I'd be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this. Don't spoil it by reading the comments first.
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The practical answer is that most people would indeed put their neck in the noose for those other 10 strangers, because they and they alone can save them. However, if the King were instead to go out onto the marketplace and say "I will hang ten people today unless one person steps up to take their place", no-one would volunteer. This makes little sense from a consequentialist point of view; it's just a fact about human psychology.
One consequence is that if you're ever being attacked on the street while passers by walk on, don't just shout for help: select a particular passer by and ask them for help as specifically as you can.
I hold the "wound-healing" theory of charity, which I by coincidence made up earlier today.
Suppose you have a nasty wound on your leg. Suppose your body isn't very smart, and you have to direct the platelets yourself to begin healing it. Judging from how we go about international aid, most people would direct them to the center of the wound. That wouldn't work. The platelets would die and shed, and the wound would never heal.
You heal a wound from the outside in. You begin healing the parts that just border the healthy, solid parts, and gradually work your way to the center.
Likewise, if you want to help people, you shouldn't throw money into the most unstable, unproductive, screwed-up part of the world. You should find a population that is barely self-sufficient, and help them be more self-sufficient.
You can't fix the worse problem first. You'll get nowhere if you look at this as a collection of individual problems. You won't find a country that has a high standard of living, high employment, and a good educational system, but can't get mosquito nets for their beds.
You can't even begin to think about the issue unless you understand some complex-system domain, preferably economics or ecology. As a crude analogy, an economy is like the framework of a large and complicated tent. If the tent has fallen, you can't pick up individual pieces and put them back in place. It will fall down again as soon as you let go.
Trying to "fix the worst problem first" is the philosopher's solution. A philosopher looks for the biggest questions, tackles them directly, and never solves them. A scientist looks for questions that are solvable. Science also proceeds at its edges.
It seems to me that if you set the price of virtue too high, a lot of people will say "Fuck virtue, I'm not bothering at all"-- and if you aren't supposed to feel like a good person unless you give all your disposable income to charity, that's setting the price too high.
Stable religions seem to set the price of virtue (in terms of giving to charity) at 10% of income. Anyone know whether that's just the Abrahamic religions?
The thing is, I could just as easily be one of the ten as the eleventh (actually, ten times as easily), so it's in my interests to support a norm where the eleventh sacrifices for the good of the ten. I am in very little danger of starving to death in Africa.
It's not pleasant, but it is true.
Not that covert, really.
There's an objection to be made that you can't be sure how useful charity is, but it's not a very strong objection. Last I heard there was pretty good evidence converging around $1000 or so being enough to save a person's life.
I accept this argument as valid and have for some time. I doubt I could donate everything to charity, but ~50% seems like a good compromise between human weakness and inhuman mathematics. We'll see how far I follow through on this when I get an income.
You need to choose a very carefully targeted charity that takes into account knock-on effects like displacing local production, before you should accept any such claim. It is now being suggested that the majority of aid is actually counterproductive and destroys local industry in exchange for giving Westerners a warm fuzzy feeling. Hence Africa staying poor despite (because of?) hundreds of billions spent.
Frankly, if you're going to put in that much work into buying expected utilons at the cheapest available price, you shouldn't be considering any mainstream charity targets like aid to developing countries. Let Bill Gates worry about it, if that's the limit of his creativity.
I've done some research into this, and found a few targeted charities that I trust.
However, I'm a bit skeptical of the "aid is naturally counterproductive" claim (which I admit is stronger than what you're saying here, although I have heard some people say it). There are definitely some cases where it's true (you don't just send in random goods for free!), but the claim that you can't help poor people so you might as well keep all your money is just too convenient.
Take the claim from the OB post that it would take $3000 per person to raise per capita income $3. Unless they are referring to some specific, especially stupid kind of aid, this is clearly false. Simply invest the $3000 at 5% interest, and give the $150/year to the Africans and you've raised per capita income 50x as much. Not that this is a good idea, but it does seem to show there's something fishy about the calculation.
