(I reposted my comment, since I edited it and it got a lot longer) I agree with the basic argument and I appreciate that it's made clearly. I don't agree that it fundamentally supports effective...
Exemplary
(I reposted my comment, since I edited it and it got a lot longer)
I agree with the basic argument and I appreciate that it's made clearly. I don't agree that it fundamentally supports effective altruism, the author is eager to make that argument. And that leads into, here and in a few of the author's other posts - I can't say that I'm impressed with someone who takes down foolish arguments by inventing hateable left-wing characters to propose them.
The foolish argument here is that individual harms caused by systemic problems require systemic solutions (like, to adopt the framing, abolishing capitalism totally) so individual solutions are a waste of time and money. Obviously that's foolish, as the author argues, in that addressing individual harms is a good thing to do in and of itself and it would be cruel to ignore those harms when they're what you really want to address in tackling a systemic problem, anyway.
But I also reject the framing that to criticise inaction against systemic problems ("root causes" in this framing) is to callously permit the ongoing harm. You could only think such a thing if you consider systemic problems to be unsolvable monoliths on which society is built, making trying to solve them pointless and futile. The way the author contrasts the problems caused as a natural result of capitalism with the problems (malaria and smallpox) caused by, uh, literal natural selection is telling about this view. It is foundationally conservative.
You can give people malaria nets, and when that stops them from catching malaria and dying, that's laudable. You can also change the way our societies and economies, our international distribution of resources, is structured so that they never needed you to buy the net for them in the first place. I dare say that would be even better. It would take a lot of hard, concerted effort, but hey, so does developing a vaccine to eradicate the smallpox virus with. The author is however very happy to convince his readers that working towards such large structural changes is not only misguided but foolish and embarrassing, the preserve of ignorant elites. Like I said - I'm not impressed.
To build on the author's metaphor...most of us just want the world to stop selling metaphorical 'smallpox itch ointment' in place of making vaccines. Specifically would like the people selling...
To build on the author's metaphor...most of us just want the world to stop selling metaphorical 'smallpox itch ointment' in place of making vaccines. Specifically would like the people selling said ointment to stop spreading propaganda about how harmful vaccines are.
I thought I would mostly agree with you in principle until that last sentence. Changing society to solve the root cause here is at the very least an order of magnitude more complex than developing...
You can give people malaria nets, and when that stops them from catching malaria and dying, that's laudable. You can also change the way our societies and economies, our international distribution of resources, is structured so that they never needed you to buy the net for them in the first place. I dare say that would be even better. It would take a lot of hard, concerted effort, but hey, so does developing a vaccine to eradicate the smallpox virus with.
I thought I would mostly agree with you in principle until that last sentence. Changing society to solve the root cause here is at the very least an order of magnitude more complex than developing a smallpox vaccine. Anybody who claims otherwise has no idea how incredibly difficult it is to predict and work with truly complex systems. The first problem here is that in similar situations it's usually almost impossible to even define a clear single goal and the concrete steps to reach it - which is part of the point of this article.
Most people do not understand complex systems, that's normal and expected, it's just that the "if we just worked together towards xxxx..." is usually not a result of some wrong decision based on an illusion that we cannot solve it, so we don't even try, most of the time it truly is a tremendously difficult problem.
That's a good point. "Root-causeism" can be counterproductive. Sometimes, when I read things like "but it's a band-aid solution!", I think to myself that band-aids are actually pretty useful....
That's a good point. "Root-causeism" can be counterproductive. Sometimes, when I read things like "but it's a band-aid solution!", I think to myself that band-aids are actually pretty useful. Additionally, this is often not a binary choice. You can give a band-aid while a more substantial solution is being developed. I am unconvinced that, in most cases, the existence of a temporary solution prevents the existence of a permanent one. Many permanent solutions are so incredibly difficult that it is impossible to know if they are even possible, and when they are possible, it is very hard to predict when they will be viable. And some are possible and theoretically viable, but only in a perfect-world scenario.
