
Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them - robertwiblin
https://80000hours.org/articles/accidental-harm/
======
chrisseaton
This is very interesting!

But I've seen a lot of push back against this kind of thinking in some
political groups. For example saying that you should follow norms of niceness
when promoting a cause - people call that tone policing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing)

You could say you should criticise the people who are tone policing rather
than the people who are worked up about a cause that personally effects them
so aren't managing to be very polite, but the problem is not the people who
try to tone police you, it's the people who don't like your tone and don't
criticise you for it - they silently just ignore your cause or vote against
it.

~~~
hueving
People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an
argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans
engage in conversation.

If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking
moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously
and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any
responses I care to make.

How many pro-choice people do you think are persuaded by the people screaming
"murderer" outside of Planned Parenthood?

People have a limited amount of time to deal with all of the issues in the
world. If you can't explain your argument in a calm, rational manner, people
who are on the fence will shut you out.

See what Howard Dean's screaming did to his campaign.

~~~
YorkshireSeason

       How many pro-choice people do 
       you think are persuaded by
    

Symmetrically, how many pro-life people do you think are persuaded by the
people screaming "woman-hater/sexist/misogynist" outside of Planned
Parenthood?

    
    
       If you can't explain your 
       argument in a calm, rational 
       manner,
    

You overestimate the efficacy of explaining in a calm, rational manner. As a
university teacher with > 10 years experience, I can tell you with extreme,
and reliably reproducible experience, that explaining in a calm, rational
manner is also typically overrated. Year in, year out, I tell my students to
test their coureswork before submission to ensure it compiles, year in, year
out, I tell my students not to cheat etc etc ... and year in, year out, a
_large_ number of students ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational
advice.

What screaming (or the university equivalent: bad grades) achieves is not so
much conviction, but communicating _urgency_. How to react to urgency a
different matter.

A second social function of screaming (re-)producing simple us/them group
identities.

~~~
YinglingLight
"An interesting article in The Atlantic talks about studies showing that
liberals think in terms of _fairness_ while conservatives think in terms of
_morality_. So if you want to persuade someone on the other team, you need to
speak in their language. We almost never do that. That’s why you rarely see
people change their opinions...

...If your aim is to persuade, you have to speak the language of the other.
Talking about fairness to a conservative, or morality to a liberal, fails at
the starting gate. The other side just can’t hear what you are saying."

[http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/02/15/how-to-persuade-the-
other...](http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/02/15/how-to-persuade-the-other-party/)

~~~
leetcrew
> liberals think in terms of fairness while conservatives think in terms of
> morality

i don't think this is a very accurate characterization. for one thing,
fairness itself is a moral value. however, i do think liberals and
conservatives tend to have different moral systems. in broad strokes, liberals
tend to have more of a utilitarian perspective, while conservatives tend to be
more deontological.

~~~
jerf
Jonathon Haidt has actually done some great scientific work on the real
differences between liberals and conservatives. This is a shortish version:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc)
There's also some more detailed and longer versions if you poke around on
YouTube a bit, plus a book you can buy if you're really interested.

I don't think your characterization of either side is particularly accurate.
Neither side is utilitarian, and both sides are plenty deontological, just
with different rule sets. Both sides are rationalizing deeply-held instinctual
beliefs, or the lack thereof.

------
lbriner
The bit I struggled with is that in many fields, either the majority are
wrong/don't have the solution (Argumentum ad populum) or otherwise listening
to expertise/experience can either give you too much input or, again, implies
that there is more chance that experience will give you a better solution to a
problem. In their example, if Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had asked his more
experienced peers about approaching the problem of infections, they would have
told him he was barking up the wrong tree with hand washing.

The really difficult part of any venture is knowing _how_ to distinguish wise
advice from just another opinion.

Many great solutions come from people with "crazy" thinking and I would expect
they could have caused great damage (or perhaps have - jet engines) but
otherwise we would be moving very slowly as a planet?

~~~
taeric
I find the claim that the majority are wrong in fields tough to believe. Not
impossible, mind. Just tough.

I would think it matters on what is "right." Are they wrong in the way that
Newton was wrong? Still far more correct that anyone else? (Obviously, not to
that degree.)

~~~
lbriner
The majority are not wrong by definition but the fallacy is that you cannot
assume that the majority are right.

As far as knowledge is concerned, was Newton right for a period until we
learned about quantum mechanics or was he always wrong? Was he always right
but only within limits that he couldn't know in advance?

Apologies for the philosophy but this is the real complexity of an article
about avoiding harm by doing various "good practice" stuff!