Jeffrey Sachs writes some interesting responses to the claim that Africa is too corrupt to be able to handle aid. If anyone has seen a specific counterargument to Sachs' claims, please link me to it.
Before I went back to school and lost my income, my favorite charities were microfinance, iodine supplementation (see Raising the World's IQ ) and yes, the Singularity Institute. Although I will be very disappointed if you guys (or anyone) still need money by the time I'm in my prime donating years.
Simply invest the $3000 at 5% interest, and give the $150/year to the Africans
to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power
Fixed that for you.
As P. J. O'Rourke says, speaking of something like a total of $200,000(?) per poor person spent by the American welfare system, it's a flabbergasting phenomenon that appears to be real: You can't fix poverty by giving people money.
I'd love it if the Singularity Institute had an endowment by the time you get out of school, but I wouldn't count on it if I were me.
"to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power"
Note the reference to Jeffrey Sachs in my comment. If you haven't read The End of Poverty, he demolishes the "It's all warlords stealing the money" argument pretty darned thoroughly.
I was thinking of my prime giving years as late middle age, two or three decades down the line, and I was hoping less that you would have an endowment than that, you know, you would control the world and dazzle the few remaining people who hadn't advanced to a Stross-ian Economy 2.0 by transforming small asteroids into giant gold nuggets. But I guess an endowment would be nice too.
Haven't read The End of Poverty, but I'm willing to accept that it's other forms of economic displacement, not just the warlords stealing. However, it really doesn't look like ending African poverty is remotely as simple as giving them a bunch of money. You'd think it would be. I wish it were. But it doesn't appear to be.
It's not particularly surprising that ending poverty isn't that simple. Most developed economies were brought to their current stage through hundreds of years of innovation, investment, protectionism, and use of inexpensive raw materials and labor from the global South (among other things), and the ones that industrialized more quickly (like Singapore) often had unique geographical or political characteristics that aided this. The development of a stable, diverse economy (and correspondingly high standards of living for a population) depends on far more things than a simple infusion of capital.
For that matter, poor African states are usually poor for very different reasons. Congo's poor despite its great natural resource wealth because the Belgians systematically sabotaged its ability to rule itself before independence even arrived, in the early '60s, and then it got stuck with corrupt dictators who robbed it blind for four decades. Rwanda's poor because the genocide destroyed everything it had built, and even the stable, non-corrupt government that's in power today can't overcome such odds in a generation (and has virtually no natural resources to help it along). Botswana's actually not that poor, because it has a competent government that's used its diamond wealth well. Rather like different aid organizations are differently competent, different African governments are better- and worse-positioned to benefit from A) aid or B) participation in the global economy in general.
Citation so very needed. 200,000 dollars to do what? And how often? And by what agencies?
"The American Welfare system" is an enormous patchwork of state, federal and local organizations with different mandates and populations served. It also does not tend to transfer much money at all. I've lived on Social Security Disability for years and it pays a little over 7k a year (try "bootstrapping" yourself on that budget). I make another 40 dollars monthly in food stamps. I am receiving the maximum amount possible from SSDI; the max for Food Stamps is about 120 dollars monthly.
I am highly suspicious of the claim that for my annual income of ~7600 USD, it takes ~192,400 USD just to get it to me, affecting no other welfare recipients in the country.
Total yearly welfare spending in the usa is $700 billion [1]. This includes federal, state, and local spending. This is being spent on around 50 million people [2] (that's 1/6th of the population). So $14K/person. To get $200K/person you'd need there to be only 3 million poor people in the usa (1%) which is way to low.
This sounds like maybe 50% overhead, not 500% overhead.
Also, as I know you are aware because you linked to it once at OB, Eliezer, there is the work of Gregory Clark, which suggests a double reason refuting this essay's line of argument. Not a response directly to your comment then, but as an add on I mention it here.
I suppose this line of reasoning is not new to most here, but since I don't see it explicitly mentioned....
