This is the first I heard of 80,000 hours, and their site gives me an instant negative vibe, and it’s not just the abundance of weird pink on it. But I have trouble pinpointing quite what it is.
I notice that in their list of high-impact careers, not one of them involves actually doing the work that all this charity pays for. The grunt work is beneath them and the audience they’re aiming at. A lot of the careers consist of telling other people what to do: managers, policy advisors, grant writers, sitting on funding bodies. The closest any of them get to boots on the ground is scientific research and development.
Now, I can see the argument for this. If your abilities lie in the direction of a lucrative profession, you should do that and give most of the proceeds to charity. The lawyer and the soup kitchen. But take this a step further (as the 80,000ers do themselves). Wouldn’t it be even more effective to persuade other people to do this? If you get 10 people to make substantial donations, that’s more effective than just doing it yourself. Or in their words, “There are also many opportunities for forming chains of these activities. For instance, you could campaign for more people to become professional philanthropists, who could spend money paying for more campaigners.”
But why stop there? The more money people have, the more they can give, so you should concentrate on persuading the seriously wealthy to donate. And to move in their circles, you will have to cultivate a certain degree of prosperity yourself, or you’ll never get access. Just an expense of the job, which will pay off with even more money raised for charity.
But then again, governments command vastly more wealth and power than almost any individual, so that is where you could have a truly great impact. Better still, go for the governments of governments, the supra-national organisations. Of course, it will be such a chore to maintain a pied-à-terre in every major capital, charter private jets for your travelling, and dine at the most expensive restaurants with senior politicians and businessmen, but one could probably put up with it.
Now, the higher up this pyramid you go, the smaller it gets, so there will only be room for a few giga-effective careers at the top. But never mind, it’s your duty to climb as far up as you can, and if you do replace someone rather than adding yourself, make sure that it’s because you can do an even more effective job than they were doing.
And it’s all for the sake of the poor, and the more successful you are, the less you’ll ever see of them.
Yes, I can see the argument.
Onion, if you want to write a satirical piece on this theme, go right ahead.
BTW, a couple of the names on the list of authors of their blog are LessWrong regulars, although I’m not sure Eliezer should be listed there: the only post attributed to him is actually a repost by someone else of something he posted to LW.
You know, this is sort of WAD. It’s much easier to get people to do good if it happens to nearly coincide with something they wanted to do anyway. If you have someone who was already planning to become a banker, then it’s much easier to persuade them to keep doing that, but give away money, than it is to persuade them to become a peniless activist. As it happens, this may be hugely effective, and so a massive win from a consequentialist point of view.
I like to think of it more on the positive front: as a white, male, privileged Westerner with a high-status education you basically have economic superpowers, so you can quite easily do a lot of good by doing pretty much what you were going to do anyway. Obviously, most of this is due to your circumstances, but it’s still a great opportunity.
The amusement or absurdity value should be irrelevant in evaluating such decisions. I feel really angry when I consider remarks like these (not angry at someone or some action in particular, but more vaguely about the human status quo). The kind of spectacle where tickets are purchased in dead child currency.
This has been my concern. I’m not involved with 80k but I travel in Effective Altruism circles, which extend beyond 80k and include most of their memes.
What is incredibly frustrating is that none of this actually proves anything. It is still true that a wealthy banker is probably able to do more good than a single aid worker. Clearly we DO need to make sure there’s an object-level impact somewhere. But for the near future, unless their memes overtake the bulk of the philanthropy world, it is likely that methods 80k advocates are sound.
Still, the whole thing smells really off to me, and your post sums up exactly why. It is awful convenient for a movement consisting of mostly upper-middle-class college grads that their “effective” tools for goodness award them the status and wealth that they’d otherwise feel entitled to.
alternately, humans are badly made and care more about status and wealth than about the poor sick. They won’t listen if you tell them to sacrifice themselves, but they might listen if you tell them to gain status and also help the poor at the same time. The mark of a strong system in my mind is one that functions despite the perverse desires of the participants. If 80k can harness people’s desire to do charity to people’s desire for money and status I think it can go really far.
