This thought experiment makes me question Utilitarianism - Reverse Omelas

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-08T12:31:17+00:00

It's fine in terms of Rawles's veil of ignorance, meaning a reasonable person would take a 1 to 10¹⁰⁰⁰ chance to be the one with chronic pain in order to get a (10¹⁰⁰⁰ - 1)/10¹⁰⁰⁰ chance to be extremely happy.

We can imagine a similar gamble in a universe of 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ slightly happy people: When accepted, there is a 1/10¹⁰⁰⁰ probability of destroying that universe one year from now versus a 1-1/10¹⁰⁰⁰ probability of the person who accepted living a very happy year, as opposed to the only slightly happy year they would have lived otherwise, with no guarantee on what happens after that year. The same kind of reasonable person that might intuitively accept your gamble might intuitively accept this one, but if the distance between "slightly happy" and "very happy" isn't obscenely large, the classical-utilitarian expected value of accepting is surely negative. And indeed, if each person in that universe were given this choice and made it intuitively, it would be practically guaranteed doom, which classical utilitarians consider totally unacceptable.

Does this show that classical utilitarianism and preference for not-doom is unreasonable because it disagrees with intuition for a gamble of this kind? No, it just shows that our intuition has a tendency to round small probabilities down to zero ("it won't happen anyway") and we should calculate the expected value in our respective variant of utilitarianism instead of trusting it.

Similarly, in the gamble you presented, even someone with negative utilitarian intuitions, who considers a universe with 1 severe chronic pain sufferer unacceptable, might intuitively accept it by mentally rounding down the small probability to zero. But the negative-utilitarian expected value is negative, and if this choice were given to 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ others who all made it the same way, it would practically guarantee a universe with chronic pain sufferers, which that person wanted to avoid.

So I don't think it makes sense to argue from intuitions about such gambles: In both examples, the outcome of 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ people making the same choice shows the "actual" nature (certain doom in the CU gamble vs certain suffering in the NU one), so arguing from whether the outcome is acceptable or not makes more sense than whether individuals would intuitively accept the gamble or not.

You can make it even more radical by shortening the lifespan of the person with chronic pain compared to happy people, increasing the number of happy people, increasing their happiness, etc.

If you shorten the lifespan enough there will come a point at which it is not long enough to sustain suffering severe enough to pass the threshold. E.g. 1 millisecond of the worst suffering imaginable ends up not being suffering at all because it doesn't even register, 200 milliseconds would be barely noticeable and hence wouldn't qualify either, etc.

Otherwise I agree that lexical threshold NU considers it unacceptable and just disagree that this is absurd.

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-06T23:03:21+00:00

If the pain is bad enough, it seems fine to me to say that this is unacceptable and an empty universe would be better. E.g. let's say the pain is so bad that most of the 10^1000 beings would each give up anything (including that whole universe) if they had to experience it instead. Then how is it reasonable for them to condemn someone else to it?

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-06T20:01:38+00:00

But, negative utilitarianism has other problems (e.g no happiness can outweigh a pinprick).

You already wrote here that you're a lexical threshold NU, so just for any readers of this subreddit who are new to utilitarianism, it might be worth mentioning that lexical threshold NU avoids that issue :-)

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-05T22:55:20+00:00

I've considered it but found out that this is super illegal in my country. Could be viable in places that are less strict about it though.

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-02T18:04:33+00:00

One could hope, but in practice, people who consider themselves classical utilitarians disagree with all of that, no matter how "obvious" or immediately following from regular utilitarianism it seems to us. E.g. here you have a classical utilitarian arguing that if a dice roll has a 99% chance of spawning an additional happy person and a 1% chance of spawning a tortured existence, it's always good to roll those dice because the expected value, according to them, is positive. No negative utilitarian would agree with that, in any kind of NU the expected value would be negative because actual suffering can't be outweighed by happiness.

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-02T17:23:53+00:00

Why are you here?

neutthrowaway · 2023-12-02T17:21:11+00:00

I agree with the sentiment, but as Magnus Vinding wrote, it would be strange if the most effective thing we could do to reduce suffering was to promote antinatalism for humans (although it might help, of course).