~~~
taeric
I don't know if I would agree that the majority can't be wrong by definition.
I just find it an odd and strong claim. I suspect I misunderstand the point.

What is the claim "the majority are wrong/don't have the solution" meant to
support? If I just emphasized on the "wrong" instead of "don't have the
solution", apologies.

For Newton, he was always wrong based on his equations abilities to predict
everything. He was just closer than many before that point such that it was
undetectable for a long time.

Which is my point in asking. If folks are correct in their predictive and
application based metrics, it is somewhat silly to belabor them being "wrong"
in some absolute sense.

~~~
taeric
Not sure anyone is still following here. For a fun example of an entire field
being wrong, look into the history of the causes of ulcers.

------
mcguire
There are a couple of other issues that could be added to this list.

Credit

One of the sayings that I know to be (mostly) absolutely true is, "there is no
limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." I
have a (much more successful, and respected) friend to whom it is something of
a mantra.

On the other side, seeking credit has a lot of pitfalls. The obvious one is
taking credit for someone else's work; that's just bad and leads to bad
results. But further, by aggressively taking credit for things you've done,
you can actively force other people out of the field you're working on. Has
anyone been bitten by the off-handed, "yeah, we took a look that several years
ago" comment?

Further, becoming the face of some project means that you with all of your
warts hanging out come to represent the project and its goals. Take care.

Goals

Choose the goals of your project carefully. For one thing, they can take on a
life of their own. On one hand, our modern financial services system has the
excellent goal of allocating resources where they can do the most good, but
they have become so complex as to be a maze with great freakin' bear traps all
over the place.

Then there's opportunity cost. Some goals are laudable, but take on too much
emphasis at the expense of other, more reachable, more effective goals. Take
the "reducing extinction risk" mentioned (repeatedly) in the article. Sure,
somebody should probably worry a bit about the risk of human extinction,
but...

" _Many experts who study these issues estimate that the total chance of human
extinction in the next century is between 1 and 20%._

" _For instance, an informal poll in 2008 at a conference on catastrophic
risks found they believe it’s pretty likely we’ll face a catastrophe that
kills over a billion people, and estimate a 19% chance of extinction before
2100._ "

The risks they came up with are, molecular nanotech weapons, nanotech
accidents, superintelligent AI, wars, nuclear wars, nuclear terrorism,
engineered pandemics, and natural pandemics. (I'm surprised; global warming
didn't make the list in 2008.)

Here's the dealy-o, though: what _actually_ is the risk of human extinction
before 2100? 19%? (1 in 5, really?) Their conservative 3%?

"Nanotech" currently is at most an OSHA problem. (Don't breathe in the
microparticles!) The risk of "grey goo" is likely pretty damn low, given the
history of the last 30 years of nanotechnology. (First thought on hearing of
the possibility of nano-machines? "Ya mean, like proteins?")

Conventional wars don't actually kill that many people; they tend to disperse
too easily. I'm even given to understand that the effect of major wars is an
increase in the rate of population growth. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand,
are very, very bad...for cities. But they're unlikely to do anything
noticeable to people in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, the Australian
outback, or Mongolia.

Pandemics have been a problem before, they'll be a problem again, but I'll let
somebody else describe the problems with an infectious agent capable of
killing _all_ of its hosts. Likewise, climate changes have been problems
before, and have led to bad outcomes. But killing everyone isn't ever been on
the table. And for AI, I'm more concerned with the AI that runs your car off
the road because it's not actually able to perceive the lane markers.

Individually, each of those is bad. They'll possibly kill billions of people
and possibly lead to the collapse of civilizations---some of them have done so
before. But complete extinction is incredibly unlikely and "ending all life on
Earth" is just silly.

But human extinction is an issue that will get attention. It'll sell
newspapers. And more than some minimal level of resources spent on it means
less resources for other issues. Like, say, identifying and addressing actual
problems with nanomaterials or wars or infectious agents.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
I agree, humans are probably the single hardest among multicellular life to
entirely wipe out. Not because we're hardier than cockroaches, or hibernate
when it's cold.

There's just so many of us, and every last one of us would be hellbent on
survival. At this point in our technology and understanding, I bet there could
be survivors of extinction level events equaling the K-T extinction that wiped
out the dinosaurs.

People already have bomb shelters that can last them months; feeding people
does not require sunlight, only dirt, water, lamps and electricity. Nuclear
winter can't stop the flow of electricity, survivors of any event can jerry-
rig surviving wind turbines, nuclear power, geothermal, or hydro to create
life sustaining electricity.

Would the survivors be smart enough to accomplish such feats? Of course,
assuming they could read. The internet may collapse but the abundance of
printed material, even doomsday vaults containing encyclopedias can provide
for entertainment and education in long post-apocalyptic nights.

These things exist: [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/amazing-doomsday-
bunkers-of...](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/amazing-doomsday-bunkers-of-
the-super-rich/)

When people fret and worry about the fate of the human race.

I'm not worried. People will adapt and figure it out like they always have.
The only thing people need to worry about is their own survival in harsh
times.

