Yes, emotional empathy does not optimize effective altruism, or your moral idea of good. But this is true of lots of emotions, desires and behaviors, including morally significant ones. You’re singling out emotional empathy, but what makes it special?
I agree with you that nothing makes them special. But you seem to view this as a reductio ad absurdum. Doing the same for all other emotions which might bias us or get in the way of doing what’s moral would not lead to a balanced lifestyle, to say the least.
But we could just as easily bite that bullet. Why should we expect optimizing purely for morality to lead to a balanced lifestyle? Why wouldn’t the 80⁄20 rule apply to moral concerns? Under this view, one would do best to amputate most parts of one’s mind that made them human, and add parts to become a morality maximizer.
Obviously this would cause serious problems in reality, and may not actually be the best way to maximize morality even if it was possible. This is just a sort of spherical cow in a vacuum level concept.
Even if it were the best way to maximize morality, why would you want to maximize it?
Human values are complex. Wanting to maximize one at the expense of all others implies it already is your sole value. Of course, human don’t exactly converge on the subgoal of preserving their values, so the right words can (and have) convinced people to follow many single values.
Perhaps I should have been more specific than to use a vague term like “morality”. Replace it with CEV, since that should be the sum total of all your values.
Most people value happiness, so let me use that as an example. Even if I value own happiness 1000x more than other people’s happiness, if there are more than 1000 people in the word, then the vast majority of my concern for happiness is still external to myself. One could do this same calculation for all other values, and add them up to get CEV, which is likely to be weighted toward others for the same reason that happiness is.
Of course, perhaps some people legitimately would prefer 3^^^3 dust specs in people’s eyes to their own death. And perhaps some people’s values aren’t coherent, such as preferring A to B, B to C, and C to A. But if neither of these is the case, then replacing one’s self with a more efficient agent maximizing the same values should be a net gain in most cases.
I don’t believe a CEV exists or, if it does, that I would like it very much. Both were poorly supported assumptions of the CEV paper. For related reasons, as the Wiki says, “Yudkowsky considered CEV obsolete almost immediately after its publication in 2004”. I’m not sure why people keep discussing CEV (Nick Tarleton, and other links on the Wiki page) but I assume there are good reasons.
One could do this same calculation for all other values, and add them up to get CEV,
That doesn’t sound like CEV at all. CEV is about extrapolating new values which may not be held by any actual humans. Not (just) about summing or averaging the values humans already hold.
Getting back to happiness: it’s easy to say we should increase happiness, all else being equal. It’s not so obvious that we should increase it at the expense of other things, or by how much. I don’t think happiness is substantially different in this case from morality.
Thanks for letting me know that CEV is obsolete. I’ll have to look into the details. However, I don’t think our disagreement is in that area.
it’s easy to say we should increase happiness, all else being equal. It’s not so obvious that we should increase it at the expense of other things
Agreed, but the argument works just as well for decreasing happiness as for possible increases. Even someone who valued their own happiness 1000x more than that of others would still prefer to suffer than for 1001 people to suffer. If they also value their own life 1000x as much as other people’s lives, they would be willing to die to prevent 1001+ deaths. If you added up the total number of utils of happiness, according to his or her utility function, 99.9999% of the happiness they value would be happiness in other people, assuming there are on the order of billions of people and that they bite the bullet on the repugnant conclusion. (For simplicity’s sake.)
But all that’s really just to argue that there are things worth dying for, in the case of many people. My central argument looks something like this:
There are things worth dying for. Loosing something valuable, like by suppressing a biased emotion, is less bad than dying. If suppressing emotional empathy boosts the impact of cognitive empathy (I’m not sure it does) enough to achieve something worth dying for, then one should do so.
But I’m not sure things are so dire. The argument gets more charitable when re-framed as boosting cognitive empathy instead. In reality, I think what’s actually going on is empathy either triggers something like near-mode thinking or far-mode, and these two possibilities are what leads to “emotional empathy” and “cognitive empathy”. If so, then “discarding [emotional] empathy” seems far less worrying. It’s just a cognitive habit. In principle though, if sacrificing something more actually was necessary for the greater good, then that would outweigh personal loss.
There are other things you value besides happiness, which can also be hyper-satisfied at the cost of abandoning other values. Maybe you really love music, and funding poor Western artists instead of saving the global poor from starvation would increase the production of your favorite sub-genre by 1000x. Maybe you care about making humanity an interplanetary species, and giving your savings to SpaceX instead of the AMF could make it come true. If only those pesky emotion of empathy didn’t distract you all the time.
How can you choose one value to maximize?
