The Repugnant Conclusion is an abstract hypothetical and has no bearing to the Earth we live in. More births on this Earth does not make life worse for the rest of us, especially for nations trying to prepare for looming demographic decline. No one should use the RC thought experiment as justification for any policy decisions in the real world.
Not an EA but there are so many problems with this argument.
The first and most obvious is that all the arguments here should lead EAs to oppose contraception, not merely abortion. If abortion has prevented "15,000,000 QALYs" , then contraception has prevented *billions* of QALYs from coming into being. So this argument can be defeated with a simple reductio:
If it's wrong for EAs to support abortion rights, it's significantly more wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
It's not wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
Therefore, it's not wrong for EAs to support abortion rights.
Apart from this, the argument makes a number of assumptions that can be easily picked apart.
One assumption is that a woman who gets an abortion would never have another child at a time that would be better for her and the potential child. In fact, many women who get abortions end up having another child later (whom they would *not* have had if they had the abortion). Thus, the abortion actually increases total QOLY because this later child might have had an overall happier life, and this child would not have existed if the woman had been forced to not get an abortion. I don't see how this general increase in happiness is accounted for in your reasoning.
This is to say nothing of the fact the article doesn't even consider the massive drop in utility women would experience if they were routinely forced to have children they didn't want. Sadly, this general indifference to *women's* happiness is pretty commonplace in pro-life arguments.
>It's not wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
You have not demonstrated this.
>One assumption is that a woman who gets an abortion would never have another child at a time that would be better for her and the potential child.
I address this in the post, if you don't want this kid the most "moral" thing to do from a utilitarian standard is to put it up for adoption. Then you can still have any kids you would have had otherwise.
>This is to say nothing of the fact the article doesn't even consider the massive drop in utility women would experience if they were routinely forced to have children they didn't want.
Do you suspect the drop in utility is enough to counteract the loss of 78 QALYs?
I couldn't say, as I have not examined the issue in detail. It would depend on which option resulted in greater future utility. I can certainly see how you could make a good argument that EAs should not support access to contraceptives, but I am far from confident.
What I am confident on is that choosing to kill the fetus instead of carrying it to term loses the future 78 QALYs. Whether that also implies you should be opposed to contraception is immaterial. Arguably EAs should be vegans as well, but you wouldn't see me arguing "X implies EAs should not eat meat, but it is not wrong for EAs to eat meat, therefore X is not true." That would be bad reasoning.
How can you be confident that abortion prevents QALYs from existing but not that contraceptives prevent far *more* QALYs from coming about? Are you saying you're not sure if contraceptive access decreases birth rates, but you are confident abortion decreases overall birth rates?
I'm saying that I am sure that killing a fetus will result in 58.5-78 QALYs of future utility being lost (depending on the risk of miscarriage, which changes based on trimester). Birth rates don't really come into it.
However, if you believe that contraceptives prevent millions of future QALYs being lost, then that would be a good reason to be opposed to contraceptives. It would not be a good reason to ignore the fact that killing a fetus loses future QALYs as well.
Birth rates come into it because if contraceptive access lowers birth rates (I think this is incontrovertible at this point) then contraceptives prevent billions of QALYs from coming into existence, to a degree far more than abortion does.
If your argument is that EAs should also be opposed to contraceptive access, or even any form of intercourse that won't result in conception, that's fine, but I actually would view that as a reductio against being an EA. I don't think I need an argument to explain why using a condom should not be illegal.
As an effective altruist who is anti-abortion, the reason I don't donate to anti-abortion causes is simple: they are already flooded with money, and I have no reason to expect that saving a life from abortion costs less than $5,000. Saving a life from malaria does cost $5,000, so for the same money, I can save more lives from malaria than I can from abortion.
Yeah, I’ve talked to several EAs that point out that it is not a neglected or tractable cause area. Research into artificial wombs or treatments that lessen risk of miscarriages are more likely to be promising, but those are also talent constraint, not funding constrained. Unless you are already a biomedical engineer, it’s unlikely to be the best cause area.
I would disagree with them by the virtue of quantity of abortions per year. Let's say we replaced all the numbers with 'wolf attacks'. Wolf attacks are undeniably up dramatically.
There's also the argument from the extremes. Sure $5000 saves one malaria life but the man who cures malaria would then be worth billions. If your population is only, say, 1000 people the chances that you have a genius who can fix malaria forever is basically zero. If your population was 100 trillion somehow then it's very likely that the man who can cure malaria is in there somewhere.
