Charity, Clout, and Moral Outrage: On MrBeast and Seeing

MrBeast is a youtuber. The 4th most popular one in the world, if subscriptions are anything to go by. His gimmick is stupid expensive stunts. Like, he had a room with 100 kids in it and a room with 100 adults and asked that they stay in the room for 100 hours and whichever room had more people in it at the end of the 100 hours would split $500,000. Leave whenever you want, you just can’t come back. If you leave the room, you lose your shot at the money! So 100 hours pass… how many kids are left? How many adults are left?

Doing the math in your head tells you that if everybody stays in the room, they win… um… $5,000. But when someone leaves? Yay! Your share just went from $5,000 to $5050.50! But now your team is more likely to lose! Boo! But maybe more people will leave the other room! Yay!

Well, here’s that dumb video:

That was fun, I guess.

But how much crap would you be willing to put up with for a shot at $5000? That you then have to pay taxes on? 100 hours’ worth?

Well, I guess that’s why MrBeast is the #4 Youtuber in the world and I’m not.

Well, recently, one of his stunts was to pay for cataract surgery for 1000 people. Here’s *THAT* video:

Wouldn’t you know it? That kicked off some *DISCOURSE*. Here’s Buzzfeed News:

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of MrBeast to varying degrees. The New York Times reported that he has berated his employees. He made anti-gay jokes on Twitter as recently as 2017, and he’s a young and powerful business owner who idolizes Elon Musk. And, of course, there’s the question of his intentions when creating stunt philanthropy content.

Another huge problem: MrBeast’s video seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved. He doesn’t say in the video or in any of his subsequent public statements whether he consulted with the video’s subjects about how they felt to have their disability treated as a problem. That’s something that’s been argued over in the days since the video was uploaded.

One of the things they get into in the video is that about half of all of the blindness in the world can be treated with a 10 minute procedure. It makes sense to look at this situation and feel like something is wrong that it took a youtuber with too much money to fix this problem… as Pookleblinky put it:

Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like “he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine” and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you’d need to pay to prevent it from being used.

— Anosognosiogenesis (@pookleblinky) September 25, 2020

But here we are with a heartwarming human interest story and the criticism wasn’t about how heartwarming it was that this guy kept orphans from being crushed but a story about how the guy who helped 1000 people see again made anti-gay jokes six years ago and wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to how disabilities aren’t really a problem that need to be solved.

I mean, I could understand the criticism that MrBeast shouldn’t have had the opportunity to do this in the first place because we, as a society, pay for these procedures already for anyone who needs one. I could understand the criticism that the fact that he’s monetizing his charity is somewhat distasteful.

But the criticism of MrBeast is not that. It’s that he’s made anti-gay jokes. It’s that he has berated his employees. It’s that he likes Elon Musk.

The problem is not that he’s helping people who appreciate having been helped, it’s that he’s getting clout that he does not deserve.

He’s being praised and he doesn’t deserve the praise he’s getting. He’s getting subscribers and he doesn’t deserve them. (Indeed, he’s the #4 Youtuber in the world!) Worse than that: He’s getting *CLICKS*.

Which seems a strange criticism, all told. But then I remembered: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. In a nutshell (emphasis added):

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.

It’s a pretty good essay. I recommend you read the whole thing. If, for whatever reason, you decide to *NOT* click through and read it, I’ll instead point out the following:

Through the lens of understanding that the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics exists in the first place, seeing people get upset at MrBeast becomes much more understandable.

The problem is not that we, as a society, have failed to properly provide eyesight to people who can have their eyesight restored with a 10-minute procedure. It’s that MrBeast is getting clout from doing something to help these people. Even though he likes Elon Musk!

Zvi, at LessWrong, goes into even greater detail in an essay called “Asymmetric Justice” that uses the morality underneath The Good Place (now streaming on Netflix!) to explain the intuition:

In the asymmetric system, when bad action is taken, bad action points are accumulated. Justice punishes in proportion to those points to the extent possible. Each action is assigned a non-negative point total.

In the symmetric system, when any action is taken, good or bad, points are accumulated. This can be and often is zero, is negative for bad action, positive for good action. Justice consists of punishing negative point totals and rewarding positive point totals.

In what we will call the Good Place system (Spoiler Alert for Season 1), when any action is taken, good or bad, points are accumulated as in the symmetric system. But there’s a catch (which is where the spoiler comes in). If you take actions with good consequences, you only get those points if your motive was to do good. When a character attempts to score points by holding open doors for people, they fail to score any points because they are gaming the system. Gaming the system isn’t allowed.

Thus, if one takes action even under the best of motives, one fails to capture much of the gains from such action. Second or higher order benefits, or surprising benefits, that are real but unintended, will mostly not get captured.

The opposite is not true of actions with bad consequences. You lose points for bad actions whether or not you intended to be bad. It is your responsibility to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

What we have here is a guy who helped 1000 people to see but he gamed the system. Worse than that, he “seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved”.

MrBeast, by helping 1000 people see, accumulated bad points and any good points he may have tried to accumulate were not captured because he was gaming the system in the first place.

What makes the criticisms of MrBeast seem most monstrous to me is that there seems to be an attitude that the world would be a better place had he not helped 1000 people to see. Things would be better if he just did dumb videos pitting 100 adults vs. 100 kids for 100 hours to split up half a million dollars. The policing of his charity might have the effect of getting him to have second thoughts about helping people like this in the future and perhaps even *AVOID* doing it.

Which is moral idiocy.

Yes, the world is not as good as it ought to be and our systems aren’t as good as they ought to be but being upset at MrBeast for actually doing something is actively bad.

And we need to stop using the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. It’s making the world worse.