
Extreme altruism: caring for strangers at the expense of family - aschearer
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/22/extreme-altruism-should-you-care-for-strangers-as-much-as-family
======
TeMPOraL
> _What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if
> everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than
> anyone else’s?_

They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and
wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone
cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too.

Because seriously, a _lot_ of bad things stem from the fact that majority of
people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as
exploitable.

\--

I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar
depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid
thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think
I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people.

In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood
has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to
explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even _thousands_ of people to save one
relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't
even blink.

Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I
also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on
purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought
helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and
worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity,
not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we
all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We
_are_ family.

And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people
with dreams of brighter future. But somebody _has_ to do the job of fixing
things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This deserves to be less of an HN comment, and more of a manifesto (I mean
that as a compliment).

------
Mz
_In wartime, it is thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family
for the sake of a cause. In ordinary times, to ask a person to sacrifice his
life for a stranger seems outrageous, but in war it is commonplace._

In wartime, you go off to war in hopes of preventing it from coming to your
village, in hopes of protecting your family and your land and your people and
your little world. I think we are seeing articles like this because with 7
billion people on the planet and dead zones in the ocean and global media, we
cannot escape the awareness that the fabric of society is tattered and could
fray further and the only hope for protecting our little corner or the world
is to somehow find a way to make the entire world more stable. Yet, no one
knows how to make that happen.

People are scared, even wealthy people. And some of them react by trying to
make the entire world a better place. Global media makes it hard to have those
boundaries that distinguish clearly between whom we _should_ help or _must_
help and whom we have no obligation to help. Global media makes it hard to
figure out where to draw those lines. It has erased boundaries we did not know
we had, and now we don't know how this new reality works.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I have been thinking about the world as if we are in wartime* for some time
now. It kind of makes a lot of things that I see around me make a lot more
sense.

But I don't think it's true that no one knows how to make the entire world
more stable. I think the article explains it very well: You just start
treating people outside your family as if they were in your family.

(Family, meaning your circle of care, not your biological family.)

Many are already doing this, but since poverty is still here it apparently
isn't enough people yet. Pile on!

* The war, in this sense, is between those who want to add more individuals to their family and those who want to farm individuals as resources. And of course many of us play both roles, sometimes simultaneously.

------
jondubois
Poverty is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the
wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. If poor Africans keep
having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty -
If you give them the wrong kind of help, you will just allow them to survive
and have more children but it wont create any long term improvements.

I think the root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured
as well as they could be because there are too many of them. I think the one
child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years
- It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and
allowed them to get the best education possible.

~~~
Mz
The One Child policy was a draconian method. A humane solution is to improve
education and rights for _women_ globally. Educated, empowered women choose to
have fewer children, take better care of them, etc.

~~~
jondubois
I have heard some bad stories about that - But I think it's important to
decouple the policy itself from the way it was enforced.

The policy is very powerful in at least two ways: Firstly, it allows parents
to focus all their energy and resources on raising and educating a single
child. Then secondly, because Chinese people have fewer children, the assets
in China will be inherited by fewer people which means a higher net worth per
capita for the next generation.

~~~
maloney
It's a terrible policy. Have you looked into the gender imbalance in China?
Google "China gender imbalance"

This policy will hurt China for decades.

------
obrero
The old party line of the Communist Party USA was to not only not support
charity, but on some level to work against charity. As Europe and North
America shifted from farming and feudalism, a new group came into existence,
the "reserve army of labor" (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour)
), also known as the unemployed. As the people who control production want
this, trying to fight this charity and whatnot is considered a waste of time -
the people who control production want unemployment and poverty to be at a
certain level, and if the working class makes a massive effort to relieve it
one place, the controllers of production will just increase it elsewhere.

You can see this in its modern form by reading the Wall Street Journal,
Businessweek etc. in the year 2000. There were worries the unemployment rate
had gotten "too low" (<4%), i.e. it was a problem too many people looking for
a job could find one. Talks of inflation and so forth, basically the WSJ-speak
way which can easily be translated into Marxist terminology.

If the powers that be were openly seeking to increase unemployment in 2000,
what is the point of devoting a lot of effort to charity? The communists
thought charities contributed to this problem, by prolonging the agony. It
seems the problem is more structural.

------
pdonis
The problem I see with the title concept--caring for strangers at the expense
of family, or more generally caring for people you don't know, at the expense
of people you do know--is that in order to effectively help someone, you have
to know them. But no one person can know everyone in the world. Human beings
don't scale. The only effective way to get a lot of people helped is to have a
lot of people willing to help, each of whom gets to know a few people well
enough to understand what will help them, and then helps those few people.

But for some odd reason, we don't think of "charity" this way. We think that
helping people you know, so that your help is as effective as possible, is
somehow less "moral" than "helping" people you don't know at all, so that you
don't know what will help them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them_

It is not strictly true. Yes, helping someone effectively involves a person
who knows the recipient of aid enough to understand their needs. But that
doesn't have to be you. You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito
nets to save lives. You can work on _making_ those nets, and that is helping.
Or you can have a well-paying job and use surplus income to support people
distributing those nets, people who know those they're helping.

Also, a lot of low-hanging-fruits of world-fixing exist on social or global
level, not on the level of individuals. I don't need to know of or care about
any sick person in particular to help fight malaria effectively - in fact,
getting emotional is often counterproductive. What matters are aggregate
effects. Number of people who would die but are not going to because of the
aid is what matters. Average quality of life improving is what matters.

But I think that's orthogonal to the issue of family vs. strangers, and
conflating the two doesn't help with anything. I agree that we shouldn't treat
helping people we know as less moral just because we know them (and thus get
to experience their gratitude). But I also don't think that those close to me
are inherently more worth than those further. I may _care_ about my "close
circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense.
This comes naturally when you start extending your concept of 'family and
friends' to the entire world.