Right. But most victims of malaria don't die. Without treatment, most victims eventually recover. But if you do the math, and factor in the cost of shipping, the amount of false positives, and the general fatality rate, it comes out that if you spend $5,000 on malaria treatments, you can expect to save one life on average.
The reason why it's one of the best charities to donate to is that we have the cure for malaria and it's incredibly cheap. The people who need the cure generally don't have $3. Millions of people make less than $2 per diem. They're mostly subsistence farmers.
1) the issue is pretty intractable- there are no clear policy support/ other stuff that will actually lead to people changing minds/ changing policy on this.
2) We get more and more certain as we move trimesters - first and at least first half of second trimester fetuses very likely don’t have qualia, so the numbers here are overestimated. Vast majority of abortions happen in first half.
3) it’s bad for EA optics. If EAs started taking a stance on controversial topics like this, people would take it less seriously in more important parts.
4) EA is pretty utilitarian with deontic constraints. Rights from government, it could be argued, are within the purview of those deontic constraints. Therefore, on grounds that the government shouldn’t interfere with bodies of women, we should allow abortion. (I think this argument is a bit iffy, but it’s not awful).
5) You should look into parfit’s non identity problem.
6) on the other hand, I agree with you on the EV here and think more EAs should, in a vacuum, agree with this.
>first and at least first half of second trimester fetuses very likely don’t have qualia, so the numbers here are overestimated.
Why does it matter if they have qualia at the time of abortion? Whether they do or not we still lose 78 QALYs.
When the abortion occurs does effect how many QALYs we expect to lose (since first trimester fetuses have maybe a 25% chance of miscarrying regardless). But that just changes it from 78 to 58 QALYs lost.
>Even if the abortion is in the first trimester, where there is about a 25% chance of miscarriage, that’s still $2,281,500 of lost utility ((78 x .25) x $39,000)
As far as pure utilitarianism goes, I think the expected meat consumption of the marginal person likely makes birth net-negative (this is the “Meat Eater Problem”). But you don’t have to be a utilitarian to be an EA, you can value things like bodily autonomy or freedom in general while still thinking that people in far away places or animals matter more than zero.
I am not a utilitarian, but I don't think your argument works, at very least not cleanly.
I will assume all of the kids are vegan and climate/environmentally neutral.
Your argument would just be that in general we should do anything that increases population (like banning contraception...), but that doesn't make it wrong.
The actual number of births prevented is probably not going to be nowhere close the number of abortions. You can't compare a country like fifties Romania to the US in this regard.
Quality of life (now QOL) of everyone having to adhere to the new laws would slightly diminish.
QOL of the women/parents would diminish significantly. More people would be in worse relationships. QOL of the children vs the children that would have been had would be worse. QOL of everyone interacting with all of these people would be worse. All these people would be less productive.
I would put over 90% on the average abortion being a net positive even without considering non-human animal suffering and environmental impacts. This is mostly based on intuition how these factors would play out. Me being fairly liberal is going to somewhat influence that, still if we could ask god I'd take the bet at 7 to 1.
The real answer why EAs don't like abortion is of course that no one is actually a utilitarian. At best you are logically convinced and have, over time, integrated parts of it into your intuitive moral understanding, which is the thing we actually act on. Most will still greatly value personal freedom, and to overcome this you'd need a huge moral consequence.
>Your argument would just be that in general we should do anything that increases population (like banning contraception...), but that doesn't make it wrong.
No, my argument is that from a utilitarian point of view it is hard to see how you can justify killing a fetus rather than carrying it to term and putting it up for adoption. Whether that also implies utilitarians should be pro-natalist is general may or may not be true, but has nothing to do with whether the decision to abort a fetus is net negative or positive utility.
>Quality of life (now QOL) of everyone having to adhere to the new laws would slightly diminish.
Enough to offset the over 30,000,000 lost QALY each year? That seems unlikely.
>All these people would be less productive.
Why? Do you have evidence that societies which have more abortions per capita are more productive?
>The real answer why EAs don't like abortion is of course that no one is actually a utilitarian.
This, I am coming to suspect, is broadly accurate.
Slightly fewer people? In 2023 22% of all pregnancies were ended by abortion. Over half a million per year, and over 50 million since Roe was passed. That's not slightly, that's significantly fewer people, and billions of lost QALYs.
