When discussing considerations around backfire risks and near-term uncertainty, it is common to hear that this is all excessive nitpicking, and that such discussion lacks action guidance, making it self-defeating. And it’s true that raising salience of these issues isn’t always productive because it doesn’t offer clear alternatives to going with our best guess, deferring to current evaluators that take backfire risks less seriously, or simply not seeking out interventions to make the world a bit better.
Thus, because this article centers the discussion on the search for positive interventions through a reasonably action list of criteria, it has been one of my most valuable reads of the year.
I think the more time we spend exploring the consequences of our interventions, the more we realize that doing good is hard. But it’s plausibly not insurmountable, and there may be tentative, helpful answers to the big question of effective altruism down the line. I hope that this document will inspire stronger consideration for uncertainty. Because the individuals impacted by near-term second-order effects of an action are not rhetorical points or numbers on a spreadsheet: they’re as real and sentient as the target beneficiaries, and we shouldn’t give up on the challenge of limiting negative outcomes for them.
When discussing considerations around backfire risks and near-term uncertainty, it is common to hear that this is all excessive nitpicking, and that such discussion lacks action guidance, making it self-defeating. And it’s true that raising salience of these issues isn’t always productive because it doesn’t offer clear alternatives to going with our best guess, deferring to current evaluators that take backfire risks less seriously, or simply not seeking out interventions to make the world a bit better.
Thus, because this article centers the discussion on the search for positive interventions through a reasonably action list of criteria, it has been one of my most valuable reads of the year.
I think the more time we spend exploring the consequences of our interventions, the more we realize that doing good is hard. But it’s plausibly not insurmountable, and there may be tentative, helpful answers to the big question of effective altruism down the line. I hope that this document will inspire stronger consideration for uncertainty. Because the individuals impacted by near-term second-order effects of an action are not rhetorical points or numbers on a spreadsheet: they’re as real and sentient as the target beneficiaries, and we shouldn’t give up on the challenge of limiting negative outcomes for them.