I think a bigger issue than theoretical altruism, is the issue of altruism at the point of a gun. I don't like using the bifurcated version of the political spectrum here but for the sake of the thing:
Are the left or the right more likely to raise taxes on individuals for whom that would be a bigger burden than on themselves?
Are the left or the right more likely to raise taxes on corporations because they think they are all rich and don't deserve the money they make and therefore 'the state' has the right to it more than those who earn it do?
Are the left or the right more likely to create an environment that supports, or at least doesn't overburden small businesses which create so much value for communities, large and small?
Are the left or the right more likely to support legislation that benefits out of state corporations at the expense of smaller local businesses?
Are the left or the right more likely to take away rights and then set up legislation that makes it almost impossible for them to be given back by a future version of the legislature?
Are the left or the right more likely to reform corrupt government institutions which cause so much harm and chew up so much local cash and provide a deeply degenerate version of the product they purport to produce or provide (thinking education in my town)?
Are the left or the right more likely to give substantive tax relief to families?
Are the left or the right more likely to leave the real altruistic giving to the individual rather than the hand that holds the power of life or death over your freedom and property?
I know the answer for my area, and these things are much more important, and impact the families and institutions in my neck of the woods MUCH more powerfully than the theoretical altruism of people willing to take the time to do a survey.
My biggest problem here is in accepting donation as a stand-in for impartial altruism, given the frequent -- almost to the point of cliche -- type of claim associated with the political right, that free money encourages counterproductive habits which wreck communities. A utilitarian who sincerely held that belief might very well personally sacrifice in order to *reduce* the scope of certain common human-to-human charities.
There are numerous different forms of charity. It is of course *possible* that a given individual believes that literally all of them- no matter how constructed- even if it is just loaning clothes to people going to job interviews or paying for tutoring for kids- are counterproductive. However if someone says they believe this, I'd be much more inclined to say they're rationalising to get the result they want. At a certain point, you can't keep taking people at their word.
That assumes people are knowledgeable about a variety of charities or that trustworthy charities that match their altruistic interests even exist. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised if losing faith in one or more specific charities reduces people's motivation to research further.
> People who disliked or were neutral on bears were 50% more likely not to give at least 25 dollars than those who liked them. This effect was significant P = 0.0094, though nowhere near as strong as the political effects. This may have been in part because people who like bears are more leftwing?
Could this be evidence of the fact that more people who read your blog gave the survey therefore skewing it? Also the fact that there were more left wing people than right wing in your survey...
Regarding mistake/conflict theory, it seems to me this result quite strongly supports the "Mistake" theory - a large majority of people on both the left and right are at least moderately altruistic - so probably the difference is not mostly conflicting interests.
That said Scott's EA affiliation may make your sample unusually altruistic, so this may not generalise.
I suspect you are directionally right, but I also think that the effect size was likely extremely exaggerated because of your sample. Scott has a lot of Effective Altruism readers. An EA person would almost definitionally choose the generous option, since it’s clearly very effective and they could even use a portion of the donation to replace money they were planning on donating, if they wanted to. EAs also screw fairly left, and I suspect that was a major cofounder.
That said, I do think the reason EAs skew left is likely the reason you are suggesting. You are touching on an interesting truth, but I suspect that if you ran the same experiment on a general population with a minuscule number of EAs, your results would be less pronounced.
I think this is the problem one always runs into which is that the sampled population is not the American population. Same issue with studies of psychology undergraduates. There is a way to cross check it, but it would cost about 500 dollars. We would need to put the same set of questions to a pollfish sample
Did any of the questions about political opinion correlate with a bigger difference in the participant's self-assessed position on the political spectrum? I would guess that some of the questions would be more politically telling than others.
I suspect the overall charitableness reflected here is higher than you'd get in other contexts due to the endowment effect. This is tested in practice by donation-matching schemes; if your employer promises to match your donations to charity 2:1, that's effectively the same as this test, but I'd expect most people to donate nothing in response to such an offer.
Don't feel like you have to investigate such a specific hypothesis, but I'm a little curious: I predict that the people I referred from Twitter were overall more charitable than the ones I referred from Facebook. IDK how many of them mentioned the exact person and site they came from though, nor if there were enough from me to be significant.
