How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ingroup Favoritism

Epistemic Status: Fairly Confident.
Implications: Very Uncertain.

Enlightened utilitarianism says we should value the happiness of everyone equally, while selfish ingroup preference says we should act preferentially to favor each other. But, as noted by Eliezer, here, rationalists aren’t so good at this.

Is it a problem that we’re bad at coordination? We are an ingroup, but tend not to act in self-interested ways to promote ourselves (or do so less than many other groups.) This would be an issue if it reduces our overall effectiveness — and I think it might. I see three possibilities;

1. This isn’t a problem in practice because rationalists are actually so much better at everything that favoring them in interactions is already rational, and as people realize this, ingroup solidarity isn’t needed.
2. This isn’t a problem in practice because rationalists are bad enough at actually implementing their claimed utilitarianism that there is sufficient ingroup favoritism. This provides most of the benefits that other groups, like religious groups, get from explicitly promoting ingroup solidarity.
3. This is a problem, because the benefits that groups like religions provide by showing ingroup favoritism are important, and are lacking in the rationalist community.

I strongly suspect the third option is the correct one.

Why?

There are some solid arguments that in-group favoritism is beneficial, from evolutionary theory, from game-theoric models, and from sociology and social psychology. All of these show the same thing; in-group favoritism is a good strategy.

Nepotism, favoring family, has a justifiably bad reputation. More than that, favoritism is against utilitarian ethics, and we shouldn’t change beliefs to achieve the goal of favoring each other — but there are places where avoiding ingroup preference is suboptimal. If rationalists systematically under-utilize an effective strategy, we should consider changing.

Some methods, of course, will undermine the utilitarian beliefs being promoted. Even so, we should be careful of where we place the Schelling fence. One example where it seems clearly justified is friendship; “people often feel that having friends who are worth more than a thousand distant strangers is a departure from some ideal utilitarianism,” as Katja Grace (Metaeuphoric) noted in “friendship is utilitarian.” But she concludes that, in fact, “caring about each other terminally seems like a pretty good arrangement instrumentally.” (And the fact this needs to be pointed out seems like evidence against possibility 1.)

Beyond the shocking claim that friendship is good, turning utilitarian behavior into a movement seems to have gained much more traction than carefully avoiding ingroup favoritism. I think current behavior is sub-optimal from the perspective of spreading rationality and utilitarian ethics (a net positive,) since the models mentioned above suggest we some degree of ingroup favoritism will help the group. Contra possibility 2, most groups wouldn’t need to be told to be friendly, or to build social capital by favoring those similar to yourself in certain ways. In our pseudo-Rationalia, where people might otherwise try for this “ideal utilitarianism,” it’s probably useful.

How to go about balancing between the extremes of Spock-like anti-favoritism and nepotism without descending into the maelstrom isn’t obvious, and other than publicly noting the problem for others to consider, I don’t have simple answers. So I guess it’s a good thing I can ask my ingroup for ideas.