I am not joking around, but neither am I arguing that they should shut up shop and go save the world some other way. I have not concluded a view on whether what they are doing is worth while, and my posting is simply to voice a concern. If you think it’s an unfounded one, go ahead and say why.
I don’t know. But I think there’s a valid point here, and an Onion piece begging to be written about a bunch of Oxford philosophy students urging people to save the world by earning pots of money as bankers (a target they’ve painted on themselves with their own press release), and I can’t help imagining what Mencius Moldbug would have to say about them.
I don’t think I understand your concern. It’s that people who go into high-earning careers will lose touch with “real people” (although the people these folks want to help are usually future people or in the developing world, and thus people they would never have met anyway)?
I’m not RichardKennaway, but I read him as basically applying a be-wary-of-convenient-clever-arguments-for-doing-something-you’d-probably-want-to-do-anyway heuristic. I see where he’s coming from. The 80,000 Hours argument for getting riches & status instead of becoming (say) an aid worker or a doctor does smell suspiciously self-serving, at least to my nose. However — and it’s a big “However” — their argument does appear to be correct, so I try to ignore the smell.
Yes, that’s exactly what was in my mind, and Raemon expressed it also.
their argument does appear to be correct, so I try to ignore the smell.
I don’t think that’s the right way to resolve the conflict. One person’s taking beliefs seriously is another’s toxic decompartmentalisation, after all. Why should the smell yield to the argument instead of vice versa? Especially when you notice that the part telling you that is the part making the argument, and the cognitive nose is inarticulate. No, what is needed is to resolve the contradiction, not to suppress one side of it and pretend you are no longer confused.
And meanwhile, go and be a banker, or whatever the right answer presently seems to be, because there is no such thing as inaction while you resolve the conundrum: to do nothing is itself to do something. If you later conclude it’s a false path, at least the money will give you the flexibility to switch to whatever you decide you should have been doing instead.
Why should the smell yield to the argument instead of vice versa?
That’s the $64,000(-a-year) question, and I don’t have an answer I’m happy with for the general case. Here’s roughly what I think for this specific situation.
As you say, my nose can’t describe what it smells. It might be a genuine problem or a false alarm. To find out which, I have to consciously poke around for an overlooked counterargument or a weak spot in the original argument, something to corroborate the bad smell. I did that here and couldn’t find a killer gap in 80,000 Hours’ arguments, nor a strong counterargument for why I should disregard them.
For simplicity, consider a stripped down version of the decision problem where I have only two options: becoming a rich banker vs. getting a normal job paying the median salary.
Suppose I disapprove of the banker option for whatever reason. If I hold my nose and become a banker anyway, it seems very likely to me that (1) I would nonetheless prefer that to having someone with different values in my place instead, and (2) that even if taking a banking job worked against my values or goals, I could compensate for that by hiring other people to further them.
I had thought that reference class forecasting might warn against the get-rich-and-give strategy: people with more income give a smaller percentage of it to charity, so by entering banking one might opt into a less generous reference class. But quick Googling reveals that people with higher incomes give more in absolute terms, at least in the UK, the US, and Canada.
Putting aside the chance of my being wrong, what about the disutility of being wrong? Well, I agree with your final paragraph, so that doesn’t seem to weigh heavily against the 80,000 Hours point of view either.
All in all my nose seems to have overreacted on this one. Maybe it raised the alarm because 80,000 Hours’ conclusion failed a quick universalizability test, namely “would this still be the best choice if everyone else in the same boat made it too?” But that test itself seems to fail here.
I doubt my thoughts on this are bulletproof; there’s a good chance I’m missing part of the puzzle or just plain wrong on some fundamental issue. Maybe I’ve built a convenient, clever meta-argument for arguing myself into something I’d probably want to do anyway! Still, ultimately I can devote only so much thought (and self-distrust) to this. I have to make a judgement call, and this is the best one I can make, whatever the risk of motivated cognition.