Furthermore, ‘increasing happiness’ probably isn’t a monolithic value, it has divisions and subgoals. And most likely, there are also multiple emotions and instincts that make you value them. Maybe you somewhat separately value saving people’s lives, separately value reducing suffering, separately value increasing some kinds of freedom or equality, separately value helping people in your own country vs. the rest of the world.
If you could choose to hyper-satisfy one sub-value at the expense of all the others, which would you choose? Saving all the lives, but letting them live in misery? Eliminating pain, but not caring when people die? Helping only people of one gender, or of one faith, or one ethnicity?
The answer might be to find other people who care about the same set of values as you do. Each will agree to work on one thing only, and gain the benefits of so specializing. (If you could just pool and divide your resources the problem would be solved already.) But your emotions would still be satisfied from knowing you’re achieving all your values; if you withdraw from the partnership, the others would adjust their funding in a way that would (necessarily) defund each project proportionally to how much you value it. So you wouldn’t need to ‘discard’ your emotions.
I do think all this is unnecessary in practice, because there aren’t large benefits to be gained by discarding some emotions and values.
I agree with you on the complexity of value. However, perhaps we are imagining the ideal way of aggregating all those complex values differently. I absolutely agree that the simple models I keep proposing for individual values are spherical cows, and ignore a lot of nuance. I just don’t see things working radically differently when the nuance is added in, and the values aggregated.
That sounds like a really complex discussion though, and I don’t think either of us is likely to convince the other without a novel’s worth of text. However, perhaps I can convince you that you already are suppressing some impulses, and that this isn’t always disastrous. (Though it certainly can be, if you choose the wrong ones.)
there aren’t large benefits to be gained by discarding some emotions and values.
Isn’t that what akrasia is?
If I find that part of me values one marshmallow now at the expense of 2 later, and I don’t endorse this upon reflection, wouldn’t it make sense to try and decrease such impulses? Removing them may be unnecessarily extreme, but perhaps that’s what some nootropics do.
Similarly, if I were to find that I gained a sadistic pleasure from something, I wouldn’t endorse that outside of well defined S&M. If I had an alcoholism problem, I’d similarly dislike my desire for alcohol. I suspect that strongly associating cigarettes with disgust is helpful in counteracting the impulse to smoke.
If I understand correctly, some Buddhist try to eliminate suffering by eliminating their desires. I find this existentially terrifying. However, I think that boosting and suppressing these sorts of impulses is precisely what psychologists call conditioning. A world where none refines or updates their natural impulses is just as unsettling as the Buddhist suppression of all values.
So, even if you don’t agree that there are cases where we should suppress certain pro-social emotions, do you agree with my characterization of antisocial emotions and grey area impulses like akrasia?
(I’m using values, impulses, emotions, etc fairly interchangeably here. If what I’m saying isn’t clear, let me know and I can try to dig into the distinctions.)
I think I understand your point better now, and I agree with it.
My conscious, deliberative, speaking self definitely wants to be rid of akrasia and to reduce time discounting. If I could self modify to remove akrasia, I definitely would. But I don’t want to get rid of emotional empathy, or filial love, or the love of cats that makes me sometimes feed strays. I wouldn’t do it if I could. This isn’t something I derive from or defend by higher principles, it’s just how I am.
I have other emotions I would reduce or even remove, given the chance. Like anger and jealousy. These can be moral emotions no less than empathy—righteous anger, justice and fairness. It stands to reason some people might feel this way about any other emotion or desire, including empathy. When these things already aren’t part of the values their conscious self identifies with, they want to reduce or discard them.
And since I can be verbally, rationally convinced to want things, I can be convinced to want to discard emotions I previously didn’t.
It’s a good thing that we’re very bad at actually changing our emotional makeup. The evolution of values over time can lead to some scary attractor states. And I wouldn’t want to permanently discard one feeling during a brief period of obsession with something else! Because actual changes take a lot of time and effort, we usually only go through with the ones we’re really resolved about, which is a good condition to have. (Also, how can you want to develop an emotion you’ve never had? Do you just end up with very few emotions?)
Agreed. I’ll add 2 things that support of your point, though.
First, the Milgram experiment seems to suggest that even seemingly antisocial impulses like stubbornness can be extremely valuable. Sticking to core values rather than conforming likely led more people to resist the Nazis.
Also, I didn’t bring it up earlier because it undermines my point, but apparently sociopaths have smaller amygdalas than normal, while kidney donors have larger ones, and empathy is linked to that region of the brain. So, we probably could reduce or remove emotional empathy and/or cognitive empathy if we really wanted to. However, I’m not at all inclined to inflict brain damage on myself, even if it could somehow be targeted enough to not interfere with cognitive empathy or anything else.
So, more generally, even reversible modification worries me, and the idea of permanently changing our values scares the shit out of me. For humanity as a whole, although not necessarily small groups of individuals as a means to an end, I don’t endorse most modifications. I would much rather we retain a desire we approve of but which the laws of physics prevent us from satisfying, than to remove that value and be fulfilled.