"Repugnant conclusion! Many utilitarians do not believe we have a duty to maximize the number of humans that exist, even if it results in greater net utility."
If they don't want greater utility then they're not utilitarians. Simple as?
"The fetus is not a being of moral concern, so there is no utility lost from aborting it."
I'll keep all the fetuses, they keep all the adults sans fetuses. Check in after 150 years and I'll have the entirety of humanity and it's utility and they'll have a graveyard.
There's also an aspect to EA donations I have rarely seen addressed which I'll call "frictional loss of monetary utility". The money's utility gets whittled away the further from your locus of control it gets donated. Similarly a bullet's impact gets weaker the further your target is. If I donate 50$ for a pizza to a guy I can buy it and he gets a 50$ pizza. If I donate it to a guy in the next city I can call ubereats but because of delivery costs and app costs maybe he gets 30$ of pizza. If I donate it for an African to eat pizza I imagine paying the NGO and everything else involved the African gets maybe 1-5$ of pizza. The utility has been whittled down to maybe 10% or less.
If an American, in America, fired rifle bullets to shoot an elephant in Africa he would fail pretty much 100% of the time no matter how much money he spent on bullets simply because of frictional energy loss. Similarly donation money has a similar wastage from the institutional friction that degrades its value over distance & social distance.
That said the money spent to stop an abortion in your city is of far more utility than the same amount of money spent abroad in Africa. And it behooves the utilitarian to spend his money as close to his locus of control as possible to maximize the utility of that money. This is the opposite view of most EA since they tend to go from the lens of the beneficiary but this view is from the lens of the utility's power.
I got it by Googling around for EA related pictures under a Creative Commons license. I don't know anything in particular about what's going on in the picture.
Bro EA is just a way to sound cool at a party. Take acceptable center left elite opinion and add a dash of *math* (not too much math).
A real EA would conclude that they should just have a bunch of kids and invest in the stock market. Or if they got really extreme they should go all Elon musk and try to IVF a brood of smart kids into existence.
Increasing the population of Africa would be way down the list of EA priorities if they took their math seriously.
How does having kids save lives? Is that your question?
So all of human existence until recently was a Malthusian struggle that was nasty, brutish, and short.
Then all of a sudden smart people + capitalism ended that equilibrium. Population and living standards got exponentially better.
But there are still parts of the world stuck in that old equilibrium. Africa for instance.
I think EAs view themselves as trying to bring Africa (etc) along to our standard through bed nets or whatever. But I view africas problems as largely genetic in nature. All this foreign aid has still left African life nasty, brutish, and short.
So increases in African population simply make the world more like Africa. If population projections + immigration bear fruit it’s possible that the entire developed world project will stall or reverse, returning life to being nasty, brutish, and short everywhere. You can see this writ small in pockets of the first world already.
So a more proven method of improving living standards is smart people + capitalism. So smart people ought to beget more smart people and do more capitalism. It’s worked pretty well so far. Increased Wealth will trickle down to the africas of the world as much as they are capable of grasping it (they have antibiotics and fertilizer after all).
Perhaps one day smart people + capitalism will solve the genetics problem and fix Africa. Best to keep the engine of progress humming to bring that day as soon as possible.
So if you want to help the world, have more kids and create more economic growth. People like James watt were right to ignore the starving orphans around him and focus on his steam engine.
Anyway. You say you view Africa's problems as genetics. Surely their genetics didn't cause mosquitoes carrying malaria, right?
Pollution, malnutrition, and disease all have a demonstrable effect on IQ. So if you started effectively donating to charities, wouldn't that have the end result of making Africans more intelligent?
Thank you for this. It explains our ideological difference, even beyond your beliefs that Africans are genetically inferior.
You failed to answer my question "how does this save lives"? Instead, you started talking about improving living standards. But the best way of improving living standards is saving lives, which would be lost because of the lack of Vitamin A supplements.
I think human suffering is bad. Making very rich people even richer does not balance that out. Some of this is from my religion, but the idea that human suffering is a bad thing that should be prevented seemed to me quite obvious while I was still an atheist.
Do you understand this argument at all?
Or are you still convinced that spending 10% of my income to fake my beliefs to sound cool at some unnamed parties that I don't go to?
Suffering is bad. But suffering is inevitable default unless you have the right equilibrium.
If you eliminate one form of suffering in Africa they will simply find another. Since they can’t escape the Malthusian trap (they lack the iq to do so) even if you succeed in the short run the population will simply increase and the suffering will come right back.
