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.