1) Most controversial, and almost an aside to the main argument that Clark makes but of course the claim that gets the most ink: that there is something in the culture or even genes of certain societies that keeps them from effectively industrializing.
2) The core claim: That throughout history, temporarily increasing the food supply (through minor technical innovation, or through some other windfall) in a non-industrialized population just leads to more births, creating more people living at the subsistence level. The next food or money shock around the corner puts all these people at death's door. An increase in their numbers just strains the subsistence system even more, inviting an even more horrible catastrophe. Only large, across-the-board increases in the efficiency of economic agents can provide anything other than temporary respite from this trap.
I do not mean to be glib about the horrible, regrettable, and tragic death of a single victim of starvation, let alone millions. But if poorly aimed altruism leads to MORE starvation in the future, then it is not really altruism but self-important, deadly moralizing. I don't know where the truth of the situation lies, but at the very least I bet I could come up with a cute, leading and misleading thought experiment that would lead the essay-writer to admitting he's killing 10 times as many people as he claims he's saving. And I'd be just as reprehensible in my intellectual laziness as he appears to be.
Added: In response to Yvain's latest post, I can accept that this is one sense a dodge of the question. I suppose I don't have a response to the central question, if indeed the central question is whether to do everything in one's power to alleviate suffering, either through food charity or condom charity or whatever. So to separate out the issues here: (1) I find the argument disingenuous, (2) I do not have an answer. .... yet. I must think more clearly about my morals.
So I imagined myself at this person's speech, and found it fairly predictable for the most part. When he said he wanted to ask a few questions before the speech, I knew that the questions would actually be "part of" the speech, and I felt I should put the effort to try to answer them honestly (at least internally, if I were too embarrassed to admit the true answers publicly), as he probably chose the questions to trigger some insight later on.
When he asks if I was 50% confident I would kill myself to save 10, I was pretty torn, and I suspect I would not have resolved the question (and thus not raised my hand) by the time he moved on to the next question.
When he asks if I'm 95% confident I would kill myself to save 10, this was a much easier question. I know I'm not 95% confident and thus did not even consider raising my hand.
When he asks if I would spend 20 years in jail to save 10, my first gut instinct was to raise my hand, and I think I would have raised my hand. But, with my hand still in the air, I think I would immediately start regretting it, as I know that I, personally, am terrible at intuiting time duration, and started to wonder "how long is 20 years, really? That's practically my whole life so far... am I really willing to give up almost as much time as all the time I've ever experienced so far?"
"Too late", I imagined thinking to myself, "he's moved on to the next question." Would I live in eternal poverty to save 10? This again was an easy answer: definitely not. If 20 years was uncomfortably long, there's no way I'd live 60-80, or longer (if I sign up for cryonics?) without being able to afford videogames, internet access, etc.
And I'd at first be surprised by the number of hands that went up, but then I'd figure this is typical of neurotypicals (I'm on the autistic spectrum), who don't say what they mean, and don't even realize they don't mean what they are saying.
Then, as soon as the speaker said
In both situations if the people die, you will be rich; if they live, you will be poor, and it is within your power to decide which it is to be. In either situation if you decide that they should die in order that you can be rich, you have put your happiness, or not actually even that, you have put material riches for yourself above 10 people’s lives.
I successfully predicted that this speech would be about donating money to the poor.
So to answer the implied question:
I'd be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this.
I can tell you that my thoughts really didn't have much to do with poverty, morality, charities or Africa, but a lot more to do with people (in general, not just neurotypicals) not actually thinking about nor realizing what it is that they are saying. As an Autist, I "knew" on some level that NTs weren't doing this intentionally, but this speech actually really hit me hard with the idea that they really weren't doing it intentionally.
This really reminds me of Eliezer's Cached Thought concept.
the next time you hear someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme you think is silly or false, you'll think, "Cached thoughts." My belief is now there in your mind, waiting to complete the pattern. But is it true? Don't let your mind complete the pattern! Think!