The last two paragraphs of this article are so aggressive that I wish the author had stopped before that. They had made good points. I don't see any benefit in ending with a weirdly specific rant that feels like a call for confrontation. It was out of place like they accidentally pasted part of another article. They call their opposers "smug", but end by stating that those who disagree with them are probably "irrational". That's pretty smug too. It is usually enough to just say someone's "wrong".
Well, I actually like this reasoning a lot. It’s a refreshing take and I find myself agreeing, unexpectedly perhaps. Especially this bit resonated with me: I have previously read about the...
Well, I actually like this reasoning a lot. It’s a refreshing take and I find myself agreeing, unexpectedly perhaps.
Especially this bit resonated with me:
But despite that, we got rid of smallpox. Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people, and we simply got rid of it. It took a coordinated effort from the global health community, but it did not require addressing the root cause of smallpox. Bad things are effects; to address an effect, one doesn’t need necessarily to address its root cause.
I have previously read about the mind-boggling undertaking this was, and the effort that it took. And with the context of this article, yes, of course, it was never about tackling the root cause of smallpox… but it was wildly successful nonetheless.
It's so weird to me that we've decided that killing the organism that literally creates the disease is somehow not addressing the root cause of the disease — as if simply being poor causes people...
It's so weird to me that we've decided that killing the organism that literally creates the disease is somehow not addressing the root cause of the disease — as if simply being poor causes people to spontaneously develop AIDS or malaria out of nowhere.
the alleged root cause is that, due to the nature of biology, there will always be viruses; if you just eradicate one virus without changing the nature of biology, you're not getting at the root...
the alleged root cause is that, due to the nature of biology, there will always be viruses; if you just eradicate one virus without changing the nature of biology, you're not getting at the root of the problem, because there will be more viruses
i think the author's main point with this is that you can always push the concept of a root cause one level deeper, so it's not really useful to make a binary split of root cause/symptom; instead we should just consider the magnitude of the impact of whatever we do
It's true that we will never fully vanquish communicable disease, but we will also never fully vanquish poverty; for as long as humanity exists, we will have to be vigilant. I think is is...
It's true that we will never fully vanquish communicable disease, but we will also never fully vanquish poverty; for as long as humanity exists, we will have to be vigilant. I think is is misguided, and maybe even actively harmful, to treat poverty as temporary concern that we can some day ignore.
My complaint is not about that, however. It's about the evolution of the term "root cause" into such a vague and unintuitive definition. It feels increasingly like people can categorize anything into root causes and non-root causes to serve their pet policy preferences.
Well, poverty and lack of education are associated with contracting both of those diseases. For malaria, sleeping with a mosquito net and other repellents is a very effective preventative. It's...
Well, poverty and lack of education are associated with contracting both of those diseases. For malaria, sleeping with a mosquito net and other repellents is a very effective preventative. It's separate from the effort to make sterile mosquitos to eradicate malaria from the world. For HIV and AIDS, convincing people to use condoms and clean needles is much easier than creating a vaccine.
Treating and eradicating diseases are distinct but related endeavours.
I agree; we need a multi-pronged approach — a combination of preventatives, cures, and treatments. But I strongly dislike the modern tendency to arbitrarily label some things a root causes and...
I agree; we need a multi-pronged approach — a combination of preventatives, cures, and treatments.
But I strongly dislike the modern tendency to arbitrarily label some things a root causes and other things not a root cause to justify how we spend resources. It's basing policy decisions on rhetorical persuasion rather than real-world outcomes.
I think the focus on root-causes comes from people trying to reduce complexity and boil down the question of "what needs to be done" to a singular answer. People look at the question in terms of...
I think the focus on root-causes comes from people trying to reduce complexity and boil down the question of "what needs to be done" to a singular answer. People look at the question in terms of there being a set of competing ideas that steal resources from one another. So in their mind, the optimal way to proceed is to try and logically deduce the one best option and consolidate all resources and efforts around that one best option for maximum efficiency.