Only a society capable of rational action can create long term conditions in which life is not constant suffering.
The genetic iq of Africa is probably in the low 80s. You can observe blacks in the first world and back out the white admixture % in the dna. IQs lower than that are likely environmental, though it’s not like we’ve figured out how to fix the environment.
Low 80s is too low to form a functioning society (83 is the literal cutoff where they say you are too stupid for the army in the most basic roles).
By contrast let’s say instead of bed nets you just had more kids. That brings self sustaining life into the world. Presumably your kids and their would generate a lot of economic surplus for the world and advance civilization directly or indirectely.
You could invest in polygenic genetic research or new IVF methods , which might actually solve the African genetic problem. Or you could just buy treasury bonds and lower the cost of capital for people investing in all sorts of things that can make the world better.
Making rich people richer caused a million fold increase in world gdp per capita, virtually ended child mortality, increased life expectancy, and gave us antibiotics and this delicious stake and eggs in eating (as opposed to barely not starving on stale bread like most people for most of existence).
Giving to the poor gave us the same Malthusian trap slop we’ve had forever.
Now, if you stance is “I tithe 10% to the poor as is Christian tradition” I won’t give you much trouble. I actually think a degree of charity probably takes the edge off of societal stress. I think Christian charity was part of why we got an Industrial Revolution (hyper violent and dominance based cultures can’t do so). I just don’t believe that the highest good is bed nets for Africa and i feel like the gene culture convolution that happened in Europe just doesn’t translate to this trans continental situation.
The Repugnant Conclusion is an abstract hypothetical and has no bearing to the Earth we live in. More births on this Earth does not make life worse for the rest of us, especially for nations trying to prepare for looming demographic decline. No one should use the RC thought experiment as justification for any policy decisions in the real world.
Not an EA but there are so many problems with this argument.
The first and most obvious is that all the arguments here should lead EAs to oppose contraception, not merely abortion. If abortion has prevented "15,000,000 QALYs" , then contraception has prevented *billions* of QALYs from coming into being. So this argument can be defeated with a simple reductio:
If it's wrong for EAs to support abortion rights, it's significantly more wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
It's not wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
Therefore, it's not wrong for EAs to support abortion rights.
Apart from this, the argument makes a number of assumptions that can be easily picked apart.
One assumption is that a woman who gets an abortion would never have another child at a time that would be better for her and the potential child. In fact, many women who get abortions end up having another child later (whom they would *not* have had if they had the abortion). Thus, the abortion actually increases total QOLY because this later child might have had an overall happier life, and this child would not have existed if the woman had been forced to not get an abortion. I don't see how this general increase in happiness is accounted for in your reasoning.
This is to say nothing of the fact the article doesn't even consider the massive drop in utility women would experience if they were routinely forced to have children they didn't want. Sadly, this general indifference to *women's* happiness is pretty commonplace in pro-life arguments.
>It's not wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives.
You have not demonstrated this.
>One assumption is that a woman who gets an abortion would never have another child at a time that would be better for her and the potential child.
I address this in the post, if you don't want this kid the most "moral" thing to do from a utilitarian standard is to put it up for adoption. Then you can still have any kids you would have had otherwise.
>This is to say nothing of the fact the article doesn't even consider the massive drop in utility women would experience if they were routinely forced to have children they didn't want.
Do you suspect the drop in utility is enough to counteract the loss of 78 QALYs?
Are you arguing that it is in fact wrong for EAs to support access to contraceptives?
I couldn't say, as I have not examined the issue in detail. It would depend on which option resulted in greater future utility. I can certainly see how you could make a good argument that EAs should not support access to contraceptives, but I am far from confident.
What I am confident on is that choosing to kill the fetus instead of carrying it to term loses the future 78 QALYs. Whether that also implies you should be opposed to contraception is immaterial. Arguably EAs should be vegans as well, but you wouldn't see me arguing "X implies EAs should not eat meat, but it is not wrong for EAs to eat meat, therefore X is not true." That would be bad reasoning.
How can you be confident that abortion prevents QALYs from existing but not that contraceptives prevent far *more* QALYs from coming about? Are you saying you're not sure if contraceptive access decreases birth rates, but you are confident abortion decreases overall birth rates?
