I donāt buy your example on 80kās advice re: climate change. You want to cooperate in prisonerās dilemmas if you think that it will cause the agent you are cooperating with to cooperate more with you in the future. So there needs to a) be another coherent agent, which b) notices your actions, c) takes actions in response to yours, and d) might plausibly cooperate with you in the future. In the climate change case, what is the agent youād be cooperating with here and does it meet these criteria?
Is it the climate change movement? It doesnāt seem to me that āthe climate change movementā is enough of a coherent agent to do things like decide āletās help EA with their goals.ā
Or is it individual people who care about climate change? Are they able to help you with your goals? What is it you want from them?
First, the only strong claim that Iām trying to make in the post is that the standard EA advice in this setting is to free-ride. Free-riding is not necessarily irrational or immoral. In the section āWorking to not Destroy Cooperationā I argue that itās possible that this sort of free-riding will make the world worse, but that is more speculative.
As far as who the other players are in the climate change example, I was thinking of it as basically everyone else in the world who has some interest in preventing climate change, but the most important players are those who are or could potentially have a large impact on climate change and other important problems. This takes the form of a many-player public goods game, which is similar conceptually to a prisonerās dilemma. While I do think itās unlikely that everyone who has contributed to fighting climate change will collectively decide āletās not help EA with their goalsā, I think itās possible that if EA has success with their current strategy, some people will choose to use the methodology of EA. This could lead them to contribute to causes which are neglected by their value systems but which most people currently in EA find less important than climate change (causes like philanthropy in their local communities, or near term conservation work, or spreading their religion, or some bizarre thing that they think is important but no one else does). So, in that way, free-riding by EA could lead others to free-ride, which could make us all worse off.
Gotcha. So your main concern is not that EA defecting will make us miss out on good stuff that we could have gotten via the climate change movement deciding to help us on our goals, but rather that it might be bad if EA-type thinking became very popular?
I donāt buy your example on 80kās advice re: climate change. You want to cooperate in prisonerās dilemmas if you think that it will cause the agent you are cooperating with to cooperate more with you in the future. So there needs to a) be another coherent agent, which b) notices your actions, c) takes actions in response to yours, and d) might plausibly cooperate with you in the future. In the climate change case, what is the agent youād be cooperating with here and does it meet these criteria?
Is it the climate change movement? It doesnāt seem to me that āthe climate change movementā is enough of a coherent agent to do things like decide āletās help EA with their goals.ā
Or is it individual people who care about climate change? Are they able to help you with your goals? What is it you want from them?
First, the only strong claim that Iām trying to make in the post is that the standard EA advice in this setting is to free-ride. Free-riding is not necessarily irrational or immoral. In the section āWorking to not Destroy Cooperationā I argue that itās possible that this sort of free-riding will make the world worse, but that is more speculative.
As far as who the other players are in the climate change example, I was thinking of it as basically everyone else in the world who has some interest in preventing climate change, but the most important players are those who are or could potentially have a large impact on climate change and other important problems. This takes the form of a many-player public goods game, which is similar conceptually to a prisonerās dilemma. While I do think itās unlikely that everyone who has contributed to fighting climate change will collectively decide āletās not help EA with their goalsā, I think itās possible that if EA has success with their current strategy, some people will choose to use the methodology of EA. This could lead them to contribute to causes which are neglected by their value systems but which most people currently in EA find less important than climate change (causes like philanthropy in their local communities, or near term conservation work, or spreading their religion, or some bizarre thing that they think is important but no one else does). So, in that way, free-riding by EA could lead others to free-ride, which could make us all worse off.
Gotcha. So your main concern is not that EA defecting will make us miss out on good stuff that we could have gotten via the climate change movement deciding to help us on our goals, but rather that it might be bad if EA-type thinking became very popular?