If I understand correctly, you think that people in EA do care about the sign of their impact, but that in practice their actions don’t align with this and they might end up having a large impact of unknown sign?
That’s certainly a reasonable view to hold, but given that you seem to agree that people are trying to have a positive impact, I don’t see how using phrases like “expected value” or “positive impact” instead of just “impact” would help.
In your example, it seems that SBF is talking about quickly making grants that have positive expected value, and uses the phrase “expected value” three times.
Reasonably determining whether an anthropogenic x-risk related intervention is net-positive or net-negative is often much more difficult[1] than identifying the intervention as potentially high-impact. With less than 2 minutes to think, one can usually do the latter but not the former. People in EA can easily be unconsciously optimizing for impact (which tends to be much easier and aligned with maximizing status & power) while believing they’re optimizing for EV. Using the term “impact” to mean “EV” can exacerbate this problem.
Thanks for the reply!
If I understand correctly, you think that people in EA do care about the sign of their impact, but that in practice their actions don’t align with this and they might end up having a large impact of unknown sign?
That’s certainly a reasonable view to hold, but given that you seem to agree that people are trying to have a positive impact, I don’t see how using phrases like “expected value” or “positive impact” instead of just “impact” would help.
In your example, it seems that SBF is talking about quickly making grants that have positive expected value, and uses the phrase “expected value” three times.
Reasonably determining whether an anthropogenic x-risk related intervention is net-positive or net-negative is often much more difficult[1] than identifying the intervention as potentially high-impact. With less than 2 minutes to think, one can usually do the latter but not the former. People in EA can easily be unconsciously optimizing for impact (which tends to be much easier and aligned with maximizing status & power) while believing they’re optimizing for EV. Using the term “impact” to mean “EV” can exacerbate this problem.
Due to an abundance of crucial considerations.