This actually has a name. It’s called moral licensing.
I agree with you that nothing makes them special. But you seem to view this as a reductio ad absurdum. Doing the same for all other emotions which might bias us or get in the way of doing what’s moral would not lead to a balanced lifestyle, to say the least.
But we could just as easily bite that bullet. Why should we expect optimizing purely for morality to lead to a balanced lifestyle? Why wouldn’t the 80⁄20 rule apply to moral concerns? Under this view, one would do best to amputate most parts of one’s mind that made them human, and add parts to become a morality maximizer.
Obviously this would cause serious problems in reality, and may not actually be the best way to maximize morality even if it was possible. This is just a sort of spherical cow in a vacuum level concept.
If the 80⁄20 rules applies to moral concerns why do you think that getting rid of empty is part in the 20% that does 80%?
Even if it were the best way to maximize morality, why would you want to maximize it?
Human values are complex. Wanting to maximize one at the expense of all others implies it already is your sole value. Of course, human don’t exactly converge on the subgoal of preserving their values, so the right words can (and have) convinced people to follow many single values.
Perhaps I should have been more specific than to use a vague term like “morality”. Replace it with CEV, since that should be the sum total of all your values.
Most people value happiness, so let me use that as an example. Even if I value own happiness 1000x more than other people’s happiness, if there are more than 1000 people in the word, then the vast majority of my concern for happiness is still external to myself. One could do this same calculation for all other values, and add them up to get CEV, which is likely to be weighted toward others for the same reason that happiness is.
Of course, perhaps some people legitimately would prefer 3^^^3 dust specs in people’s eyes to their own death. And perhaps some people’s values aren’t coherent, such as preferring A to B, B to C, and C to A. But if neither of these is the case, then replacing one’s self with a more efficient agent maximizing the same values should be a net gain in most cases.
I don’t believe a CEV exists or, if it does, that I would like it very much. Both were poorly supported assumptions of the CEV paper. For related reasons, as the Wiki says, “Yudkowsky considered CEV obsolete almost immediately after its publication in 2004”. I’m not sure why people keep discussing CEV (Nick Tarleton, and other links on the Wiki page) but I assume there are good reasons.
That doesn’t sound like CEV at all. CEV is about extrapolating new values which may not be held by any actual humans. Not (just) about summing or averaging the values humans already hold.
Getting back to happiness: it’s easy to say we should increase happiness, all else being equal. It’s not so obvious that we should increase it at the expense of other things, or by how much. I don’t think happiness is substantially different in this case from morality.
Thanks for letting me know that CEV is obsolete. I’ll have to look into the details. However, I don’t think our disagreement is in that area.
Agreed, but the argument works just as well for decreasing happiness as for possible increases. Even someone who valued their own happiness 1000x more than that of others would still prefer to suffer than for 1001 people to suffer. If they also value their own life 1000x as much as other people’s lives, they would be willing to die to prevent 1001+ deaths. If you added up the total number of utils of happiness, according to his or her utility function, 99.9999% of the happiness they value would be happiness in other people, assuming there are on the order of billions of people and that they bite the bullet on the repugnant conclusion. (For simplicity’s sake.)
But all that’s really just to argue that there are things worth dying for, in the case of many people. My central argument looks something like this:
There are things worth dying for. Loosing something valuable, like by suppressing a biased emotion, is less bad than dying. If suppressing emotional empathy boosts the impact of cognitive empathy (I’m not sure it does) enough to achieve something worth dying for, then one should do so.
But I’m not sure things are so dire. The argument gets more charitable when re-framed as boosting cognitive empathy instead. In reality, I think what’s actually going on is empathy either triggers something like near-mode thinking or far-mode, and these two possibilities are what leads to “emotional empathy” and “cognitive empathy”. If so, then “discarding [emotional] empathy” seems far less worrying. It’s just a cognitive habit. In principle though, if sacrificing something more actually was necessary for the greater good, then that would outweigh personal loss.
There are other things you value besides happiness, which can also be hyper-satisfied at the cost of abandoning other values. Maybe you really love music, and funding poor Western artists instead of saving the global poor from starvation would increase the production of your favorite sub-genre by 1000x. Maybe you care about making humanity an interplanetary species, and giving your savings to SpaceX instead of the AMF could make it come true. If only those pesky emotion of empathy didn’t distract you all the time.
How can you choose one value to maximize?
Furthermore, ‘increasing happiness’ probably isn’t a monolithic value, it has divisions and subgoals. And most likely, there are also multiple emotions and instincts that make you value them. Maybe you somewhat separately value saving people’s lives, separately value reducing suffering, separately value increasing some kinds of freedom or equality, separately value helping people in your own country vs. the rest of the world.
