Giving Game 2020 results

This semester, I got my 'Effective Altruism' class to decide how to allocate $5000 in donations between the four EA funds. (Half the funds were provided by UM Ethics Programs, as the result of an internal grant request I submitted for this purpose. The other half were matching funds from my personal charitable budget.)  Our resulting breakdown was as follows:

* Global Health & Development: $2500

* Animal Welfare: $700

* Long-Term Future: $1450

* Effective Altruism Meta: $350

Giving Game 2017 results

This past week I ran a 'Giving Game' for my Effective Altruism class, letting each student decide (after class discussion) how to allocate £100 of my charitable budget for the year.  There was just one restriction: if they wanted to pick something other than one of the four EA Funds options (which have expert managers directing funds in the fields of "global health & development", "animal welfare", "long-term future", and "EA community"), they had to convince at least one other classmate to join them.  In the first seminar group, half the class ended up choosing alternative options; in the second, all stuck with the EA funds.  The end result was a bit more varied and (less conservative) than the first time I tried this, so that was interesting to see.  (I think it helped both to allow individual discretion rather than requiring group consensus decisions, and also to have the new "EA funds" available to enable responsibly contributing to a cause area without having to identify or select particular outstanding organizations within the area.  You can now just make the value judgment, and defer to trusted experts on the empirical details.)

Teaching Effective Altruism

A few people have asked for my EA syllabus from last term, so I thought I'd share it here with some general reflections.

It was a fun class to teach, but I'd do things a bit differently the next time around.  A big one is just the nature of the teaching: This one was organized as a very "student-led" module, all seminar discussions and no lectures.  While the students really enjoyed the discussions, they seemed a bit complacent in places (esp. regarding their dismissals of expected value / global catastrophic risks and of the significance of non-human animal interests), where in a lecture I might have been better able to develop these challenges in greater depth.

Anyway, here is the syllabus for the 9-week class, using MacAskill's Doing Good Better as the main textbook, with some supplementary readings...

Student Spotlight: Intrinsically Irrational Instrumental Desires

I had always assumed that only ultimate ends, or telic / final / non-instrumental desires, could be intrinsically irrational.  (Think Future Tuesday Indifference.)  Instrumental desires, by contrast, may happen to be irrational if based on a false and irrational means-end belief, but then the problem is extrinsic to the desire itself -- the problem instead lies with the false belief, and one could presumably imagine circumstances in which the means-end belief would be true, thus making the instrumental desire in question a perfectly reasonable way of achieving one's goals.

Or so I assumed. (And I think it's a fairly common assumption.)

University of York undergraduate philosophy student Lorin Thompson (mentioned here with permission) drew my attention to an interesting class of counterexamples.  We can obtain intrinsically irrational instrumental desires if we consider instrumental desires that are essentially self-defeating.  His example is the "desire to think of a number, in order to not think of a number (simultaneously)."  The implicit means-end belief -- that one can achieve avoiding thinking of a number, by means of thinking of a number -- is logically incoherent, and the resulting instrumental desire is thus intrinsically (rather than merely extrinsically) irrational.

It's a cool case!  At the very least, I'll need to re-write my essay question for future years to ask something like whether there are "unworthy" ultimate ends rather than just "intrinsically irrational desires", as it now turns out that even Humean subjectivists should make room for the latter.

Does anyone know whether such cases have been discussed before, or could it potentially be a new contribution to the literature if Lorin were to write up his paper for an academic journal?

My Giving Game results

In my Effective Altruism class this past week I've run a "giving game", getting the students, in small groups, to discuss & decide where to donate £100 of my money.  It was quite interesting.

One potential downside of requiring the decisions to be made by consensus in small groups (of three or four students each) was that this ended up creating a bit of a bias towards conservative / "safe" choices from GiveWell's top charities, rather than more speculative (but potentially high upside) options about which there were disagreements within the group.  For example, one group had members initially supporting animal welfare, climate change mitigation, and criminal justice reform, but since they couldn't resolve these disagreements in the hour allotted for discussion and debate, they ended up agreeing to fund a deworming charity instead.  Another student favoured existential risk reduction, but again could not reach consensus on this within their group.

