Here's an attempted reconstruction of Mills' argument. I'm not endorsing this argument (although there are parts of it with which I sympathize), but I think it is a lot better than the case for Mills as you present it in your post:
If a friend asked me whether she should vote in the upcoming Presidential election, I would advise her not to. It would be an inconvenience, and the chance of her vote making a difference to the outcome in my state is minuscule. From a consequentialist point of view, there is a good argument that it would be (mildly) unethical for her to vote, given the non-negligible cost and the negligible benefit. So if I were her personal ethical adviser, I would advise her not to vote. This analysis applies not just to my friend, but to most people in my state. So I might conclude that I would encourage significant good if I launched a large-scale state-wide media blitz discouraging voter turn-out. But this would be a bad idea! What is sound ethical advice directed at an individual is irresponsible when directed at the aggregate.
80k strongly encourages professional philanthropism over political activism, based on an individualist analysis. Any individual's chance of ...
Responding to your reconstruction: I think 80k are pretty clear about the fact that their advice is only good on the margin. If they get to a position where they can influence a significant fraction of the workers in some sector, then I expect their advice would change.
With respect to why some viscerally reject the idea, I think many see charity as a sort of morally repugnant paternalism that demeans its supposed beneficiaries. (I can sympathize with this, although it seems like a rather less pressing consideration than famine and plague.)
You might actually be able to cut ideologies up - or at least the instinctive attitudes that tend to precede them - according to how comfortable they are with charity and what they see it as encompassing: liberals think charity is great; socialists find charity uncomfortable and think it would be best if the poor took rather than passively received; libertarians either also find charity uncomfortable but extend that feeling to any system that socialists might hope to establish, or think charity is great but that the social democratic stuff liberals like isn't charity.
It might also be possible to view this unease as stemming from formally representing charity as purchasing status. I give you some money, I feel great, you feel crummy (but eat.) It's a bit like prostitution: one doesn't have to deny that both parties are on net better off from any given transaction to hold that something exploitative is going on. F...
Downvoted for the extremely tendentious paraphrase. I'm generally in favor of more discussion of politics on this site, but I think it's a topic we need to be extra careful about. This is not the way to do it.
Also, it's "Engels", not "Engles".
I'm extremely interested in this discussion, but I agree - if you're going to discuss politics, please do so more carefully. A deliberately uncharitable paraphrase is not a good place to start.
I'm sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn't help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I've noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn't seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author's confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can't make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.
This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There's only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn't a terrible strategy. When I'm trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone's argument though, the he...
When I calculate that in 50 years of giving away $40K a year you save 1000 lives at $2K each, that's not saying the number is exactly 400. It's saying 1000 is my best guess...
Bold added myself. Should that be 1000?
I hate to go off on a tangent, but:
Bad calculations also tend to be distributed widely, with people saying things like "one pint of blood can save up to three lives" when the expected marginal lives saved is actually tiny.
Just in the past week I was trying to figure out the math behind that statistic. I couldn't find actual studies on the topic that would let me calculate the expected utility of donating blood. Do you happen to know said information?
The current issue of the Oxford Left Review has a debate between socialist Pete Mills and two 80,000 hours people, Ben Todd and Sebastian Farquhar: The Ethical Careers Debate, p4-9
Link to the article (the one in the post is dead)
I find the replaceability assumption very problematic, too. If this wasn't LW, I would simply state the obvious an say that all sorts of evil stuff can be justified by replaceability. But this is LW, so I'll say that replaceability is not true for reflective decision theories.
The other potential bankers aren't using reflective decision theories. It's really that simple.
Added: Actually, it's even simpler: the other potential bankers have different goals. But the point about whether other people are using reflective decision theories is sometimes relevant.
Well, it kind of does apply to henchmen of an opressive reigime. The classic example is Oskar Schindler: he ran munitions factories for the Nazis in order to help him smuggle Jews out of Germany (and he ran them at under capacity). Schindler is generally regarded as a hero, but that seems to be trading on precisely something like the replaceability argument. If he hadn't done the job, someone else would have, and not only would they not have saved anybody, they would have run the factories better.
Flip the argument around for "being a banker" (or your doubtful career of choice) and it's hard to see what changes.
This is the first I heard of 80,000 hours, and their site gives me an instant negative vibe, and it's not just the abundance of weird pink on it. But I have trouble pinpointing quite what it is.
You know, this is sort of WAD. It's much easier to get people to do good if it happens to nearly coincide with something they wanted to do anyway. If you have someone who was already planning to become a banker, then it's much easier to persuade them to keep doing that, but give away money, than it is to persuade them to become a peniless activist. As it happens, this may be hugely effective, and so a massive win from a consequentialist point of view.
I like to think of it more on the positive front: as a white, male, privileged Westerner with a high-status education you basically have economic superpowers, so you can quite easily do a lot of good by doing pretty much what you were going to do anyway. Obviously, most of this is due to your circumstances, but it's still a great opportunity.