(Specifically I think most of my Twitter followers lean towards the rationalist/EA archetype, whereas most of my friends on Facebook are people from the MTG community, which still leans strongly left-wing, but of a more performative and less charitable bent. I tried running a charity Magic judge conference once and wow did people get mad at me. On the other hand a lot of the Twitter people probably came from the viral "good egg" post, so maybe most of them weren't my personal followers.)
It occurs to me that you could have asked people for their preferred charity in the form, and then you could have analyzed the specific charities chosen for things like religion and EA-ness.
Could you post the questions somewhere? I might have other ideas for things to test, but now that the form is closed I have no way of knowing what the questions were.
Because almost all of the responses were the maximum or minimum, so very little was lost relative to the gain in interpretability from making it categorical. The slight loss of power wasn't an issue because of the sample size was massive.
Also, I'm open to being convinced, but there are a lot of unexplained leaps here. On what possible basis do you assert that a 4 is probably closer to a 0 than to a 6??? Also, you say
"A single-question measure of left-right orientation leaves much to be desired, and generosity also cannot be reliably assessed with a single data point. Without these measurement unreliabilities, the real relationship is likely to be stronger."
Why? Why is it likely to be stronger? Is this supposed to be obvious? Or is it merely a guess?
>Nothing depends upon my assessment that a four is probably closer to a zero than a six except one basis to treat the data categorically. In doing so we reduce the likelihood of getting a positive result, but increase the interpretability. Anyone who wants to setup an ordinal regression is welcome, but it will if anything make the result larger.
>It's not certain it would be stronger, which is why nothing depends on it in the argument,
and additionally I only talk of what is likely. However the general result that unreliability decreases relationships is well understood in the field and not really in dispute
(I don't know why you imagined reddit rather than substack...)
To be clear, I mean my first point, and I'm specifically interested in separating feminist-leaning leftists from utilitarian-leaning leftists, and libertarian-leaning rightists from Christian-leaning rightists (for the latter I don't mean separating "conservatives who are religious" from "conservatives who aren't religious", I mean separating those whose conservatism is Christian-inspired, regardless of whether they believe in God themselves).
This could be done with both "how favourable are you to feminism/utilitarianism/libertarians/Christianity" questions and with a question that cleaves the two. Like "if fetal self-awarwness were proven to exist, would you unhesitantly support banning almost all abortions at that point?" for the first, and pretty much any traditional moral regulation (prostitution, euthanasia etc) for the second.
If those are controlled for sufficiently and the results show feminists more selfless than Christians, I'll be amazed and I'll update in favour of your model. Until then I remain sceptical, given the biased sample.
So we can look at Christians fairly easily in the sample, they're no more or less generous than non-Christians. We can also look at non-libertarians by filtering for people who think the rich should pay more tax. Right-wingers who think the rich should pay more tax (n=65) are actually more likely to be ungenerous in our sample, with 40% giving less than 25 dollars.
We can exclude utilitarianism in the sample as the driver of leftwing beneficence by only looking at people who wanted didn't want to switch the trolley. While switchers aren't necessarily utilitarian, non-switchers are (nearly) necessarily not utilitarian.
33 leftwing non-switchers were generous
8 were ungenerous
16 right-wing non-switchers were generous
16 were ungenerous
So it looks like utilitarianism won't explain the difference.
The feminist angle is more difficult to unpack and I don't have any answers for you here. Is our sample so massively different from the mainstream because of a relative absence of feminism so as to reverse a 2.8 to 1 odds ratio? Maybe, but I'm doubtful. This is always a problem in anything less than full population sampling.
1. I'm probably being confusing in my terminology, but what I mean by "Christians" in this context is "conservatives whose conservative ideology is based on Christianity". Actually being a practicing Christian is not sufficient for this, or arguably even necessary (c.f. atheists who think traditional Christian morality is the best ethical system). A libertarian or populist can be a Christian, go to church etc, without building their political philosophy upon it. And at the very least, let's please separate right- and left-wing Christians, for whom the word means something very different, and since the right/left distinction is the entire point of the survey.
2. Fair point about non-libertarian rightists. I wonder what would explain that. My guess is that rightists who think the rich should pay more tax are coded as "populist right", and this group both feels socially marginalised (thus more likely to think they need the money) and has much lower levels of social trust (thus not trusting perhaps any charity to spend money wisely or honestly).
3. I appreciate the breakdown, but there are too many variables here. Are you going to release the anonymised data?
I'd like to see the correlations between religion, trolley-switching, and different political positions at least. But based only on what you've provided, I think right-wing non-switchers are likely to be libertarian, and them being less generous fits my prediction. But left-wing non-switchers being more generous doesn't, so I'll update slightly on that.
