Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the Ants

Isaac Asimov in The Naked Sun, one of his many robot-mystery books, wrote that the minds of his positronic-brained robots (unlike our forever-dumb switch-brained computers) were “Logical but not reasonable.” That trope, as you well know, was then recycled endlessly in sci-fi.

Take Mr Spock, who was not only supremely logical, but who was always trotting around spouting probabilities for complex events, which numbers were accepted with somber seriousness by Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Hey, they were numbers, and found via complex calculation, which made them Science. Therefore they had to be right, right?

Wrong. That conclusion is logical but not reasonable.

Bear with me, because although the point I’m about to make, and have made endless times during the Class, seems dull and dry, and is dull and dry, it has profound consequences, which we’ll see below.

What is logic? Logic is the study of the relations between propositions. That’s it. That is all logic is, and nothing more. Relations between propositions, mark you, and not the origins of propositions. Logic gives the relation, and reason (hence reasonable) gives the propositions. I cannot emphasize these facts too strongly.

Briefly, probability is also logic. Thus all probability judgements are statements about relations between propositions, and nothing more. Any mindless computer can be programmed to churn out relations between propositions, but none of them can be reasonable about those propositions.

Which makes what Spock was doing logical but not reasonable, because it is not the logic or probability, but the propositions themselves that are of paramount importance in making any decision, especially life-or-death ones, like whether to wipe out Klingons in orbit around Uranus.

We wanted to know what evidence Spock based his calculations on, not the numbers. But we never learned. Whose lives was he valuing more? Klingons or man? What about the costs of damages? These questions are not logical. But they, and not logic, make all difference in deciding whether to open fire.

Effective Altruists

Which beings us to the Effective Altruists, an offshoot or subset (and a large one) of the Rationalists. A better term for either group, given what we have just learned, would be Logicalists. These folks, many of whom are ginning the latest AI panic (see this), pride themselves on their logical rational thinking, and have elevated prowess in these feats to the level of religion.

Effective altrusits are logical but not reasonable, because they have either forgotten, and more likely never learned, those dull and dry facts I reminded us of above. Which deficit causes them to wild flights of logical fantasy, because they assume—unthinkingly—that their beginning propositions, also called premises, are the one and only natural premises to use in any argument.

As proof of this, I bring you the eminently logical, but not reasonable, article Insects Matter More Than People in the Aggregate. (As of this writing, that piece has almost 2 million views, which is why I’m bringing it to you. This article in rebutal will get maybe two thousand. Ah, well.)

The author, Bentham’s Bulldog (apt name), bills himself as an Effective Altruist. And it seems he is indeed a typical member of the breed.

His logical argument, in brief, is that insects suffer pain, pain (a tacit premise of his) is bad, and because insects vastly outnumber humans, their lives in aggregate morally outweigh the life of men. A flavor of his writing:

Here’s an argument for an infinite number of insects mattering more than a single human.

We evolved from creatures very much like insects. Plausibly no generation mattered more than 100x more than the one immediately before it. Let’s say there are 100 billion generations between us and insects. That would mean that we can matter no more than 100^(100 billion) times more than an insect.

Of course, this doesn’t establish how many insects a human is worth. But it does establish there is some quantity of insects’ interests that can outweigh a humans’ interest. For more on this kind of argument, see here and here.

The same kind of logic was offered by other Rationalists for shrimp. One, James Miller, a professor of economics, wrote

Let me defend effective altruists’ concern for shrimp welfare. We don’t know whether shrimp are conscious. But if they are conscious and can feel pain, we should be willing to spend resources to reduce the suffering we inflict on them. We don’t need certainty to justify spending resources to reduce the risk that we’re torturing conscious beings. Yes, reducing this to math can yield absurd conclusions about, say, how many babies we should sacrifice to spare how many shrimp from suffering. But any well-defined moral system can lead to troubling conclusions, and that doesn’t excuse cruelty to beings that may be conscious nor justify not thinking carefully about moral choices.

In my ongoing efforts to brighten the world through the telling of hilarious jokes, I responded to him “We need to kill all the whales to save the shrimp.”

But I had not reckoned with the full power of logic, and so was somewhat startled when Miller responded this way to my quip:

Unironically that is something we should consider, although as the shrimp are probably in a Malthusian environment, we have to consider the marginal implications of killing all the whales on the shrimp.

All Rationalists suffer from Humor Deficit Disorder, just like Mr Spock. To laugh is not logical. Logic is serious business. We’re trying to minimize pain in the universe, mister, so don’t get in our way by distracting us with frivolities.

At any rate, I admitted I did not anticipate Miller’s response, but many others replied to me that they had (and I believe them). One fellow was even more logical than Miller, and carried through both Bulldog’s and Miller’s logical argument to its, well, logical conclusion:

Have you tried proposing the heat death of the universe as solution to all possible moral crises?

And he may be on to something there, because I reminded him that this solution was already thought of: “But the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

Stay reasonable, not logical, my friends.

Bonus: As I finished this I saw this NY Post article: “Father of AI-doomer ideology Effective Altruism backed bestiality, said newborn baby worth less than a hog“.

The nutty professor dubbed the “father” of effective altruism (EA), the theory beloved by AI doomers who want the power to police the technology, expressed support for bestiality and said the life of a newborn baby is worth less than a chimp’s or a hog’s.

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist who argues that killing disabled infants is not morally wrong, that sex with animals is preferable to raising them for food and that even necrophilia can be moral.

Since the 1970s, he has suggested rejecting traditional concepts of right and wrong and replacing morality solely by calculating and maximizing interests.

We’ll look at more of this later this week.

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