If I do this again in future years, I might try to think of an alternative way of implementing the giving game to allow the students a bit more free reign. E.g., one option would be to give each student £50 (or whatever) that they can allocate individually, or perhaps with the additional requirement that they must find / convince at least one other student in the class to share their choice of charity (to encourage argument and discussion).  Discussion could then proceed in small groups of rotating membership (rather than having fixed groups as we did this year).  Something I'll think about, anyway.

As for the verdicts, following my students' directions, I have just donated:
* £200 to the Against Malaria Foundation,
* £200 to GiveDirectly,
* £100 to each of SCI and Deworm the World,
* £100 to Project Healthy Children,
* £100 to Cool Earth,
* £100 to Animal Equality, and
* £100 to Basic Needs (an international mental health charity).

Most of these donations got a further 25% boost from UK Gift Aid; for UK taxpayers, donating via the GWWC Trust is very helpful in this respect!

What charities do you consider most effective?  Comments / suggestions welcome!  (I'm quite partial to meta-charities, myself...)

Expected Value without Expecting Value

I'm currently teaching a class on "Effective Altruism" (vaguely related to this old idea, but based around MacAskill's new book).  One of the most interesting and surprising (to me) results so far is that most students really don't accept the idea of expected value.  The vast majority of students would prefer to save 1000 lives for sure, than to have a 10% chance of saving a million lives.  This, even though the latter choice has 100 times the expected value.

Grading with gDocs: Updated

If anyone's interested, I've updated my Grading with Google Docs python scripts to work with the latest gdata library from Google.

So, after setting up the scripts correctly, I can create individualized google docs for each student in my class, just by typing "python CreateDocs.py".  The student is automatically emailed the link to their new google doc, and when the due date for the paper has passed, I can remove student access to the papers while I grade, by simply typing "python RemovePermits.py".  And then, once all the grading is complete, return the papers instantly with "python ReturnDocs.py".

It's pretty neat.  Anyone else tempted to try it?  (Though I'd probably only recommend it if you have at least some background in programming, in case you run into any bugs that I haven't foreseen.)

Syllabus idea: "Making a Difference"

I think a lot of people -- and perhaps especially college undergrads -- want their lives to "make a difference". So I think it'd be a lot of fun to design a practical ethics course around this theme.

Fun / Mind-bending Philosophy?

Helen and I have been thinking we'd like to put together a syllabus for an undergrad course that isn't bound by any unifying theme or topical focus, but each week simply assigns an awesomely fun paper / topic in philosophy to discuss. We want papers/topics that are fun to read, and sure to stimulate vibrant discussion -- the kind where you end up sticking around talking long after class has "officially" ended. (I have a penchant for "mind-benders", but other fun and gripping topics are also fair game.)

Some possibilities we've come up with so far include: Dennett's "Where am I?", Parfit on split-brains and fission, something on time travel (preferably including Heinlein's short story, "—All You Zombies—"), something questioning the passage of time, maybe some classic phil mind thought experiments like the Chinese Room and/or zombies, some fun paradoxes: mere addition, infinite spheres of utility. Maybe some mindbenders like Bostrom's simulation argument, and Matrix-inspired discussions of radical skepticism and whether life in the Matrix is as good as reality. Something on "the meaning of life" (e.g. Camus or Richard Taylor on Sisyphus? Susan Wolf?). Some phil religion would be nice: maybe Sider's "Hell and Vagueness"? The classic problem of evil? (Not so fun, alas, but sure to get students talking, at least.) Something on free will?

Any other suggestions (including readings for suggested topics) welcome... Help us brainstorm!

Grading with Google Docs

I like having students submit their work electronically, rather than dealing with reams of paper. But I don't so much like dealing with weird file formats (e.g. Microsoft's docx, or Apple's extensionless documents), or the bother of downloading and uploading attachments one at a time. Fortunately, I recently came across the perfect technical solution (thanks to Andrew Cullison and Cédric Eyssette): use Google Docs with python scripts to automate the electronic transactions. In this post I'll explain the process step-by-step. It takes a little bit of set-up, but saves a heap of tedium down the line.

Teaching Precepts

I'd be curious to hear from other college teachers what kinds of structured activities they've found to work well for philosophy discussion sections (also called 'precepts' here, or 'tutorials' back home in NZ). The default of whole class discussion is fine as far as it goes, but tends to lead to very imbalanced participation. Occasionally splitting the class up into small groups can help with this, though their assigned task needs to be very clearly defined or there's a risk that they'll just sit there and not know what to do. Let me describe a structure that I found worked really well for my applied ethics class this year -- then I hope others will chip in with their own suggestions.