4. "Is our sample so massively different from the mainstream because of a relative absence of feminism so as to reverse a 2.8 to 1 odds ratio?"
It would certainly seem so. On the last ACX survey, 18.6% of readers are favourable to the social justice movement (i.e. wokeness) and 74.9% are favourable to abortion. That looks like three times as many non-feminist progressives as feminist ones, on a face-value reading. Abortion could be libertarian as well I guess, but similar results if you use strong action on global warming (70.1%) or unfavourability towards Trump (88.1%) to represent progressivism instead.
And of course ACX is heavy on EAs, who are overwhemingly utilitarian and your very small sample of non-switchers reflects that.
I think this is the problem one always runs into which is that the sampled population is not the American population. Same issue with studies of psychology undergraduates. There is a way to cross check it, but it would cost about 500 dollars. We would need to put the same set of questions to a pollfish sample
As someone who would answer the political orientation question as either a zero or a four, depending on phrasing and mood, I naturally find your hypothesis flattering.
There's a perfect data set in existence, and it's possible that the relevant questions have already been asked - but you'll never be able to access it.
In Australia all blood and plasma donations are voluntary, ie altruistic. Approximately two percent of the population donate regularly I believe. This isn't nearly as significant an act as a kidney donation, it's an hour or so out of your time with some mild discomfort, every three months. The service is run by the Australian Red Cross, one of our largest charities, who undoubtedly carry out market research on their donor base and motivations. While we never ask political affiliations in Australia, especially for large quantitative research, qualitative small group research does look at this sometimes.
Anyway, as I sit tending my fire on this cool autumn night, I just thought that that would be a perfect dataset, that no one can use.
I think a bigger issue than theoretical altruism, is the issue of altruism at the point of a gun. I don't like using the bifurcated version of the political spectrum here but for the sake of the thing:
Are the left or the right more likely to raise taxes on individuals for whom that would be a bigger burden than on themselves?
Are the left or the right more likely to raise taxes on corporations because they think they are all rich and don't deserve the money they make and therefore 'the state' has the right to it more than those who earn it do?
Are the left or the right more likely to create an environment that supports, or at least doesn't overburden small businesses which create so much value for communities, large and small?
Are the left or the right more likely to support legislation that benefits out of state corporations at the expense of smaller local businesses?
Are the left or the right more likely to take away rights and then set up legislation that makes it almost impossible for them to be given back by a future version of the legislature?
Are the left or the right more likely to reform corrupt government institutions which cause so much harm and chew up so much local cash and provide a deeply degenerate version of the product they purport to produce or provide (thinking education in my town)?
Are the left or the right more likely to give substantive tax relief to families?
Are the left or the right more likely to leave the real altruistic giving to the individual rather than the hand that holds the power of life or death over your freedom and property?
I know the answer for my area, and these things are much more important, and impact the families and institutions in my neck of the woods MUCH more powerfully than the theoretical altruism of people willing to take the time to do a survey.
My biggest problem here is in accepting donation as a stand-in for impartial altruism, given the frequent -- almost to the point of cliche -- type of claim associated with the political right, that free money encourages counterproductive habits which wreck communities. A utilitarian who sincerely held that belief might very well personally sacrifice in order to *reduce* the scope of certain common human-to-human charities.
There are numerous different forms of charity. It is of course *possible* that a given individual believes that literally all of them- no matter how constructed- even if it is just loaning clothes to people going to job interviews or paying for tutoring for kids- are counterproductive. However if someone says they believe this, I'd be much more inclined to say they're rationalising to get the result they want. At a certain point, you can't keep taking people at their word.
That assumes people are knowledgeable about a variety of charities or that trustworthy charities that match their altruistic interests even exist. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised if losing faith in one or more specific charities reduces people's motivation to research further.
> People who disliked or were neutral on bears were 50% more likely not to give at least 25 dollars than those who liked them. This effect was significant P = 0.0094, though nowhere near as strong as the political effects. This may have been in part because people who like bears are more leftwing?
Could this be evidence of the fact that more people who read your blog gave the survey therefore skewing it? Also the fact that there were more left wing people than right wing in your survey...
Regarding mistake/conflict theory, it seems to me this result quite strongly supports the "Mistake" theory - a large majority of people on both the left and right are at least moderately altruistic - so probably the difference is not mostly conflicting interests.
