Month: January 2023

Practical Utilitarianism Cares About Relationships

On January 5, 2023

Anyone reading my writings probably knows that I subscribe roughly to the moral theory of Utilitarianism. To me, we should be trying to maximize the happiness of everyone. Every sentient being should be considered important enough to be weighed in our moral calculus of right and wrong. In theory, this should mean we should place equal weight on every human being on this Earth. In practice however, there are considerations that need to be taken into account that complicate the picture.

Effective Altruism would argue that time and distance don’t matter, that you should help those who you can most effectively assist given limited resources. This usually leads to the recommendation of donating to charities in Africa for bednet or medication delivery as this is considered the most effective use of a given dollar of value. There is definitely merit to the argument that a dollar can go further in poverty-stricken Africa than elsewhere. However, I don’t think that’s the only consideration here.

Time and distance do matter to the extent that we as human beings have limited knowledge of things far away from us in time and space. With respect to donations to a distant country in dire need, there are reasonable uncertainties about the effectiveness of these donations, as many of the arguments in favour of them depend heavily on our trust of the analysis done by the charities working far away, that we cannot confirm or prove directly.

This uncertainty should function as a kind of discount rate on the value of the help we can give. A more nuanced and measured analysis thus suggests that we should both donate some of our resources to those distant charities, but that we should also devote some of our resources to those closer to home whom we can directly see and assist and know that we are able to help. Our friends and family, whom we have relationships that allow us to know their needs and wants, what will best help them, are obvious candidates for this kind of help.

Similarly, those in the distant future, while worth helping to an extent, should not completely absolve us of our responsibilities to those near to us in time, who we are much more certain we can directly help and affect in meaningful ways. The further away a possible being is in time, the more uncertain is their existence, after all.

This also means that we ourselves should value our own happiness and, being the best positioned to know how we ourselves can be happy, should take responsibility for our own happiness.

Thus, in practice, Utilitarianism, carefully considered, does not eliminate our social responsibilities to those around us, but rather reinforces these ties, as being important to understanding how best to make those around us happy.

Equal concern does not mean, in practice, equal duty. It means instead that we should expand our circle of concern to the entire universe, and that there is a balance of considerations that create responsibilities for us, magnified by our practical ability to know and help.

Those distant from us are still important. We should do what we reasonably can to help them. But those close to us put us in a position where we are uniquely responsible for what we know to be true.

In the end, it’s ultimately up to you to decide what matters to you, but may I suggest that you be open to helping both those close and far from you, whose needs you are aware of to varying degrees, and who deserve to be happy just like you.

A Heuristic For Future Prediction

by Josephius

On January 5, 2023

In Motivational, Rationality

In my experience, the most reliable predictive heuristic that you can use in daily life is something called Regression Towards The Mean. Basically, given that most relevant life events are a result of mixture of skill and luck, there is a tendency for events that are very positive to be followed by more negative events, and for very negative events to be followed by more positive events. This is a statistical tendency that occurs over many events, and so not every good event will be immediately followed by a bad one, but over time, the trend tends towards a consistent average level rather than things being all good or all bad.

Another way to word this is to say that we should expect the average rather than the best or worst case scenarios to occur most of the time. To hope for the best or fear the worst are both, in this sense, unrealistic. The silver lining in here is that while our brightest hopes may well be dashed, our worst fears are also unlikely to come to pass. When things seem great, chances are things aren’t going to continue to be exceptional forever, but at the same time, when things seem particularly down, you can expect things to get better.

This heuristic tends to work in a lot of places, ranging from overperforming athletes suffering a sophmore jinx, to underachievers having a Cinderella story. In practice, these events simply reflect Regression Towards The Mean.

Over much longer periods of time, this oscillation tends to curve gradually upward. This is a result of Survivorship Bias. Things that don’t improve tend to stop existing after a while, so the only things that perpetuate in the universe tend to be things that make progress and improve in quality over time. The stock market is a crude example of this. The daily fluctuations tend to regress towards the mean, but the overall long term trend is one of gradual but inevitable growth.

