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          <h1 id="post-title">Shut up and Multiply</h1>

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<p><strong>Entry Question</strong>: What do you do when your feelings say one thing and the numbers say another?</p>
<hr />
<h1 id="ice-cream-vs-best-friend">Ice-cream vs Best Friend</h1>
<p><strong>Scenario</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your best friend is sitting in a cafe by the road. A drunk-driver is about to smash into those chairs in about a couple of seconds. If your friend doesn’t move soon, he will be dead. You are a few feet away from him so you can inform him in time. However, you haven’t noticed the car yet.</p>
<p>Now, I come up to you and give you a delicious ice-cream and make you turn your back to the road. You’re enjoying the wonderful ice-cream, oblivious to everything else that’s happening. Moments later, your friend lies dead on the road.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Question</strong>: Would you have rather thrown away the ice-cream if it meant that you could save your friend? Or is the ice-cream more important?</p>
<h1 id="what-we-lack">What we lack</h1>
<p>I hope the answer is obvious. Of course, we’re gonna save the friend! What the f*ck does an ice-cream have to do with anything? This is a human life we’re talking about.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Critic</strong>: Yo, if the ice-cream were so unimportant, why did you take it? Why didn’t you save your friend in the first place?</p>
<p><strong>You</strong>: Hey! I didn’t <em>know</em> about the car. If I’d known, of course, I’d have rushed to save my friend.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was your <em>lack of knowledge</em> about the car that had prevented you from taking the right action. If someone had given you the knowledge directly, you would have accepted it gladly.</p>
<p>Ok. Now consider this scenario:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You and your friends are out camping. Near a forest, your best friend gets bitten in the leg by something. You don’t know what. However, that whole spot is now turning blue and your friend starts losing consciousness.</p>
<p>You don’t know what to do. You take out the first-aid kit. There are quite some anti-venom medicines in there, but you don’t know what does what. So, you open the medical booklet and start searching for the symptoms. There are about 8 matching situations, each with its own emergency treatment. You go into each one in detail. None of the first 7 situations match. The last one matches. However, by the time you get the medicines out, your friend is already dead.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What happened there?</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Critic</strong>: Why did you fail here?</p>
<p><strong>You</strong>: I wasn’t able to get to the information in time!</p>
<p><strong>Critic</strong>: But you had the necessary knowledge with you, right?</p>
<p><strong>You</strong>: Yes, but I didn’t have the <em>processing power</em> to get to it in time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If someone had done the processing for you and computed the right course of action to take, would you have accepted it? Yes, gladly! It was your lack of <em>processing power</em> that had prevented you from taking the right action - saving your friend.</p>
<h1 id="money">Money</h1>
<p><strong>Scenario</strong>: You don’t have the money</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your friend has just been badly hurt in an accident. The doctor at the hospital says that you need twenty-five thousand dollars to operate on him and save his life. Your friend’s family doesn’t have that kind of money. Neither do you. You can’t get it from anywhere. You just watch as your friend dies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Question</strong>: If I had somehow made sure that you had twenty-five thousand dollars necessary, would you have accepted that state of affairs?</p>
<p>Of course! You would have jumped at the chance. The only reason you couldn’t help your friend was because you didn’t have the money.</p>
<p>Inference: A world where your friend is alive and where you have $25,000 less money is better than a world where your friend has died and where you have the $25,000 with you.</p>
<p><strong>Scenario</strong>: You have the money</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Same situation as last time. Friend, hospital, badly hurt, $25,000. This time, you own a luxury car - worth around $55,000 in resale value. A decent but non-luxury car costs $30,000.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What will you do?</p>
<p>Will you sell your car and get the lower-priced one so that your friend can live? Or is the luxury car more important to you than your friend’s life?</p>
<h1 id="when-good-feelings-are-bad">When good feelings are bad</h1>
<p>Would you rather have intense fun here (eating an ice-cream, maybe) while your friends are in deep pain out of your sight?</p>
<p>No. You’d rather become sad and come to know of your friends’ plight so that you could help them.</p>