Theres two main reasons I would disagree with this sentiment. The first is that peoples efforts and passions are not fungible commodities. If someone is working for Project Vesta because they are passionate about chemistry and want to address climate change, and then you manage to convince them that carbon capture is a waste of time, they arent necessarily just going to default to doing whatever alternative you suggest. Just because you manage to take resources away from carbon capture they are not guaranteed to go toward electing progressive representatives or whatever you would rather be focusing on. Maybe once they decide that the contribution they were interested in making is off the table, they just lose interest altogether.
The other reason is that eventually you probably still are going to need to deal with the immediate symptoms at some point. If you did succeed at addressing whatever the root cause you have identified, someone will still need to do the work of changing the derivative causes of the problem that more directly cause the thing you are trying to fix. So its not really wasted effort to have people working on those derivative issues sooner rather than later. Even if you do upend capitalism or whatever it is, theres already lots of carbon in the atmosphere and there are certain unavoidable emissions that will continue to exist, so carbon capture might still be useful.
This article was clearly written for a very specific type of person that subscribes to to false dichotomy that one can't reduce harm AND attack root causes simultaneously. The author helplfully...
This article was clearly written for a very specific type of person that subscribes to to false dichotomy that one can't reduce harm AND attack root causes simultaneously. The author helplfully tells us exactly what group he feels fit this description:
I’ve spent a few recent articles arguing that PEPFAR is really valuable and attempts to cut it would be disastrous. PEPFAR is an international program that combats HIV—it’s saved many millions of lives. Probably the most common response has been roughly the following: “sure PEPFAR saves a few kids from diseases, but it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem which is [gestures vaguely at whatever bit of one’s ideology explains why bad things happen].”
I suggest that this might be an oversimplification of the responses he's gotten, but then again people that ridiculous exist everywhere on social media, so it's plausible. To anyone who doesn't hold that false dichotomy, this article reads a bit strange. For one thing, it doesn't argue against addressing root causes, despite being titled Against Addressing Root Causes. It argues that root causes aren't the only thing worth addressing. Which is true! We all love mosquito nets and smallpox being extinct.
But then effective altruism keeps coming up:
People also make the same objection to effective altruism.
This is certainly how it’s treated among left-wing academics. Such people tend to criticize effective altruism on the grounds that it doesn’t address the capitalist system that causes all the bad things in the world; we know that capitalism causes all the world’s ills because it’s asserted by pompous, [insults continue for three lines]
And I am certain that this is an oversimplification of the case against effective altruism. It's also stripped of context: we're no longer talking specifically about mosquito nets or contraception or smallpox vaccines, we're just talking generally about anything effective altruism is concerned with. There are probably some issues where this is a valid criticism! Some things do need the root causes addressed.
I guess my point is don't take typify your critics by your stupidest social media replies.
Uh no, we solved the root cause of starvation with population control - contraceptives. That anchored the goalposts in place, so that we could kick our institutions through them permanently. The...
The root cause of starvation is the evolutionary competition for resources. But we didn’t have to solve that to end most starvation. All we had to do was build robust institutions to grow more food!
Uh no, we solved the root cause of starvation with population control - contraceptives. That anchored the goalposts in place, so that we could kick our institutions through them permanently.
The point of the "root cause" is to identify the specific amplifiers and exponents to turn a hard problem into an easy problem. If turning the hard problem into an easy problem is itself a harder problem than just solving the original hard problem, then it's not "the root cause", it's just the world we live in. Otherwise, we could say "the root cause of everything is that we haven't built am AGI yet!".
Smallpox is an interesting example, in that every time you reduce the number of smallpox cases, you reduce the size of the problem - like any other exponential growth. Sure, poverty is an amplifier, but so is directly preventing the spread of the disease! It makes future action exponentially easier! How is it not a root cause?
(I reposted my comment, since I edited it and it got a lot longer)
I agree with the basic argument and I appreciate that it's made clearly. I don't agree that it fundamentally supports effective altruism, the author is eager to make that argument. And that leads into, here and in a few of the author's other posts - I can't say that I'm impressed with someone who takes down foolish arguments by inventing hateable left-wing characters to propose them.
