Just a quick response on the CEAâs groups team end.
We are processing many small grants and other forms of support for CB and we do not have the capacity to publish BOTECs on all of them.
However, I can give some brief heuristics that we use in the decision-making.
Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world. We would love for these students to instead focus on solving the worldâs biggest and most important problems.
Based on the current amount available in EA, its projected growth, and the value of getting people working in EA careers, we currently think that spending at least as much as McKinsey does on recruiting pencils out in expected value terms over the course of a studentâs career. There are other factors to consider here (i.e. double-counting some expenses) that mean we actually spend significantly less than this. However, as Thomas saidâeven small chances that dinners could have an effect on career changes make them seem like effective uses of money. (We do have a fair amount of evidence that dinners do in fact have positive effects on groups.)
Given the current landscape, we think missing out on great people and great opportunities is a huge loss. This is especially true if you think there are heavy tails in the amount of impact individuals have. We have thought a lot about our funding guidelines, and suggestions, and feel comfortable with our current status though we are constantly reviewing and updating as the landscape changes.
We appreciate your concern and are always eager for feedback. If you (or others) want to expand on this post with a more in-depth, comprehensive version of this feedback, weâd be open to responding to this in more depth as well.
(The below is copied from a comment by Max Dalton below and I am adding it here for visibility)
âBy the way, we are not planning to spend $50m on groups outreach in the near future. Our groups budget is $5.4m this year.
Thanks for outlining your reasoning here, and Iâm really excited about the progress EA groups are making around the world.
I could easily be missing something here, but why are we comparing the value of CEAâs community building grants to the value of Mckinsey etc?
Isnât the relevant comparison CEAâs community building grants vs other EA spending, for example GiveWellâs marginally funded programs (around 5x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers)?
If CEA is getting funding from non-EA sources, however, this query would be irrelevant.
Iâm obviously not speaking for Jessica here, but I think the reason the comparison is relevant is that the high spend by Goldman ect suggests that spending a lot on recruitment at unis is effective.
If this is the case, which I think is also supported by the success of well funded groups with full or part time organisers, and that EA is in an adversarial relationship to with these large firms, which I think is large true, then it makes sense for EA to spend similar amounts of money trying to attract students.
The relvent comparison is then comparing the value of the marginal student recurited with malaria nets ect.
Thanks Nathan, that would make a lot of sense, and motivates the conversation about whether CEA can realisticly attract as many people through advertising as Goldman etc.
I guess the question is then whether:
a) Goldmanâs activities are actually effective at attracting students; and
b) This is a relevant baseline prior for the types of activities that local EA groups undertake with CEAâs funding (e.g. dinners for EA scholars students)
Just a quick response on the CEAâs groups team end.
...
Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world.
Iâm surprised to see CEA making such a strong claim. I think we should have strong priors against this stance, and I donât think Iâve seen CEA publish conclusive evidence in the opposite direction.
Firstly, note that these three companies come from very different sectors of the economy and do very different things.
Secondly, even if you assign high credence to the problems with these firms, it seems like there is a fair bit of uncertainty in each case, and you are proposing a quite harsh upper bound - âprobably at best neutralâ.
Thirdly, each of these are (broadly) free market firms, who exist only because they are able to persuade people to continue using their services. Itâs always possible that they are systematically mistaken, and that CEA really does understand social network advertising, management consulting, trading and banking better than these customers⊠but I think our prior should be a little more modest than this. Usually when people want to buy something it is because they want that thing and think it will be useful for them.
Finally, there are in fact for each of these firms a bunch of concrete benefits they provide. Rarely do I see these explicitly weighed in the calculus against the problems:
Facebook allows people to keep in touch with friends and relatives, to share their thoughts and news about their lives, and meet like-minded new friends. Certainly I have personally made many new friends over facebook, and engaged in many good discussions. It also allows advertisers to show their products to the people who are most likely to appreciate them, saving others from having their time wasted with irrelevant ads.
McKinsey provides advice and allows for the diffusion of best practices from leading firms to others in the economy. They can also help management overcome internal veto players and other opposition to change by helping supply credibility to decisions. For some types of consulting (though a little different to what McKinsey mainly does) we even have RCTs showing that they improve productive efficiency.
