I can relate to this post, even when I was never part of the EA-movement. When I was younger, I did join a climate-organization, and also had an account on kiva.org. And I would say there was a lot of guilt and confusion around my actions at that point, whilst simultaneously trying to do a lot of ‘better than’-actions.
Your post is very extensive, and as such I find myself engaged by just reading one of the external links and the post itself. Therefore, my comment isn’t really a comment to the whole post, but sees the post through one entry-point I thought might be valuable. I hope it is still useful to the thematic you had in mind.
I focused on Child in the Pond and have used that as my pivot point—as well as reading the whole interaction between ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’.
Imagining being in the pond situation does fill me with emotions that would steer me towards taking action to alleviate the immediate suffering. But there are two things I believe that the Child in the pond text gets conflated, and which might also be relevant for the interactions between ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’.
The two are: 1. ‘Why’ you save the kid from drowning, but why you can’t “save” lives. 2. And relatedly, why focusing on money as a metric for saving lives, can fuel the same situations the text implies we should avoid.
1. ‘Why’ you save the kid from drowning, but why you can’t “save” lives. To take the conflation first.
Why do you save the kid from drowning? Many might be motivated by ‘compassion’ - to want to alleviate the perceived suffering of the child. You perceive the situation, interpret it, feel an emotion, and you choose to act on it. Acting on this emotion, seems like the best course of action—the situation might be complex, there are a lot of things you don’t know, but to do this would be ‘the moral thing to do’.
But there is quite the leap between having the physical abilities, and being in a situation where you can save a child from drowning, and what the Child in the Pond text talks about, namely ‘saving lives’. It says:
In other words, an arbitrary link is made between a situation in which you can ‘act’ to save a child from drowning, to a situation in which you can ‘pay’ to save a child.
But if it were the same, you could, If you so desired, save the toddler in the pond by simply pulling out your ‘magical card of FixEveryProblem’, swipe it, and the problem would be solved. If you really wanted to help more, you might even get the option of getting the toddler a ‘good, caring parent’, one/two/three very good friends and the premium helping package where they have healthy, fulfilling and enriching lives for themselves and everyone they come into contact with.
But you can’t. You can’t pay to save the toddler. You have to be there, see the situation, understand it, be willing to act and decide to act. An action that might naturally be followed up by you caring for the child and bringing it to its caretakers (what happened there btw..?), whilst dealing with the reactions the toddler has to the situation, be it anything from loud screaming, crying, to gut-wrenching misery and getting water on your face and clothes, or maybe even puked on. Do you still do it? Yes, I hope you would.
Yes, it is a conflation. It is also made a lot worse by the use of the word ‘save’, and the implicit ‘guarantee’ it hinges on your money—that it ‘saves’ lives. If your only goal was to ‘save’ lives, the most rational choice I can see would be to try to minimize the amounts of people getting born—as every person ‘born’ is only guaranteed to ‘lose’ their life. You might buy for the vaccines, but they get lost in transport, or destroyed by an earthquake. Losing your life, on the other hand, is guaranteed. Remove religious elements like Jesus, and you have the perfect antidote for human suffering: Antinatalism.
- You can’t ‘save’ lives, you can only ‘prolong’ life.
- You can’t pay to prolong life, there are certain acts/resources that prolongs a life, alleviates various kinds of suffering and even increases well-being.
This might seem like a small problem by itself, but it creates a lot of stumbling-blocks when communicating effectively, because donating money isn’t an action that save children from certain illnesses by itself.
2. And relatedly, why focusing on money as a metric for saving lives, can fuel the same situations the text implies we should avoid.
As I pointed out above, there is a conflation between the drowning child and donating money. It compares apples and oranges, it conflates two different things and compares them as being the same.
Now, in the same text, there is this story of the child Wang Yue dying in the streets, despite numerous people seeing her. What does this have to do with money? Well, if you start to argue that ‘money’ saves lives, then going to work on time, and leaving ‘saving the person’ to someone working in a charity, or to those paid by society to take care of her (Parents?), might arguably be the correct choice of action.
To a charity, the expression ‘Money saves lives’ is true in the sense that you create a product with ingredients like: distinct causal connection between an action and a result—Give us money >> less children die of malaria. If you save the child Wang Yue, you might not have a product team, a PR team, a photographer or a film-crew on the ready to create a product that people can buy. In other words, you aren’t guaranteed to make money. And since money saves lives, losing money might start looking akin to losing lives.
