The Tree of Priorities: A (Cause) Prioritization Framework

Imagine a couple that tries to make a decision about how to set the table at their wedding. They spend all their time trying to work out this difficult decision, making lists and drawings, and asking Google and friends for advice. Yet underneath their efforts pertaining to the wedding table, a deeper doubt is lingering in their minds: whether they really want to marry each other in the first place. Unfortunately, they have not spent sufficient time contemplating this more fundamental question, and yet what occupies their attention is still the wedding table.

This is clearly unreasonable. Whether it makes sense to spend time on setting the wedding table depends on whether the wedding is sensible in the first place, and therefore the latter is clearly the most important question to contemplate and answer first. Two weeks after the wedding, a divorce is filed. It was all a waste, one that deeper reflection could have prevented.

This example may seem a little weird, yet I think it captures what most of us do most of the time to a striking extent. We all spend significant amounts of energy planning and executing ill-considered “weddings”. Rather than considering the most important and fundamental questions, we get caught up in ill-considered specific tasks that happen to feel important or interesting.

This is hardly a great mystery when considered from an evolutionary perspective: doing whatever felt most interesting at any given time probably made a lot of sense in our ancestral environment, and no doubt still does much of the time — ignoring every moderately interesting thing that jumps into consciousness is not a recipe for success in today’s world either. The key, of course, is balance. Yet I believe we are out of balance for the most part, unfortunately. It is too rare for us to be guided by considerations about which objectives are most reasonable to pursue, and we too rarely see the importance of thinking hierarchically about our priorities.

For that is arguably the point the example above illustrates: we should contemplate the fundamental questions and decisions before we move on to the more specific ones, since the answers to the fundamental questions largely determine which specific tasks are worth pursuing. In short, the specifics are contingent on the fundamentals. And this has significant implications: we need to pay much more attention to the fundamentals.

This is what the “tree of priorities” illustrated below is all about. It is a framework for making decisions that emphasizes first things first, while highlighting that “first things first” is best thought of in hierarchical terms.

At the bottom of this tree we have our fundamental values upon which everything else rests and depends — the root and stem of the tree, one could say. From this, something slightly more specific follows, namely the causes that are worth pursuing given our values — the branches of the tree. Finally, on these branches, we find something more specific still, namely interventions that enable us to attain success in the respective cause areas — the leaves of the tree, if you will.

An illustration of this tree might look like this (there can obviously be any number of causes):

So, at the most general level, this “tree of priorities” asks us to consider three questions, in the following order:

    1) What are our fundamental values? (In other words: what matters?)

    2) Which causes should we pursue given our fundamental values?

    3) Which interventions should we pursue within our specific causes?

I think this is a valuable set of questions, not least due to their ordering: it is clear that our answers to question 3) depend on our answers to question 2), which in turn depend on our answers to question 1).

Hence, the tree of priorities suggests an idea that does not seem shared by many, namely that contemplating fundamental values should be our first priority. I think this is largely correct, at least if we do not have a thoroughly considered answer in place already.

Our fundamental values can be thought of as the point of departure that determines our forward direction, and if we take off in just a slightly sub-optimal direction and keep on moving, we might well end up far away from where we should ideally have gone. In other words, being a little wrong about the fundamentals can result in being extremely wrong at the level of the specifics, and hence it is worth spending considerable resources on clarifying and refining the fundamentals.

Cause Prioritization

“Cause prioritization is the most effective use of altruistic resources.”

— Paul Christiano

People who want to improve the world are, like everybody else, extremely biased. A prime example is that we tend to work on whatever cause we have stumbled upon so far and to suppose, without deeper examination, that this cause is the most important one. This cannot be safely assumed, however.

Here’s what a typical path of “cause updating” might look like: We find out that thousands of people die every single day due to extreme poverty, and find that to be the most important cause to work on. Then we realize that humanity torments and kills billions of non-human beings every year, and that discrimination against these beings cannot be justified, which might then prompt us to focus on ending this moral catastrophe. Then we are told about the suffering of wild animals, its enormous scope, and why we ignore it, and then we might (also) work on that. Then we are convinced by arguments about the enormous importance of the far future, and then that becomes our main focus. And so on.

To be sure, such an evolutionary progression is helpful and even laudable. The question is just whether we can optimize it. Might we be able to undertake this process of updating in a more direct and systematic fashion? After all, having undergone a continual process of updating that has made us realize that we were wrong about, and perhaps even completely unaware of, the most pressing causes in the past, it seems reasonable to assume that we are likely still wrong in significant ways today. We should be open to the possibility that the cause we are currently working on is not be the most pressing one.

Cause prioritization is the direct and systematic attempt to become better informed about which causes are worth prioritizing the most. The importance of such a deliberate effort should be apparent: working on the causes through which we can have the best impact is obviously of great importance — it means that we can potentially help many more sentient beings — and in order to identify those causes, deliberate exploration seems significantly more efficient than expecting to stumble upon them by chance. Rather than optimizing specific tasks that further a given cause, cause prioritization goes a step meta and asks: given our values, what causes are most important to focus on in the first place?