Goldmanâs trading arm provides a wide range of services to market participants, like research, prime brokerage and market making, that are necessary to help keep markets efficient. They also provide investment banking services, allowing companies and governments to raise money to finance projects, and retail banking, giving ordinary people higher interest rates than theyâd get from their legacy banks.
Itâs possible that these has been some explicit analysis of these firms to support your very strong statement. I searched on the forum for âMcKinseyâ to try to find it, but at least the first page or so of results were generally positive referencesâe.g. people quoting their work on climate change, or positively referencing how they would address a problem. 80k does have an old article with some cursory analysis of the harms of finance, but the analysis is seriously flawed, and it doesnât cover Management Consulting or Social Networks at all.
Curious if you disagree with Jessicaâs key claim, which is âMcKinsey << EA for impactâ? I agree Jessica is overstating the case for âMcKinsey â 0âł, but seems like best-case for McKinsey is still order(s) of magnitude less impact than EA.
Subpoints:
Current market incentives donât address large risk-externalities well, or appropriately weight the well-being of very poor people, animals, or the entire future.
McKinsey for earn-to-learn/âgive could theoretically be justified, but that doesnât contradict Jessicaâs point of spending money to get EAs
Most students require a justification for anyone charitable spending significant amounts of money on movement building & competing with McKinsey reads favorably
Agree we should usually avoid saying poorly-justified things when itâs not a necessary feature of the argument, as it could turn off smart people who would otherwise agree.
Sorry, I was trying to get a quick response to this post and I made a stronger claim than I intended. I was trying to say that I think that EA careers are doing much more good than the ones mentioned on average and so spending money is a good bet here. I wasnât intending to make a definitive judgment about the overall social impact of those other careers, though I know my wording suggests that. I also generally want to note that this element was a personal claim and not necessarily a CEA endorsed one.
This was a great comment and thoughtful reply and the top comment was great too.
Looking at the other threads generated from the top comment, it looks like tiny turns of phrase in that top comment, produced (unreasonably) large amounts of discussion.
I think we all learned a valuable lesson about the importance of clarity and precision when commenting on the EA forum.
Thirdly, each of these are (broadly) free market firms, who exist only because they are able to persuade people to continue using their services. Itâs always possible that they are systematically mistaken, and that CEA really does understand social network advertising, management consulting, trading and banking better than these customers⊠but I think our prior should be a little more modest than this. Usually when people want to buy something it is because they want that thing and think it will be useful for them.
I consider this to be a pretty weak argument, so it doesnât contribute much to my priors, which although weak (and so the particulars of a company matter much more), are probably centered near neutral on net welfare effects (in the short to medium term). I think a large share of goods people buy and things they do are harmful to themselves or others before even considering the loss of income/âtime as a result, or worse for them than the things they compete with. Itâs enough that I wouldnât have a prior strongly in favour of what profitable companies are doing being good for us. Here are reasons pushing towards neutral or negative impacts:
A lot of goods are mostly for signaling, especially signaling wealth, which often has negative externalities and Iâd guess little positive value for the individual. Brand name versions of things, clothing, jewelry, cars.
Many modern ways people spend their time (enabled by profitable companies) have probably made us less active, more indoor-bound, less close with others, and less pursuant of meaning and meaningful goals, which may conflict with peopleâs reflective preferences, as well as generally be bad for health, mental health and other measures of wellbeing. Basically a lot of the things we do on our computers and phones.
Many things are stimulating and addictive, and companies are optimizing for want, not welfare. Want and welfare can come apart when we optimize for want. So we get cigarettes, addictive video games, junk food, algorithms optimizing for clicks when weâd be better off stepping away from the internet or doing more substantial things online, and lots of salt, sugar and calories in our foods.
Media companies may optimize for revenue over accurate reporting. This includes outrage, playing to our fears, demonizing and polarization.
Some companies make us want their stuff for fear of missing out or social pressure, so it can be closer to coercion than providing a valuable opportunity.