The amusement or absurdity value should be irrelevant in evaluating such decisions. I feel really angry when I consider remarks like these (not angry at someone or some action in particular, but more vaguely about the human status quo). The kind of spectacle where tickets are purchased in dead child currency.
This has been my concern. I'm not involved with 80k but I travel in Effective Altruism circles, which extend beyond 80k and include most of their memes.
What is incredibly frustrating is that none of this actually proves anything. It is still true that a wealthy banker is probably able to do more good than a single aid worker. Clearly we DO need to make sure there's an object-level impact somewhere. But for the near future, unless their memes overtake the bulk of the philanthropy world, it is likely that methods 80k advocates are sound.
Still, the whole thing smells really off to me, and your post sums up exactly why. It is awful convenient for a movement consisting of mostly upper-middle-class college grads that their "effective" tools for goodness award them the status and wealth that they'd otherwise feel entitled to.
alternately, humans are badly made and care more about status and wealth than about the poor sick. They won't listen if you tell them to sacrifice themselves, but they might listen if you tell them to gain status and also help the poor at the same time. The mark of a strong system in my mind is one that functions despite the perverse desires of the participants. If 80k can harness people's desire to do charity to people's desire for money and status I think it can go really far.
Linking to the article seems like it would be significantly better than this sort of paraphrase. I'm not sure whether you can get authorization to do so, but I would find that a lot more useful, especially for controversial political issues like this.
The current issue of the Oxford Left Review has a debate between socialist Pete Mills and two 80,000 hours people, Ben Todd and Sebastian Farquhar: The Ethical Careers Debate, p4-9. I'm interested in it because I want to understand why people object to the ideas of 80,000 hours. A paraphrasing:
- Todd and Farquhar
- Choose your career to most improve the world. Focus on the consequences of your decisions.
- Mills
- 80,000 hours says you must work a high paying but world-destroying career so you can give more money away. Then "your interests are aligned with the interests of capital" and you can't use political means to improve the world because that endangers your career.
- Todd and Farquhar
- Professional philanthropy is one option, but so are research and advocacy. Even if you go the high paying career route, you could be a doctor. Even if you take a people-harming but well paying job you're just replacing someone else who would do it instead. Engels was a professional philanthropist, funding Marx's reasearch.
- Mills
- "80k makes much of replaceability: 'the job will exist whatever you do.' This is stronger than the claim that someone else will become a banker; rather, it states that there will always be bankers, that there will always be exploitation." Engles took on too much by trying to be both a professional philanthropist and an activist which drove him to depression and illness.
- Todd and Farquhar
- Campaigning might be better than professional philanthropy, though you should consider whether you do better to get a well-paying job and fund multiple people to campaign. Replaceability means that a given job will exist whether you take it or not, but "there might be some things you could do that would cause the job to cease to exist; for instance, by campaigning against banking". "Even if you believe capitalism is one of the world's greatest problems, you shouldn't make the seductive inference that you should devote your energies to fighting it. Rather, you should work on the cause that enables you to make the biggest difference. There may be other very big problems which are more tractable."
- Mills
- "The language of probability will always fail to capture the possibility of system change. What was the expected value of the civil rights movement, or the campaign for universal suffrage, or anticolonial struggles for independence? As we have seen most recently with the Arab Spring, every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable." I don't like that 80,000 hours uses calculations in their attempt to estimate the good you could do through various potential careers. Stop focusing on the individual when the system is the problem. [Other stuff that doesn't make sense to me.]
As a socialist, Mills really doesn't like the argument that the best way to help the world's poor is probably to work in heavily capitalist industries. He seems to be avoiding engaging with Todd and Farquhar's arguments, especially replaceability. He also really doesn't like looking at things in terms of numbers, I think because numbers suggest certainty. When I calculate that in 50 years of giving away $40K a year you save 1000 lives at $2K each, that's not saying the number is exactly 1000. It's saying 1000 is my best guess, and unless I can come up with a better guess it's the estimate I should use when choosing between this career path and other ones. He also doesn't seem to understand prediction and probability: "every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable" may be how it feels for those living under an oppressive regime but it's not our best probability estimate. [1]
In a previous discussion a friend also was mislead calculations. When I said "one can avert infant deaths for about $500 each" their response was "What do they do with the 500 dollars? That doesn't seem to make sense. Do they give the infant a $500 anti-death pill? How do you know it really takes a constant stream of $500 for each infant?". Have other people run into this? Bad calculations also tend to be distributed widely, with people saying things like "one pint of blood can save up to three lives" when the expected marginal lives saved is actually tiny. Maybe we should focus less on estimates of effectiveness in smart-giving advocacy? Is there a way to show the huge difference in effect between the best charities and most charities without using these?
Maybe I should have way more of these discussions, enough that I can collect statistics on what arguments and examples work and which don't.
(I also posted this on my blog)
[1] Which is not to say you can't have big jumps in probability estimates. I could put the chance of revolution at 5% somewhere based on historical data but then hear some new information about how one has just started and sounds really promising which bumps my estimate up to 70%. But expected value calculations for jobs can work with numbers like these, it's just "impossible" and "inevitable" that break estimates.