I hope to explore this question in future essays. I wish to provide a rough framework for how we can think about cause prioritization, and based on this, I will try to point to important causes and questions that I think we should focus on and explore further.

New Book: 'Reflections on Intelligence'

A lot of people are talking about “superintelligent AI” these days. But what are they talking about? Indeed, what is “intelligence” in the first place? I think this is a timely question, as it is generally left unanswered, even unasked, in discussions about the perils and promises of artificial intelligence, which tends to make these discussions more confusing than enlightening. More clarity and skepticism about this term “intelligence” are desperately needed. Hence this book.

Free Download:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/655938

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JQOLZAO/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1141019523

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/reflections-on-intelligence

http://www.inktera.com/store/title/eef38a48-7dd0-46b0-b331-2ff7fc070228

https://www.scribd.com/book/320195280/Reflections-on-Intelligence

A Short Critique of 'The Effective Altruism Handbook'

Today I read the recently published Effective Altruism Handbook. I had been looking forward to reading it, hoping to read something that I would both agree with and learn from. Unfortunately, the main lesson I learned was that there is a big problem with the effective altruism movement in its current form.

The problem is actually well exemplified by my personal experience with donating based on GiveWell’s recommendations. I came upon GiveWell and their work about two years ago, and this encounter prompted me to immediately redirect my donations to their three top recommended charities at the time, namely Against Malaria Foundation, Deworm the World Initiative and GiveDirectly.

This made the best sense ethically. Or so I thought. For about a year later, I got an email update from GiveDirectly, which informed me what the money I donated was being spent on: a plurality was being spent on “livestock.” Having just finished writing the essay Why “Happy Meat” Is Always Wrong at the time, I felt that my position on this matter was quite thoroughly considered, and the conclusion was clear: I could not continue supporting GiveDirectly, so I cancelled my donations to them.

One might object that my cancellation was unfair. After all, the goal of GiveDirectly is poverty reduction, not anti-speciesism, so can we not give them a break? The answer is no, and the reason why is captured perfectly in the following nine words from Peter Singer’s piece on speciesism in the EA Handbook: “'speciesism,' by analogy with racism, must also be condemned.”

Unfortunately, my reading of the EA Handbook made it clear to me that this indeed is a big problem in the EA movement today: it is profoundly speciesist. What else can one call it when its evaluations of success and effectiveness almost always focus uniquely on one species, homo sapiens?

Given the ubiquity of speciesism in our world today, this should perhaps not come as a big surprise, yet the EA movement really should do better. After all, the EA Handbook itself contains a chapter on speciesism that soundly argues for its rejection, yet unfortunately the book, including that chapter itself, fails completely to make explicit the most basic of implications of such a rejection, even though the main implications of rejecting speciesism could in my view have been listed fairly shortly: endorse veganism, end the property status of non-human animals, and take the suffering of non-human beings in nature seriously.

I have tried to elaborate on all these points in my recent book on the subject, yet the following conveys some of my reasoning in brief:

1) We do not find it justifiable to buy products that result from deliberately enslaving and killing humans, so upon rejecting speciesism, we should not find it justifiable to buy products that result from deliberately enslaving and killing non-human beings.

2) We rightly reject the property status of human individuals, no matter what cognitive abilities they may have, and so upon rejecting speciesism, we should also reject the property status of non-human individuals.

3) We do not disregard human beings just because they find themselves in “nature” or otherwise outside of any human society, and upon rejecting speciesism, we cannot disregard non-human beings on those grounds either.

These are all rather relevant points, and the failure to include any of these in the EA Handbook must be considered a serious omission, especially when one considers the enormous numbers of individuals involved. As Luke Muehlhauser recognizes in one of his two chapters in the book, the vast majority of sentient beings on the planet are of non-human rather than human kind, and the vast majority of these, more than 99.9 percent, live in nature. Who speaks for them? Fortunately, there is a growing number of people in the wider effective altruism community who do, and thankfully, Muehlhauser mentions two of the most vocal such advocates: David Pearce and Brian Tomasik.

Hopefully, the EA movement will keep on advancing and eventually live up to its dedication to the well-being of all sentient beings. Unfortunately, today, the bulk of the movement appears to greatly underestimate the moral importance of non-human beings and our strong reasons to help them.

New Book: 'Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It'

Why is speciesism wrong, and what are the implications of rejecting it? These are the questions I try to answer in my latest book: Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It.

A short description:

What can justify discrimination against other sentient beings? In this book, Magnus Vinding explores the issue of species discrimination. He argues that speciesism — discrimination based on species membership — is unjustifiable, and proceeds to examine the practical implications of this conclusion. This examination reveals more than a few ways in which our behavior and attitudes need to change profoundly.

An Important Book: 'The Hedonistic Imperative'

Few things have influenced and inspired me as much as The Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce — a controversial book that advocates for the end of suffering and which presents a rough sketch of how it might be achievable.