I'm saying that I am sure that killing a fetus will result in 58.5-78 QALYs of future utility being lost (depending on the risk of miscarriage, which changes based on trimester). Birth rates don't really come into it.
However, if you believe that contraceptives prevent millions of future QALYs being lost, then that would be a good reason to be opposed to contraceptives. It would not be a good reason to ignore the fact that killing a fetus loses future QALYs as well.
Birth rates come into it because if contraceptive access lowers birth rates (I think this is incontrovertible at this point) then contraceptives prevent billions of QALYs from coming into existence, to a degree far more than abortion does.
If your argument is that EAs should also be opposed to contraceptive access, or even any form of intercourse that won't result in conception, that's fine, but I actually would view that as a reductio against being an EA. I don't think I need an argument to explain why using a condom should not be illegal.
As an effective altruist who is anti-abortion, the reason I don't donate to anti-abortion causes is simple: they are already flooded with money, and I have no reason to expect that saving a life from abortion costs less than $5,000. Saving a life from malaria does cost $5,000, so for the same money, I can save more lives from malaria than I can from abortion.
That's fair enough.
Voting costs you nothing. Now that many states have referendums on abortion, how do your vote / how would you vote if it came up in your state?
*nasally annoying voice* technically it costs time. But I would vote no.
Also I do donate to local pregnancy centers administered by my Church.
Yeah, I’ve talked to several EAs that point out that it is not a neglected or tractable cause area. Research into artificial wombs or treatments that lessen risk of miscarriages are more likely to be promising, but those are also talent constraint, not funding constrained. Unless you are already a biomedical engineer, it’s unlikely to be the best cause area.
I would disagree with them by the virtue of quantity of abortions per year. Let's say we replaced all the numbers with 'wolf attacks'. Wolf attacks are undeniably up dramatically.
There's also the argument from the extremes. Sure $5000 saves one malaria life but the man who cures malaria would then be worth billions. If your population is only, say, 1000 people the chances that you have a genius who can fix malaria forever is basically zero. If your population was 100 trillion somehow then it's very likely that the man who can cure malaria is in there somewhere.
We already have the cure for malaria. That's why it only costs $5000 to save a life from malaria.
Weird. Now that you've said it, internet says a course of the treatment costs $3.
Right. But most victims of malaria don't die. Without treatment, most victims eventually recover. But if you do the math, and factor in the cost of shipping, the amount of false positives, and the general fatality rate, it comes out that if you spend $5,000 on malaria treatments, you can expect to save one life on average.
The reason why it's one of the best charities to donate to is that we have the cure for malaria and it's incredibly cheap. The people who need the cure generally don't have $3. Millions of people make less than $2 per diem. They're mostly subsistence farmers.
A few things to be said here, imo:
1) the issue is pretty intractable- there are no clear policy support/ other stuff that will actually lead to people changing minds/ changing policy on this.
2) We get more and more certain as we move trimesters - first and at least first half of second trimester fetuses very likely don’t have qualia, so the numbers here are overestimated. Vast majority of abortions happen in first half.
3) it’s bad for EA optics. If EAs started taking a stance on controversial topics like this, people would take it less seriously in more important parts.
4) EA is pretty utilitarian with deontic constraints. Rights from government, it could be argued, are within the purview of those deontic constraints. Therefore, on grounds that the government shouldn’t interfere with bodies of women, we should allow abortion. (I think this argument is a bit iffy, but it’s not awful).
5) You should look into parfit’s non identity problem.
6) on the other hand, I agree with you on the EV here and think more EAs should, in a vacuum, agree with this.
>first and at least first half of second trimester fetuses very likely don’t have qualia, so the numbers here are overestimated.
Why does it matter if they have qualia at the time of abortion? Whether they do or not we still lose 78 QALYs.
When the abortion occurs does effect how many QALYs we expect to lose (since first trimester fetuses have maybe a 25% chance of miscarrying regardless). But that just changes it from 78 to 58 QALYs lost.
>Even if the abortion is in the first trimester, where there is about a 25% chance of miscarriage, that’s still $2,281,500 of lost utility ((78 x .25) x $39,000)
Typo. Should be: ((78 x .75) x $39,000).
As far as pure utilitarianism goes, I think the expected meat consumption of the marginal person likely makes birth net-negative (this is the “Meat Eater Problem”). But you don’t have to be a utilitarian to be an EA, you can value things like bodily autonomy or freedom in general while still thinking that people in far away places or animals matter more than zero.
