Jess Whittlestone - Rationality & Effective Altruism - EA Global Melbourne 2015
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Jess Whittlestone on rationality and why we should care about it. Two major aspects of rationality are covered: 'epistemic rationality' - forming accurate beliefs and 'instrumental rationality' - the skill of advancing your goals given your resources. Jess then discusses what rationality isnt and some common misconceptions. Further, Jess discusses three common components of rationality central to EA: 1) Seeking Truth (inc intellectual honesty, open-mindedness) 2) Questioning our intuitions (inc Thinking fast and slow) 3) Being 'effective' (being strategic instead of just responding to environmental pressures) Video of Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqK_w6DQ6v8 Also of interest: http://jesswhittlestone.com/blog/2014/11/25/becoming-more-rational-what-i-got-out-of-the-cfar-workshop Many thanks for watching! - Support me via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scifuture - Please Subscribe to this Channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture - Science, Technology & the Future website: http://scifuture.org
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Jess Whittlestone - Rationality & Effective Altruism - EA Global Melbourne 2015
- 1. Rationality and EA Jess Whittlestone
- 2. • “Epistemic rationality”: the skill of forming accurate beliefs • “Instrumental rationality”: the skill of advancing your goals given your resources
- 4. 3 components of rationality central to EA: 1. Seeking the truth 2. Questioning our intuitions 3. Being ‘effective’
- 5. 1. Seeking the truth “Truth – more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation of good outcomes” – Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world
- 7. “Intellectual honesty”: – Being honest with yourself about why you believe the things you do
- 8. “Open-mindedness”: – Seriously considering the possibility that you might be wrong, being willing to change your mind
- 9. 2. Questioning our intuitions System 1: thinking “fast” Defining characteristics: • Unconscious • Effortless • Automatic, without self control System 2: thinking “slow” Defining characteristics: • Deliberate and conscious • Effortful • Controlled
- 10. “If I look at the mass I will never act”
- 12. Intuition and reason are collaborators – not opponents
- 13. 3. Being “effective” • Being strategic in the pursuit of goals, the ability to stay on track • Default is just responding to environmental pressures
- 14. 1. What are you trying to achieve? 2. What does progress actually look like? How can you tell when you’ve met your goal? 3. Might there be a better path to your goal than your current one? 4. How might your current plan fail? How can you make it stronger? 5. Can you use environmental and social contexts to bolster your motivation? 6. How will your future self feel about this?
- 15. What distinguishes effective altruists?
- 16. The challenge of rationality
- 17. Summary • The ways we’ve evolved to think and behave aren’t necessarily those that are best for improving the world • What distinguishes EAs from other altruistic people is largely a matter of recognizing this fact, and recognizing that we can do better • How? – Resisting the urge to settle on specific cause areas, being willing to switch paths – Not taking our intuitive judgements at face value, but recognising when they are useful – Being strategic in the pursuit of our goals rather than simply responding to immediate pressures
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, I’m Jess – it’s really good to be here! My aim with this talk is to give you an overview of what rationality is and why it’s really important for us as people who want to do as much good in the world as possible.
- I don’t want to spend too much time on technical definitions, as I don’t think that’s super interesting. But I also know that different people use the term “rationality” to mean very different things, so it seems important to clarify what we’re talking about here. By “rationality”, I actually mean two distinct, but very closely related skillsets: first, the ability to form accurate beliefs about the world – “epistemic rationality” Second, the ability to effectively move towards your goals given your resources – “instrumental rationality”
- One common misconception about rationality is to associate it with this guy – Spock from Star Trek – the idea being that being rational is mostly about not having emotions. I want to emphasise strongly that this is not what I mean by rationality – often our emotions can actually help us to arrive at accurate beliefs about the world and achieve our goals. And if we didn’t have any emotions, we’d probably find it impossible to make any decision. So that’s what I mean by rationality – forming accurate beliefs and finding the best ways to achieve our goals. From now on I’m going to leave these technical definitions behind and talk about some more familiar concepts.
- I’m going to discuss three ideas that are central to what it means to be “rational” that I also think are really key to what it means to be an effective altruist. I’ll discuss each of these more in turn – seeking the truth, balancing intuition and reason, and being ‘effective.’