That said Scott's EA affiliation may make your sample unusually altruistic, so this may not generalise.
I suspect you are directionally right, but I also think that the effect size was likely extremely exaggerated because of your sample. Scott has a lot of Effective Altruism readers. An EA person would almost definitionally choose the generous option, since it’s clearly very effective and they could even use a portion of the donation to replace money they were planning on donating, if they wanted to. EAs also screw fairly left, and I suspect that was a major cofounder.
That said, I do think the reason EAs skew left is likely the reason you are suggesting. You are touching on an interesting truth, but I suspect that if you ran the same experiment on a general population with a minuscule number of EAs, your results would be less pronounced.
Yeah, to crosspost a comment
I think this is the problem one always runs into which is that the sampled population is not the American population. Same issue with studies of psychology undergraduates. There is a way to cross check it, but it would cost about 500 dollars. We would need to put the same set of questions to a pollfish sample
Did any of the questions about political opinion correlate with a bigger difference in the participant's self-assessed position on the political spectrum? I would guess that some of the questions would be more politically telling than others.
I already donate to charity, I don't need you to do it for me! :)
I suspect the overall charitableness reflected here is higher than you'd get in other contexts due to the endowment effect. This is tested in practice by donation-matching schemes; if your employer promises to match your donations to charity 2:1, that's effectively the same as this test, but I'd expect most people to donate nothing in response to such an offer.
Don't feel like you have to investigate such a specific hypothesis, but I'm a little curious: I predict that the people I referred from Twitter were overall more charitable than the ones I referred from Facebook. IDK how many of them mentioned the exact person and site they came from though, nor if there were enough from me to be significant.
(Specifically I think most of my Twitter followers lean towards the rationalist/EA archetype, whereas most of my friends on Facebook are people from the MTG community, which still leans strongly left-wing, but of a more performative and less charitable bent. I tried running a charity Magic judge conference once and wow did people get mad at me. On the other hand a lot of the Twitter people probably came from the viral "good egg" post, so maybe most of them weren't my personal followers.)
It occurs to me that you could have asked people for their preferred charity in the form, and then you could have analyzed the specific charities chosen for things like religion and EA-ness.
Could you post the questions somewhere? I might have other ideas for things to test, but now that the form is closed I have no way of knowing what the questions were.
Can you post a link to the questions again? You said you would investigate hypotheses we post but I don't recall all the questions.
I am not sure how to do that? Scott seems to manage some how but I'm not sure how to set it up in Google forms.
Why would you convert a useful integer variable - amount donated - to a categorical variable?
Because almost all of the responses were the maximum or minimum, so very little was lost relative to the gain in interpretability from making it categorical. The slight loss of power wasn't an issue because of the sample size was massive.
Also, I'm open to being convinced, but there are a lot of unexplained leaps here. On what possible basis do you assert that a 4 is probably closer to a 0 than to a 6??? Also, you say
"A single-question measure of left-right orientation leaves much to be desired, and generosity also cannot be reliably assessed with a single data point. Without these measurement unreliabilities, the real relationship is likely to be stronger."
Why? Why is it likely to be stronger? Is this supposed to be obvious? Or is it merely a guess?
>Nothing depends upon my assessment that a four is probably closer to a zero than a six except one basis to treat the data categorically. In doing so we reduce the likelihood of getting a positive result, but increase the interpretability. Anyone who wants to setup an ordinal regression is welcome, but it will if anything make the result larger.
>It's not certain it would be stronger, which is why nothing depends on it in the argument,
and additionally I only talk of what is likely. However the general result that unreliability decreases relationships is well understood in the field and not really in dispute
"I will investigate any hypotheses requested in the comments"
Did you read my comment on your first analysis (of the ACX survey) and make any attempt to control for those differences?
Which comment here is yours? https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1c97ltr/altruistic_kidney_donation_initiators_are_less/
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/altruistic-kidney-donation-initiators/comment/54523860
(I don't know why you imagined reddit rather than substack...)
To be clear, I mean my first point, and I'm specifically interested in separating feminist-leaning leftists from utilitarian-leaning leftists, and libertarian-leaning rightists from Christian-leaning rightists (for the latter I don't mean separating "conservatives who are religious" from "conservatives who aren't religious", I mean separating those whose conservatism is Christian-inspired, regardless of whether they believe in God themselves).