That’s a part of it. One reason for the lawyer to now and then put in a shift at the soup kitchen is to keep his feet on the ground and observe the actual effect of what he’s donating to. Some managers put in a shift on the shop floor now and then for the same reason. Maybe 80,000ers should consider spending their vacations out in the field?
Maybe 80,000ers should consider spending their vacations out in the field?
I agree. I’m writing from Ecuador right now. Seeing serious poverty first-hand does hit me in a different place than reading about it. But I still think donating to efficient charities is the best way to help these people—not me volunteering or moving here.
I think most of the 80K Hours founders are/were philosophy grad students. So they weren’t especially likely to wind up as either on-the-ground nonprofit workers or high-flying financiers. And I gather many of them had an ugh field around money, so trying to earn more of it (and being read by other people as someone who loves money) is more of a sacrifice than it might seem.
Some of the links you make aren’t sound (lots of people are already trying to get the seriously wealthy to donate, so it might not be where you can have the greatest impact, there’s not a good reason to think that you would be more effective than the people who currently run the IMF and WorldBank) but the overall idea seems good to me: look for where you can most improve the world and go there.
Assuming that we run on corrupted hardware, how much should we trust explanations: “I should get a lot of money and power, because I am a good person, so this will help the whole society”?
Also, if I tried to convert you to a money-making cult, such as Amway, I would start by describing the good things you could do after you become super-rich. Not because we are at LW where we signal that we care about saving the world, but because this is the standard recruitment tactic.
(This does not prove that “80,000 hours” is a bad thing. I just explain how it pattern-matches and creates a negative vibe.)
This is the first I heard of 80,000 hours, and their site gives me an instant negative vibe, and it’s not just the abundance of weird pink on it. But I have trouble pinpointing quite what it is.
I notice that in their list of high-impact careers, not one of them involves actually doing the work that all this charity pays for. The grunt work is beneath them and the audience they’re aiming at. A lot of the careers consist of telling other people what to do: managers, policy advisors, grant writers, sitting on funding bodies. The closest any of them get to boots on the ground is scientific research and development.
Now, I can see the argument for this. If your abilities lie in the direction of a lucrative profession, you should do that and give most of the proceeds to charity. The lawyer and the soup kitchen. But take this a step further (as the 80,000ers do themselves). Wouldn’t it be even more effective to persuade other people to do this? If you get 10 people to make substantial donations, that’s more effective than just doing it yourself. Or in their words, “There are also many opportunities for forming chains of these activities. For instance, you could campaign for more people to become professional philanthropists, who could spend money paying for more campaigners.”
But why stop there? The more money people have, the more they can give, so you should concentrate on persuading the seriously wealthy to donate. And to move in their circles, you will have to cultivate a certain degree of prosperity yourself, or you’ll never get access. Just an expense of the job, which will pay off with even more money raised for charity.
But then again, governments command vastly more wealth and power than almost any individual, so that is where you could have a truly great impact. Better still, go for the governments of governments, the supra-national organisations. Of course, it will be such a chore to maintain a pied-à-terre in every major capital, charter private jets for your travelling, and dine at the most expensive restaurants with senior politicians and businessmen, but one could probably put up with it.
Now, the higher up this pyramid you go, the smaller it gets, so there will only be room for a few giga-effective careers at the top. But never mind, it’s your duty to climb as far up as you can, and if you do replace someone rather than adding yourself, make sure that it’s because you can do an even more effective job than they were doing.
And it’s all for the sake of the poor, and the more successful you are, the less you’ll ever see of them.
Yes, I can see the argument.
Onion, if you want to write a satirical piece on this theme, go right ahead.