It is available for free here:


http://www.hedweb.com/

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id962563217

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hedonistic-imperative-david-pearce/1121134916

http://www.inktera.com/store/title/a6f35a9a-9016-45a9-beb1-139359da67d1

https://www.scribd.com/book/254033870/The-Hedonistic-Imperative

The following video gives a brief introduction to the ideas of David Pearce:

"Animal Agriculture" – A Distributed Evil

How many of us would be willing to kill a non-human being whom we had raised ourselves if we had absolutely no need to eat this being?

A minority of us, I’m sure.

How many of us would be willing to pay other people to raise and kill a non-human being if we had no need to eat this being?

The answer, unfortunately, is the number of people who buy and eat flesh; that is, the vast majority of us.

In my experience, most people will admit that such an inconsistency is indefensible, and rightly so. After all, the ethical status of doing something does not depend on who carries out the action, but on what the action is — whether we kill somebody ourselves or pay someone else to do it, it is still wrong; for the victim, the result is the same: death by human hands. Yet the reality is, most unfortunately, that this inconsistency thrives untroubled and untouched by such simple observations. The reality is that we pay others, on a daily basis, to do what we could never do ourselves — to do an act that most of us would be horrified to carry out ourselves, and, in the case of many of us, even unable to ever forgive ourselves for having done. The inconsistency is striking, and more than that, it is nothing less than the source of the greatest atrocity committed by humanity today.

It is worth noting that the decisive difference between our unwillingness to kill another being and our willingness to buy the flesh from that same being does not seem to only lie in the fact that it is another person who is leading the knife, as it is probably still only a minority of us who would accept that someone else kills a non-human being if we have to watch it happen. For instance, if we stood in front of a non-human being, and someone then came to us and asked: “Will you pay me to kill this being and give you all her flesh?” I think very few of us would say "yes". In fact, I think most people would be horrified and openly condemn it if they saw it happen right before them in real life. For instance, if someone in my local park killed a wild bird there, I am sure the other people in the park would object to this action and not be very moved by the assurance that the bird will be eaten. Yet the person who sits and eats a sandwich that contains the flesh from a chicken while he condemns this bird killer and shakes his head over incomprehensible human evil can claim no moral high ground whatsoever, as he has himself paid another person to do the very thing he is condemning: the killing of a bird whom we do not need to kill or eat, and that bird might well have suffered a death far more brutal than the death he has just witnessed and condemned (many chickens are for instance boiled alive at slaughterhouses because their throats are not cut fully).

So it seems that it is not merely because others do it that we are willing to support an act so brutal and evil that we would not want to do it ourselves, but because others do it so smoothly and without letting us know anything about it. We consume “animal products” because the entire “production process” happens so conveniently out of sight.

This should give us pause. The fact that the vast majority of us are supporting something that only a small minority of us would ever be able to do simply because it happens out of sight reveals that we are completely disconnected from what it is we consume and what the process behind it is — and knowingly so, because we know that we don’t know much about it. We are knowingly looking away, and by doing this we are not only betraying the non-human victims, but also ourselves and our own values.

This is the horror of a large, distributed system. By distributing the various acts of evil — the act of raising non-human beings only for them to be killed, the act of killing them, the act of distributing and selling them, and the act of buying and eating them — we have managed to construct a system that is as evil as only the most sadistic person could be on his own. After all, many people who raise non-human beings for them to be killed report that they cannot bear seeing them get killed, and that they feel terrible when they send them to slaughter. Yet by distributing the next evil act in this great circle of evil to another person who has not seen any of these beings grow up — not seen their personalities and charming quirks, but only seen another anonymous being enter the slaughterhouse — we manage to get the job done. Collectively, together, we can do it. And it is not the case that this person whose job it is to kill the beings is especially culpable in any way; it is simply a job that exists in response to a demand. Our demand. It all comes back to us, the consumers, who merrily buy and eat the non-human beings.

As a general matter, the evil that a large, distributed system can manage to perform by virtue of splitting up a large-scale atrocity into many small tasks, each undertaken by people who are mostly good and kind individuals, is something that we should all be extremely cognizant of, as we clearly are not well-equipped to recognize such evils. However, the fact that we have such a blind spot does not provide an excuse for our blindness in any way. All it takes to cure our blindness is simply that we open our eyes and stop looking away from the fact of our exploitation of other animals and the role that we as consumers play in it. Because we are all part of this clockwork — as active a part as any. In fact, we who consume the non-human beings have taken on the most fundamental task of all. We perform the climactic end step of this entire circle of evil, the step that powerfully reinforces the ideological foundation of the entire practice of exploiting non-human beings in an act of indulgent promulgation: Yes, non-human beings are mere things. They are just things we can consume for frivolous reasons.

Collectively we are doing what none of us could do alone. We have managed to create a collective practice that is far more evil than anything we could ever dream of doing individually. How have we managed to do this? How do we stop it? I would argue that our final act of consuming “animal products” — what most people consider a relatively innocent act — is not only a crucial piece in the puzzle of our exploitation of non-human beings, and it is not only a powerful contributing factor to our moral confusion with regard to them; it is the very foundation of it all. It is the cardinal sin we commit against them. Only when we stop this will we stop our exploitation of non-human beings and all the horrors it inevitably carries with it.