This could be done with both "how favourable are you to feminism/utilitarianism/libertarians/Christianity" questions and with a question that cleaves the two. Like "if fetal self-awarwness were proven to exist, would you unhesitantly support banning almost all abortions at that point?" for the first, and pretty much any traditional moral regulation (prostitution, euthanasia etc) for the second.
If those are controlled for sufficiently and the results show feminists more selfless than Christians, I'll be amazed and I'll update in favour of your model. Until then I remain sceptical, given the biased sample.
So we can look at Christians fairly easily in the sample, they're no more or less generous than non-Christians. We can also look at non-libertarians by filtering for people who think the rich should pay more tax. Right-wingers who think the rich should pay more tax (n=65) are actually more likely to be ungenerous in our sample, with 40% giving less than 25 dollars.
We can exclude utilitarianism in the sample as the driver of leftwing beneficence by only looking at people who wanted didn't want to switch the trolley. While switchers aren't necessarily utilitarian, non-switchers are (nearly) necessarily not utilitarian.
33 leftwing non-switchers were generous
8 were ungenerous
16 right-wing non-switchers were generous
16 were ungenerous
So it looks like utilitarianism won't explain the difference.
The feminist angle is more difficult to unpack and I don't have any answers for you here. Is our sample so massively different from the mainstream because of a relative absence of feminism so as to reverse a 2.8 to 1 odds ratio? Maybe, but I'm doubtful. This is always a problem in anything less than full population sampling.
Thanks for the detailed response. A few issues.
1. I'm probably being confusing in my terminology, but what I mean by "Christians" in this context is "conservatives whose conservative ideology is based on Christianity". Actually being a practicing Christian is not sufficient for this, or arguably even necessary (c.f. atheists who think traditional Christian morality is the best ethical system). A libertarian or populist can be a Christian, go to church etc, without building their political philosophy upon it. And at the very least, let's please separate right- and left-wing Christians, for whom the word means something very different, and since the right/left distinction is the entire point of the survey.
2. Fair point about non-libertarian rightists. I wonder what would explain that. My guess is that rightists who think the rich should pay more tax are coded as "populist right", and this group both feels socially marginalised (thus more likely to think they need the money) and has much lower levels of social trust (thus not trusting perhaps any charity to spend money wisely or honestly).
3. I appreciate the breakdown, but there are too many variables here. Are you going to release the anonymised data?
I'd like to see the correlations between religion, trolley-switching, and different political positions at least. But based only on what you've provided, I think right-wing non-switchers are likely to be libertarian, and them being less generous fits my prediction. But left-wing non-switchers being more generous doesn't, so I'll update slightly on that.
4. "Is our sample so massively different from the mainstream because of a relative absence of feminism so as to reverse a 2.8 to 1 odds ratio?"
It would certainly seem so. On the last ACX survey, 18.6% of readers are favourable to the social justice movement (i.e. wokeness) and 74.9% are favourable to abortion. That looks like three times as many non-feminist progressives as feminist ones, on a face-value reading. Abortion could be libertarian as well I guess, but similar results if you use strong action on global warming (70.1%) or unfavourability towards Trump (88.1%) to represent progressivism instead.
And of course ACX is heavy on EAs, who are overwhemingly utilitarian and your very small sample of non-switchers reflects that.
I think this is the problem one always runs into which is that the sampled population is not the American population. Same issue with studies of psychology undergraduates. There is a way to cross check it, but it would cost about 500 dollars. We would need to put the same set of questions to a pollfish sample
As someone who would answer the political orientation question as either a zero or a four, depending on phrasing and mood, I naturally find your hypothesis flattering.
There's a perfect data set in existence, and it's possible that the relevant questions have already been asked - but you'll never be able to access it.
In Australia all blood and plasma donations are voluntary, ie altruistic. Approximately two percent of the population donate regularly I believe. This isn't nearly as significant an act as a kidney donation, it's an hour or so out of your time with some mild discomfort, every three months. The service is run by the Australian Red Cross, one of our largest charities, who undoubtedly carry out market research on their donor base and motivations. While we never ask political affiliations in Australia, especially for large quantitative research, qualitative small group research does look at this sometimes.
Anyway, as I sit tending my fire on this cool autumn night, I just thought that that would be a perfect dataset, that no one can use.
Oh and I could get you in touch with lots of people who necked pills for decades, but they were all raging lefties before they started!