BTW, a couple of the names on the list of authors of their blog are LessWrong regulars, although I’m not sure Eliezer should be listed there: the only post attributed to him is actually a repost by someone else of something he posted to LW.
You know, this is sort of WAD. It’s much easier to get people to do good if it happens to nearly coincide with something they wanted to do anyway. If you have someone who was already planning to become a banker, then it’s much easier to persuade them to keep doing that, but give away money, than it is to persuade them to become a peniless activist. As it happens, this may be hugely effective, and so a massive win from a consequentialist point of view.
I like to think of it more on the positive front: as a white, male, privileged Westerner with a high-status education you basically have economic superpowers, so you can quite easily do a lot of good by doing pretty much what you were going to do anyway. Obviously, most of this is due to your circumstances, but it’s still a great opportunity.
The amusement or absurdity value should be irrelevant in evaluating such decisions. I feel really angry when I consider remarks like these (not angry at someone or some action in particular, but more vaguely about the human status quo). The kind of spectacle where tickets are purchased in dead child currency.
I can see that my response to 80,000 Hours could be just as self-serving as they can be seen as being, but see my further response to satt.
This has been my concern. I’m not involved with 80k but I travel in Effective Altruism circles, which extend beyond 80k and include most of their memes.
What is incredibly frustrating is that none of this actually proves anything. It is still true that a wealthy banker is probably able to do more good than a single aid worker. Clearly we DO need to make sure there’s an object-level impact somewhere. But for the near future, unless their memes overtake the bulk of the philanthropy world, it is likely that methods 80k advocates are sound.
Still, the whole thing smells really off to me, and your post sums up exactly why. It is awful convenient for a movement consisting of mostly upper-middle-class college grads that their “effective” tools for goodness award them the status and wealth that they’d otherwise feel entitled to.
alternately, humans are badly made and care more about status and wealth than about the poor sick. They won’t listen if you tell them to sacrifice themselves, but they might listen if you tell them to gain status and also help the poor at the same time. The mark of a strong system in my mind is one that functions despite the perverse desires of the participants. If 80k can harness people’s desire to do charity to people’s desire for money and status I think it can go really far.
That is a good point.
this seems like a feature since it means it is attractive to a MUCH larger subset of the populace than self sacrifice.
Is this actually meant to be an argument against 80k hours’ style of effective altruism or are you just joking around?
I am not joking around, but neither am I arguing that they should shut up shop and go save the world some other way. I have not concluded a view on whether what they are doing is worth while, and my posting is simply to voice a concern. If you think it’s an unfounded one, go ahead and say why.
I don’t know. But I think there’s a valid point here, and an Onion piece begging to be written about a bunch of Oxford philosophy students urging people to save the world by earning pots of money as bankers (a target they’ve painted on themselves with their own press release), and I can’t help imagining what Mencius Moldbug would have to say about them.
I don’t think I understand your concern. It’s that people who go into high-earning careers will lose touch with “real people” (although the people these folks want to help are usually future people or in the developing world, and thus people they would never have met anyway)?
I’m not RichardKennaway, but I read him as basically applying a be-wary-of-convenient-clever-arguments-for-doing-something-you’d-probably-want-to-do-anyway heuristic. I see where he’s coming from. The 80,000 Hours argument for getting riches & status instead of becoming (say) an aid worker or a doctor does smell suspiciously self-serving, at least to my nose. However — and it’s a big “However” — their argument does appear to be correct, so I try to ignore the smell.
Yes, that’s exactly what was in my mind, and Raemon expressed it also.
I don’t think that’s the right way to resolve the conflict. One person’s taking beliefs seriously is another’s toxic decompartmentalisation, after all. Why should the smell yield to the argument instead of vice versa? Especially when you notice that the part telling you that is the part making the argument, and the cognitive nose is inarticulate. No, what is needed is to resolve the contradiction, not to suppress one side of it and pretend you are no longer confused.