- First: being truth seeking. By this I mean genuinely aiming to form accurate beliefs about the world, rather than just believing whatever is most convenient or desirable for us. If we want to identify where the biggest problems are, and come up with solutions to those problems that are likely to work, we first need to have a clear idea of the way things currently are. We won’t do much good if we’re mistaken about what the problems in the world are, or don’t understand the kinds of solutions those problems need.
- To see how not having an accurate understanding of reality can hinder our attempts to do good, consider the story of Playpumps. The idea was to replace traditional hand water pumps in poor villages with a pump that doubled as a playground merry-go-round. It seemed like a great idea: women would no longer have to walk miles to pump water, and children had a new way to play. Playpumps were installed across Africa, the idea got increasing amount of positive media attention, and even won a World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2000. The problem? In order to pump water, the playpumps needed constant force – much more than was provided by kids playing on and off throughout the day. So children ended up sometimes being paid to “play” on the pumps – often ending up injured from falling off or sick from dizziness – or the women of the village had to do it themselves, which they found tiring and undignified. When the local communities were actually asked later on how they felt about the new pumps, many said they preferred the old hand pumps. Playpumps sounded like a great idea, but it failed because those behind it didn’t actually understand the realities of these villages, and how the playpumps would work in their lives, anywhere near enough.
- If we want to be truth seeking in our altruism, we need to start by being honest with ourselves about why we believe the things we do. Are you working on the cause or project you’re working on because you genuinely believe it’s the best way to improve the world, or because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside? I’m sure that the people who designed playpumps genuinely had really good intentions – they really wanted to improve these people’s lives. But I’d guess that part of the reason they got so excited about playpumps was also that it just sounded cool and exciting, and was the kind of idea they knew could get a lot of attention – which isn’t necessarily the same thing as an idea that will actually work. Distributing malaria nets to those at risk of malaria, say, isn’t anywhere near as cool-sounding, but there’s a lot more evidence that it actually works.
- We also need to cultivate an attitude of open-mindedness: seriously considering the possibility that even our most deeply held beliefs might be wrong, being open to considering alternatives, and willing to change our minds and our plans when new information comes along. When the evidence started to roll in that playpumps weren’t as effective as they originally thought, the company initially acknowledged their failure. But somehow despite this, Playpumps live on – now known as “roundabout water solutions”, continuing to install the same model of playpumps across South Africa. It’s possible they found a way to make them work much better, but it also seems likely that they stuck with it simply because admitting your failure, giving up on something, and starting all over again, is incredibly difficult. But it’s really important that we’re able to do this if we want to have a large impact on the world – the chances that the first thing we decide to work on is the best thing for us to be doing is just so small.
- The second part of rationality that I think is key to EA is learning to appropriately balance intuition and reason in our decision-making. A key distinction that has come out of psychology research in recent decades is between “system 1” and “system 2” types of reasoning – which has been popularised by Daniel Kahneman in the book TFS (if you haven’t read it, I recommend it!) “System 1” thinking is fast, intuitive, and automatic – it occurs without conscious control, and takes relatively little effort for our brains. For example, your vague sense of whether the person you just met was interested in what you were saying is a system 1 judgement. “System 2” thinking is slower, more deliberate, and much more effort for our brains – we have to exert conscious effort. When you do a mental calculation, or are trying to figure out the best way to explain rationality to an audience in 20 minutes, you’re using system 2 thinking.
- In many ways, EA has been characterized by extreme scepticism and rejection of system 1 reasoning when it comes to doing good in the world. And there are good reasons for this. A lot of system 1 reasoning is the result of evolved mechanisms: our brains have evolved to do the kinds of fast, intuitive, processing that helped our ancestors reproductive fitness. But this means that our moral intuitions are often ill-served to the environment we live in today, and don’t necessarily track what’s most effective at doing good. A key example of this is how we find it easier to be intuitively motivated to help when we can see our efforts benefitting a single, identifiable victim. Studies have found repeatedly that people will donate more to a cause when they’re shown a picture of a specific individual they’ll be helping than when they’re given statistics about the number of people they could be helping – even when the total amount of good they’re doing in the latter case is clearly much, much more. So there’s good reason to distrust a lot of our intuitions about doing good.
- But we shouldn’t always distrust our intuitions. There are some areas where our intuitions are likely to be more useful, or where it’s more important we pay attention to them in decisions we’re making. I think choosing a career is one such domain. To be clear, I’m not saying that we should just trust our intuitions when choosing a career. But I also think it’s important we don’t ignore them – more so than when, say, trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a charity donation. This is partly because it’s important that our system 1 is on board with whatever career we choose – if it’s not, we’re unlikely to be motivated, and so will struggle to make much difference even in a potentially high-impact path. By contrast, the effectiveness of our donations isn’t affected by whether our system 1 believes they’re effective or not. System 1 is most likely to be reliable when we’ve had a lot of experience with good feedback. So our intuitions about whether we’ll work well with someone are probably worth listening to if we’ve worked with a lot of people in the past. But our intuitions about what kind of work we’ll enjoy might be more suspect if we’ve never had a proper job in our lives. What to do when system 1 and system 2 conflict? I struggled with this for a while when deciding whether to do a PhD or not (and then whether to quit a PhD or not) – my system 2 could come up with convincing arguments for doing the PhD, but my system 1 wasn’t quite on board.
- Intuition and reason often framed as opponents – but instead, we should think of them as collaborators. They’re both giving us different kinds of information, which we can use together to make better decisions. Doing this well is a difficult skill – I definitely haven’t mastered it yet. e.g. suppose – purely hypothetically – you’re trying to decide whether to quit your PhD or not. You might start with an intuition about what you should do Then use your s2 to lay out explicit arguments for and against that intuition Then look at each step of your argument and use your s1 to answer questions like : “what would the world look like if this were true?”, “how surprised would I be if this were false?” And then use this to refine your explicit arguments Repeat The general idea is that our intuitions aren’t to be blindly trusted, but they’re not to be ignored either. They’re giving us some information – we need to figure out what and whether that information is relevant to our decisions.
- There’s this nice example I’m stealing from Anna Salamon of someone who wanted to become a world-class comedian, and his plan for doing so was to sit and watch hours of Garfield cartoons. The point here is that we’re not always that great at coming up with the best plans for achieving our goals, the plans that are most likely to get us there – so even if we have great plans about how to improve the world, we might end up doing little good. It’s easy to end up just reacting to whatever is most pressing or interesting around us right now. So far we’ve been talking mostly about how to figure out the best ways to improve the world, how to come up with good plans. But it’s also crucial – perhaps more crucial – that for any well-chosen project, we’re able to execute on our plans effectively – to stay on track and actually get the work done.
- What kinds of things do we need to be able to do to effectively achieve our goals?
- I think that prioritising and developing these key rationality skills is actually a really central part of what distinguishes someone we’d call an effective altruist from someone who doesn’t, even if they’re otherwise very altruistic. Being cause-neutral, and open to changing plans. Questioning our intuitions about doing good, rather than just going with the thing that sounds like it might help. Thinking really explicitly and strategically about our plans for making a difference, and guarding against failure.
- I want to emphasise the extent to which being rational in the ways I’ve been talking about is actually really challenging. I think it’s important to be really aware of this, because it means we’ll be less harsh on ourselves and others when we inevitably sometimes fail to live up to these standards. We’re human, and our human brains aren’t designed to be able to answer complex questions about how to most effectively improve the world. We’ve evolved to think and behave in ways that are best for propagating our genes. There’s clearly a misalignment between this and the ways of thinking and behaving that are best for us as individuals – if all you cared about was propagating your genes, the men in this audience should really be spending most of their time at the sperm bank. We have a lot of psychological mechanisms that actively push against being rational – which actively hinder our attempts to figure out the truth, or to achieve our goals. We have a strong drive to make sense of the world, to avoid uncertainty. We prefer to believe desirable things than things that make us feel bad. These two things together make it really hard to be genuinely truth-seeking: challenging our beliefs is unpleasant both because it creates uncertainty, and because it can sometimes force us to accept unpleasant conclusions. We’re also cognitive misers – our brains want to avoid effortful processing whenever possible So challenging and dialoguing with our intutions, and thinking strategically about our goals and plans are effortful things we’re not naturally inclined to do. Just because it’s challenging, tough, doesn’t mean we can’t make progress – I think the existence of the EA community is itself already evidence that we can.