~~~
pdonis
_> You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives._

No, but if the criterion is effectiveness, you do have to know that
distributing mosquito nets is the most effective thing you can do to help
those people. How can you know that if you don't know them? What if it would
be more effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make
something they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to
teach them how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To
know whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people.

 _> What matters are aggregate effects._

I don't agree with this as a blanket statement. I agree that in certain cases,
aggregate effects may be the best measure to use; but to say they're what
matters in all cases is going way beyond our knowledge. Individual human
beings don't average; every single one of us is a unique individual. Reducing
7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers is ignoring so much
information that the claim that those aggregate effects are "what matters"
seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

 _> I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than
everyone else is just nonsense._

First, the reason we have an instinctual drive to help people close to us is
not that they are worth more than everyone else; it's that we know much more
about them, so we know much more about what they need.

Second, "worth" is not an intrinsic property of a person. It's a property of
relationships between people. My family is worth more _to me_ than someone I
don't know in Africa because I have a close relationship with them. But the
family of that person in Africa is worth more _to them_ than I am. Saying that
every single person must be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once
again, ignores so much information about the individual people and their
relationships that it seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

And just so it's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of
insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone, seems
to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good while
avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their needs, so
that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution; they want to be
able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that they're helping
in the most effective way they can. They don't want to face the fact that
helping people doesn't scale; one person can't effectively help millions of
other people. One person should be focused on helping a few people that they
know well; for millions of people to be helped, there need to be millions of
people willing to help and willing to do the work of each getting to know a
few people well in order to help them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _How can you know that if you don 't know them? What if it would be more
> effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make something
> they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to teach them
> how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To know
> whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people._

Or, you can trust the people who know the people. Or if you're willing to risk
it a little bit more, you can trust the people who know and trust the people
who know the people, and that gives you
[http://www.givewell.org/](http://www.givewell.org/).

The problem is, none of us has enough time and resources to research
everything, nor it would be the most effective use of our time. That's why, in
general, humans invented professional specialization.

> _I don 't agree with this as a blanket statement._

I didn't really intended it to be a blanket one. I was trying to point out
that among the possible effective ways of helping, there are a lot of easy
things that do _not_ require you to know the person you're helping, because
the projects are resource-starved, not care-starved.

> _Individual human beings don 't average; every single one of us is a unique
> individual. Reducing 7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers
> is ignoring so much information that the claim that those aggregate effects
> are "what matters" seems incredibly presumptuous to me._

Oh yes they do, they do average quite well. I don't mean that you should
always treat people as numbers, but there _are_ cases when you absolutely
must. You must because neither our heads nor our tools have enough computing
power to account for every single person's differences and idiosyncrasies. In
problems of scale, like saving lives effectively, you have to simplify, or you
won't be able to do anything at all. [[...]]

> _My family is worth more to me than someone I don 't know in Africa because
> I have a close relationship with them. But the family of that person in
> Africa is worth more to them than I am. Saying that every single person must
> be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once again, ignores so much
> information about the individual people and their relationships that it
> seems incredibly presumptuous to me._

I get this sentiment. My family is worth "more" to me than some random African
family in so far that I have stronger emotional ties with people I know
better. And true, ceteris paribus, I would be able to help people I know
personally much more. But I suppose I was talking about a different concept
under the word "worth". What I'm aiming at is that for me, it is immoral to
hurt an innocent stranger badly in some way, in order to save myself or
someone close to me from some lesser hurt. Or if I had a choice to make,
whether save 1000 strangers or 100 people I know, among which there are my
friends, then however badly this would hurt I still feel that I need to choose
1000 strangers. In this way, human lives are equivalent. (In practice one also
has to adjust for things like QALY, or alternative strategies, etc., but
that's just deeper structure of the same general point.)

