Interesting. My personal view is that the neglect of future generations is likely ‘where the action is’ in cause prioritisation, so if you exclude their interests from the cooperative portfolio, then I’m less interested in the project.
I’d still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it’s going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation. I’d be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?
The point about putting more emphasis on international coordination and improving institutions seems reasonable, though again, I’d wonder if it’s enough to trump the lower neglectedness.
Either way, it seems a bit odd to describe longtermist EAs who are trying to help future generations as ‘uncooperative’. It’s more like they’re trying to ‘cooperate’ with future people, even if direct trade isn’t possible.
On the point about whether the present generation values x-risk, one way to illustrate it is that value of a statistical life in the US is about $5m. This means that US citizens alone would be willing to pay, I think, 1.5 trillion dollars to avoid 0.1ppt of existential risk.
Will MacAskill used this as an argument that the returns on x-risk reduction must be lower than they seem (e.g. perhaps the risks are actually much lower), which may be right, but still illustrates the idea that present people significantly value existential risk reduction.
I’d still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it’s going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation. I’d be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?
I think one point worth emphasizing is that if the cooperative portfolio is a pareto improvement, then theoretically no altruist, including longtermist EAs, can be made worse off by switching to the cooperative portfolio.
Therefore, even if future generations are heavily neglected, the cooperative portfolio is better according to longtermist EAs (and thus for future generations) than the competitive equilibrium. It may still be too costly to move towards the competitive equilibrium, and it is non-obvious to me how the neglect of future generations changes the cost of trying to move society towards the cooperative portfolio or the gain of defecting. But if the cost of moving society to the cooperative portfolio is very low then we should probably cooperate even if future generations are very neglected.
I’d be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?
The more general model captured the idea that there are almost always gains from cooperation between those looking to do good. It doesn’t show, however, that those gains are necessarily large relative to the costs of building cooperation (including opportunity costs). I’m not sure what the answer is to that.
Here’s one line of reasoning which makes me think the net gains from cooperation may be large. Setting aside the possibility that everyone has near identical valuations of causes, I think we’re left with two likely scenarios:
1. There’s enough overlap in valuations of direct-work to create significant gains from compromise on direct-work (maybe on the order of doubling each persons impact). This is like example A in the post.
2. Valuations of direct work are so far apart (everyone thinks that their cause area is 100x more valuable than others) that we’re nearly in the situation from example D, and there will be relatively small gains from building cooperation on direct work. However, this creates opportunities for huge externalities due to advocacy, which means that the actual setting is closer to example B. Intuition: If you think x-risk mitigation is orders of magnitude more important than global poverty, then an intervention which persuades someone to switch from working on global poverty to x-risk will also have massive gains (and have massively negative impact from the perspective of the person who strongly prefers global poverty). I don’t think this is a minor concern. It seems like a lot of resources get wasted in politics due to people with nearly perpendicular value systems fighting each other through persuasion and other means.
So, in either case, it seems like the gains from cooperation are large.
I’d still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it’s going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation.
For now, I don’t think any major changes in decisions should be made based on this. We don’t know enough about how difficult it would be to build cooperation and what the gains to cooperation would be. I guess the only concrete recommendation may be to more strongly emphasize the “not being a jerk” part of effective altruism (especially because that can often be in major conflict with the “maximize impact” part). Also I would argue that there’s a chance that cooperation could be very important and so it’s worth researching more.
Interesting. My personal view is that the neglect of future generations is likely ‘where the action is’ in cause prioritisation, so if you exclude their interests from the cooperative portfolio, then I’m less interested in the project.
I’d still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it’s going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation. I’d be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?
The point about putting more emphasis on international coordination and improving institutions seems reasonable, though again, I’d wonder if it’s enough to trump the lower neglectedness.
Either way, it seems a bit odd to describe longtermist EAs who are trying to help future generations as ‘uncooperative’. It’s more like they’re trying to ‘cooperate’ with future people, even if direct trade isn’t possible.
On the point about whether the present generation values x-risk, one way to illustrate it is that value of a statistical life in the US is about $5m. This means that US citizens alone would be willing to pay, I think, 1.5 trillion dollars to avoid 0.1ppt of existential risk.
Will MacAskill used this as an argument that the returns on x-risk reduction must be lower than they seem (e.g. perhaps the risks are actually much lower), which may be right, but still illustrates the idea that present people significantly value existential risk reduction.
I think one point worth emphasizing is that if the cooperative portfolio is a pareto improvement, then theoretically no altruist, including longtermist EAs, can be made worse off by switching to the cooperative portfolio.
Therefore, even if future generations are heavily neglected, the cooperative portfolio is better according to longtermist EAs (and thus for future generations) than the competitive equilibrium. It may still be too costly to move towards the competitive equilibrium, and it is non-obvious to me how the neglect of future generations changes the cost of trying to move society towards the cooperative portfolio or the gain of defecting. But if the cost of moving society to the cooperative portfolio is very low then we should probably cooperate even if future generations are very neglected.
The more general model captured the idea that there are almost always gains from cooperation between those looking to do good. It doesn’t show, however, that those gains are necessarily large relative to the costs of building cooperation (including opportunity costs). I’m not sure what the answer is to that.
Here’s one line of reasoning which makes me think the net gains from cooperation may be large. Setting aside the possibility that everyone has near identical valuations of causes, I think we’re left with two likely scenarios:
1. There’s enough overlap in valuations of direct-work to create significant gains from compromise on direct-work (maybe on the order of doubling each persons impact). This is like example A in the post.
2. Valuations of direct work are so far apart (everyone thinks that their cause area is 100x more valuable than others) that we’re nearly in the situation from example D, and there will be relatively small gains from building cooperation on direct work. However, this creates opportunities for huge externalities due to advocacy, which means that the actual setting is closer to example B. Intuition: If you think x-risk mitigation is orders of magnitude more important than global poverty, then an intervention which persuades someone to switch from working on global poverty to x-risk will also have massive gains (and have massively negative impact from the perspective of the person who strongly prefers global poverty). I don’t think this is a minor concern. It seems like a lot of resources get wasted in politics due to people with nearly perpendicular value systems fighting each other through persuasion and other means.
So, in either case, it seems like the gains from cooperation are large.
For now, I don’t think any major changes in decisions should be made based on this. We don’t know enough about how difficult it would be to build cooperation and what the gains to cooperation would be. I guess the only concrete recommendation may be to more strongly emphasize the “not being a jerk” part of effective altruism (especially because that can often be in major conflict with the “maximize impact” part). Also I would argue that there’s a chance that cooperation could be very important and so it’s worth researching more.