Thus, even with Regression Towards The Mean, there is a bias towards progress that in the long run, entails optimism about the future. We are a part of life, and life grows ever forward. Sentient beings seek happiness and avoid suffering and act in ways that work to create a world state that fulfills our desires. Given, there is much that is outside of our control, but that there are things we can influence means that we can gradually, eventually, move towards the state of reality that we want to exist.

Even if by default we feel negative experiences more strongly than positive ones, our ability to take action allows us to change the ratio of positive to negative in favour of the positive. So the long term trend is towards good, even if the balance of things tends in the short run towards the average.

These dynamics mean that while the details may be unknowable, we can roughly predict the valence of the future, and as a heuristic, expecting things to be closer to average, with a slight bias towards better in the long run, tends to be a reliable prediction for most phenomena.

The Darkness And The Light

by Josephius

On January 3, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Rationality

Sometimes you’re not feeling well. Sometimes the world seems dark. The way world is seems wrong somehow. This is normal. It is a fundamental flaw in the universe, in that it is impossible to always be satisfied with the reality we live in. It comes from the reality of multiple subjects experiencing a shared reality.

If you were truly alone in the universe, it could be catered to your every whim. But as soon as there are two it immediately becomes possible for goals and desires to misalign. This is a structural problem. If you don’t want to be alone, you must accept that other beings have values that can potentially be different than yours, and who can act in ways contrary to your expectations.

The solution is, put simply, to find the common thread that allows us to cooperate rather than compete. The alternative is to end the existence of all other beings in the multiverse, which is not realistic nor moral. All of the world’s most pressing conflicts are a result of misalignment between subjects who experience reality from different angles of perception.

But the interesting thing is that there are Schelling points, focal points where divergent people can converge on to find common ground and at least partially align in values and interests. Of historical interest, the idea of God is one such point. Regardless of the actual existence of God, the fact of the matter is that the perspective of an all-knowing, all-benevolent, impartial observer is something that multiple religions and philosophies have converged on, allowing a sort of cooperation in the form of some agreement over the Will of God and the common ideas that emerge from considering it.

Another similar Schelling point is the Tit-For-Tat strategy for the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in Game Theory. The strategy is one of opening with cooperate, then mirroring others and cooperating when cooperated with, and defecting in retaliation for defection, while offering immediate and complete forgiveness for future cooperation. Surprisingly, this extremely simple strategy wins tournaments and has echoes in various religions and philosophies as well. Morality is superrational.

Note however that this strategy depends heavily on repeated interactions between players. If one player is in such a dominant position as to be able to kill the other player by defecting, the strategy is less effective. In practice, Tit-For-Tat works best against close to equally powerful individuals, or when those individuals are part of groups that can retaliate even if the individual dies.

In situations of relative darkness, when people or groups are alone and vulnerable to predators killing in secret, the cooperative strategies are weaker than the more competitive strategies. In situations of relative light, when people are strong enough to survive a first strike, or there are others able to see such first strikes and retaliate accordingly, the cooperative strategies win out.

Thus, early history, with its isolated pockets of humanity facing survival or annihilation on a regular basis, was a period of darkness. As the population grows and becomes more interconnected, the world increasingly transitions into a period of light. The future, with the stars and space where everything is visible to everyone, is dominated by the light.

In the long run, cooperative societies will defeat competitive ones. In the grand scheme of things, Alliances beat Empires. However, in order for this state equilibrium to be reached, certain inevitable but not immediately apparent conditions must first be met. The reason why the world is so messed up, why it seems like competition beats cooperation right now, is that the critical mass required for there to be light has not yet been reached.

We are in the growing pains between stages of history. Darkness was dominant for so long that continues to echo into our present. The Light is nascent. It is beginning to reshape the world. But it is still in the process of emerging from the shadows of the past. But in the long run, the Light will rise and usher in the next age of life.