And meanwhile, go and be a banker, or whatever the right answer presently seems to be, because there is no such thing as inaction while you resolve the conundrum: to do nothing is itself to do something. If you later conclude it’s a false path, at least the money will give you the flexibility to switch to whatever you decide you should have been doing instead.
That’s the $64,000(-a-year) question, and I don’t have an answer I’m happy with for the general case. Here’s roughly what I think for this specific situation.
As you say, my nose can’t describe what it smells. It might be a genuine problem or a false alarm. To find out which, I have to consciously poke around for an overlooked counterargument or a weak spot in the original argument, something to corroborate the bad smell. I did that here and couldn’t find a killer gap in 80,000 Hours’ arguments, nor a strong counterargument for why I should disregard them.
For simplicity, consider a stripped down version of the decision problem where I have only two options: becoming a rich banker vs. getting a normal job paying the median salary.
Suppose I disapprove of the banker option for whatever reason. If I hold my nose and become a banker anyway, it seems very likely to me that (1) I would nonetheless prefer that to having someone with different values in my place instead, and (2) that even if taking a banking job worked against my values or goals, I could compensate for that by hiring other people to further them.
I had thought that reference class forecasting might warn against the get-rich-and-give strategy: people with more income give a smaller percentage of it to charity, so by entering banking one might opt into a less generous reference class. But quick Googling reveals that people with higher incomes give more in absolute terms, at least in the UK, the US, and Canada.
Putting aside the chance of my being wrong, what about the disutility of being wrong? Well, I agree with your final paragraph, so that doesn’t seem to weigh heavily against the 80,000 Hours point of view either.
All in all my nose seems to have overreacted on this one. Maybe it raised the alarm because 80,000 Hours’ conclusion failed a quick universalizability test, namely “would this still be the best choice if everyone else in the same boat made it too?” But that test itself seems to fail here.
I doubt my thoughts on this are bulletproof; there’s a good chance I’m missing part of the puzzle or just plain wrong on some fundamental issue. Maybe I’ve built a convenient, clever meta-argument for arguing myself into something I’d probably want to do anyway! Still, ultimately I can devote only so much thought (and self-distrust) to this. I have to make a judgement call, and this is the best one I can make, whatever the risk of motivated cognition.
That’s a part of it. One reason for the lawyer to now and then put in a shift at the soup kitchen is to keep his feet on the ground and observe the actual effect of what he’s donating to. Some managers put in a shift on the shop floor now and then for the same reason. Maybe 80,000ers should consider spending their vacations out in the field?
I agree. I’m writing from Ecuador right now. Seeing serious poverty first-hand does hit me in a different place than reading about it. But I still think donating to efficient charities is the best way to help these people—not me volunteering or moving here.
I think most of the 80K Hours founders are/were philosophy grad students. So they weren’t especially likely to wind up as either on-the-ground nonprofit workers or high-flying financiers. And I gather many of them had an ugh field around money, so trying to earn more of it (and being read by other people as someone who loves money) is more of a sacrifice than it might seem.
Some of the links you make aren’t sound (lots of people are already trying to get the seriously wealthy to donate, so it might not be where you can have the greatest impact, there’s not a good reason to think that you would be more effective than the people who currently run the IMF and WorldBank) but the overall idea seems good to me: look for where you can most improve the world and go there.
If you do pinpoint it, I would be curious.
Assuming that we run on corrupted hardware, how much should we trust explanations: “I should get a lot of money and power, because I am a good person, so this will help the whole society”?
Also, if I tried to convert you to a money-making cult, such as Amway, I would start by describing the good things you could do after you become super-rich. Not because we are at LW where we signal that we care about saving the world, but because this is the standard recruitment tactic.
(This does not prove that “80,000 hours” is a bad thing. I just explain how it pattern-matches and creates a negative vibe.)
EDIT: Also, be wary of convenient clever arguments for doing something you’d probably want to do anyway.
Maybe it reminds him of Breast Cancer advertising?