~~~
StavrosK
> survivors of any event can jerry-rig surviving wind turbines, nuclear power,
> geothermal, or hydro

Excepting nuclear, where do you think the energy for those things comes from?

------
kineticdial
I feel weirdly (perhaps irrationally) about the effective altruism people
including 80,000 hours. I just can't shake the cult-y vibes they give off. Am
I alone in this?

~~~
tomp
No... I, for one, would really like to know what the actual (measurable,
practical) _effect_ of effective altruism is. I definitely hope that it's not
just like, we do _nothing_ but more _effectively_.

I likewise question the efficacy of efforts like eradicating malaria. I can't
help but feel all that money would be better spent on technology (not
startups, but like fusion and other energy research, nanotech, space industry
etc), even if for-profit. Like, no mater how many Africans you can save from
malaria, they will keep dying or living shitty lives because of poverty,
famine, wars... Only technology can _actually_ change the world (and politics,
but we can't really seem to be able to do much about _that_...).

~~~
blackflame7000
Ultimately this can all be boiled down to the idea if working smarter not
harder. Unfortunately mankinds definition of smart varies as as wildly as
their actual intelligence

~~~
tomp
> working smarter not harder

Not even. I think it's more about, _what to work towards_ \- i.e. the goal. I
mean, feeding hungry people is definitely a worthwhile goal, but... you have
to do it again, tomorrow. It's not a scalable solution.

~~~
arandr0x
What if feeding hungry people today is what it takes for them to feed
themselves tomorrow? Africa currently has millions of entrepreneurs, and half
the rare earth minerals in your computer's chips and a plurality of the beans
for the daily cup of Starbucks you need to do your vastly more lucrative job
with it come from there. Not only is the people of Africa not dying (or dying
less fast) something that can pay dividends in the future, you directly
benefit from it. (Most of the aid we send to Africa is not even remotely
altruism, effective or not, although most of it is also not very effective.)

I think the goals of NGOs working in that space are generally in the right
place. It's true that they seldom do anything scalable in the sense of
transformational research or marked improvement in processes, but the
structure (of funding) somewhat prevents them to. I think the most scalable
thing we can do for poor countries right now is make information, education
and food and essential medication as available and as cheap as possible for as
much of their population as possible, and let these children's children save
themselves.

------
Johnny555
_Imagine a first year medical student who comes across a seriously injured
pedestrian on a busy street, announces that they know first aid, and provides
care on their own...but imagine that a passerby who was about to call an
ambulance refrained because the student showed up and took charge_

Then he's not following his first aid training. One of the first things they
taught in my first aid class is to send someone for help first -- find someone
in the crowd and tell them specifically to call 911. Don't just tell the crowd
in general to call for help or everyone may assume someone else is doing it,
direct someone in particular to call.

~~~
ngokevin
That reinforces the article though.

"You take on a challenging project and make a mistake through lack of
experience or poor judgment"

The student thought they were doing good, but they did not ask someone to call
for help due to lack of experience / poor judgement, worsening the situation
potentially.

------
superplussed
There is a German word for this: verschlimmbessern. This roughly translates in
English to "imworsenprove". :)

~~~
onemoresoop
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern)

------
blackflame7000
Because the desire to do a good deed causes people to discount the
ramifications of detrimental effects by rationalizing with the “it was for the
best” adage

~~~
wccrawford
The thing I hate most is the "We had to do something" statement, justifying
the horrible outcomes they created in a vain attempt to do a little good.

No, you didn't _have_ to do anything. Doing nothing is actually sometimes
better than doing something stupid.

------
ThomPete
A good example of that is Germany.

They removed Nuclear from their energy sources and now need to use coal
instead to compensate.

But it gets better than that.

Denmark focused primarily on wind energy with the consequence that this
summers heatwave resulted in them having to get their energy from Germany who
now without Nuclear had to use even more coal.