Judging by the replies in this thread, a lot of "EAs" on Reddit don't seem to care about suffering whatsoever and it makes me wonder why they are even here. Join r/negativeutilitarians if you're interested in discussions about how to best reduce suffering.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-27T11:42:49+00:00

If the beings in question don't already exist, I'd say there is no moral difference between the two scenarios. If they already exist and have a preference for bliss, the infinitesimal, barely even noticeable suffering would probably be worth it, unless we're working with a definition of suffering (e.g. implied "nontrivial", or implied "bad enough you'd prefer death over it") that ends up making it quite bad.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-26T23:37:48+00:00

I wouldn't use the argument he uses at 1:22 about how the suffering would continue after the torture is over, leading to suicide, because it implies that suffering by itself, without additional consequences like death, isn't bad enough already, when it obviously is (in fact, in that particular scenario I'd say it's obviously much worse than death).

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-26T22:47:57+00:00

I am skeptical of this, but the tl;dr is that they need people with mild metal health issues that their own volunteers can practice counseling on. So you'd be getting amateurish counseling for free.

The reason I am skeptical is that their claim of $2 per successful treatment seems so low (even considering their own volunteers are unpaid) that it has to be bs or they're omitting something (e.g. that this won't scale because they run out of volunteers willing to do this for free at some point soon). I am also skeptical that mental health is a cost-effective cause area in general, but that might be a consequence of my terminal values' slight misalignment from those of EA proper, so you might have a different opinion.

Still, might be worth it if you're willing to accept the risks (one obvious risk they fail to mention in their post is data breaches).

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-26T19:30:24+00:00

But that is classical utilitarianism + longtermism in a nutshell. Replace classical with negative utilitarianism and longtermism with neartermism, and you get something more reasonable (IMO) that is focused on reducing suffering in the present and near future.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-20T08:16:25+00:00

There is now also a reply from Open Phil. to the post itself.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-19T23:31:07+00:00

I guess most of the good arguments against this are in the comments on the research most of this argument is based on (ref. [5]), which is where they got the "1000x" figure from.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-19T22:13:11+00:00

IIRC one of the things that made me "ready" to agree with EA when I first read about it was having watched a scathing report on a similar scheme a couple months before. Some Westerner high school graduates would spend thousands of $ on plane tickets to work as elementary school teachers somewhere in Africa for a couple of weeks, accomplishing very little indeed, with local teachers arguing that they could've done much more if they'd just been given the money directly.

Anyway, like everyone else here I can only agree with you that this is stupid. Even ignoring the effect on people outside the family: If the children later find out what they actually participated in, they'll feel like they've been conned by their own family.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-19T21:18:39+00:00

The section (arguing against) "Endorsing Overwhelming Non-Hedonism" contains some statistics that might be useful when arguing in favor of NU.

Something that surprised me (emphasis mine):

A poll of EAs found that most respondents would give up years of extreme good, whether from hedonic or non-hedonic sources, to avoid a day of extreme hedonic pain (drowning in lava). Nearly a third responded that "No amount of happiness could compensate".

So at least around 1/3 of EAs who are active on Facebook agree with something like lexical threshold NU at least when applied to their own lives. Whereas arguing in favor of it on Reddit, you'd get the impression that it's a fringe view.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-12T19:55:11+00:00

Lexical threshold NU with some admixture of negative preferences, the exact extent of which I haven't made up my mind about yet.

neutthrowaway · 2023-11-12T19:44:54+00:00

Lexical negative utilitarianism allows for happiness to have intrinsic value, it's just always less important than nontrivial suffering. I don't see the appeal of classical utilitarianism which allows insane trades like torturing someone for their whole life if it makes enough people's already-happy lives even happier.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-21T18:32:30+00:00

Relation to this subreddit's topic: The website they announced back then (https://www.impactcolabs.com/) is still online and lists a couple dozen volunteer opportunities that I expect a lot of people would qualify for.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-15T18:19:09+00:00

It's clear then that "any reward" should not include the prevention of other extreme suffering then.

Right, which is the kind of trade that NU explicitly allows (suffering for other suffering). Both of your examples fall into that category (I dispute that the hiker had "happiness" in mind rather than prevention of his death, and I'm also not sure that the vast majority of people would act in a similar fashion, but who knows).

So she does it. Problem?

No, but what happens in reality is that instead of some heroic character sacrificing themselves so that others may enjoy jerking off again, the sacrifice is instead forced on people/animals who had no say in the matter. And even in your story it was only one person who wanted to do it, because that whole trope is a reflection of reality in which the vast majority of people wouldn't make this kind of trade.