<p>You would even say that it is <em>wrong</em> for you to have fun eating the ice-cream. Your fun there was opposed by the truth. If you knew the actual truth, you would feel angry and guilty. You would want to change things so that your friends were no longer in pain.</p>
<p>You couldn’t <em>comprehend</em> the whole truth, and so your mind was giving you different feelings than the ones you would actually want to have - the right feelings.</p>
<p>In other words, your mind is in a different state of mind that it would be if you knew the whole truth. If you had more knowledge and could process things better, you would do something completely different and end up getting way more benefits. But your current mind lacks all that, so you are losing out on all those benefits.</p>
<h1 id="intensity-of-feelings">Intensity of feelings</h1>
<p><strong>Scenario</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You see a kid in great pain on account of a deadly disease. You feel immense sympathy and suffering. You don’t want that kid to be hurt like that. He is hurting for no fault of his own. That is unfair, you feel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You felt great anguish in that scenario. You feel like doing whatever you can to alleviate his pain.</p>
<p><strong>Scenario</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You see 200 kids in the same hospital. All of them are suffering just as bad as the previous kid.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Question</strong>: Do you feel 200 times the pain and sympathy?</p>
<p>Would you take 200 times the action you would take earlier?</p>
<p>If not, that means you will take less than 200x the action you would take in the previous case. Less than 200x the money donated earlier, or less than 200x the community service you would have done earlier, or whatever.</p>
<p>Which means, at least one of those 200 kids is gonna get less help than the previous case. Well… what was <em>his</em> fault? Why is <em>he</em> getting less help from you now?</p>
<p>If he had been alone in a room and you’d met with him, would you not have given him the full amount you had donated to the first kid?</p>
<hr />
<p>You can’t feel emotions that scale up with the tragedies. 1 kid dies, it’s a tragedy. You feel some pain. But if 200 kids die, you don’t feel 200x the pain. Your mind doesn’t work like that.</p>
<p>But it should! 200 kids dying is <em>200 times</em> as bad as 1 kid dying.</p>
<p>Don’t think about whether you would have the resources to take action on these ideas. Just follow the line of thought to its conclusion.</p>
<p>If you <em>had</em> the resources, wouldn’t you want to spend 200x the resources on 200 kids than you would on 1 kid? Right? They are all strangers to you, so you don’t care about any of them more than the other. Your choices should be consistent that way.</p>
<h1 id="doing-the-right-thing">Doing the Right Thing</h1>
<p>From these cases, it should be clear that, most often, we don’t do the right thing because we lack the knowledge and processing power that we need to know what to do.</p>
<p>We don’t do the right thing because we don’t <em>feel</em> as strongly as we should.</p>
<p>We are too busy enjoying our ice-cream.</p>
<h1 id="shut-up-and-multiply">Shut up and Multiply</h1>
<p>In light of all these f*cked-up facts about our mind, we come to the inevitable conclusion: Shut up and Multiply.</p>
<p>Our brain is incapable of dealing with large numbers effectively. There are a number of biases that affect our reasoning on such a level. It is experimentally demonstrated that we are insensitive to scope (1000 vs 10000 vs 100000 vs 1000000 - all pretty much feel the same to us).</p>
<p>This means we can’t <em>feel</em> the full extent of stuff that is going on.</p>
<p>We lack the knowledge of what we really need to do. We lack the processing power to compute the right action in each situation. We lack the ability to feel the pain of an entire planet.</p>
<p>So, we need to put our feelings aside and calculate the numbers methodically.</p>
<p>How much is <em>one</em> human life worth to you? The equivalent of $100? $1000? $10? $1,000,000?</p>
<p>Well, 50 <em>million</em> people die every year. That’s 50,000,000 humans dying off. 150,000 people every day.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I don’t really care about those people”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If each one of them were to lay dying in front of you, would you not feel the urge to do something about it? Isn’t it because you are insensitive to scope? (50 people vs 50 million people - sounds just about the same, doesn’t it?)</p>
<p>If you multiply the worth of one human life across that huge number, you are suffering terrific losses every year. You just don’t know it yet.</p>
<h1 id="not-just-deaths">Not just deaths</h1>
<p>What about all the suffering in the world? Wouldn’t you stop them if you could? They matter to you.</p>
<p>All the poverty and suffering and diseases and unnecessary wars needs to end.</p>
<h1 id="what-needs-to-be-done">What needs to be done</h1>
<p>Put your flawed feelings aside for a moment and shut up and multiply.</p>