~~~
kardos
> They removed Nuclear from their energy sources

Nope, it's not 2022 yet [1].

> and now need to use coal instead to compensate.

Looks to me that wind/solar is compensating for the gradual decline in
nuclear, and also for the bulk of increasing demand [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closures_and_phase-
out)

[2] [https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
energy-c...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-
consumption-and-power-mix-charts)

~~~
ThomPete
It's also coal.

------
motohagiography
The article seems written in a "gentle reminder," tone that implies a basic
attribution error about the sort of people they are reminding. As a corollary
to a famous adage, I would suggest that it is best not to attribute to
ignorance what can be explained by incentives.

------
hinkley
One that has gotten me and some of my cohort is the idea that if you have a
below average income you have to live in an ugly run down neighborhood.

But a few too many beautification projects and property taxes start to go up.
Now you’re pricing people out of their neighborhood. With renters they don’t
even get the benefit of selling their house.

Most of the solutions I can think of could be easily gamed by speculators,
which makes me wonder if the others just have a flaw I don’t see.

~~~
zanny
This only happens in unique context, though. If you were in a theoretical
environment where there wasn't any demand for beautified neighborhoods the
value of the housing wouldn't rise if you beautified it.

The circumstance though isn't unique and is applicable in a lot of different
markets. Investing in almost _anything_ makes it more valuable. Be that
housing, a country, a company, a farm or a person. That is why education is
such a potent force multiplier.

Housing though has an elephant in the room being how bad the situation has
gotten. Its the same class of problem as healthcare because both aren't luxury
optional goods. People need housing, and that housing need requires parameters
that are in conflict with one another. The worst part is that because
sustainability of housing trumps all other aspects of it that means you can
easily find yourself in an unsafe, insecure environment out of necessity.
Beautification makes the living more enjoyable and prosperous but is trumped
by the cost benefit analysis of living there. When people are already
sacrificing personal safety for job security they quickly get pushed out if
you make the housing more valuable for any reason _but_ enhanced job security.

------
FrankyHollywood
This is an old problem :)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

------
philipodonnell
> Everyone understands that one risk of failure is that it tarnishes your
> reputation. But, unfortunately, people will sometimes decide that your
> mistakes reflect on your field as a whole. This means that messing up can
> also set back other people in your field.

I find this to be the case with non-profits and others attempting to make big
pushes to promote local entrepreneurship. I have objected to several attempts
based on the organizers focusing on the wants of donors (not the
entrepreneurs), lacking any marketing plan beyond "if you build it they will
come" and not having long-term plans for sustainability. Every failed attempt
sets back the next one by 2-3 years but no one wants to listen to a naysayer.

------
xtacy
Interesting article, but I would have loved it if they touched upon how to
effectively follow these principles in a world where there's competition. For
instance, getting feedback, thoroughly vetting ideas, etc., is a good
practice. But if you are competing against those who exploit the limited
attention of investors/peers to quickly get ahead (in the short term), they
_could_ get an enormous first-mover advantage. How does one deal with that?

~~~
kerbalspacepro
The guide they're describing is for playing a pro-social game where everybody
is trying to score points for the common good (i.e to save/better lives). In a
competitive environment that is zero-sum in the short term has different
rules.

------
yellowapple
"Imagine a first year medical student who comes across a seriously injured
pedestrian on a busy street, announces that they know first aid, and provides
care on their own. They’ll look as though they’re helping. But imagine that a
passerby who was about to call an ambulance refrained because the student
showed up and took charge. In that case, the counterfactual may actually have
been better medical care at the hands of an experienced doctor, making their
apparent help an illusion."

I think this is a poor analogy. Or maybe it's an excellent analogy for the
dilemma the article glosses over: would the "right" answer be for the medical
student to _not_ help someone very obviously in need? Ambulances don't
materialize instantaneously out of thin air, nor do they magically teleport
themselves (and the patient inside) to a hospital. That hospital might be
overcrowded, delaying treatment further.

Or the med student could actually try to help (or at least triage) and at the
same time call an ambulance.

