Maximising whims
A wise man on Twitter once wrote:
I think a place [Effective Altruism] sometimes goes awry is in its emphasis on search for optimality. I strongly doubt that any strategy is sufficiently likely to be “best” that we should label it as such.
I agree.
I think of 80,000 Hours as trying to help people see more of the best opportunities available to them, and then draw a rough circle around some 2-20% of the most promising.
Most of the value comes from drawing that circle. It is hard to draw a great circle, but if you’ve not thought about it much, you can probably draw a better circle (e.g. by thinking about scale, leverage, neglectedness).
How to choose between the opportunities within your circle? We can offer some rules of thumb, but none that turn the decision into a straightforward expected value calculation.
You can try some Fermi estimates, but at a certain point these are just Tarot cards.
Fundamentally, you must summon the resolve to act despite the uncertainty. Keynes:
It is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.
I think of it as a three step process. Generate ideas, filter as best you can, then… pick on a whim.
80,000 Hours is saying: we can help you generate ideas and filter.
Some wish they could avoid the whim part. But I don’t think that’s an option.
Another wise man:
Many extremely valuable things will never seem credibly optimal. […] [Effective altruism] seems to want to know what people are doing, and why they’re doing it. But those people mostly didn’t understand what or why until after the fact. Darwin thought he was on the Beagle to do geology, Turing working on an esoteric problem in mathematical logic…
“Smart person follows their curiosity and/or tries to solve some problem they’ve bumped into, happens upon a valuable breakthrough” might be a common pattern. If it is, 80,000 Hours can submit this kind of activity as an option to consider in your circle. We can say it might be one of your best options, but I don’t think we can say it is your best option.
It seems like EA sometimes comes accross as offering an unrealistic degree of precision, probably due to the use of maximising language. “Find a much better option”—the realistic aim—might be a clearer slogan than “find the best option”—the regulative ideal.
What is philosophy? Some answers.
Marilyn Adams: Philosophy is thinking really hard about the most important questions and trying to bring analytic clarity both to the questions and the answers.
Peter Adamson: I guess I think philosophy is the study of the costs and benefits that accrue when you take up a certain position.
Simon Blackburn: Well, it’s a process of reflection on the deepest concepts, that is structures of thought, that make up the way in which we think about the world.
Wendy Brown: Philosophy asks about life’s meanings. Philosophy asks about who we are, what we might be, how we conceive ourselves, and how we can even think these questions.
Claire Carlyle: Philosophy is about making sense of that situation that we find ourselves in.
Tony Coady: Philosophy has always been something of a science of presuppositions; but it shouldn’t just expose them and say ‘there they are’. It should say something further about them that can help people. As I get older and older I’m more and more concerned that there should be more imagination in philosophy than there is.
Tim Crane: To quote Wilfrid Sellars, philosophy is the attempt to understand how things in the most general sense of that word hang together in the most general sense of those words.
Sebastian Gardner: Philosophy is the attempt to unify theoretical and practical reason.
Raymond Geuss: I’m afraid I have a very unhelpful answer to that, because it’s only a negative answer. It’s the answer that Friedrich Schlegel gave in his Athenaeum Fragments: philosophy is a way of trying to be a systematic spirit without having a system.
Thomas Hurka: Philosophy is abstract thought guided by principles of logic and ideals of precision in thought and argumentation about the most general issues concerning human beings and the world and our place in the world.
Brian Leiter: A philosopher for Nietzsche was an honorific. It refers to the person who creates or legislates value. It’s the person who, to borrow an image from one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, Judge Richard Posner, is a Moral entrepreneur. It’s a nice image. It’s somebody who creates new ways of evaluating things—what’s important, what’s worthwhile— that changes how an entire culture or an entire people understand those things.
Alexander Nehamas: I can’t answer that directly. I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.
Alex Neill: Philosophy is thinking that is obsessed with clarity.
Thomas Pogge: Philosophy in the classical sense is the love of wisdom. So the question then is ‘What is wisdom?’ And I think wisdom is understanding what really matters in the world.
Janet Radcliffe Richards: I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of subjects. I regard it as involving the kind of questions where you’re not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together.