If you could choose to hyper-satisfy one sub-value at the expense of all the others, which would you choose? Saving all the lives, but letting them live in misery? Eliminating pain, but not caring when people die? Helping only people of one gender, or of one faith, or one ethnicity?
The answer might be to find other people who care about the same set of values as you do. Each will agree to work on one thing only, and gain the benefits of so specializing. (If you could just pool and divide your resources the problem would be solved already.) But your emotions would still be satisfied from knowing you’re achieving all your values; if you withdraw from the partnership, the others would adjust their funding in a way that would (necessarily) defund each project proportionally to how much you value it. So you wouldn’t need to ‘discard’ your emotions.
I do think all this is unnecessary in practice, because there aren’t large benefits to be gained by discarding some emotions and values.
I agree with you on the complexity of value. However, perhaps we are imagining the ideal way of aggregating all those complex values differently. I absolutely agree that the simple models I keep proposing for individual values are spherical cows, and ignore a lot of nuance. I just don’t see things working radically differently when the nuance is added in, and the values aggregated.
That sounds like a really complex discussion though, and I don’t think either of us is likely to convince the other without a novel’s worth of text. However, perhaps I can convince you that you already are suppressing some impulses, and that this isn’t always disastrous. (Though it certainly can be, if you choose the wrong ones.)
Isn’t that what akrasia is?
If I find that part of me values one marshmallow now at the expense of 2 later, and I don’t endorse this upon reflection, wouldn’t it make sense to try and decrease such impulses? Removing them may be unnecessarily extreme, but perhaps that’s what some nootropics do.
Similarly, if I were to find that I gained a sadistic pleasure from something, I wouldn’t endorse that outside of well defined S&M. If I had an alcoholism problem, I’d similarly dislike my desire for alcohol. I suspect that strongly associating cigarettes with disgust is helpful in counteracting the impulse to smoke.
If I understand correctly, some Buddhist try to eliminate suffering by eliminating their desires. I find this existentially terrifying. However, I think that boosting and suppressing these sorts of impulses is precisely what psychologists call conditioning. A world where none refines or updates their natural impulses is just as unsettling as the Buddhist suppression of all values.
So, even if you don’t agree that there are cases where we should suppress certain pro-social emotions, do you agree with my characterization of antisocial emotions and grey area impulses like akrasia?
(I’m using values, impulses, emotions, etc fairly interchangeably here. If what I’m saying isn’t clear, let me know and I can try to dig into the distinctions.)
I think I understand your point better now, and I agree with it.
My conscious, deliberative, speaking self definitely wants to be rid of akrasia and to reduce time discounting. If I could self modify to remove akrasia, I definitely would. But I don’t want to get rid of emotional empathy, or filial love, or the love of cats that makes me sometimes feed strays. I wouldn’t do it if I could. This isn’t something I derive from or defend by higher principles, it’s just how I am.
I have other emotions I would reduce or even remove, given the chance. Like anger and jealousy. These can be moral emotions no less than empathy—righteous anger, justice and fairness. It stands to reason some people might feel this way about any other emotion or desire, including empathy. When these things already aren’t part of the values their conscious self identifies with, they want to reduce or discard them.
And since I can be verbally, rationally convinced to want things, I can be convinced to want to discard emotions I previously didn’t.
It’s a good thing that we’re very bad at actually changing our emotional makeup. The evolution of values over time can lead to some scary attractor states. And I wouldn’t want to permanently discard one feeling during a brief period of obsession with something else! Because actual changes take a lot of time and effort, we usually only go through with the ones we’re really resolved about, which is a good condition to have. (Also, how can you want to develop an emotion you’ve never had? Do you just end up with very few emotions?)
Agreed. I’ll add 2 things that support of your point, though.
First, the Milgram experiment seems to suggest that even seemingly antisocial impulses like stubbornness can be extremely valuable. Sticking to core values rather than conforming likely led more people to resist the Nazis.
Also, I didn’t bring it up earlier because it undermines my point, but apparently sociopaths have smaller amygdalas than normal, while kidney donors have larger ones, and empathy is linked to that region of the brain. So, we probably could reduce or remove emotional empathy and/or cognitive empathy if we really wanted to. However, I’m not at all inclined to inflict brain damage on myself, even if it could somehow be targeted enough to not interfere with cognitive empathy or anything else.
So, more generally, even reversible modification worries me, and the idea of permanently changing our values scares the shit out of me. For humanity as a whole, although not necessarily small groups of individuals as a means to an end, I don’t endorse most modifications. I would much rather we retain a desire we approve of but which the laws of physics prevent us from satisfying, than to remove that value and be fulfilled.