The foolish argument here is that individual harms caused by systemic problems require systemic solutions (like, to adopt the framing, abolishing capitalism totally) so individual solutions are a waste of time and money. Obviously that's foolish, as the author argues, in that addressing individual harms is a good thing to do in and of itself and it would be cruel to ignore those harms when they're what you really want to address in tackling a systemic problem, anyway.
But I also reject the framing that to criticise inaction against systemic problems ("root causes" in this framing) is to callously permit the ongoing harm. You could only think such a thing if you consider systemic problems to be unsolvable monoliths on which society is built, making trying to solve them pointless and futile. The way the author contrasts the problems caused as a natural result of capitalism with the problems (malaria and smallpox) caused by, uh, literal natural selection is telling about this view. It is foundationally conservative.
You can give people malaria nets, and when that stops them from catching malaria and dying, that's laudable. You can also change the way our societies and economies, our international distribution of resources, is structured so that they never needed you to buy the net for them in the first place. I dare say that would be even better. It would take a lot of hard, concerted effort, but hey, so does developing a vaccine to eradicate the smallpox virus with. The author is however very happy to convince his readers that working towards such large structural changes is not only misguided but foolish and embarrassing, the preserve of ignorant elites. Like I said - I'm not impressed.
To build on the author's metaphor...most of us just want the world to stop selling metaphorical 'smallpox itch ointment' in place of making vaccines. Specifically would like the people selling said ointment to stop spreading propaganda about how harmful vaccines are.
I thought I would mostly agree with you in principle until that last sentence. Changing society to solve the root cause here is at the very least an order of magnitude more complex than developing a smallpox vaccine. Anybody who claims otherwise has no idea how incredibly difficult it is to predict and work with truly complex systems. The first problem here is that in similar situations it's usually almost impossible to even define a clear single goal and the concrete steps to reach it - which is part of the point of this article.
Most people do not understand complex systems, that's normal and expected, it's just that the "if we just worked together towards xxxx..." is usually not a result of some wrong decision based on an illusion that we cannot solve it, so we don't even try, most of the time it truly is a tremendously difficult problem.
That's a good point. "Root-causeism" can be counterproductive. Sometimes, when I read things like "but it's a band-aid solution!", I think to myself that band-aids are actually pretty useful. Additionally, this is often not a binary choice. You can give a band-aid while a more substantial solution is being developed. I am unconvinced that, in most cases, the existence of a temporary solution prevents the existence of a permanent one. Many permanent solutions are so incredibly difficult that it is impossible to know if they are even possible, and when they are possible, it is very hard to predict when they will be viable. And some are possible and theoretically viable, but only in a perfect-world scenario.
The last two paragraphs of this article are so aggressive that I wish the author had stopped before that. They had made good points. I don't see any benefit in ending with a weirdly specific rant that feels like a call for confrontation. It was out of place like they accidentally pasted part of another article. They call their opposers "smug", but end by stating that those who disagree with them are probably "irrational". That's pretty smug too. It is usually enough to just say someone's "wrong".
Well, I actually like this reasoning a lot. It’s a refreshing take and I find myself agreeing, unexpectedly perhaps.
Especially this bit resonated with me:
I have previously read about the mind-boggling undertaking this was, and the effort that it took. And with the context of this article, yes, of course, it was never about tackling the root cause of smallpox… but it was wildly successful nonetheless.
It's so weird to me that we've decided that killing the organism that literally creates the disease is somehow not addressing the root cause of the disease — as if simply being poor causes people to spontaneously develop AIDS or malaria out of nowhere.
the alleged root cause is that, due to the nature of biology, there will always be viruses; if you just eradicate one virus without changing the nature of biology, you're not getting at the root of the problem, because there will be more viruses
i think the author's main point with this is that you can always push the concept of a root cause one level deeper, so it's not really useful to make a binary split of root cause/symptom; instead we should just consider the magnitude of the impact of whatever we do
It's true that we will never fully vanquish communicable disease, but we will also never fully vanquish poverty; for as long as humanity exists, we will have to be vigilant. I think is is misguided, and maybe even actively harmful, to treat poverty as temporary concern that we can some day ignore.