And it seems like both Alice and Bob have unwittingly bought into the concept of Money=lives. What actually prolongs lives, isn’t money, but resources, genetics and luck. You need resources like time, effort, skill, innovation, dedication, will, focus, materials, care, understanding and cooperation, to name a few. Money doesn’t create these resources, it is used to direct them
System lens:
Alice: You know, Bob, you claim to really care about improving the world, but you don’t seem to donate as much as you could or to use your time very effectively. Maybe you should donate that money rather than getting takeout tonight?
This was the experience I had with climate organizations and kiva.org as well, that this conflation is very rampant. Ironically, people would on the one hand say that ‘capitalism’ is wrong, whilst on the other saying that donating is good. Which is odd. If Capitalism is inherently unsustainable, how does monetizing more of human life, values and needs, create more sustainability?
Human resources like care, time, understanding, empathy, love, cooperation, friendships, intelligence, wisdom, skill etc. are interconnected with each other, and don’t grow due to money. Money might give you access to certain resources—but the resources aren’t there due to money.
A different kind of communication:
Reading the argument between Bob and Alice reminds me of discussions that go in circles. In a way, the issue they are arguing might be a totally different one, but finding out ‘what is going on’ needs a different approach. I remember hearing about this process where people with different political views were to have a talk, but instead of the usual ‘debate format’, they were to explain how they got to believe what they believed in. It lead to much higher levels of mutual understanding and respect, but I haven’t seen this replicated in the national debates.
Conclusion:
One thing is the conflation I spotted, which ties to a lot of conflicts, that seem like they are conflicts on one level—but are really about something else. But knowing that the issues are more ‘fundamental’ might not feel that reassuring, which is why I presented the point about a kind of communication that might bring more understanding and respect, whilst still exploring disagreements or different points of view. My hope is for more understanding in general, and to see various skills people have applied in ways that increase felt meaning for the people participating in disagreement—as well as anyone listening to it.
I don’t really understand how your central point applies here. The idea of “money saves lives” is not supposed to be a general rule of society, but rather a local point about Alice and Bob—namely, donating ~5k will save a life. That doesn’t need to be always true under all circumstances, there just needs to be some repeatable action that Alice and Bob can take (e.g, donating to the AMF) that costs 5k for them that reliably results in a life being saved. (Your point about prolonging life is true, but since the people dying of malaria are generally under 5, the amount of QALY’s produced is pretty close to an entire human lifetime)
It doesn’t really matter, for the rest of the argument, how this causal relationship works. It could be that donating 5k causes more bednets to be distributed, it could be that donating 5k allows for effective lobbying to improve economic growth to the value of one life, or it could be that the money is burnt in a sacrificial pyre to the God of Charitable Sacrifices, who then descends from the heavens and miraculously cures a child dying of malaria. From the point of view of Alice and Bob, the mechanism isn’t important if you’re talking on the level of individual donations.
In other words, Alice and Bob are talking on the margins here, and on the margin, 5k spent equals one live saved, at least for now.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I seem to have overcomplicated the point made in this post by adding the system-lens to this situation. It isn’t irrelevant, it is simply besides the point for Alice and Bob.
The goal I am focusing on is a ‘system overhaul’ not a concrete example like this.
I was also reminded of how detrimental the confrontational tone and haughtiness by Alice and the lack of clarity and self-understanding of Bob is for learning, change and understanding. How it creates a loop where the interaction itself doesn’t seem to bring either any closer to being more in tune with their values and beliefs. It seems to further widen the gulf between their respective positions, instead of capitalizing on their respective differences to further improve on facets of their values-to-actions efficiency ratio that their opposite seems capable of helping them with.
But I didn’t focus much on this point in my comment.
Thanks for the linked post, it was right on the money.
I see that I look at market-economy as a problem by itself, but I haven’t really thought about money from a less idealistic point of view.
It is really hard to come to terms with the argument he makes, when the system money operates under is so flawed.
But maybe it is more of a general point. In the instance between Alice and Bob, they might not see or have the ability to try to change the system itself, and under those circumstances I have missed the point.
