effective altruism

Effective Altruism for Ghosts

Halloween is approaching, and that leads to spooky thoughts.

It is known that the dead outnumber the living by a factor of about 13:1. Hence anything that affects the welfare of the dead can affect a large number of people, assuming that the dead are people and have welfare.

The traditional answer is to remember and honour ancestors, a near-universal practice. Assuming this improves ancestor well-being significantly this would seem to be a very effective thing to do. Bigger, better and more frequent All Hallows Eve and Dia Los Muertes celebrations as a new cause area for philanthropists?

Not so fast. First, it is not entirely clear how much well-being is improved (cost effectiveness may be low), but more importantly, most ancestor veneration only goes back a finite number of generations. While there is some general veneration of the dead in general, mostly the focus is on people who are remembered. Since cultural memory only lasts a few generations that means that only a fraction of the dead will benefit. Hence at the very least veneration of all dead seems to scale better and treat each soul neutrally. In a prioritarianism framework veneration of neglected dead is even more important.

However, a more serious issue is the general welfare state of the dead. If there are places of eternal punishment they are obviously major sources of disvalue (unless one thinks they are just punishments, in which case they might be positive) and should be removed. Even improving a fairly dreary afterlife like the Greek one would seem to provide a potential long-lasting benefit to a vast number. While clearly a neglected question, tractability appears low. Still, especially models ascribing near-pessimal suffering lasting eternally would run into the fanaticism problem that improving this would always be the top priority intervention, no matter how hard. One can consider this a form of Pascal’s mugging.

Taking a longtermist perspective on the dead produces other interesting issues. Over the span of the future many people will die, producing a potentially vast number of future dead. If the dead have unlives worth living this can become a dominant contribution to the overall good. If the dead have unlives not worth living on the other hand it becomes a strong argument for either early extinction, or radical life-extension ensuring that future generations do not die. If the afterlife can be improved in the future or future dead can be given unlives worth living this can also outweigh the current issue.

One issue is whether dead are resistant to proton decay and the heat death of the universe. If they are, and their state can be improved to be positive, then this might provide a massive existential hope.

Clearly these considerations are preliminary. We do not have a strong evidence base to even estimate QAUYs (Quality Adjusted Unlife Years) to an order or magnitude. It is very possible that dead have literally zero experience and well-being. But as the above considerations show, even a low credence of nonzero QAUYs provide in expectation a very strong reason to act in some way, if possible. Hence the value of information in regard to the state of the dead is extremely high. This suggests that paranormal investigations should be regarded as a potentially valuable near term cause area for effective altruism.

However, this might miss an even bigger opportunity: ghostly effective altruism. While dead people likely have a fairly weak ability to affect the physical world, if they have the abilities commonly ascribed to them (perceive descendant lives, precognition, nudge things in an eerie way) they could, if they coordinated better, likely improve the life of the living in many ways. Since there are many dead per living individual, that would give each living person a team that could enhance their life. Even if past dead may not have been too effective, we should expect an increasing number of effective altruists in the afterlife. They may of course primarily choose to focus on the biggest risks, haunting nuclear weapons control systems, biowarfare labs and sleep depriving AI researchers with a lacking commitment to safety.

So if you encounter something mysterious and frightening late at night, maybe it is just a nudge from the other side to increase the long-term flourishing of humanity.

Happy Halloween!

Best problems to work on?

80,000 hours has a lovely overview of “What are the biggest problems in the world?” The best part is that each problem gets its own profile with a description, arguments in favor and against, and what already exists. I couldn’t resist plotting the table in 3D:

Most important problems according to 80,000 Hours, according to scale, neglectedness, and solvability.
Most important problems according to 80,000 Hours, according to scale, neglectedness, and solvability. Color denotes the sum of the values.

There are of course plenty of problems not listed; even if these are truly the most important there will be a cloud of smaller scale problems to the right. They list a few potential ones like cheap green energy, peace, human rights, reducing migration restrictions, etc.