Philosophical Training

One of my best students recently asked how he could further improve his philosophical work. It's something I occasionally wonder for myself, too. So I thought I'd throw the question out there for the collective wisdom of the Internets to answer: how should one "train" in philosophy?

Most obviously, one can learn from expert feedback on one's written papers. One's instructor may pick up on the main flaws or possible objections that should be addressed, and suggest potential avenues for further developing and extending the core ideas of the paper, which should eventually help one to develop a "sense" of what makes for good philosophy. However, there may be only limited opportunities for obtaining such formal written feedback (since professors are likely busy with their own work, and perhaps reluctant to do anything that feels like additional "grading"), in which case more general, informal discussions -- e.g. in office hours, or by email -- may be more welcome.

More generally, simply doing philosophy -- writing, and arguing with others -- is presumably always good practice. My advice: start a philosophy blog, and use it to (i) practice clearly summarizing any interesting ideas you come across in readings and lectures; and (ii) test out some of your own arguments and ideas. (At least, I find this invaluable. YMMV.)

Then there's the method of simply exposing oneself to a lot of professional-level philosophy: read - or skim - the top journals, attend departmental talks or 'colloquia' by visiting professors, etc. See if you absorb their philosophical skills by osmosis; or, better yet, combine with the previous suggestion to actively engage with the new ideas and methodologies you encounter.

(These procedural questions aside, there's also the question of what philosophical content to focus on. I would strongly advise undergrads, especially, to obtain a broad familiarity with the various sub-fields and methodologies: from ethics to formal logic, and from armchair analyses to more empirically-minded approaches. Further, I think almost any philosopher can benefit from thinking about the connections between their field and others -- e.g. between ethical and epistemological normativity, or between meta-ethics and meta-metaphysics.)

Have I missed anything important? And how would you balance the various recommendations -- is a marginal hour better spent reading more journal articles or developing more of one's own ideas, say?

[Cf. Getting the Most Out of Grad School]

Teaching the Metaphysics-Epistemology distinction

Much philosophical thinking requires a solid grasp of the difference between what's true and what's demonstrable. This doesn't always come naturally to students. (For example, many seem to confuse the questions of whether an argument is sound, and whether it can be shown to be sound.) In such cases, what are the best pedagogical methods an instructor could use to help struggling students acquire the skill of working with this distinction in a philosophically mature way?

I guess that will depend on the nature of their resistance. It could stem from either:
(i) difficulty grasping the objective metaphysical concepts (truth, facts, etc.) as distinct from the more subjective epistemic ones (proof, demonstration, etc.); or
(ii) skepticism as to whether the former could ever matter without the latter.

The first problem seems like it should be easy enough to overcome with a few examples: we can't tell whether there are an odd number of stars in the sky, but there's presumably some fact of the matter nonetheless.

The second is trickier. I guess one way to bring out the importance is to note the important difference between "not certain" and "certainly not". That is, it's one thing to be unsure whether an argument is sound or not (because you can't decisively determine the truth or falsity of the premises), but it's quite another to claim that it is definitely unsound. But we need the metaphysics-epistemology distinction to make sense of this difference. If there's no difference between truth and proof, then one's inability to prove a premise would allow one, absurdly, to infer that it must be false.

A more complicated example is the epistemic externalist's response to radical skepticism. More generally: everyone agrees that if I'm actually deceived by an evil demon then I thereby lack knowledge. So the controversy instead concerns the epistemic status of my beliefs in those cases in which they are true. That is, to properly assess radical skepticism, one must consider a scenario in which the subject's beliefs are true, but where this fact is not absolutely transparent to the subject (since, from her perspective, she can't rule out the possibility of the evil demon). We may find -- especially if we accept an externalist theory of knowledge -- that the subject can count as having knowledge in this scenario after all. That suffices to refute the radical skeptic's claim that knowledge is impossible -- that we lack knowledge even if our beliefs happen to be true. But note that we never could have gotten this far if we didn't take care to distinguish the epistemic and metaphysical aspects of the problem, i.e. the difference between what's "not certain" and what's simply "not".

