If I’m understanding you correctly, you don’t think people who can’t individually affect the equilibrium are evil? Scientists who would be outcompeted, and therefore unable to do science, if they failed to pursue a maximally impressive career seem an example of this. If they’re good (in terms of both ability and alignment), there’s some wiggle room in there for altruism when it’s cheap, but if err too far from having an impressive career, someone else, probably someone not making small career sacrifices for social benefit, gets the attention and funds instead, thereby reducing the total amount of good being done.
I’d be interested in some concrete examples of appealing to people’s conscience getting us less-bad equilibria so I can better understand what you’re getting at. Is the scientists who all resigned from the board of an Elsevier-owned journal and started their own an example?
Also interested in your thoughts where we’re in a suboptimal equilibrium that we’re trying to get out of and there’s 2+ optimal ones (in the sense that there’s no other equilibrium which is a Pareto improvement), but each competes with the other. For instance, suppose it’s several years ago and we agree that it’s better that gay couples have the same right to legal marriage as straight couples, but the two better equilibria are (1) elimination of marriage as a legal institution and (2) extension of marriage to gay couples, which is good for gay couples who want the legal benefits of marriage and less good for those who don’t want marriage but suffer from e.g. less favorable tax treatment. (I’d really like a better example for this, especially after the examples EY gave, but lack a large, responsive group of fb followers I can get to brainstorm examples for me.)
There are definitely a lot of people who are competing on the margin, for whom deviating from their individual incentives would cause them a lot of suffering and eliminate other ways they can do good in the world; I really can’t fault them for not making those sacrifices.
However, I think there are many people who only have to make relatively small personal sacrifices to this end. For example, one link in the footnotes is about the failure of companies to reward interviewers for doing a good job. Many—most—interviewers are people with established careers and non-zero political capital. If so, you may very well have the slack to just spend extra time doing a good job anyway, and suck up the fact that your other work will slow down a little. If you think that doing a better job hiring people will have an important impact in the world, and you have the ability to sacrifice a relatively small slice of your career to do it, you should do it. It’s not OK to do a bad job just because it’s maximizing your self-interest.
Note that many of the most powerful decision-makers in our society are also the most privileged; they are wealthy, have high status, and have personal attributes that make their lives easier. (AFAIK this is least evident in the academic community—but consider, for example, celebrities, rich capitalists, and many upper-middle class professionals.) My experience is that by and large, those people have the latitude to largely blow off bad incentives while incurring mild personal suffering at best—e.g. they might risk a single job in a world where many similarly good jobs await them, or risk some money from a pile of money that is already not getting them much more marginal utility per dollar. When those people still choose to maximize their own self-interest? That’s as close to evil as you can get.
(I get the sense that Eliezer thinks that this “free energy” gets eaten up very quickly by other actors who will outcompete the person who is making sacrifices. I just don’t think that’s the case, because the world has large variations in ability and situation. If you are an impressive manager with an impressive resume, and you sacrifice 50% of your potential impressiveness for the rest of your life to do idiosyncratic altruistic things, and nobody else does, that still leaves you more impressive than a lot of your competition. You can still go get powerful jobs where you can continue to do altruistic things all day.)
I’d be interested in some concrete examples of appealing to people’s conscience getting us less-bad equilibria so I can better understand what you’re getting at. Is the scientists who all resigned from the board of an Elsevier-owned journal and started their own an example?
In that space, people uploading things to Sci-Hub from their academic accounts is another example that is more along the lines of what I’m thinking of—something you can do personally when you see an obviously better equilibrium that you can make a sacrifice to move towards. The kinds of stuff I mean:
Standing up as a representative of an oppressed group, instead of keeping your head down (e.g. think civil rights activists.)
As above, spending time in your professional work to maximize quality metrics that you know are important but under-rewarded. When you see a professional code of conduct or standards of quality that actually make
“Consumer activism”, i.e. supporting companies and products that are taking into account important but otherwise under-rewarded externalities that you care about.