I recently got the same question, and here are my rough answers:

  • Fixing our collective epistemic systems. Societies work as cognitive systems: acquiring information, storing, filtering and transmitting it, synthesising it, making decisions, and implementing actions. This is done through individual minds, media and institutions. Recently we have massively improved some aspects through technology, but it looks like our ability to filter, organise and jointly coordinate has not improved – in fact, many feel it has become worse. Networked media means that information can bounce around multiple times acquiring heavy bias, while filtering mechanisms relying on authority has lost credibility (rightly or wrongly). We are seeing all sorts of problems of coordinating diverse, polarised, globalised or confused societies. Decision-making that is not reality-tracking due to (rational or irrational) ignorance, bias or misaligned incentives is at best useless, at worst deadly. Figuring out how to improve these systems seem to be something with tremendous scale (good coordination and governance helps solve most problems above), it is fairly neglected (people tend to work on small parts rather than figuring out better systems), and looks decently solvable (again, many small pieces may be useful together rather than requiring a total perfect solution).
  • Ageing. Ageing kills 100,000 people per day. It is a massive cause of suffering, from chronic diseases to loss of life quality. It causes loss of human capital at nearly the same rate as all education and individual development together. A reduction in the health toll from ageing would not just save life-years, it would have massive economic benefits. While this would necessitate changes in society most plausible shifts (changing pensions, the concepts of work and life-course, how families are constituted, some fertility reduction and institutional reform) the cost and trouble with such changes is pretty microscopic compared to the ongoing death toll and losses. The solvability is improving: 20 years ago it was possible to claim that there were no anti-ageing interventions, while today there exist enough lab examples to make this untenable. Transferring these results into human clinical practice will however be a lot of hard work. It is also fairly neglected: far more work is being spent on symptoms and age-related illness and infirmity than root causes, partially for cultural reasons.
  • Existential risk reduction: I lumped together all the work to secure humanity’s future into one category. Right now I think reducing nuclear war risk is pretty urgent (not because of the current incumbent of the White House, but simply because the state risk probability seems to dominate the other current risks), followed by biotechnological risks (where we still have some time to invent solutions before the Collingridge dilemma really bites; I think it is also somewhat neglected) and AI risk (I put it as #3 for humanity, but it may be #1 for research groups like FHI that can do something about the neglectedness while we figure out better how much priority it truly deserves). But a lot of the effort might be on the mitigation side: alternative food to make the world food system more resilient and sun-independent, distributed and more robust infrastructure (whether better software security, geomagnetic storm/EMP-safe power grids, local energy production, distributed internet solutions etc.), refuges and backup solutions. The scale is big, most are neglected and many are solvable.

Another interesting set of problems is Robin Hanson’s post about neglected big problems. They are in a sense even more fundamental than mine: they are problems with the human condition.

As a transhumanist I do think the human condition entails some rather severe problems – ageing and stupidity is just two of them – and that we should work to fix them. Robin’s list may not be the easiest to solve, though (although there might be piecemeal solutions worth doing). Many enhancements, like moral capacity and well-being, have great scope and are very neglected but lose out to ageing because of the currently low solvability level and the higher urgency of coordination and risk reduction. As I see it, if we can ensure that we survive (individually and collectively) and are better at solving problems, then we will have better chances at fixing the tougher problems of the human condition.

Consequentialist world improvement

I just rediscovered an old response to the Extropians List that might be worth reposting. Slight edits.

Communal values

On 06/10/2012 16:17, Tomaz Kristan wrote:

>> If you want to reduce death tolls, focus on self-driving cars.
> Instead of answering terror attacks, just mend you cars?

Sounds eminently sensible. Charlie makes a good point: if we want to make the world better, it might be worth prioritizing fixing the stuff that makes it worse according to the damage it actually makes. Toby Ord and me have been chatting quite a bit about this.

Death

In terms of death (~57 million people per year), the big causes are cardiovascular disease (29%), infectious and parasitic diseases (23%) and cancer (12%). At least the first and last are to a sizeable degree caused or worsened by ageing, which is a massive hidden problem. It has been argued that malnutrition is similarly indirectly involved in 15-60% of the total number of deaths: often not the direct cause, but weakening people so they become vulnerable to other risks. Anything that makes a dent in these saves lives on a scale that is simply staggering; any threat to our ability to treat them (like resistance to antibiotics or anthelmintics) is correspondingly bad.

Unintentional injuries are responsible for 6% of deaths, just behind respiratory diseases 6.5%. Road traffic alone is responsible for 2% of all deaths: even 1% safer cars would save 11,400 lives per year. If everybody reached Swedish safety (2.9 deaths per 100,000 people per year) it would save around 460,000 lives per year – one Antwerp per year.