My complaint is not about that, however. It's about the evolution of the term "root cause" into such a vague and unintuitive definition. It feels increasingly like people can categorize anything into root causes and non-root causes to serve their pet policy preferences.
Well, poverty and lack of education are associated with contracting both of those diseases. For malaria, sleeping with a mosquito net and other repellents is a very effective preventative. It's separate from the effort to make sterile mosquitos to eradicate malaria from the world. For HIV and AIDS, convincing people to use condoms and clean needles is much easier than creating a vaccine.
Treating and eradicating diseases are distinct but related endeavours.
I agree; we need a multi-pronged approach — a combination of preventatives, cures, and treatments.
But I strongly dislike the modern tendency to arbitrarily label some things a root causes and other things not a root cause to justify how we spend resources. It's basing policy decisions on rhetorical persuasion rather than real-world outcomes.
I think the focus on root-causes comes from people trying to reduce complexity and boil down the question of "what needs to be done" to a singular answer. People look at the question in terms of there being a set of competing ideas that steal resources from one another. So in their mind, the optimal way to proceed is to try and logically deduce the one best option and consolidate all resources and efforts around that one best option for maximum efficiency.
Theres two main reasons I would disagree with this sentiment. The first is that peoples efforts and passions are not fungible commodities. If someone is working for Project Vesta because they are passionate about chemistry and want to address climate change, and then you manage to convince them that carbon capture is a waste of time, they arent necessarily just going to default to doing whatever alternative you suggest. Just because you manage to take resources away from carbon capture they are not guaranteed to go toward electing progressive representatives or whatever you would rather be focusing on. Maybe once they decide that the contribution they were interested in making is off the table, they just lose interest altogether.
The other reason is that eventually you probably still are going to need to deal with the immediate symptoms at some point. If you did succeed at addressing whatever the root cause you have identified, someone will still need to do the work of changing the derivative causes of the problem that more directly cause the thing you are trying to fix. So its not really wasted effort to have people working on those derivative issues sooner rather than later. Even if you do upend capitalism or whatever it is, theres already lots of carbon in the atmosphere and there are certain unavoidable emissions that will continue to exist, so carbon capture might still be useful.
This article was clearly written for a very specific type of person that subscribes to to false dichotomy that one can't reduce harm AND attack root causes simultaneously. The author helplfully tells us exactly what group he feels fit this description:
I suggest that this might be an oversimplification of the responses he's gotten, but then again people that ridiculous exist everywhere on social media, so it's plausible. To anyone who doesn't hold that false dichotomy, this article reads a bit strange. For one thing, it doesn't argue against addressing root causes, despite being titled Against Addressing Root Causes. It argues that root causes aren't the only thing worth addressing. Which is true! We all love mosquito nets and smallpox being extinct.
But then effective altruism keeps coming up:
And I am certain that this is an oversimplification of the case against effective altruism. It's also stripped of context: we're no longer talking specifically about mosquito nets or contraception or smallpox vaccines, we're just talking generally about anything effective altruism is concerned with. There are probably some issues where this is a valid criticism! Some things do need the root causes addressed.
I guess my point is don't take typify your critics by your stupidest social media replies.
It certainly gave me some pause while I was reading, but I don't think it outweighs the value of the main argument, at least in this case.
Uh no, we solved the root cause of starvation with population control - contraceptives. That anchored the goalposts in place, so that we could kick our institutions through them permanently.
The point of the "root cause" is to identify the specific amplifiers and exponents to turn a hard problem into an easy problem. If turning the hard problem into an easy problem is itself a harder problem than just solving the original hard problem, then it's not "the root cause", it's just the world we live in. Otherwise, we could say "the root cause of everything is that we haven't built am AGI yet!".
Smallpox is an interesting example, in that every time you reduce the number of smallpox cases, you reduce the size of the problem - like any other exponential growth. Sure, poverty is an amplifier, but so is directly preventing the spread of the disease! It makes future action exponentially easier! How is it not a root cause?