Iâd guess relatively little is spent on advertisement for things that we have good evidence for improving our welfare, because most of those things are hard to profit from: basic healthy foods, exercise (although there are certainly exercise products and programs that get advertised, but less so just gym memberships, joining sports leagues, running outside), just spending more time with your friends and family (in cheap ways, although travel and amusement parks are advertised), pursuing meaning or meaningful goals, helping others (even charity ads are relatively rare). So, advertisement seems to push us towards things that are worse for us than the alternatives weâd have gone with. To capitalize on the things that do make us substantially better off, companies may sell us more expensive versions that arenât (much) better or things to go with them that donât substantially help.
Iâd expect a lot of hedonic adaptation for many goods and services, but not mental health (almost by definition), physical pain and to a lesser extent general health and mobility, which are worsened by a lot of the things companies provide, directly or indirectly by competing with the things that are better for health.
Company valuations donât usually substantially reflect their externalities, and shorting companies is riskier and more costly than buying and holding shares, so this biases markets towards positively valuing companies even if their overall value for the world is negative.
There are often negative externalities on nonhuman animals in particular, although the overall effects on nonhuman animals may be complicated when you also consider the effects on wild animals.
I do think itâs plausible McKinsey and Goldman have done and do more good than harm for humans in the short term, based on the arguments you give, but I donât have a strong view either way. It could depend largely on whether raising peopleâs consumption levels makes them better off overall (and how much) in the places where people are most affected by these companies. Measures of well-being do seem to positively correlate with income/âwealth/âconsumption at the individual level, and Iâd guess also at the aggregate level for developing countries, but Iâd guess not for developed countries, or at best weakly so. There are negative externalities for increasing an individualâs income on othersâ life satisfaction, although itâs possible a large share is due to rescaling, not actually thinking your life is worse absolutely than otherwise. See:
Based on GiveDirectly in Kenya. They had multiple measures of wellbeing, but negative effects were only observed for life satisfaction for non-recipient households of cash transfers in the same village. See Table A5.
This table from Veenhoven, R. (2019). The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course., reproduced in this post.
Some companies may also contribute to relative inequality or even counterfactually make the median or poor person absolutely poorer through their political activities.
The categories of things Iâm optimistic about for human welfare in the short to medium term are:
Things that save us time, so we can spend more time on things that actually make us better off.
Things that improve or protect our health (including mental health).
Things that make us (feel) safer/âmore secure (physically, financially, etc.).
Things that make us more confident, but without substantially net negative externalities (negative externalities may come from positional goods, costly signaling, peer pressure).
Things that help us make better decisions, without important negative effects.
Iâm neutral to optimistic about these (possibly neutral because they just replace cheaper versions of themselves that would be just as good):
In-person activities with friends/âfamily.
Things for hobbies or projects.
Restaurants.
Iâm about neutral and pretty uncertain about screen-based entertainment (TV, movies, video games), and recreational substances that arenât extremely addictive or harmful (alcohol, marijuana).
There are also a lot of externalities that act at least equally on humans, like carbon emissions, promotion of ethnic violence, or erosion of privacy. Those are all examples off the top of my head for Facebook specifically.
I upvoted Larksâ comment, but like you I think this particular argument, âpeople buy from these firmsâ, is weak.
But surely, the spirit of the original comment is correct too.
No matter which worldview you have, the value of a top leader moving into EA is overwhelmingly larger than the the social value of the same leader ârowingâ in these companies.
Also, at the risk of getting into politics (and really your standard internet argument) gesturing at âfree marketâ is really complicated. You donât need to take the view of Matt Stoller or something to notice that the benefits of these companies can be provided by other actors. The success of these companies and their resources that allow recruitment with 7 figure campus centres probably has a root source different than pure social value.
The implication that this statement requires CEA to have a strong model of these companies seems unfair. Several senior EAs, who we wonât consider activists or ideological, have deep experiences in these or similar companies. They have opinions that are consistent with the parent commentâs statement. (Being too explicit here has downsides.)
I think the main crux here is that even if Jessica/âCEA agrees that the sign of the impact is positive, it still falls in the neutral bracket because on the CEA worldview the impact is roughly negligible relative to the programs that they are excited about.