Can you imagine a world where everyone followed this advice? I don't really know what would happen but it seems possible if all disposable income is given to people who don't have an income in regions that don't have an economy that this would choke economies and bringing the entire world population down to a subsistence level.
That's like imagining a world in which everyone became nurses and we had no other professions, or where everyone decided not to have children and the population crashed. We shouldn't discourage people from becoming nurses or not having children just because it would be bad if everyone did. If economies really started crashing because everyone gave away lots of money (or we had too many nurses or not enough babies), people would adjust their behavior.
Organizations like Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save advocate those of us in the developed world giving between 1% and 10% of our income. That would easily end the worst of world poverty, and (I believe) would not destroy economies.
Obviously, people in the developed world are not leaping to give away 50% of their income. Until they start, I'll continue trying to make up for them.
I'm pretty sure that if everyone did what their explicit morality told them to we would have endless global religious wars, but that doesn't mean that a world where people who build sane explicit moralities for themselves wouldn't make the world better by following those moralities in so far as they can.
Please remember that we're supposed to be able to submit links, not just original essays. Anyone downvoting on that basis (rather than dislike of the link itself) is making an error about Less Wrong posting policies. A link like this wouldn't be promoted to the front page but it's okay to vote up if you like the content.
The linked article presents a situation where the ten people you could save were chosen at random by a king. However, the people who you could save by giving to food aid charities are not random. They are specifically those who for some reason cannot produce enough to feed themselves. A few hundred years ago, feeding them would have prevented deaths in the short term, but caused an equal or greater number of deaths a generation later due to excess population. It also eliminates selection effects which would make future generations more productive. It may be possible to feed everyone today, but our moral instinct has had very little time to adjust to that fact, and it's still difficult to ensure our efforts aren't counterproductive. A lot of aid ends up being claimed by warlords and used against the people we want to help.
Yes, but there are ways to save people for not very much money. See http://givewell.net/psi
If you weren't so lazy and risk-averse, you could start your illegal toxic waste dumping business immediately :)
I'm glad that your button isn't readily available. If it chose its victims without any intent to cause personal regret, then I can't see any less than 10% of people opting for wealth - goodbye human race.
This whole speech makes me mad. The same people who urge us to not have kids, because of overpopulation, are urging us to spend all of our disposable income in supporting 'poor people', because they are in misery. And why are they in misery? Because they had more kids than they could afford to take care of. And their parents did. And their parents before them.
You on the other hand, are descended from a long line of prudent people. Who though about the consequences of their actions and decided that the short term pleasure wasn't worth the long term pain. Those in misery, those we are being urged to save, they, and their parents, didn't exercise the self restraint to not have kids they couldn't afford, and so now we should rush in and save them -- from the pain associated with their shortsightedness. They are and were obviously more indifference to their own future suffering, and to the future suffering of their children than to the pleasure of having half a dozen kids, why should we be more concerned about their suffering than they were? You postpone marriage and sacrifice to get a good job, they go out and have 10 kids when they don't have enough food and money to support themselves.
If revealed preferences show anything, they show that they, personally, aren't actually very distressed by the threat of dying of hunger, or being debilitated by disease, or living in a society wracked by violence and injustice. And they aren't too distressed by the possibility of their children living and dying in exactly the same way. They obviously aren't concerned enough about it to change their own behavior. Why should we rush in and save them?
That's the problem with utilitarianism. Just like every other form of socialism it says that people who are smart, and conscientious, and hard working, should spend their time working to accomplish the goals of people who are lazy, stupid, and thriftless. Or rather working 24/7 to save them from the consequences of their actions. They go off and have half a dozen kids with no way to support them, and then we are supposed to spend out time maximizing "the sum total of human happiness" by supporting them and their kids -- by doing for them things they can't be bothered to do for themselves.