If you believe that births in general are net negative utility I would disagree with you, but it would be logically consistent with being pro-choice.
I am not a utilitarian, but I don't think your argument works, at very least not cleanly.
I will assume all of the kids are vegan and climate/environmentally neutral.
Your argument would just be that in general we should do anything that increases population (like banning contraception...), but that doesn't make it wrong.
The actual number of births prevented is probably not going to be nowhere close the number of abortions. You can't compare a country like fifties Romania to the US in this regard.
Quality of life (now QOL) of everyone having to adhere to the new laws would slightly diminish.
QOL of the women/parents would diminish significantly. More people would be in worse relationships. QOL of the children vs the children that would have been had would be worse. QOL of everyone interacting with all of these people would be worse. All these people would be less productive.
I would put over 90% on the average abortion being a net positive even without considering non-human animal suffering and environmental impacts. This is mostly based on intuition how these factors would play out. Me being fairly liberal is going to somewhat influence that, still if we could ask god I'd take the bet at 7 to 1.
The real answer why EAs don't like abortion is of course that no one is actually a utilitarian. At best you are logically convinced and have, over time, integrated parts of it into your intuitive moral understanding, which is the thing we actually act on. Most will still greatly value personal freedom, and to overcome this you'd need a huge moral consequence.
>Your argument would just be that in general we should do anything that increases population (like banning contraception...), but that doesn't make it wrong.
No, my argument is that from a utilitarian point of view it is hard to see how you can justify killing a fetus rather than carrying it to term and putting it up for adoption. Whether that also implies utilitarians should be pro-natalist is general may or may not be true, but has nothing to do with whether the decision to abort a fetus is net negative or positive utility.
>Quality of life (now QOL) of everyone having to adhere to the new laws would slightly diminish.
Enough to offset the over 30,000,000 lost QALY each year? That seems unlikely.
>All these people would be less productive.
Why? Do you have evidence that societies which have more abortions per capita are more productive?
>The real answer why EAs don't like abortion is of course that no one is actually a utilitarian.
This, I am coming to suspect, is broadly accurate.
I think all of the QOL diminishing factors put together are most likely enough to offset slightly fewer people.
Slightly fewer people? In 2023 22% of all pregnancies were ended by abortion. Over half a million per year, and over 50 million since Roe was passed. That's not slightly, that's significantly fewer people, and billions of lost QALYs.
What I'm saying is that not every abortion would lead to an extra life because people would be more careful.
Last part is spot on. These types are utilitarians until it comes to person sacrifice.
"Repugnant conclusion! Many utilitarians do not believe we have a duty to maximize the number of humans that exist, even if it results in greater net utility."
If they don't want greater utility then they're not utilitarians. Simple as?
"The fetus is not a being of moral concern, so there is no utility lost from aborting it."
I'll keep all the fetuses, they keep all the adults sans fetuses. Check in after 150 years and I'll have the entirety of humanity and it's utility and they'll have a graveyard.
There's also an aspect to EA donations I have rarely seen addressed which I'll call "frictional loss of monetary utility". The money's utility gets whittled away the further from your locus of control it gets donated. Similarly a bullet's impact gets weaker the further your target is. If I donate 50$ for a pizza to a guy I can buy it and he gets a 50$ pizza. If I donate it to a guy in the next city I can call ubereats but because of delivery costs and app costs maybe he gets 30$ of pizza. If I donate it for an African to eat pizza I imagine paying the NGO and everything else involved the African gets maybe 1-5$ of pizza. The utility has been whittled down to maybe 10% or less.
If an American, in America, fired rifle bullets to shoot an elephant in Africa he would fail pretty much 100% of the time no matter how much money he spent on bullets simply because of frictional energy loss. Similarly donation money has a similar wastage from the institutional friction that degrades its value over distance & social distance.
That said the money spent to stop an abortion in your city is of far more utility than the same amount of money spent abroad in Africa. And it behooves the utilitarian to spend his money as close to his locus of control as possible to maximize the utility of that money. This is the opposite view of most EA since they tend to go from the lens of the beneficiary but this view is from the lens of the utility's power.
Yup, they all lean left.
I'm not EA, but you have a really good point.
Where is the picture from? I didn’t know that Elon Musk has ever gone to an EA Global? Is this real?
I got it by Googling around for EA related pictures under a Creative Commons license. I don't know anything in particular about what's going on in the picture.