Hello Firinn,
I can relate to this post, even when I was never part of the EA-movement. When I was younger, I did join a climate-organization, and also had an account on kiva.org. And I would say there was a lot of guilt and confusion around my actions at that point, whilst simultaneously trying to do a lot of ‘better than’-actions.
Your post is very extensive, and as such I find myself engaged by just reading one of the external links and the post itself. Therefore, my comment isn’t really a comment to the whole post, but sees the post through one entry-point I thought might be valuable. I hope it is still useful to the thematic you had in mind.
I focused on Child in the Pond and have used that as my pivot point—as well as reading the whole interaction between ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’.
Imagining being in the pond situation does fill me with emotions that would steer me towards taking action to alleviate the immediate suffering. But there are two things I believe that the Child in the pond text gets conflated, and which might also be relevant for the interactions between ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’.
The two are:
1. ‘Why’ you save the kid from drowning, but why you can’t “save” lives.
2. And relatedly, why focusing on money as a metric for saving lives, can fuel the same situations the text implies we should avoid.
1. ‘Why’ you save the kid from drowning, but why you can’t “save” lives.
To take the conflation first.
Why do you save the kid from drowning? Many might be motivated by ‘compassion’ - to want to alleviate the perceived suffering of the child. You perceive the situation, interpret it, feel an emotion, and you choose to act on it. Acting on this emotion, seems like the best course of action—the situation might be complex, there are a lot of things you don’t know, but to do this would be ‘the moral thing to do’.
But there is quite the leap between having the physical abilities, and being in a situation where you can save a child from drowning, and what the Child in the Pond text talks about, namely ‘saving lives’. It says:
In other words, an arbitrary link is made between a situation in which you can ‘act’ to save a child from drowning, to a situation in which you can ‘pay’ to save a child.
But if it were the same, you could, If you so desired, save the toddler in the pond by simply pulling out your ‘magical card of FixEveryProblem’, swipe it, and the problem would be solved. If you really wanted to help more, you might even get the option of getting the toddler a ‘good, caring parent’, one/two/three very good friends and the premium helping package where they have healthy, fulfilling and enriching lives for themselves and everyone they come into contact with.
But you can’t. You can’t pay to save the toddler. You have to be there, see the situation, understand it, be willing to act and decide to act. An action that might naturally be followed up by you caring for the child and bringing it to its caretakers (what happened there btw..?), whilst dealing with the reactions the toddler has to the situation, be it anything from loud screaming, crying, to gut-wrenching misery and getting water on your face and clothes, or maybe even puked on. Do you still do it? Yes, I hope you would.
Yes, it is a conflation. It is also made a lot worse by the use of the word ‘save’, and the implicit ‘guarantee’ it hinges on your money—that it ‘saves’ lives.
If your only goal was to ‘save’ lives, the most rational choice I can see would be to try to minimize the amounts of people getting born—as every person ‘born’ is only guaranteed to ‘lose’ their life. You might buy for the vaccines, but they get lost in transport, or destroyed by an earthquake. Losing your life, on the other hand, is guaranteed. Remove religious elements like Jesus, and you have the perfect antidote for human suffering: Antinatalism.
- You can’t ‘save’ lives, you can only ‘prolong’ life.
- You can’t pay to prolong life, there are certain acts/resources that prolongs a life, alleviates various kinds of suffering and even increases well-being.
This might seem like a small problem by itself, but it creates a lot of stumbling-blocks when communicating effectively, because donating money isn’t an action that save children from certain illnesses by itself.
2. And relatedly, why focusing on money as a metric for saving lives, can fuel the same situations the text implies we should avoid.
As I pointed out above, there is a conflation between the drowning child and donating money. It compares apples and oranges, it conflates two different things and compares them as being the same.
Now, in the same text, there is this story of the child Wang Yue dying in the streets, despite numerous people seeing her. What does this have to do with money? Well, if you start to argue that ‘money’ saves lives, then going to work on time, and leaving ‘saving the person’ to someone working in a charity, or to those paid by society to take care of her (Parents?), might arguably be the correct choice of action.
To a charity, the expression ‘Money saves lives’ is true in the sense that you create a product with ingredients like: distinct causal connection between an action and a result—Give us money >> less children die of malaria.
If you save the child Wang Yue, you might not have a product team, a PR team, a photographer or a film-crew on the ready to create a product that people can buy. In other words, you aren’t guaranteed to make money. And since money saves lives, losing money might start looking akin to losing lives.