<p>You can’t trust your mind to come to the right conclusions. Left to itself, it will just eat the ice-cream and ignore the crap happening. Not cool. You need to gain the knowledge and processing power and compute the right action using cold-blooded reason. Ignore your feelings here - they are not helpful. They don’t scale up usefully to deal with Big Problems. Look to the numbers - what do they say? What should we do? What needs to be done?</p>
<p>What do the numbers say? When you add all the pain and loss that is occurring in the world and look at what you could do to alleviate that and stop this madness… and when you compare that with whatever plans you had to get a little more happiness in your life… which one is greater? Which one would you rather have?</p>
<p>Yes, in the ideal case, we would have both. But this world is pretty f*cking far from ideal. Now that push has come to shove, what will you choose?</p>
<p>Would you have a world where you get a little bitch-ass happiness for a time while people keep dying and suffering all around you? Or would you have a world where all those millions of lives are saved at the cost of a little happiness on your side?</p>
<p>Is all your personal pleasure really worth it? You’ve been living that way for decades now, probably. What came of it? How epic was it, really?</p>
<h1 id="this-is-your-candy">This is <em>your</em> candy</h1>
<p>You’re not doing this out of selflessness. This is not about self-sacrificing “altruism”.</p>
<p>This is what <em>you</em> want.</p>
<p>I’m one of the most selfish people I know. I’m not doing this for other people’s benefit. I am pretty incapable of thinking that way. I’m doing this because <em>I</em> want people to be better off. I can’t bear to watch people suffer for no reason of their own.</p>
<p>Even if nobody else asked me for help, I would still want the world to be better. I’m not doing it for them.</p>
<p>It’s like eating candy. Why do we eat candy? Cos <em>we</em> like candy. The candy may want to be eaten. That’s just a coincidence. But even if the candy didn’t want to be eaten, we would still eat it. Similarly, why do I want to improve the world and remove all the crap pain and suffering? Because <em>I</em> like it that way. Even if nobody else wanted the world that way, I would still go ahead and try to make it happen.</p>
<p>(This is why the word “selfish” is useless. We <em>all</em> act to improve the world as per <em>our</em> Utility Function. We would never want to sub-ordinate our Utility Function to someone else’s and do something completely opposite to our actual goals. <em>That</em> would be true selflessness. We are all “selfish”.)</p>
<p>Fortunately, it so happens that, being of the same human species, we seem to have been endowed with pretty much the <em>same</em> utility function, all of us. We all want the same things on the large scale, more or less. We just don’t know it yet. We lack the knowledge and processing power to see through to what we actually want. If we Shut up and Multiply, we will come to see that we share this vision. We can help each other build the world we want. So, in this case, this is <em>our</em> candy.</p>
<p>Anyway, just remember that <em>you</em> want the world to be a certain way. This is your candy. You want this. When playing for such high stakes, put your flawed feelings aside. Shut up and Multiply. Do what needs to be done to make it happen.</p>
<hr />
<h1 id="notes">Notes</h1>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply">Shut up and Multiply</a> is, of course, a classic Eliezer post.</p></li>
<li><p>Main point: Have consistent preferences</p>
<p>Make inferences from the scenario answers - you care more about your friend’s life than an ice-cream or other such short-term pleasures. Ditto for life vs $25,000</p>
<p>Then, you should make consistent choices in other scenarios.</p></li>
<li><p>Main idea: No Impact, No Right to Talk.</p>
<p>Honourable intentions are no good to us. We judge actions solely by their Impact.</p></li>
<li><p>Conclusion: Brain++</p>
<p>Mind with more knowledge, processing power, and scalable feelings.</p>
<p>Brain++ gets epic benefits that you are losing out on. Much better world.</p>
<p>How do you get Brain++? Shut up and Multiply.</p></li>
<li><p>What about my little bitch-ass Happiness?</p>
<p>Life satisfaction is more likely what you are referring to.</p>
<p>Break it down.</p>
<p>Talk about the limitations.</p>
<p>Your feelings are flawed.</p></li>
<li><p>Face it directly</p>
<p>Seriously, if you would argue that, compared to a little kid dying in front of you, for no fault of its own, for stupid reasons like diseases and accidents, you would rather go on eating ice-creams and watching movies and trying to get a girlfriend (or boyfriend) and make more money than the other people you know, even though these things do not end up giving you what you want… then, there is nothing more I can say to convince you.</p></li>
<li><p>If you can’t</p>
<p>at least admit it. We can figure out a way. But, first, admit to the truth.</p></li>
</ul>

<div class="info">Created: November  6, 2014</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: January 22, 2015</div>
<div class="info">Status: finished</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: utility, feelings</div>

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