That's the problem with democracy too, especially democracy in the form with mass redistribution. Money (which is, literally, time) is taken from the smart, the hardworking, and the conscientious, and given to the foolish, the feckless and the irresponsible. This TRANSFERS decision making power as to what to do with the spare resources of society from people who would invest in cultural enhancement, things like scientific research, to those whose highest goals are pleasure and the shortsighted avoidance of pain.
This is a mistake on two levels:
First, it turns evolution on it's head. Soon the world is full of thriftless, heedless, irresponsible people.
Second, it destroys the possibility of progress. I say encourage smart, conscientious, hardworking people to use their spare time, energy and money to advance human KNOWLEDGE, and to have smart, conscientious, hardworking kids of their own, who will do the same.
If increasing the sum total of human happiness is your goal, there are far better ways of accomplishing it than giving all of your money to aid workers to distribute to the poor.
1) Even if you did save the lives of 10 people, by sending all your spare cash to provide food aid or medical assistance to the dreadfully poor. I don't think it actually decreases the amount of suffering in the world, or increases the amount of human happiness. It just gives 10 people you saved the 'opportunity' to suffer in a dozen other unpleasant ways. The quality of life in places where people actually die from malnutrition is dreadful.
2) If you just want to maximize the human happiness of 10 people, have 10 kids, and raise them lovingly. You'd add more to the sum total of human enjoyment in the world than someone who rescues 10 people from starvation. The number of additional " enjoyable human life years" you give them is probably nil, since you don't, and can't, make sure they are educated, or taught a useful profession, or protected from dreadful diseases, or from random violence by thugs and jihadists and the hundreds of other injustices and oppression they would encounter in Africa,or where-ever. Just making sure they don't die of starvation is just the start of the unending list of things you would have to fix to make their lives enjoyable. Cut out the middleman, those ineffectual, incompetent aid workers, who need tens of thousands of your money to marginally improve the life of one person (maybe). Raise 10 kids of your own. Guaranteed the happy, useful lives of THOSE ten kids will add more to the 'sum total of human happiness' than the lives of those hypothetical 10 people in Africa.
3) Besides, raising 10 kids of your own would dramatically increase your OWN happiness. Why feel guilty? Pleasure that you give yourself is as much a contribution to the sum total of human happiness as pleasure you enable your 10 kids experience, by living happy and productive lives. And believe me, your life would be MUCH more enjoyable. And not just from the fun of watching the kids grow up. If you're a guy, and if you're reading this blog, the odds are high you are a guy, then, believe me, there is no 'game' you can play that would be as sure a road to finding a beautiful, loving woman who wants YOU, as announcing to all and sundry that you want to get married and have a lot of kids -- and that you are looking for someone who wants that too. Try THAT the next time you walk into a bar.
4) And if you're reading this blog, the odds are high that you are about 2 standard deviations above the average human being in intelligence, conscientiousness, and willingness to work hard. If the 10 people whose lives you make possible are all YOUR KIDS, instead of some random strangers, you just helped improve the human gene pool, and by a lot. We need more people who are just like you, who care about scientific progress, and the future of the human race, etc. So get out there and replicate!! :-) ,Instead of sending your money off to help replicate other people, replicate yourself! You are exactly the sort of people we need more of.
Even better, if you do have kids, (instead of spending your time supporting other peoples kids), you can raise them to be USEFUL: scientists, engineers, researchers -- people who can make a real contribution to humanity, instead of eaking out their lives as subsistence agriculturalists, or as "marginally attached workers" in some slum of a mega city, or idling their time away in some refugee camp...
The real question is, is the ultimate value maximizing the number of human-years? How about the quest for knowledge? Improvement of the species?
Is saving 10 people from starvation (ie, funding the continued existence of 10 people, engaging in the typical activities of a subsistence agriculturist, and experiencing the normal pleasures/pains of a subsistence agriculturist's life, of greater value than, say, funding one person working to figure out how to increase human being's peak IQ? [although, of course, fill in here the research question that you think is the most important]
I'd say that the average subsistence agriculturalist isn't contributing anything (and CAN'T contribute anything) to the most valuable activities mankind is currently engaged in.