There's Lots of Low-Hanging Fruit

There are many areas where there aren't incentives for smart people to figure out efficient things

In Nazi Germany, there was low-hanging fruit, at least, from a moral perspective. In order to be better than lots of people you just had to…not be a Nazi. Not so hard, right? Most people throughout human history have managed to not be Nazis, I manage it pretty well (some disagree, of course), and even bad people manage to avoid being Nazis. If you fail at the task of not being a Nazi, that reflects rather poorly on you, partly because you failed the world’s easiest task and partly because you’re a Nazi.

Economists often claim that you don’t find 20-dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. I actually did once find a 20-dollar bill lying around on the sidewalk, and have claimed ever since that the economists have been soundly empirically refuted (though the Austrians won’t be moved by this allegation), but putting that aside, the broad point is true. When some task can be optimized, there will often be smart people optimizing it so that it’s really hard for you to beat them. This is why it’s so difficult to beat the stock market or to beat prediction markets.

One big disagreement I often have with rationalists is that I think they think that there’s way more low-hanging fruit than there actually is. For example, Eliezer literally thinks that there’s low-hanging fruit in quantum physics—that the many worlds interpretation is obviously correct, and physicists’ failure to recognize this is evidence of total failure on their part to grasp the obvious. When the rationalists claim that some view about the world is obvious—is low-hanging fruit—they are consistently wrong. That’s why I’m skeptical when Eliezer claims to have solved fundamental physics—I don’t know anything about fundamental physics, but it seems unlikely that Eliezer would be better at it than actual physicists would, who spend day in and day out working on physics.

But even I think there’s lots of low-hanging fruit. Most people don’t think that the worst thing ever is bad at all. In the natural world, huge numbers of animals live miserable lives of intense suffering. Most animals give birth to enormous numbers of offspring, very few of whom survive, meaning nearly every animal meets their grisly demise after a few days. Every year, quintillions of beings die horrible painful deaths in nature—from starvation, predation, or suffocation. Nature contains, every year, far more suffering than has ever existed in human suffering.

And most people think it isn’t bad at all.

They don’t just think that it’s a necessary evil or that we can’t do anything about it, they think it isn’t bad. If you tell people that you take wild animal suffering seriously, most people laugh it off, as if you just announced that you’ve become a scientologist. If you think it’s seriously bad when a quintillion beings have their flesh ripped apart by predators or their organs slowly erode as they starve, then you’re a radical.

It isn’t hard to beat the crowds when it comes to wild animal suffering. If your view is that this is a serious problem, that already puts you ahead of 99.9% of people, who think that wild animal suffering isn’t at all bad.

You don’t have to be smart to beat the crowds, nor do you have to be an expert on the issue. If your analysis is as simple as “it seems bad when 10^19 beings die horrible, painful deaths” then you’re ahead of almost all people. And if you donate to the wild animal initiative, for example, then you’re ahead of nearly everyone. Even the people who acknowledge that animal suffering is bad even when it occurs in nature mostly do nothing about it.

Imagine if everyone in society tied down animals and sexually assaulted them dozens of times a year. It would be easy to be morally better than most people—just don’t do that. Find a different hobby, screw horses…oh, perhaps that was a poor choice of expression in context. Well, it turns out that our situation is similar: most people eat meat, wherein they inflict literally torturous conditions on thousands of beings for the sake of small benefits. The vegan who sexually assaults a thousand pigs in their life causes much less animal suffering than the average meat eater. When most people are complicit in the worst crime in human history, it’s not hard to be morally better than average by not paying other people to carry out the worst crime in human history.

And we can do more than that. We can prevent horrible things from happening at small personal costs—prevent an entire living, breathing human being from dying of malaria by donating a few thousand dollars. We can save an animal from torture for a dollar. Every dollar you donate can prevent hens from being caged for 120 years. And yet despite it being possible for nearly everyone in affluent countries to save lots of lives and prevent hundreds of years of torture for every dollar donated, virtually no one does it. If you donate 5,000 dollars to effective charities every year, you’re doing more good than almost everyone—ditto if you donate to effective animal charities.

Nearly everyone can prevent terrible things from happening at minimal personal cost. And yet most people don’t do it. Not hard to beat the crowds.

But it’s not just when it comes to morality that it’s easy to be better than almost everyone: it’s also true when it comes to ideas. Most people get their political views, for example, by listening to either the news or political commentators they find entertaining. If you just read the expert literature and adopt the views that almost all experts in the relevant field agree on—for example, the desirability of free trade in economics—you’ll be able to do better than most people.

Or take Anki. It’s a flashcard app that makes learning things super easy. And virtually no one uses it. Now, some people just don’t know about it or don’t need to memorize lots of facts. But college students mostly do, and nonetheless mostly don’t use Anki. If one actually searches out information about how to accomplish tasks well—and then does those tasks—it’s not hard to coast. There are well-understood ways to remember what you read or memorize things, but most people just don’t do them for no good reason. School is a lot easier if you just do the things that demonstrably work for learning things.

There are lots of thousand-dollar bills lying on the ground. There are lots of cases where spending 20 minutes learning something can actually dramatically improve your life. Living a more ethical life than almost everyone isn’t hard—you just have to avoid paying for senseless torture or donate to charity a bit.