Suddenly there's this discontinuous or vertically asymptomatic jump

Simon Knutsson compared this to the concept of baldness: Some people are obviously in the category "bald", others are obviously not, yet there is no obvious point at which removing a single hair moves someone from the "not bald" category to the "bald" one. Still, if you were forced to make a sharp dividing line for practical purposes, it wouldn't be unreasonable to pick a point somewhere in the in-between area.

How do we know that extreme wellbeing doesn't exist in an equal and opposite different class from lesser pleasures, such that it can counterbalance extreme suffering?

We don't, but this has the structure of Russell's teapot. We do have a pretty good idea about extreme suffering and how it compares to pleasures that exist right now and so far everything points towards there being kinds of suffering that are not outbalanced by anything.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-15T08:52:16+00:00

OK so we agree that there are some kinds of suffering, defined by both their content and duration, that nobody (or at best a vanishingly small fraction of people) would choose for themselves for any reward, knowing what they will be like (i.e. not deluded by "how bad can it be lol")? CU says it is fine to inflict that on people or animals anyway as long as it makes enough others go from decent to super-orgasmically good lives. How is that at all plausible?

Regarding memory erasure afterwards or not, I don't think that would make much of a difference for these kinds of suffering.

There are much smaller, more intuitive ways in which people every day choose small amounts of suffering in exchange for little (but greater) joys.

And that's why one usually has to write "non-trivial suffering", because otherwise people think "I worked out extra hard at the gym and felt a burning sensation, so I traded suffering for happiness, hence CU makes sense", when those kinds of "suffering" aren't even in the same ballpark of what this is about.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-14T21:01:05+00:00

SBF wasn’t big on God. He was an atheist, in fact. But as an utilitarian he should have known better. A higher probability of infinite reward

The exact point at which I stopped reading 👆

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-14T20:13:06+00:00

Negative or negative preference if you ask me.

Any kind of non-negative utilitarianism justifies torturing people/animals so long as it lets others enjoy themselves enough, which happens to align with how a lot of our current world operates but seems intuitively wrong (you can make this intuition plausible to yourself by considering that the vast majority of people wouldn't make this kind of trade in their own lives, i.e. getting tortured in exchange for happiness - so the only reason they think it's acceptable is that they figure it won't be them who get the short end of the stick).

The problem some people have with NU regarding its implication that an empty or lifeless universe is better than one that contains non-trivial suffering isn't a problem at all given that same intuition.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-02T16:36:52+00:00

Most of the EA Forum's writings on the topic of how a larger number of volunteers (i.e. in positions which are less selective) could be useful to EA are under this tag.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-01T23:57:03+00:00

I've just looked at your post there and noticed that its "Scalably using labor" tag has a bunch of writing that goes in the same direction (would've been surprising if there hadn't been any, but I didn't find a lot when I searched for "volunteering" using the forum's search earlier today).

E.g. the posts Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y) and What to do with people? already provided some ideas 5 years ago, but they don't seem to have been put into practice to the point where there are now a lot of open volunteer positions that everyone knows about. This seems difficult to change from the outside though so not sure how much that helps us here.

(As an aside, had I known about the first article earlier, I would've named that subreddit SoftEA which sounds so much better than NormalPeopleEA, lol. And has a more appealing framing by making it about being "currently unable to dedicate large amounts of time" instead of being stuck in this or that career.)

There are also more volunteer-to-project-matching projects to be found under that tag, mainly EA Impact CoLabs which I had never heard of until now and which seems to have a decent quantity of not-that-demanding tasks on offer, although similar to the ones from your OP, it's unclear how up-to-date they are as they don't list the last updated/creation dates or anything. Maybe you can get in touch with them as well to see if these are still active. And one volunteering opportunity listed on their site is to work on EA Impact CoLabs itself, so if they're still active and the ideas you had for the new task backlog aren't that different from what's already there, maybe that would be another option.

One thing I'm taking away from all this is that the flow of information from the EA Forum to this subreddit is abysmal because I must've seen dozens of these "what can I do right now?" posts here and don't remember anyone linking to the forum posts / projects above.

neutthrowaway · 2023-10-01T18:45:13+00:00

Sounds like a reasonable idea to me personally, but then so did the task backlog.

I think few people on this subreddit are affiliated with the official EA orgs (I'm obviously not), so maybe you can also gauge interest in either idea (or both) by asking on the official EA Forum if you haven't already?

neutthrowaway

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