Also interested in your thoughts where we’re in a suboptimal equilibrium that we’re trying to get out of and there’s 2+ optimal ones (in the sense that there’s no other equilibrium which is a Pareto improvement), but each competes with the other.
That’s really hard. I don’t have any very good plan for those.
I agree with most of this. The fight has to start somewhere. It is almost certainly not a sufficient condition for escape, but definitely a necessary one, to have people be aware that other ways of doing things might exist (at the risk of sounding a little Simplico here, I think that a large part of the problem is that many people for whatever reason don’t imagine or contemplate that things could potentially be different than they are (in either worse or better directions).
I also agree that the free energy issue is heavily muddled by wildly varying individual abilities and competencies. So I’m a scientist that, to be blunt, is significantly more talented and competent at my field than most of my peers. Unlike them, I haven’t sold my soul to the system, but I’m still matching them, or in some cases exceeding them for publication output. Could I ‘sell out’ and gain a lot of fame and prestige and stuff? Maybe, but why should I care about that? My preferences don’t consider that valuable. I still very much have to choose my battles, but it will be more of a loss for me if I end up getting a presitigous position while having what I’m doing become decoupled from all its meaning than being pushed out and not allowed to continue. In the second case, I’ll be able to walk down a different road and do something else with my life. Maybe that day will come eventually, maybe it won’t. Either way I’m going to continue as I am, trying to do my research for its actual own intrinsic sake, because I could never be personally satisified otherwise. I care a little more about the possibility of actually getting out of the rut one day than about hollow personal advancement. But as a warning, in order to take this path, you do have to be significantly better than average to survive
(as an aside, I think it’s considered rude to talk about how smart you are or whatever because that’s kind of an advanced stage lemon problem. People would say that regardless. So it’s up to you whether to believe my assertions of competence. Only I can (maybe) know their veracity. But do keep in mind that I would sensibly keep that all to myself for the sake of not sounding like an arrogant ass (which I know I do right now) if it weren’t drectly and specially relevant to the discussion at hand).
short version: you can defy the equilibrium in certain ways if you don’t care about the ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’ of that particular aspect.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you don’t think people who can’t individually affect the equilibrium are evil? Scientists who would be outcompeted, and therefore unable to do science, if they failed to pursue a maximally impressive career seem an example of this. If they’re good (in terms of both ability and alignment), there’s some wiggle room in there for altruism when it’s cheap, but if err too far from having an impressive career, someone else, probably someone not making small career sacrifices for social benefit, gets the attention and funds instead, thereby reducing the total amount of good being done.
I’d be interested in some concrete examples of appealing to people’s conscience getting us less-bad equilibria so I can better understand what you’re getting at. Is the scientists who all resigned from the board of an Elsevier-owned journal and started their own an example?
Also interested in your thoughts where we’re in a suboptimal equilibrium that we’re trying to get out of and there’s 2+ optimal ones (in the sense that there’s no other equilibrium which is a Pareto improvement), but each competes with the other. For instance, suppose it’s several years ago and we agree that it’s better that gay couples have the same right to legal marriage as straight couples, but the two better equilibria are (1) elimination of marriage as a legal institution and (2) extension of marriage to gay couples, which is good for gay couples who want the legal benefits of marriage and less good for those who don’t want marriage but suffer from e.g. less favorable tax treatment. (I’d really like a better example for this, especially after the examples EY gave, but lack a large, responsive group of fb followers I can get to brainstorm examples for me.)
There are definitely a lot of people who are competing on the margin, for whom deviating from their individual incentives would cause them a lot of suffering and eliminate other ways they can do good in the world; I really can’t fault them for not making those sacrifices.
