EA - Teaching EA through superhero thought experiments by Geoffrey Miller

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Teaching EA through superhero thought experiments, published by Geoffrey Miller on October 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Concrete, thought-provoking discussion questions can often spark more interest in new ideas (such as EA principles) than abstract arguments, moral preaching, or theoretical manifestos can. This is true in college seminars, but more generally in small social gatherings of any type.When I've taught my 'Psychology of Effective Altruism' class (syllabus here), it's sometimes hard to get ordinary college students interested in abstract Effective Altruism ideas. I teach at a large American state university that is not very selective in student admissions, so there is a wide range of cognitive abilities and curiosity levels in the college juniors and seniors who take my EA class. They sometimes struggle to follow abstract presentations of key EA concepts such as scope-sensitivity, tractability, neglectedness, charity effectiveness, utility, sentience, and longtermism.But they all love superhero movies. Whatever their religious affiliation, they're all familiar with the DC and Marvel pantheons of demi-gods. For better or worse, these superhero pantheons are at the heart of modern global entertainment culture. In a politically polarized era when people can't agree on much, and tend to stay within their partisan news media bubbles, superhero movies and TV series offer some rare common ground for thinking about issues of power, altruism, existential risk, counterfactuals, moral dilemmas, etc.So, I've found it useful to provoke class discussions with some superhero thought experiments, such as: "If you had all of Superman's superpowers for 24 hours, and you wanted to do the most good in the world during that one day, what would you do?" (For a sample of about 150 replies to this question on Twitter (from ordinary followers, not from college students), see here.)This question usually provokes immediate and spirited discussion. Almost all students are familiar with Superman's imaginary superpowers, and almost all accept the premise that Superman is a good guy with good intentions.The most frequent initial responses usually involve geopolitical vigilante justice, on the principle that the fastest way to do good is to eliminate bad guys -- through killing them, jailing them, or otherwise neutralizing them. So, many students will start off saying 'Superman should simply kill foreign leader X', where X is whoever the American news media is currently demonizing as the Global Bad Guy. However, other students will usually point out that political assassinations often create martyrs, generate adverse publicity, and provoke blowback, so the longer-term effects may be neutral or negative. This can lead to a good discussion of unintended consequences, counterfactuals, moral legitimacy, public sentiment, and the global catastrophic risks of geopolitical instability.Other students will sometimes suggest that our hypothetical EA Superman should simply do what classical Superman has done ever since the comics started in 1939 -- monitor the news, look for people in distress, and go save the individuals and small groups who can be saved. This typically leads to a good discussion of scope-sensitivity: why should Superman save a few people at a time through heroic actions, when he might be able to save many more through delivering water, food, or medicines to the needy? Or through infrastructure projects like digging canals, tunnels, and harbors, building dikes and dams, or delivering metal-rich asteroids to Earth? Students enjoy debating which kinds of interventions would be the best use of Superman's time -- and the 24-hour time limit in the question makes the opportunity costs of each intervention salient.It's also easy to nudge these discussions into epistem...