> _And just so it 's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of
> insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone,
> seems to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good
> while avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their
> needs, so that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution;
> they want to be able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that
> they're helping in the most effective way they can._

I understand. But for me, insisting that we should care about only those we
know is also a cop-out, a refusal to live in a society. Moreover, for most of
the first-worlders, sending money _is_ the most effective way they can help
save lives. The actual help needs to be delivered by people personally
involved with the recipents, but _we have enough of them already_. Most of the
projects aren't constrained by personnel, they are constrained by resources.
The "easy way" is indeed the right way for most, and if you look at people
you'll notice that it's actually the hardest. People want to do everything
_but_ spend money. They'll happily volunteer, or participate in activism, or
educate, or do absolutely anything as long as it doesn't involve them paying
in hard cash. In so far as money is the unit of caring, they don't care.

It may be so that in the future, the biggest problems that need to be solved
will require everyone to invest themselves personally. But right now, the most
important problems involve producing and delivering life-saving medicine and
tools to people in need. What they need the most is _cold, hard cash_.
Mosquitoes don't care if you know the poor child they bit and infected. What
they respond to is mosquito nets, and those aren't made of care, they're paid
for by money.

~~~
pdonis
_> none of us has enough time and resources to research everything, nor it
would be the most effective use of our time. That's why, in general, humans
invented professional specialization._

So basically, you view charities as professional specialists in helping
people. My answer to that is, if they really were professional, they would not
be giving away things that could be traded for at a mutual profit. Instead,
they would be using their professional expertise and the concentrated wealth
given to them by donors to figure out how the people they want to help can
create wealth. Then those people could just trade some of the wealth they
create for other things they need.

 _> You must because neither our heads nor our tools have enough computing
power to account for every single person's differences and idiosyncrasies._

No single human's head does. But the combination of all of our heads, plus our
tools, working together, each of us dealing with a little piece of the
problem, does. Your conclusion that "you have to simplify" assumes that we
can't divide up the problem. But we can.

 _> or me, it is immoral to hurt an innocent stranger badly in some way, in
order to save myself or someone close to me from some lesser hurt._

This is similar to Singer's argument that, if I would save a drowning child,
even though it might ruin my clothes, I should also be willing to save someone
in Africa, even if I have to give up some luxuries. This argument came up in a
recent thread on effective altruism; rather than rehash my response here, I'll
just link to it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233978)

 _> for me, insisting that we should care about only those we know is also a
cop-out_

I'm not suggesting that we should only care about those we know. I'm
suggesting that the best way to care about people who need help in faraway
countries is to ask ourselves _why_ they need the help in the first place. We
seem to think that all they need is some stuff given to them. In the short
term, yes, that helps; people get better food, better homes, better clothes,
better educations, etc.

But we've been doing this for _decades_ now (if not longer), and yet _the
number of people who need all this help has not decreased_. The deal was
supposed to be that if we gave enough of these people enough resources, we
would stop the cycle of poverty; in time, these people would stop needing
help, because they would have become able to create their own wealth and trade
it, instead of having to have wealth given to them. That hasn't happened. And
that means that, by fixing the short term problem, by sending money, in the
long term, _we are not helping_.

------
epx
Eating an apple and feeling guilty... think about crazy people. I actually
knew a handful of persons like that (mostly women). They cared about anyone
except their own offspring, and the children are adults now, and struggling.
So sorry, I can't agree with that, so sorry.

------
mizzao
In economic terms, might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a
utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare?

I always thought some of my reasoning about the world was rather strange and
hard to comprehend. Now I see that there are people who are even more extreme
than me.

It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence
of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other
religions.

~~~
andrepd
You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want happiness and
thus working towards others' happiness is a worthy goal.

~~~
kybernetikos
The way you phrase it is as if one of those things follows from the other, but
it doesn't.

Would you say "You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want
ice cream, thus working towards giving them ice cream is a worthy goal"?

Just because other people want something doesn't mean that you value giving it
to them, without some other unstated belief.

~~~
kuschku
But it would make them happy? And if it costs me less than it brings them,
sure, I’d do it. That’s like the whole point why social nations in Europe can
exist. Because everyone is willing to help, sometimes even at their own cost.

~~~
MichaelGG
>And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it.

This can't be true (or did you just mean for ice cream, where the cost is
negligible?). Some people are going to have a terrible life, and for something
like 20% of your salary, you could dramatically improve it. I doubt there is a
way to measure the impact where giving, say, half of disposable income
directly to some poor folks isn't a _net_ positive.

