Poorly considered throwaway statements harm the reputation of EA
Confidence: Spent 1 hour writing this, perhaps the write-up is rusty and missing some things, but I think the claims hold true
Introduction
Over the last few months, there’s been increasing attention drawn to EA. Iit seems likely that this may continue (although perhaps the recent launch of WWOTF represents a spike, I think there is a strong upward trend). In light of this, I think that it’s really important to make sure broad claims and statements are interrogated, especially if they might be distributed widely.
Apologies for the brief and non-exhaustive post, but here I will quickly make a brief checklist of things to consider when making broad claims, using a worked example of a case study example in which I think this was done poorly. In a quick check, this rough framework seemed to work for other claims, although I imagine some modification and addition of criteria might be needed depending on the context
Statement:
Financial times- William MacAskill: The benefits of curing cancer are smaller than one might think — if we eradicated all cancers today, global life expectancy would increase by two years
Pre-checklist scoping
Ask yourself three questions
How bold is this claim?
How widely disseminated will this claim be?
How bad would the downside of this claim being false / misleading/ being misinterpreted be?
Use these questions to guide how much time you spend on the below checklist
Worked example
This is quite a bold claim that I think will be shocking to many if true
Although I imagine this interview was quite long and it was probably unclear at the time if this would make the article, I think we can assume that in expectation, this claim would have wide distribution
If false or misinterpreted, this claim could undermine whether EA is academically and intellectually rigorous, and could also lead people to think the movement only cares about life expectancy over other instrumental health, income and social goals. In fact, in talking to many senior and intelligent people in government, policy and other sectors, they saw this claim and this is exactly what they thought. Therefore, the downside risk of making this claim seems quite high
Conclusion: from this scoping, it seems worthwhile to spend at least a moderate amount of time on the checklist below
Checklist
1. Is this statement factually accurate and appropriately cited
Some of the questions you might consider are
Where is this statement from?
Which context is it based on?
What approach was used
How confident am I in its conclusion?
Worked example:
In the FT statement, none of this is made obvious (caveat: perhaps Will made these, and these were dropped by the author; again, I am not trying to specifically target and criticise this statement itself, more use it as a case study)
This statement appears to be from this source
Based on the UK setting
Used a modelling approach
Low confidence
Conclusion: Based on this, I might say: “I read a modelling study a few years ago that claimed that eradicating cancer would only reduce life expectancy by 2 years. I believe they were looking at a UK population, but this is certainly an interesting result regardless.”
2. Make it clear within what ethical framework/ world view your statement has the most effect
Make it clear what your values are and what world view your statement makes most sense within; this seems especially important for those working in the longtermist space.
Worked example
In a framework where we care a lot about the long term future of humanity, or we care about life extension, perhaps this is an appropriate statement. But in any other reasonably frameworks, it might not be
Eradicating cancer health effects- 250 million DALYS per year, and 10 million deaths (Kocarnik 2022)
Eradicating cancer income effects- highest burden of any disease, 1.16 trillion per year (WHO)
Eradicating cancer social effects—hard to quantify but quite profound on any measure
From all these views, many of which are held by a significant amount of EAs, eradicating cancer would be profoundly good.
Conclusion: Will could have said: “ If we are looking at the benefit of eradicating cancer purely from its benefit on life expectancy, it seems like it might not have the most profound impact, especially given how much current investment goes into it.”
3. Get the input and perspective of a broad range of people
This can be onerous; however, especially if a claim is central to your argument or you plan to use a claim many times, or even if you’re just using it once to a large audience, it is very helpful to get the input and perspective of a diverse and broad range of people. I think that if you had a sense check of this statement with a small focus group, it would perform very poorly, in terms of both how factually sound and optically appropriate it is.
Worked example
For this statement, you could ask 5-10 random selection of people what they thought of this statement
With more time, you could ask health epidemiologists to face check how well this stands up
If this had been done, I think we may have seen this statement modified or dropped.
Conclusion
Overall, this post has made the argument that broad claims and statements made should go through a pre-checklist scoping and then a 3 step checklist. I think this would significantly improve the epistemic rigour and optics of the movement.
I think this was a good post, but I disagree with it. I think “If we are looking at the benefit of eradicating cancer purely from its benefit on life expectancy, it seems like it might not have the most profound impact, especially given how much current investment goes into it” is a worse statement than what Will actually said. It’s harder to understand, less punchy, and less likely to get traction. It’s fundamentally saying the same thing as what Will actually said but with a lot more hedging.
I don’t think what Will actually said made EA look unrigorous in this case.