So that's one example of how it can be philosophically valuable to abstract away to a kind of "God's eye view" whereby we can consider what's true in a scenario independently from the question of what anybody in the scenario can conclusively demonstrate to be true. Can anyone suggest some other (perhaps better) examples of this philosophical method?

Teaching Philosophical Writing

What is the best way to teach students how to write philosophy papers? My current plan is to (i) assign Jim Pryor's guidelines as a prepared reading; (ii) offer a shorter handout highlighting the most important points, which I'll briefly talk through at the start of precept; and then (iii) get them to work through examples of good and bad philosophical writing, perhaps as a small group exercise, noting some of the differences.

Any other suggestions?

Teaching Method: "But how do they know?"

I've previously suggested that schools should focus more on developing cognitive skills rather than the rote memorization of facts. As another aspect of this, we might consider how the facts are taught. Typically they're simply presented as unsupported testimony, ultimately resting on the authority of the teacher or textbook. This is lamentable in two respects: (1) It fosters bad intellectual habits: students should be taught to probe and question, not merely accept assertions at face value. (2) It does little to advance students' understanding of the topic at hand. Rather than baldly reporting the facts as we take them to be, educators should also impart how we came by the knowledge in the first place, and thus how curious students could (at least in principle) test it for themselves.

Situating knowledge in its historical context would give students a greater understanding and appreciation for their disciplines, and for how intellectual progress is made. It is no longer a "black box", as if facts found their way into textbooks by some inexplicable magic. By showing progress and discovery to be an ongoing human endeavour, more students could come to fully realize that this is an endeavour that they could contribute to also. For example: for many school students, the "scientific method" - the way they're taught to do science - consists in memorizing textbooks and rotely performing predefined lab tasks. Sometimes they're told to write up a lab report in terms of "hypothesis testing", but this seems tacky and artificial when it's so divorced from the way that everything else in their science class has been presented. Teaching science as a closed book fails to make clear to young students the vital role waiting for them if they choose to pursue the subject further. (And of course the same could be said of other fields too. A history textbook might be presented without any explanation of where it came from, or how actual historians go about their work.)

A more engaging style of teaching might go something like this: Begin with a problem, and explain why it's important. Brainstorm possible solutions, or ways one might begin to inquire further. (In early sessions, students may have no idea what to say here. But hopefully they would develop the skill after further exposure to this teaching method. If so, that would be a significant educational achievement in itself.) A skilled teacher might be able to subtly guide the class discussion in the right direction, ultimately enabling them to "solve" the problem themselves. In any case, you can offer a basic account of historical methods for resolving it. The crucial point here is that you teach more than just the end result -- the "brute facts" accepted by relevant authorities. You also teach how they know it.

By teaching disciplinary methods to young students, the hope is that, in addition to better understanding the discpline, they will also be better prepared to use the methods themselves. Science classes should teach students how to be scientists, not merely indoctrinate them with what The Scientists have said. Similarly for history, and so on. Of course, part of this has to include a healthy respect for past research, and an adequately comprehensive knowledge of what those findings were, so I'm not advocating a total upheaval here. But it does seems to require an important change in perspective from the pure fact-imparting model of contemporary "schooling".

Categories:

• education

Philosophy Intro Courses

Weatherson had an interesting post a while back on "101 teaching", specifically whether it's preferable to go for breadth or depth of content. I don't have any relevant experience here, besides the classes I've taken as a student, but I'm inclined to think that the ideal undergraduate philosophy programme would offer two compulsory first-year courses (one each semester), one on methodology and the other on problems.

Oddly enough, the best overview of philosophical methods I received was in a linguistics class ("semantics"). It included first-order logic, scopal ambiguity, possible worlds analyses, counterfactuals, referential opacity, the de dicto/de re distinction, etc. Very useful -- and interesting too, if taught in the right way, with fun examples, etc. So I think it'd be great to introduce all that in a standard phil course, along with standard "critical thinking" topics, informal fallacies, and crucial philosophical distinctions like necessary vs sufficient conditions, soundness and validity, truth vs. certainty, and so forth. (I would also include a special section on thought experiments!)

The course could be called The Philosopher's Toolkit, and make use of the book of the same name. The core goal would be to impart to students the conceptual "tools" which can aid their critical thinking generally, and prepare them for academic philosophy in particular. The challenge, of course, is to impart these skills in an engaging way.