~~~
kuschku
Well, that's one of the parts of social democracies, where you end up spending
around half of your salary on income taxes.

------
chipsy
Altruism defined in wealth terms is very narrow. It allows you to steal
billions and give away millions and come out with a net balance of "wealthy
philanthropist". The characters of this article are so carefully constructed
to evade this question that I have to assume malice.

I think many do-gooders struggle with the problem on different terms: whether
they can find a place where they both fit in the system and yet also do good
for the system. For example, a basic researcher in the sciences does nothing
at all now but might open the door to great achievements later. A politician
will be distrusted no matter what they do, but if they are adept they
gradually reorganize the landscape to enable policies progressive towards
their vision of a better society. There is enormous room for people to do work
that benefits them and nobody else, but that doesn't lead to a concrete
conclusion about all workers, because this problem is faced in every sector.

~~~
orborde
> The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this
> question that I have to assume malice.

Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are real people who are, so far as I know, pretty
much as the article describes:

[http://www.givinggladly.com/](http://www.givinggladly.com/)

[http://www.jefftk.com/](http://www.jefftk.com/)

------
ZeroGravitas
What I find interesting, is that Bill Gates (and others) are doing literally
this, giving large amounts of their wealth away to people other than their
kids, and yet it doesn't seem odd in the slightest to most people.

The obvious retort is that he has more than enough, even after his charity,
which then begs the question: how much is enough? In particular, does Bill
Gates only have "enough" relatively, or is there some absolute level of
enough.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think Bill Gates (and others) understands that leaving his children _too
much_ wealth will hurt them, preclude from growing up into a functioning
member of society that trusts their own strength.

There isn't an absolute level of "enough", but as a practical limit I'd
consider that enough is the amount that lets you live without worrying about
money for food and shelter being the major part of your day-to-day
decisionmaking process.

------
DyslexicAtheist
this is nothing new and modern psychology explains it well.

[http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-
yale-...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-
psychologists-discover-why-heroes-risk-their-lives-save-307049)

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-
fear/201001/a...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-
fear/201001/altruism-heroics-and-extreme-altrusim)

~~~
aschearer
The linked article isn't about "hero altruism" as described in your links.
It's about people who put the welfare of strangers above their own. For
example by contributing 50+% of their income to charities, forgoing children
in order to pursue career and donate more, and so forth.

------
Tycho
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness)

------
emmab
The switch to male pronouns partway through the article when it became a
theoretical person was a little jarring.

~~~
cjbprime
Yeah! That was weird.

------
a3voices
What about animal and plant life? Articles like these are very human-centric.
For example it might be best if everyone from South America was forced to
relocate to Central America, and make all of South America a nature reserve.

------
andyl
Just another campaign in the cultural marxist war on the family. Who could be
against altruism?

~~~
andrepd
Why is it "another campaign"? I only see the testimony of a person with an
extreme (and commendable) sense of morality.

------
javert
But there is no _reason_ to be altruistic. It's a total fantasy, just like any
religion is.

To believe otherwise is to live an unexamined life, and the unexamined life is
not worth living.

Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of
ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).

~~~
verbin217
Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough
to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs.
They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That
wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish.
I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a
pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state
you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or
invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may
not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always
be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only
conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross
limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such
that you can then optimize it.

~~~
javert
I can't really follow this. For one thing, I don't know what "person of enough
collective benefit" means (seems like you are missing a proposition or
something).

For another thing, it's not true that people are doomed to ignorance, and it
seems like your argument probably rests on that assumption.

I don't see for a second why you'd say people are doomed to ignorance. We use
sense perception to perceive stuff, and we develop a coherent picture of the
world (so we learn to reconcile optical illusions, for instance). And for all
intents and purposes, that is reality, and it's objective.

Maybe there's some other reality underneath that, but then, maybe there are
pink unicorns dancing on Alpha Centauri; it's totally arbitrary, and thus
irrelevant.

~~~
verbin217
Why: "While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be
comprehensively examined." I have chosen to believe that _I_ am more finite
than _life_. Further I believe that I can only examine a subset of each
passing moment. I currently believe that the invention of seamless Virtual
Reality is inevitable. Also that with it we will actually create a whole new
modality of ignorance. I also believe, as Nietzsche did, that society will
increasingly trend towards nihilism.

------
throwitup
These "saints" will destroy the world.

[http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_ta...](http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_taylor_sj.htm)

~~~
andrepd
You have a right to your opinion. Care to elaborate on why you think this way?
What makes you think you are above everyone else?