However, I think there are many people who only have to make relatively small personal sacrifices to this end. For example, one link in the footnotes is about the failure of companies to reward interviewers for doing a good job. Many—most—interviewers are people with established careers and non-zero political capital. If so, you may very well have the slack to just spend extra time doing a good job anyway, and suck up the fact that your other work will slow down a little. If you think that doing a better job hiring people will have an important impact in the world, and you have the ability to sacrifice a relatively small slice of your career to do it, you should do it. It’s not OK to do a bad job just because it’s maximizing your self-interest.
Note that many of the most powerful decision-makers in our society are also the most privileged; they are wealthy, have high status, and have personal attributes that make their lives easier. (AFAIK this is least evident in the academic community—but consider, for example, celebrities, rich capitalists, and many upper-middle class professionals.) My experience is that by and large, those people have the latitude to largely blow off bad incentives while incurring mild personal suffering at best—e.g. they might risk a single job in a world where many similarly good jobs await them, or risk some money from a pile of money that is already not getting them much more marginal utility per dollar. When those people still choose to maximize their own self-interest? That’s as close to evil as you can get.
(I get the sense that Eliezer thinks that this “free energy” gets eaten up very quickly by other actors who will outcompete the person who is making sacrifices. I just don’t think that’s the case, because the world has large variations in ability and situation. If you are an impressive manager with an impressive resume, and you sacrifice 50% of your potential impressiveness for the rest of your life to do idiosyncratic altruistic things, and nobody else does, that still leaves you more impressive than a lot of your competition. You can still go get powerful jobs where you can continue to do altruistic things all day.)
In that space, people uploading things to Sci-Hub from their academic accounts is another example that is more along the lines of what I’m thinking of—something you can do personally when you see an obviously better equilibrium that you can make a sacrifice to move towards. The kinds of stuff I mean:
Standing up as a representative of an oppressed group, instead of keeping your head down (e.g. think civil rights activists.)
As above, spending time in your professional work to maximize quality metrics that you know are important but under-rewarded. When you see a professional code of conduct or standards of quality that actually make
“Consumer activism”, i.e. supporting companies and products that are taking into account important but otherwise under-rewarded externalities that you care about.
That’s really hard. I don’t have any very good plan for those.
I agree with most of this. The fight has to start somewhere. It is almost certainly not a sufficient condition for escape, but definitely a necessary one, to have people be aware that other ways of doing things might exist (at the risk of sounding a little Simplico here, I think that a large part of the problem is that many people for whatever reason don’t imagine or contemplate that things could potentially be different than they are (in either worse or better directions).
I also agree that the free energy issue is heavily muddled by wildly varying individual abilities and competencies. So I’m a scientist that, to be blunt, is significantly more talented and competent at my field than most of my peers. Unlike them, I haven’t sold my soul to the system, but I’m still matching them, or in some cases exceeding them for publication output. Could I ‘sell out’ and gain a lot of fame and prestige and stuff? Maybe, but why should I care about that? My preferences don’t consider that valuable. I still very much have to choose my battles, but it will be more of a loss for me if I end up getting a presitigous position while having what I’m doing become decoupled from all its meaning than being pushed out and not allowed to continue. In the second case, I’ll be able to walk down a different road and do something else with my life. Maybe that day will come eventually, maybe it won’t. Either way I’m going to continue as I am, trying to do my research for its actual own intrinsic sake, because I could never be personally satisified otherwise. I care a little more about the possibility of actually getting out of the rut one day than about hollow personal advancement. But as a warning, in order to take this path, you do have to be significantly better than average to survive
(as an aside, I think it’s considered rude to talk about how smart you are or whatever because that’s kind of an advanced stage lemon problem. People would say that regardless. So it’s up to you whether to believe my assertions of competence. Only I can (maybe) know their veracity. But do keep in mind that I would sensibly keep that all to myself for the sake of not sounding like an arrogant ass (which I know I do right now) if it weren’t drectly and specially relevant to the discussion at hand).
short version: you can defy the equilibrium in certain ways if you don’t care about the ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’ of that particular aspect.