And it seems like both Alice and Bob have unwittingly bought into the concept of Money=lives.
What actually prolongs lives, isn’t money, but resources, genetics and luck. You need resources like time, effort, skill, innovation, dedication, will, focus, materials, care, understanding and cooperation, to name a few. Money doesn’t create these resources, it is used to direct them
System lens:
This was the experience I had with climate organizations and kiva.org as well, that this conflation is very rampant. Ironically, people would on the one hand say that ‘capitalism’ is wrong, whilst on the other saying that donating is good. Which is odd.
If Capitalism is inherently unsustainable, how does monetizing more of human life, values and needs, create more sustainability?
Human resources like care, time, understanding, empathy, love, cooperation, friendships, intelligence, wisdom, skill etc. are interconnected with each other, and don’t grow due to money. Money might give you access to certain resources—but the resources aren’t there due to money.
A different kind of communication:
Reading the argument between Bob and Alice reminds me of discussions that go in circles. In a way, the issue they are arguing might be a totally different one, but finding out ‘what is going on’ needs a different approach.
I remember hearing about this process where people with different political views were to have a talk, but instead of the usual ‘debate format’, they were to explain how they got to believe what they believed in. It lead to much higher levels of mutual understanding and respect, but I haven’t seen this replicated in the national debates.
Conclusion:
One thing is the conflation I spotted, which ties to a lot of conflicts, that seem like they are conflicts on one level—but are really about something else. But knowing that the issues are more ‘fundamental’ might not feel that reassuring, which is why I presented the point about a kind of communication that might bring more understanding and respect, whilst still exploring disagreements or different points of view.
My hope is for more understanding in general, and to see various skills people have applied in ways that increase felt meaning for the people participating in disagreement—as well as anyone listening to it.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
I don’t really understand how your central point applies here. The idea of “money saves lives” is not supposed to be a general rule of society, but rather a local point about Alice and Bob—namely, donating ~5k will save a life. That doesn’t need to be always true under all circumstances, there just needs to be some repeatable action that Alice and Bob can take (e.g, donating to the AMF) that costs 5k for them that reliably results in a life being saved. (Your point about prolonging life is true, but since the people dying of malaria are generally under 5, the amount of QALY’s produced is pretty close to an entire human lifetime)
It doesn’t really matter, for the rest of the argument, how this causal relationship works. It could be that donating 5k causes more bednets to be distributed, it could be that donating 5k allows for effective lobbying to improve economic growth to the value of one life, or it could be that the money is burnt in a sacrificial pyre to the God of Charitable Sacrifices, who then descends from the heavens and miraculously cures a child dying of malaria. From the point of view of Alice and Bob, the mechanism isn’t important if you’re talking on the level of individual donations.
In other words, Alice and Bob are talking on the margins here, and on the margin, 5k spent equals one live saved, at least for now.
Hello Jay Bailey,
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I seem to have overcomplicated the point made in this post by adding the system-lens to this situation. It isn’t irrelevant, it is simply besides the point for Alice and Bob.
The goal I am focusing on is a ‘system overhaul’ not a concrete example like this.
I was also reminded of how detrimental the confrontational tone and haughtiness by Alice and the lack of clarity and self-understanding of Bob is for learning, change and understanding. How it creates a loop where the interaction itself doesn’t seem to bring either any closer to being more in tune with their values and beliefs. It seems to further widen the gulf between their respective positions, instead of capitalizing on their respective differences to further improve on facets of their values-to-actions efficiency ratio that their opposite seems capable of helping them with.
But I didn’t focus much on this point in my comment.
Kindly, Caerulea-Lawrence
I’m sorry I don’t have time to respond to all of this, but I think you might enjoy Money: The Unit Of Caring: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring
(Sorry, not sure how to make neat-looking links on mobile.)
Hello Firinn,
Thanks for the linked post, it was right on the money.
I see that I look at market-economy as a problem by itself, but I haven’t really thought about money from a less idealistic point of view.
It is really hard to come to terms with the argument he makes, when the system money operates under is so flawed.
But maybe it is more of a general point. In the instance between Alice and Bob, they might not see or have the ability to try to change the system itself, and under those circumstances I have missed the point.
Again, thanks for the post.
Kindly, Caerulea-Lawrence