My second ideal course, Problems of Philosophy, has two parts. (1) It would begin with a very broad and shallow survey of the major fields, just so that students get a taste of the kinds of questions that are asked (and some of the important arguments), and hopefully perk their interest in the more specialized later-year courses. (2) But it would conclude with a much more in-depth section on a particular topic (I'd choose ethics) with the goals of (i) showing students how philosophy is actually done; (ii) thereby establishing that it's not all just a matter of arbitrary opinion; and (iii) giving students a chance to do some real philosophy for themselves.

I'd also suggest an option course on Philosophy of Life that addresses the sorts of wishy-washy subjects that I've taken to rambling about recently under that category. You know: sexual ethics, existentialism, authenticity, the meaning of life, etc. Students love that stuff, and if you can't find it in a philosophy department, who else is going to offer it? It'd be loads of fun, and potentially very popular (I imagine), even if the more serious professors would scoff. Besides, they are important topics, and philosophers shouldn't feel above discussing important things every now and then. ;-)

Categories:

• education
• academia
• metaphilosophy

Blogging Philosophical Pedagogy

Trent at the newly revived Rochester philosophy blog has a couple of recent posts on pedagogy, describing how he introduces modal operators to students and how to respond to students unimpressed by the constraints of logic (for the latter problem, I recommend Gensler's strategy!). Sharing such pedagogical suggestions strikes me as a really helpful use of blogs. I probably won't be doing much (if any) teaching for another couple of years yet, but I imagine such tips could come in useful, and I find them interesting anyhow. There was once a whole blog (Metatome) dedicated to philosophical pedagogy, but it sadly seems to have died a silent death.

Anyway, I'd just like to invite all the philosophy tutors and lecturers out there to share their tricks of the trade. Feel free to post them in comments here, or on your own blog, or try to bring Metatome back to life...

BTW, one other neat example I can point to is Uriah's old post on outfoxing plagiarists. Very clever.

Categories:

• education
• philosophy
• blogging

Teaching Kids Philosophy

I recently volunteered for a mentoring program which paired me up with a gifted 10-year old who is interested in philosophy. The idea is that we meet for an hour a week and pursue these interests that he wouldn't be able to learn about in the usual school curriculum. We've just had a couple of sessions so far, and it's been quite fun, just chatting about various philosophical topics. The kid is very intelligent, which certainly helps. Anyway, I was wondering if people have any advice about teaching philosophy to (or, rather, discussing philosophy with) children.

I've found some useful sites already: the Stanford encyclopedia has some interesting background; Philosophy for kids offers some "story" resources one could use as a basis for discussion; and NorthWestern describes some group activities that sound really fun.

But most of this stuff is directed towards classroom or group discussions, and is not always so easy to apply in a 1-on-1 context. I'm not sure that kids have the capacity - or the attention spans - to go into great depth on a philosophical topic. But that doesn't matter so much in groups, because the diversity of voices provides plenty of breadth in its place.

What I really need is a way to keep a topic 'open' and interesting when there's just one student. So far, we tend to exhaust the surface of a topic fairly quickly, but I'm not sure I could go into more detail without confusing or boring the student. As a result, we've just discussed a little bit of a great many topics (e.g. skepticism, ethics, free will, logical paradoxes, whether time began, etc.). But I'm going to run out of topics soon, so really I need some way to be allow him to pursue some of these in more depth. Any ideas?

Ideas for activities would be especially appreciated. Discussions are all well and good, but they can get tiring, and a bit more variety would go down well, I think. Can anyone think of some sort of "project" that the kid might enjoy working on - something that would involve a more in-depth study of a philosophical issue, perhaps, all the while remaining accessible to a 10-year old (bearing in mind that he is exceptionally bright)?

Also, are there any discussion topics you would particularly recommend as being of interest to someone that age? The kid himself expressed some interest in time, and in logical paradoxes (say, I should combine them and discuss time-travel paradoxes - those are always fun!), and he is a huge fan of skepticism. In fact, he's convinced that he doesn't know he has hands -- which is kind of amusing, but I think I probably ought to discuss some responses to skepticism with him. (After all, dogmatic skepticism is no more enlightening than dogmatic anything-else.) It might help if I focused on questions of justification rather than knowledge, to avoid any infallibalist intuitions. And of course we'll need to examine some of his underlying relativistic assumptions (though he may be not quite so bad as most in this respect). Any other suggestions?