Based
Bro EA is just a way to sound cool at a party. Take acceptable center left elite opinion and add a dash of *math* (not too much math).
A real EA would conclude that they should just have a bunch of kids and invest in the stock market. Or if they got really extreme they should go all Elon musk and try to IVF a brood of smart kids into existence.
Increasing the population of Africa would be way down the list of EA priorities if they took their math seriously.
Pro life is not left coded so who cares.
How does that save any lives though? In some weirdo longtermist way?
How does having kids save lives? Is that your question?
So all of human existence until recently was a Malthusian struggle that was nasty, brutish, and short.
Then all of a sudden smart people + capitalism ended that equilibrium. Population and living standards got exponentially better.
But there are still parts of the world stuck in that old equilibrium. Africa for instance.
I think EAs view themselves as trying to bring Africa (etc) along to our standard through bed nets or whatever. But I view africas problems as largely genetic in nature. All this foreign aid has still left African life nasty, brutish, and short.
So increases in African population simply make the world more like Africa. If population projections + immigration bear fruit it’s possible that the entire developed world project will stall or reverse, returning life to being nasty, brutish, and short everywhere. You can see this writ small in pockets of the first world already.
So a more proven method of improving living standards is smart people + capitalism. So smart people ought to beget more smart people and do more capitalism. It’s worked pretty well so far. Increased Wealth will trickle down to the africas of the world as much as they are capable of grasping it (they have antibiotics and fertilizer after all).
Perhaps one day smart people + capitalism will solve the genetics problem and fix Africa. Best to keep the engine of progress humming to bring that day as soon as possible.
So if you want to help the world, have more kids and create more economic growth. People like James watt were right to ignore the starving orphans around him and focus on his steam engine.
Anyway. You say you view Africa's problems as genetics. Surely their genetics didn't cause mosquitoes carrying malaria, right?
Pollution, malnutrition, and disease all have a demonstrable effect on IQ. So if you started effectively donating to charities, wouldn't that have the end result of making Africans more intelligent?
Thank you for this. It explains our ideological difference, even beyond your beliefs that Africans are genetically inferior.
You failed to answer my question "how does this save lives"? Instead, you started talking about improving living standards. But the best way of improving living standards is saving lives, which would be lost because of the lack of Vitamin A supplements.
I think human suffering is bad. Making very rich people even richer does not balance that out. Some of this is from my religion, but the idea that human suffering is a bad thing that should be prevented seemed to me quite obvious while I was still an atheist.
Do you understand this argument at all?
Or are you still convinced that spending 10% of my income to fake my beliefs to sound cool at some unnamed parties that I don't go to?
Suffering is bad. But suffering is inevitable default unless you have the right equilibrium.
If you eliminate one form of suffering in Africa they will simply find another. Since they can’t escape the Malthusian trap (they lack the iq to do so) even if you succeed in the short run the population will simply increase and the suffering will come right back.
Only a society capable of rational action can create long term conditions in which life is not constant suffering.
The genetic iq of Africa is probably in the low 80s. You can observe blacks in the first world and back out the white admixture % in the dna. IQs lower than that are likely environmental, though it’s not like we’ve figured out how to fix the environment.
Low 80s is too low to form a functioning society (83 is the literal cutoff where they say you are too stupid for the army in the most basic roles).
By contrast let’s say instead of bed nets you just had more kids. That brings self sustaining life into the world. Presumably your kids and their would generate a lot of economic surplus for the world and advance civilization directly or indirectely.
You could invest in polygenic genetic research or new IVF methods , which might actually solve the African genetic problem. Or you could just buy treasury bonds and lower the cost of capital for people investing in all sorts of things that can make the world better.
Making rich people richer caused a million fold increase in world gdp per capita, virtually ended child mortality, increased life expectancy, and gave us antibiotics and this delicious stake and eggs in eating (as opposed to barely not starving on stale bread like most people for most of existence).
Giving to the poor gave us the same Malthusian trap slop we’ve had forever.
Now, if you stance is “I tithe 10% to the poor as is Christian tradition” I won’t give you much trouble. I actually think a degree of charity probably takes the edge off of societal stress. I think Christian charity was part of why we got an Industrial Revolution (hyper violent and dominance based cultures can’t do so). I just don’t believe that the highest good is bed nets for Africa and i feel like the gene culture convolution that happened in Europe just doesn’t translate to this trans continental situation.
Do you think Plan B is also immoral?