~~~
Nasrudith
It is a very poor analogy given that step two of first aid after evaluating
that one of the first steps is to call emergency services yourself or direct
someone specifically to call (targetting bypasses diffusion of
responsibility).

------
drchiu
I think a lot of this boils down to having the right amount of introspection
and insight on the part of the individual.

~~~
tw1010
True introspection turns into a math puzzle when you want to go really deep.
(It requires constant monitoring and logging of your own mind, and requires an
insane amount of tests against self deception if you want to do it properly.
Both of which are constrained by memory and compute power, which will likely
not be sufficient if for no other reason than that you need to allocate some
of it to other priorities.) I think it's a sign of wisdom to admit that it's
too big of a challenge for an individual to rely on as a substitute for
resources like this.

------
pbhjpbhj
Well I read a bit, then thought "things like being verbose, generic, and over-
guarded in offering advice and so wasting lots of readers time without making
an impact on their behaviour"?

If they'd given one direct piece of easily actionable advice the actual impact
might have been far larger ...

"So what?" \- a Church sermon I heard well over decade ago, the speaker said
basically if there's nothing that listeners will remember and act on then your
sermon is moot. You can give a tonne of great advice, but sometimes less is
more impactful.

Perhaps they do that to. The title gave me high hopes.

~~~
newsbinator
I get replies from Enterprise support reps of this sort. They vaguely address
my question without commiting to an answer or solution.

That way the onus is on me to guess what might work for my case, and meanwhile
they can mark the issue resolved.

~~~
fjsolwmv
That's terrible. A support agent should never mark an issue resolved until the
client has said the issue is resolved or been unresponsive to followip
communication for some time.

~~~
neffy
Unfortunately in practice, the lowly paid support agent is being bean counted
on the number of outstanding tickets they have, and being told to periodically
fix that problem.

"You get what you measure."

------
makach
the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

------
techscruggs
The medical field has a term for this: iatrogenic.

------
jackconnor
The moral seems to be "Don't do anything, because there are always too many
risks, many of which aren't obvious." If we followed this, nothing would ever
get invented or done, and we'd still be hunter gatherers, so I'm not really
feeling it.

------
bjt2n3904
Naturally a pessimist on these issues. Listening to graduation speeches on how
we're gonna change the world, as if it were this one weird tip discovered by a
student. (Philosophers hate him!)

Bleh. You'll change the world alright. Likely, not for the better.

------
rapfaria
That is not a good favicon, I was skimming for a list of '8 ways people trying
to do good'.

------
amelius
> Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid
> them

Like Facebook engineers?

------
ElBarto
To do good requires understanding the issue at hand and devising a measurable
plan for improvement.

This is not what many, if not most people do, or want to do, when they "try to
do good". They simply want to do something based on what _they_ see as 'good'.

------
SOMMS
Socialism. /thread

------
apathy
You’ll never get anything done if you give in to this sort of analysis
paralysis.

~~~
mcguire
Sometimes getting nothing done is the best outcome.

~~~
apathy
Rare, for the individual. Common, for congress

------
anjc
Thanks. You use the word 'field' 54 times and 'risk' 33 times in the article
but never explain what you mean by them. I found this confusing. E.g. at one
point you say that 'reducing extinction risk' is a field, but then later say
that not every risk is pressing in every field. Is 'reducing extinction risk'
both a field and a risk?

~~~
ardillaroja
field: A particular field is a particular subject of study or type of
activity.

So the authors are using 'field' to mean area of study which has standard
usage in English I think so probably didn't need to be explained further.

When the authors wrote: "Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is
important if we’re going to be serious about having an impact in important but
‘fragile’ fields like reducing extinction risk."

They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And
the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.

~~~
anjc
Thanks

> They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study.
> And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.

Then this is an unfortunately named field to introduce first, given that the
article is about 'risks' which are not 'fields'

~~~
FabHK
'risk X' is a risk, and 'reducing risk X' is a field.

There is the (meta-)risk that you harm a field (the 'harming field Y' risk).

They're studying that (meta-)risk here, in an attempt to reduce it. The
article is thus squarely in the 'reducing risk Z (of harming field Y (of
reducing risk X)))' field.

Your misunderstanding of it poses certain risks, that this comment attempts to
reduce, with a concomitant risk of failure, but that gets a bit complicated.

~~~
anjc
Ha :)

