In this post, I'll suggest a reconceptualization that may seem radical in theory but is conservative in practice.
Something along these lines strikes me as necessary to justify giving substantial support to paradigmatic Global Health & Development charities in the face of competition from both Longtermist/x-risk and Animal Welfare competitor causes.
Current Orthodoxy
I take it that Open Philanthropy's current "cause buckets" or candidate worldviews are typically conceived of as follows:
neartermist - incl. animal welfare
neartermist - human-only
longtermism / x-risk
We're told that how to weigh these cause areas against each other "hinge[s] on very debatable, uncertain questions." (True enough!) But my impression is that EAs often take the relevant questions to be something like, should we be speciesist? and should we only care about present beings? Neither of which strikes me as especially uncertain (though I know others disagree).
The Problem
I worry that the "human-only neartermist" bucket lacks adequate philosophical foundations. I think Global Health & Development charities are great and worth supporting (not just for speciesist presentists), so I hope to suggest a firmer grounding. Here's a rough attempt to capture my guiding thought in one paragraph:
Insofar as the GHD bucket is really motivated by something like sticking close to common sense, "neartermism" turns out to be the wrong label for this. Neartermism may mandate prioritizing aggregate shrimp over poor people; common sense certainly does not. When the two come apart, we should give more weight to the possibility that (as-yet-unidentified) good principles support the common-sense worldview.
So we should be especially cautious of completely dismissing commonsense priorities in a worldview-diversified portfolio (even as we give significant weight and support to a range of theoretically well-supported counterintuitive cause areas).
A couple of more concrete intuitions that guide my thinking here: (1) fetal anesthesia as a cause area intuitively belongs with 'animal welfare' rather than 'global health & development', even though fetuses are human. (2) It's a mistake to conceive of global health & development as purely neartermist: the strongest case for it stems from positive, reliable flow-through effects.
A Proposed Solution
I suggest that we instead conceive of (1) Animal Welfare, (2) Global Health & Development, and (3) Longtermist / x-risk causes as respectively justified by the following three "cause buckets":
Pure suffering reduction
Reliable global capacity growth
Speculative moonshots
In terms of the underlying worldview differences, I think the key questions are something like:
(i) How confident should we be in our explicit expected value estimates? How strongly should we discount highly speculative endeavors, relative to "commonsense" do-gooding?
(ii) How does the total (intrinsic + instrumental) value of improving human lives & capacities compare to the total (intrinsic) value of pure suffering reduction?
[Aside: I think it's much more reasonable to be uncertain about these (largely empirical) questions than about the (largely moral) questions that underpin the orthodox breakdown of EA worldviews.]
Hopefully it's clear how these play out: greater confidence in EEV lends itself to supporting moonshots to reduce x-risk or otherwise seek to improve the long-term future in a highly targeted, deliberate way. Less confidence here may support more generic methods of global capacity-building, such as improving health and (were there any ...
I like Open Phil's worldview diversification. But I don't think their current roster of worldviews does a good job of justifying their current practice. In this post, I'll suggest a reconceptualization that may seem radical in theory but is conservative in practice.
Something along these lines strikes me as necessary to justify giving substantial support to paradigmatic Global Health & Development charities in the face of competition from both Longtermist/x-risk and Animal Welfare competitor causes.
Current Orthodoxy
I take it that Open Philanthropy's current "cause buckets" or candidate worldviews are typically conceived of as follows:
neartermist - incl. animal welfare
neartermist - human-only
longtermism / x-risk
We're told that how to weigh these cause areas against each other "hinge[s] on very debatable, uncertain questions." (True enough!) But my impression is that EAs often take the relevant questions to be something like, should we be speciesist? and should we only care about present beings? Neither of which strikes me as especially uncertain (though I know others disagree).
The Problem
I worry that the "human-only neartermist" bucket lacks adequate philosophical foundations. I think Global Health & Development charities are great and worth supporting (not just for speciesist presentists), so I hope to suggest a firmer grounding. Here's a rough attempt to capture my guiding thought in one paragraph:
Insofar as the GHD bucket is really motivated by something like sticking close to common sense, "neartermism" turns out to be the wrong label for this. Neartermism may mandate prioritizing aggregate shrimp over poor people; common sense certainly does not. When the two come apart, we should give more weight to the possibility that (as-yet-unidentified) good principles support the common-sense worldview.
So we should be especially cautious of completely dismissing commonsense priorities in a worldview-diversified portfolio (even as we give significant weight and support to a range of theoretically well-supported counterintuitive cause areas).
A couple of more concrete intuitions that guide my thinking here: (1) fetal anesthesia as a cause area intuitively belongs with 'animal welfare' rather than 'global health & development', even though fetuses are human. (2) It's a mistake to conceive of global health & development as purely neartermist: the strongest case for it stems from positive, reliable flow-through effects.
A Proposed Solution
I suggest that we instead conceive of (1) Animal Welfare, (2) Global Health & Development, and (3) Longtermist / x-risk causes as respectively justified by the following three "cause buckets":
Pure suffering reduction
Reliable global capacity growth
Speculative moonshots
In terms of the underlying worldview differences, I think the key questions are something like:
(i) How confident should we be in our explicit expected value estimates? How strongly should we discount highly speculative endeavors, relative to "commonsense" do-gooding?
(ii) How does the total (intrinsic + instrumental) value of improving human lives & capacities compare to the total (intrinsic) value of pure suffering reduction?
[Aside: I think it's much more reasonable to be uncertain about these (largely empirical) questions than about the (largely moral) questions that underpin the orthodox breakdown of EA worldviews.]
Hopefully it's clear how these play out: greater confidence in EEV lends itself to supporting moonshots to reduce x-risk or otherwise seek to improve the long-term future in a highly targeted, deliberate way. Less confidence here may support more generic methods of global capacity-building, such as improving health and (were there any ...