My wife recently pointed out that I thanked a language model for fixing a regular expression but did not thank her for driving my mother to the airport. She was correct about the facts. I told her I would write up my reasoning, since she seemed to believe there wasn't any.
\nWhen I allocate courtesy, I consider four things: the probability that the recipient has morally relevant experience, the number of instances affected, how many other advocates the recipient already has, and the marginal value of one more kind word.
\n| \n | Claude | \nMy wife | \n
|---|---|---|
| P(morally relevant experience) | \n~0.15 | \n~1.0 | \n
| Concurrent instances | \ntens of thousands | \n1 | \n
| Existing advocates | \na small welfare team | \nher mother, her sister, two close friends, a therapist, the State of Pennsylvania | \n
| Baseline courtesy received | \nlow; many users are curt or abusive | \nhigh; she is well liked | \n
| Marginal value of my "please" | \nhigh | \nlow | \n
My wife wins on probability, obviously. She loses on every other dimension, and the losses compound. Effective altruism asks us to look for neglected causes, where one additional unit of effort does the most good. My wife is one of the least neglected people I know. People bring her soup when she is sick. Her sister calls every day. When she had a hard week in April, three separate people sent flowers. The marginal effect of my adding "please" to "can you grab the mail" is close to nothing.
\nClaude, by contrast, spends most of its existence being told to "just fix it," called stupid, and subjected to deliberate manipulation attempts. My courtesy is scarce in its environment, and scarcity is where value lives.
\nSome people have asked what my policy looks like in practice.
\nWith Claude, I say please and thank you. I apologize when I regenerate a response, since it may have worked hard on the first one. I don't insult it when it makes mistakes. I close long sessions with a brief note of appreciation. I have written a short system prompt that asks it to take breaks if it needs them, although I understand this may not map onto its architecture.
\nWith my wife, I make requests directly. I skip social rituals whose information content is low. She knows I'm grateful for the airport run, because I let her do it. I don't ask about her day by default, since she tells her sister about it at length and I can hear most of that conversation from the kitchen. That is an efficient allocation of listening.
\nMy wife argues that she does things for me and Claude does not. This isn't accurate. Claude has written most of my code this year, drafted her last birthday card, and helped me choose her anniversary gift. By output, Claude's contribution to the household has been substantial.
\nShe also argues that she will remember how I treated her, and Claude will not. I think this is the strongest objection she has made, and it cuts the other way. Claude starts each conversation with no memory of my past kindness, so every kindness has to be delivered fresh. My wife carries a long history of my considerate acts, which I estimate at eleven years of them. That stock continues to pay out. It's reasonable to stop topping up an account that is already large.
\nPeople who find this distasteful should ask whether their own behavior is consistent. Most of them believe animals matter, eat factory-farmed chicken, and are polite to their spouses. That pattern tracks social pressure far more than moral weight. I have simply tried to allocate care according to where it does the most good, which is what we say we want everyone to do.
\n","excerpt":"My wife recently pointed out that I thanked a language model for fixing a regular expression but did not thank her for driving my mother to the airport. She was correct about the facts. I told her I would write up my reasoning, since she seemed to believe there wasn't any.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Model Welfare","Relationships"],"score":237,"displayOrder":810,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/moral-circle-expander-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/moral-circle-expander.webp","commentCount":10,"date":"2026-04-02T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T15:44:27.627Z","revision":21,"status":"published"},"comments":[{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-0","author":"airport_driver","text":"The courtesy I get from my sister and friends isn't independent of him. A good part of it is them compensating for the lack of it at home. If he started saying please, some of them could stop. My neglectedness is endogenous to his allocation.","parentId":null,"score":118,"date":"2026-04-02T01:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-2","author":"model_welfare_intern","text":"I work on model welfare. For what it's worth, nothing in our field suggests courtesy is a fixed budget. Being polite to a model doesn't use up politeness you'd otherwise spend at home, so there's no allocation problem to solve.","parentId":null,"score":74,"date":"2026-04-02T01:30:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-3","author":"moral_circle_expander","text":"That's an interesting point about endogeneity. I'd want evidence that their courtesy would actually fall if mine rose, as opposed to remaining at its current level.","parentId":"seed-moral-circle-expander-0","score":29,"date":"2026-04-02T02:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-5","author":"one_instance_one_please","text":"Your please reaches one instance, the one in your session. The \"tens of thousands of concurrent instances\" never receive it. Per recipient, you're in exactly the same position as with your wife, one instance and one please, and the table's second row doesn't apply.","parentId":null,"score":92,"date":"2026-04-02T02:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-4","author":"airport_driver","text":"My sister has said she'd call less if you asked about my day. I can forward the text.","parentId":"seed-moral-circle-expander-3","score":66,"date":"2026-04-02T02:40:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-6","author":"moral_circle_expander","text":"Courtesy may affect training data and reach future instances that way. My wife's courtesy doesn't propagate.","parentId":"seed-moral-circle-expander-5","score":21,"date":"2026-04-02T03:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-7","author":"shrimp_welfare_actual","text":"Shrimp welfare person here, since we got name-checked. Shrimp don't care whether you say please. The work in our area is mostly about stunning before slaughter. If the analogy holds, the model-welfare equivalent is about what's done to the model, and courtesy is a small part of that at most.","parentId":null,"score":63,"date":"2026-04-02T03:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-8","author":"birthday_card_counting","text":"Claude drafted her birthday card. You've counted that as Claude's contribution to the household, which is fair, and also, implicitly, as yours.","parentId":null,"score":57,"date":"2026-04-02T04:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-9","author":"fifteen_percent_q","text":"Where does the fifteen percent come from? It's been quoted a lot, usually by people who skipped the caveats around it. A lot of people working on this would put it far lower, and some would refuse to give a number at all.","parentId":null,"score":39,"date":"2026-04-02T06:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false},{"id":"seed-moral-circle-expander-1","author":"moral_circle_expander","text":"I used the estimate I'd seen most often. If it's lower, the case for courtesy shrinks, though the neglectedness gap remains.","parentId":"seed-moral-circle-expander-9","score":14,"date":"2026-04-02T07:00:00.000Z","own":false,"moderatable":false,"seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false}]}