Michael Sandel: Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting critically on social and political and economic arrangements. It always intimates the possibility that things could be other than they are. And better.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Philosophy is the search for a coherent and justified overall world-view. Philosophers should stop looking at little issues in the corner of our lives and try to see how things fit together; how psychology fits with philosophy, how the mind fits with the body, how aesthetic value relates to economic value and justice. Those are the big issues: how do we fit together the different aspects of our lives? And that’s what philosophy ought to be addressing.
Parfit’s optimism
Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.
Georges Bataille on Nietzsche
I write because I am afraid of going mad.
[…]
The difficulties Nietzsche encountered—casting off God and the good while fired, nonetheless, with the ardor of those who have died for God and the good—those difficulities I have, in turn, encountered.
[…]
I can exist totally only by transcending in some way the stage of action. Otherwise I become soldier, professional revolutionary, scholar—not “the whole man”. Man’s fragmentary state is, essentially, the same thing as the choice of an object. When a man limits his desires, for example, to the possesion of power within the state, he acts, he knows what has to be done. It matters little if he fails; he profits from the outset. He inserts himself advantageously within time. Each of his moments becomes useful. It becomes possible for him to advance, with each passing instant, towards his chosen goal. HIs time becomes progression towards this goal (this is what we usually call living). Similarly, if his object is his own salvation. Every action makes of man a fragmentary being. Only by refusing to act, or at least by denying the preeminence of the time reserved for action, can I maintain the quality of wholeness within myself.
[…]
That definition of the whole man: “the man whose life is an umotivated feast”; it celebrates, in every sense of the word, a laughter, a dance, an orgy which knows no subordination, a sacrifice heedless of purpose, material or moral.
[…]
Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated.
[…]
[Nietzsche’s Zarathustra] never lost that Ariadne’s thread which means having no goal to serve, no cause; he knew that a cause clips one’s wings. But, on the other hand, lack of a cause casts one out into solitude; it means the sickness of the desert, a cry dying away in a vast silence.
[…]
Morality always says: “let every instant of your life be motivated.” The [Eternal] Return de-motivates the instant, frees life from purpose and is thereby, first of all, its downfall. The Return is the whole man’s dramatic mode and his mask; it is the desert of a man whose every instant is henceforward unmotivated.
[…]
How can we not draw the consequences of the purposelessness inherent in Nietzsche’s desire. Chance—and the quest of chance—represents inexorably the sole remaining recourse.
On Nietzsche (1945)
Cheryl Misak on Ramsey’s pragmatism
Wittgenstein had argued (in Ramsey’s words) that a logical truth ‘excludes no possibility and so expresses no attitude of belief at all’. From here, Ramsey arrived at one of his most fruitful insights. Beliefs exclude possibilities, and that is how we can tell one belief from another. What it is to believe a proposition is, in large part, to behave in certain ways, and to take various possibilities as either alive or dead. It is of the essence of a belief that it has a causal impact on our actions, and we evaluate beliefs in terms of how well they work. In a paper written at the same time, ‘Truth and Probability’, he went on to argue that some habits are a better basis for action than others. Truth is linked to usefulness.
[…]
Ramsey was interested in how we use something, not in pure metaphysics — he was interested in a ‘human logic’ that tells us how we should think. Such a logic ‘is not merely independent of but sometimes actually incompatible with formal logic’.
As Ramsey put it in a 1929 draft paper titled ‘Philosophy’, one method, ‘Ludwig’s’, is to:
construct a logic, and do all our philosophical analysis entirely unselfconsciously, thinking all the time of the facts and not about our thinking about them, deciding what we mean without any reference to the nature of meanings.
Ramsey’s method, in contrast, directed us to the human facts, not the facts somehow abstracted from our understanding of them. He admitted to having once been under the sway of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy:
I used to worry myself about the nature of philosophy through excessive scholasticism. I could not see how we could understand a word and not be able to recognise whether a proposed definition of it was or was not correct. I did not realise the vagueness of the whole idea of understanding, the reference it involves to a multitude of performances any of which may fail and require to be restored.
He now thinks that we will often run into terms ‘we cannot define, but … can [only] explain the way in which they are used’. Ramsey thought that the ideal language Wittgenstein was trying to construct was mere scholasticism, ‘the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category’.
[…]
Ramsey’s approach, and his rebellion against Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, were starting to become fully formed. He summed it up perfectly in another note:
We cannot really picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts.
Ramsey was the bridge between 20th-century pragmatism and analytic philosophy, and when he died, that route was obscured.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle