5 Ways to Be a Better Utilitarian
on crime through the lens of neglectedness + frens and deadlifts + Netflix as evil incarnate
I am not a utilitarian.
Not in the classical sense of the term, at least. I just don’t take philosophy seriously enough. I do not face many ethical dilemmas, and utility functions seem un-intuitive and more trouble than they’re worth. The Repugnant Conclusion never made sense to me, nobody I know cares about the welfare of unborn people. Torture vs. dust specks felt equally ridiculous, distributing suffering among innumerable people to the point of near-zero harm per person is an easy decision to make1, considering that we ask people to go through more than just a dusty eye everyday.
However, I do believe that people’s welfare is an outcome worth enhancing. Call me a commie but better outcomes for everyone sounds pretty sweet. It might just be because my personal utility function maxes out really fast, and helping people is the best way to continue improving things, regardless of arguments to the contrary. Not that I’m particularly attached to the political characteristics of the idea. If free markets and GDP growth are what gets us a better world, I’ll gladly put on the neoliberal hat.
Even so, I don’t particularly care for maximising human happiness; not it the short run, at least. Encouraging it? Yes. Enabling it? Hell yeah. But I’m no hedonist. I’m more of a freedom and opportunities guy, with the occasional penchant for localism2. So utility paradoxes or unpleasant extrapolations are rarely something I can take seriously. In fact, “You’re allowed to ignore philosophy” is an essay that’s lain in my drafts for a while now. It has potential, but would take more work than I’m ready to put in right now.
On the other hand, writing a listicle (like this one) is easier, but has always felt a little icky. Sure, it’s conveniently browsable, and makes for an easy read. And I save hours3 that would normally be spent deciding how to order the ideas in an essay. But it seems like a sloppy format nonetheless, so the least I could do was make it amusing.
I.
Befriend the lonely.
I’m not going to pull out any charts to prove my point, because social science charts are dumb. But I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of selection effect in play at the top of the socialisation pyramid. The most friendly people have the most friendly friends, and the most popular people are part of networks of similarly popular people.
And at the bottom, there are a bunch of lonely folk that are virtually invisible. You don’t see them because, well, they were never the popular ones to begin with. But they exist nonetheless. Like social dark matter, they’re part of the social universe, but live lives of quiet, unnoticed isolation.
As for why you should befriend them, it’s a simple calculation to make. The fewer friends someone has, the more valuable each additional friend is to them. Econ 101: marginal utility, but for homies. In fact, the difference between zero and one good friend is high enough that absolute loneliness is probably infinitely worse than having even one companion. And utilitarians love low-hanging infinities.
Will this mean that your personal happiness takes a hit? Perhaps, lonely people are not the most fun folk to be around (that’s often why they’re lonely in the first place). You could be hanging out with your cooler friends instead, and you’d all be slightly happier in that scenario. But being the supercilious saintly soul that I am, I recommend completely disregarding personal utility from any calculations that you do. Personal negative utility isn’t real if you choose to ignore it, y’know?
The more pleasant (and indeed, most common) outcome is that they are, in fact, pretty cool people themselves. Most people are capable of infinite depth, given a place to grow. Only a narcissist would believe otherwise. A utilitarian would embrace the possibility for upside.
P.S: I’ve realised that, despite me setting this list up to be (mostly) a joke, some people might think I’m being completely serious here. So in anticipation or the inevitable “saviour complex” and “you can’t fix them” rebukes, I should confirm that I….actually mean it. There’s a bunch of nuance and involved, but I stand by the main idea.
You’re not supposed to fix them, just walk with them for a bit.
II.
Do crime.
Yes, most crime is bad. We made those laws to prevent just the sort of negative outcomes that any good utility maximiser would hate. But many of them are often constitutional dinosaurs, kept alive just because they’re hard to get rid of.
Effective altruists have a pretty simple framework used to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular course of action, called the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework (ITN for short). Importance (how much positive impact will this have?) and tractability (what is the possibility of this working?) are just an application of the expected value formula (possibility of success x reward) to altruistic interventions. It’s the third factor, neglectedness, that really puts the “effective” in EA.
It considers how much money and effort is already going into a particular cause. Ceteris paribus, areas that are already receiving a bunch of attention and resources will see less marginal improvement from additional donations than the ones that are comparatively unpopular. In a sentence: when looking for ways to do good, pick the things that no one else is doing.
Now, consider a set of things you can do to make the world a better place. Then split that set of actions into two subsets based on whether they are currently legal acts, or if they involve breaking the law. Some (okay, most) of the actions will be completely legal, maybe even encouraged by a bunch of social and governmental bodies. These will also be really effective, like buying mosquito nets and direct cash transfers, or funding potentially world-changing technology.
But some of them will be downright illegal. Stuff that would undoubtedly make the world a better place, but get you prosecuted, fined, maybe even jailed, if you were caught. Stuff that nobody with anything to lose would ever seriously consider doing.
And you can probably have a much greater impact if you did exactly those things. Why? Because neglectedness. Many really hard-working, smart and concerned people are out there working on building scalable, effective solutions that are easily fundable. It’s the ethos of EA (and ideally, any altruistic organisation) to translate money into the greatest good possible, but it’s kinda difficult to ask people for money to, y’know, commit crimes.
But that’s exactly what you should be doing. Because everyone else is of doing everything that’s legally permissible, there’s a bunch of low-hanging fruit for anyone brave enough to disregard the fences.
Maybe it looks like Sci-hub (all hail Elbakyan!) or Wikileaks. Maybe it’s building shelters for the homeless without permission. Maybe it involves rug pulling thousands of crypto users just to fund a school in Africa. Okay, that hasn’t happened yet, but you could be the first! Either way, the market for illicit altruism4 is immensely under-explored.
If orange jumpsuits aren’t your thing, you can still do things that are aren’t strictly illegal in the legislative sense of the word, but break a few (arguably more pernicious) social laws. Like taking out loans (or over-leveraged options trading) to fund altruists today, being an effective politician, marrying outside your social class/caste, or homeschooling your kids. There’s probably weirder rules worth breaking, and maybe you’ll be the one to spot them.
III.
Start a company.
If you buy the “number go up” case for human flourishing, it’s pretty obvious that the one of the best things you can do is go create your own value-creating (and hopefully profitable) business venture that adds a positive bump to the global gross domestic product.
There are many ways in which this is a great utilitarian choice to make. For one, you avoid creating negative utility by denying someone else a job. Doing your bit to grow the pie and rejecting the dominance of zero-sum games is already an excellent utilitarian action.
Of course, the ideal outcome is that you make a lot of money. Maybe even become a billionaire, giving you heretofore undreamt of power and influence over the course of history, and the millions of lives that are swept up in it. But even just the money itself would be a big deal, (more is better when you have a plan to spend it well.
If you’re the the kind of person who cares very much about lifting people out of poverty, even a small-ish business is probably a great way to do it. The current best way of doing that, direct cash transfers, is a great idea in principle, but there’s some evidence that they don’t make much of a difference in the long-run. The argument being that any improvements in the economy are “demand-led (consumption spending) rather than investment-led (productivity spending).
But if you run your own company, there’s nobody stopping you from hiring people in countries where people most need the jobs. Infusing entire communities with earned wealth and, more importantly, connections they’d otherwise never have access to. And those are only the first-order effects, businesses usually capture just a fraction of the value they create.
"Only a minuscule fraction--about 2.2%--of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers." - William D. Nordhaus, via @pmarca
There’s a definite element of neglectedness here too. Only a small percentage of people can afford to quit their jobs, which makes it all the more important that more of them should do so. At best, you deploy billionaire levels of capital into doing good better. At worst, you distribute some VC money to the working class. Win-win, if you ask me,
IV.
Buy someone a gym membership.
I believe that the benefits to exercise remain hugely underrated5. I don’t just mean as a bandaid for the obesity crisis or as a way to counter the dysfunction caused by modern lifestyles. There’s the hormonal benefits and psycho-social upside, the improved sleep and robust joints. The ability to actively resist entropy and acquire greater functional prowess. In more than one way, it’s the cheapest anti-aging measure we have. Seriously, go pick up a heavy thing.
But this stuff goes far beyond the gym and a larger deadlift. I believe that most people also underestimate the effect of making regular progress on a clearly defined goal, especially when you’ve got nothing else going for you. Maybe it’s hard to believe how big a deal it is if you haven’t watched it happen. But from what I’ve seen, it’s huge. Others agree, and express it better than I could.
“But surely”, you say, “a gym membership isn’t particularly expensive, people can do this for themselves.” Why on earth would they need someone else to buy them something that is a non-essential, a mere nice-to-have?
And just like that, dear reader, you’ve given me the perfect opening to insert my own sob story. You can’t really blame me for doing it, it’s a really good one, as far as those stories go. I will resist the urge to go into agonising detail, but it involves me throwing rocks around and doing pull-ups on a tree. You know, classic inspiring biography stuff. All because I couldn’t pay for access to the local gymnasium.
It was not impossible, just hard to justify. There’s a dozen different ways to use a hundred dollars, and most of them sound less selfish than “let me go lift heavy things four times a week”. And there really are many such cases. Like most things, the marginal utility of money is incredibly high just above the zero mark, and far too many good things lie just beyond it.
Granted, this isn’t the most efficient way to spend your money, especially if you’re strictly thinking in WALYs. There will always be a cause that promises more effectiveness, but this is not about guaranteed return. This is about small bets that can have unpredictably large impacts (including incredible second-order effects), or go nowhere. But because they’re so cheap, they’re always worth making.
V.
Destroy Netflix.
Streaming is an incredible industry, and Netflix is it’s godfather. 222 million people currently pay for the service, and millions more pirate/borrow/share its content. Every week, users burn a collective total of a billion hours on the app. It is, quite simply, the largest waste of human potential since string theory.
I might even be able to argue that the incredibly high quality of visual content in general is as bad as nicotine. Were we supposed to be overdosing on narratives this gripping? Watching characters this charismatic? Were the actors ever meant to be this hot?! These are unnatural forces we’re dealing with, you can’t blame the consumers for losing control.
The upshot being that the average user spends 3 hours a day on the platform. How many of those hours could be spent with family or friends, building communities that are the bed-rock of a successful civilisation? How many authors kept from their writing? How many poets distracted from their angst? How much utility are we missing out on just because we’ve optimised the entertainment networks past the point of reasonableness?
But you can fix it. All it takes is a few well-placed explosives at the heart of Netflix HQ. Hit the servers, take out the engineering leads, and a corporation comes crashing down.
People will be free again. TV companies will regain power, allowing them to employ more newscasters. Likewise for theatres and their staff. The Oscars will take movies seriously again. David Lynch will have the last laugh. Families will unite. Grass will be touched.
Creative destruction at its finest. Netflix must go.
While diverse, this list is by no means an exhaustive one. There’s other fun stuff you could be doing to utility-max, like writing inspiring science fiction or banning the wasteful production of new art. Or building a crack team of global assassins, ready to take down threats to human survival and freedom. The weirder the better, what we need are ideas that have never been considered before. Don’t worry too much about rigour, for utility is in the eye of the beholder.
Don’t try to get fancy with second-order effect calculations either, we’re already far enough into ridiculous land.
Which makes me not very EA. I’m glad the drowning child thing gets people to donate more and better, but as far as though experiments go, it isn’t the best.
So if you see a listicle, you can safely assume that I’m having a really busy week
Illicit Altruism, now there’s a meme I could get behind.
You might disagree, but L + ratio + go do a push-up.
I think #2 is really interesting. What do you do about bad, incompetent, or corrupt but not evil laws? The rule of law obviously has benefits for society, but many laws are suboptimal. There would probably be harmful nth order effects if people just went around ignoring laws they didn’t like despite how noble their intentions were.
I’m not sure how to balance this with for example, Uber/ridesharing — which has made the world a better place. But Uber couldn’t just ask the taxi cab medallion owners (and their local politician buddies) if they could ruin their racket. Now that Uber exists and is working, the coalition of Uber + drivers + riders incentivizes politicians to keep it legal. We could only get to this point through the illegal actions of Uber.
I think one answer is Ben Thompson of Stratechery’s Hero Paradox. In the Chinese movie Hero, a man is hired to assassinate an emperor during the Warring States period. But when he realizes that the emperor shares his ideals of a unified and peaceful China, he decides to turn himself and his collaborators in. For this, he is a hero for serving the common good, but he is still executed for his crime of trying to kill the emperor. And thus, he is buried a hero.