Hi Ozzie, I typically find the quality of your contributions to the EA Forum to be excellent. Relative to my high expectations, I was disappointed by this comment.
> Would such a game “positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization,” as described by the Long-Term Future Fund? For context, Rob Miles’s videos (1) and (2) from 2017 on the Stop Button Problem already provided clear explanations for the general public.
It sounds like you’re arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?
This struck me as strawmanning.
The original post asked whether the game would positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilisation. It didn’t spell it out, but presumably we want that to be a material positive influence, not a trivial rounding error—i.e. we care about how much positive influence.
The extent of that positive influence is lowered when we already have existing clear and popular explanations. Hence I do believe the existence of the videos is relevant context.
Your interpretation “It sounds like you’re arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?” is a much stronger and more attackable claim than my read of the original.
These are totally different modes of impact. I assume you could make this argument for any speculative work.
I’m more sympathetic to this, but I still didn’t find your comment to be helpful. Maybe others read the original post differently than I did, but I read the OP is simply expressing the concept “funds have an opportunity cost” (arguably in unnecessarily hyperbolic terms). This meant that your comment wasn’t a helpful update for me.
On the other hand, I appreciated this comment, which I thought to be valuable:
I also like grant evaluation, but I would flag that it’s expensive, and often, funders don’t seem very interested in spending much money on it.
1. I agree my sentence “It sounds like you’re arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?” was quite overstated. I apologize for that.
That said, my guess is that I’m really not sure if presence of the Rob Miles videos did decrease the value of future work much. Maybe by something like 20%? I could also see situations where the response was positive, revealing that more work here would be more valuable, not less.
All that said, my guess is that this point isn’t particularly relevant, outside of what it shows of our arguing preferences and viewpoints. I think the original post would have a similar effect without it.
but I read the OP is simply expressing the concept “funds have an opportunity cost” (arguably in unnecessarily hyperbolic terms).
That’s relevant to know, thanks! This wasn’t my takeaway when reading it (I tend to assume that it’s clear that funds have opportunity costs, so focused more on the rest of the point), but I could have been wrong.
Hi Ozzie, I typically find the quality of your contributions to the EA Forum to be excellent. Relative to my high expectations, I was disappointed by this comment.
This struck me as strawmanning.
The original post asked whether the game would positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilisation. It didn’t spell it out, but presumably we want that to be a material positive influence, not a trivial rounding error—i.e. we care about how much positive influence.
The extent of that positive influence is lowered when we already have existing clear and popular explanations. Hence I do believe the existence of the videos is relevant context.
Your interpretation “It sounds like you’re arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?” is a much stronger and more attackable claim than my read of the original.
I’m more sympathetic to this, but I still didn’t find your comment to be helpful. Maybe others read the original post differently than I did, but I read the OP is simply expressing the concept “funds have an opportunity cost” (arguably in unnecessarily hyperbolic terms). This meant that your comment wasn’t a helpful update for me.
On the other hand, I appreciated this comment, which I thought to be valuable:
Thanks for the comment Sanjay!
I think your points are quite fair.
1. I agree my sentence “It sounds like you’re arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?” was quite overstated. I apologize for that.
That said, my guess is that I’m really not sure if presence of the Rob Miles videos did decrease the value of future work much. Maybe by something like 20%? I could also see situations where the response was positive, revealing that more work here would be more valuable, not less.
All that said, my guess is that this point isn’t particularly relevant, outside of what it shows of our arguing preferences and viewpoints. I think the original post would have a similar effect without it.
That’s relevant to know, thanks! This wasn’t my takeaway when reading it (I tend to assume that it’s clear that funds have opportunity costs, so focused more on the rest of the point), but I could have been wrong.