Now, intentional injuries are responsible for 2.8% of all deaths. Of these suicide is responsible for 1.53% of total death rate, violence 0.98% and war 0.3%. Yes, all wars killed about the same number of people as were killed by meningitis, and slightly more than the people who died of syphilis. In terms of absolute numbers we might be much better off improving antibiotic treatments and suicide hotlines than trying to stop the wars. And terrorism is so small that it doesn’t really show up: even the highest estimates put the median fatalities per year in the low thousands.

So in terms of deaths, fixing (or even denting) ageing, malnutrition, infectious diseases and lifestyle causes is a far more important activity than winning wars or stopping terrorists. Hypertension, tobacco, STDs, alcohol, indoor air pollution and sanitation are all far, far more pressing in terms of saving lives. If we had a choice between ending all wars in the world and fixing indoor air pollution the rational choice would be to fix those smoky stoves: they kill nine times more people.

Existential risk

There is of course more to improving the world than just saving lives. First there is the issue of outbreak distributions: most wars are local and small affairs, but some become global. Same thing for pandemic respiratory disease. We actually do need to worry about them more than their median sizes suggest (and again the influenza totally dominates all wars). Incidentally, the exponent for the power law distribution of terrorism is safely strongly negative at -2.5, so it is less of a problem than ordinary wars with exponent -1.41 (where the expectation diverges: wait long enough and you get a war larger than any stated size).

There are reasons to think that existential risk should be weighed extremely strongly: even a tiny risk that we loose all our future is much worse than many standard risks (since the future could be inconceivably grand and involve very large numbers of people). This has convinced me that fixing the safety of governments needs to be boosted a lot: democides have been larger killers than wars in the 20th century and both seems to have most of the tail risk, especially when you start thinking nukes. It is likely a far more pressing problem than climate change, and quite possibly (depending on how you analyse xrisk weighting) beats disease.

How to analyse xrisk, especially future risks, in this kind of framework is a big part of our ongoing research at FHI.

Happiness

If instead of lives lost we look at the impact on human stress and happiness wars (and violence in general) look worse: they traumatize people, and terrorism by its nature is all about causing terror. But again, they happen to a small set of people. So in terms of happiness it might be more important to make the bulk of people happier. Life satisfaction correlates to 0.7 with health and 0.6 with wealth and basic education. Boost those a bit, and it outweighs the horrors of war.

In fact, when looking at the value of better lives, it looks like an enhancement in life quality might be worth much more than fixing a lot of the deaths discussed above: make everybody’s life 1% better, and it corresponds to more quality adjusted life years than is lost to death every year! So improving our wellbeing might actually matter far, far more than many diseases. Maybe we ought to spend more resources on applied hedonism research than trying to cure Alzheimers.

Morality

The real reason people focus so much about terrorism is of course the moral outrage. Somebody is responsible, people are angry and want revenge. Same thing for wars. And the horror tends to strike certain people: my kind of global calculations might make sense on the global scale, but most of us think that the people suffering the worst have a higher priority. While it might make more utilitarian sense to make everybody 1% happier rather than stop the carnage in Syria, I suspect most people would say morality is on the other side (exactly why is a matter of some interesting ethical debate, of course). Deontologists might think we have moral duties we must implement no matter what the cost. I disagree: burning villages in order to save them doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to risk lives in order to save lives, both directly and indirectly (by reducing future conflicts).

But this requires proportionality: going to war in order to avenge X deaths by causing 10X deaths is not going to be sustainable or moral. The total moral weight of one unjust death might be high, but it is finite. Given the typical civilian causality ratio of 10:1 any war will also almost certainly produce far more collateral unjust deaths than the justified deaths of enemy soldiers: avenging X deaths by killing exactly X enemies will still lead to around 10X unjust deaths. So achieving proportionality is very, very hard (and the Just War Doctrine is broken anyway, according to the war ethicists I talk to). This means that if you want to leave the straightforward utilitarian approach and add some moral/outrage weighting, you risk making the problem far worse by your own account. In many cases it might indeed be the moral thing to turn the other cheek… ideally armoured and barbed with suitable sanctions.

Conclusion

To sum up, this approach of just looking at consequences and ignoring who is who is of course a bit too cold for most people. Most people have Tetlockian sacred values and get very riled up if somebody thinks about cost-effectiveness in terrorism fighting (typical US bugaboo) or development (typical warmhearted donor bugaboo) or healthcare (typical European bugaboo). But if we did, we would make the world a far better place.

Bring on the robot cars and happiness pills!