If you disagree with this maybe you agree with the weaker claim of the impact being comparatively negligible weighted by the resources these companies consume? (thereâs some kind of nuance to âconsuming resourcesâ in profitable companies, but I guess this is more gesturing at a leaving value on the table framing as opposed to just is the organisation locally net negative or positive.
Do you think people are better off overall than otherwise because of Facebook (and social media generally)? You may have made important connections on Facebook, but many people probably invest less in each connection and have shallower relationships because of social media, and my guess is that mental health is generally worse because of social media (I think there was an RCT on getting people to quit social media, and I wouldnât be surprised if there were multiple studies. I donât have them offhand). Iâd guess social media is basically addictive for a lot of people, so people often arenât making well-informed decisions about how much to use, and itâs easy for it to be net negative despite widespread use. People joining social media pressures others to join, too, making it more costly to not be on it, so FB creates a problem (induces fear of missing out) and offers a solution to it. Cancel culture, bubbles/âecho chambers, the spread of misinformation, and polarization may also be aggravated by social media.
That being said, maybe FB was really important for the growth of the EA community. I mostly got into EA through FB initially, although itâs not where I was first exposed to EA. If we think the EA community is important enough, then this plausibly dominates. And, of course, itâs where Open Philâs funding came from, but that seems to be historical luck, not really anything special about Facebook, except the growth of its market cap.
On the other hand, FB accelerated the development of AI capabilities, e.g. PyTorch was primarily built by FB. But maybe we should also consider this to be only weakly related to FBâs role in social media, and more related to the fact that itâs just a large tech company.
There are also multiple counterfactuals we could consider: no Facebook + people spend less time on social media, and no Facebook + people spend about as much time on social media (possibly on one similar to FB, or whatever other options there are now). In the first case, I think itâs hard to make a balanced argument for FB being robustly net positive. In the second case, the impact is closer to 0, from either direction, and itâs harder to evaluate its sign. Then thereâs the counterfactual impact of FB getting a more productive hire, or one who is otherwise more valued by FB.
I think McKinsey and Goldman would have other firms step into their spaces if they werenât around.
I donât think this is persuasive. I think most actions people take either increase or decrease x-risk, and you should start with a ~50% prior for which side of neutrality a specific action is on (though not clearly true; see discussion here). I agree thereâs some commonsensical notions that economic growth is good, including for the LT future, but I personally find arguments in the opposite direction to be slightly stronger. Your own comment to an earlier post is one interesting item on the list of arguments Iâd muster in that direction.
Ahh, interesting argument! I wasnât thinking about the argument that these firms might (e.g.) slightly accelerate economic growth, which might then cause an increase in x-risk (if safety is not equivalently accelerated). In general I feel sufficiently unclear about such considerationsâlike maybe literally 50:50 equipoise is a reasonable priorâthat I am loath to let them overwhelm a more concrete short-term impact story in our cost-benefit analysis, in the absence of a clear causal link to a long run impact in the opposite direction, as you suggest in the article.
In this case I think my argument still goes through, because the claim Iâm objecting to is so strongâthat there is in some sense a >50% probability that every reasonable scenario has all three firms being negative.
Thanks Jessica, this is helpful, and I really appreciate the speed at which you replied.
A couple of things that might be quick to answer and also helpful:
is there an expected value of someone working in an EA career that CEA uses? The rationale above suggests something like âwe want to spend as much as top tier employersâ but presumably this relates to an expected value of attracting top talent that would otherwise work at those firms?
I agree that itâs not feasible to produce, let alone publish, a BOTEC on every payout. However, is there a bar that youâre aiming to exceed for the manager of a group to agree to a spending request? Or a threshold where youâd want more consideration about granting funding? Iâm sure there are examples of things you wouldnât fund, or would see as very expensive and would have some rule-of-thumb for agreeing to (off-site residential retreats might be one). Or is it more âthis seems within the range of things that might help, and we havenât spent >$1m on this school yet?â
is there any counterfactual discounting? Obviously a lot of very talented people work in EA and/âor have left jobs at the employers you mention to work in EA. So whatâs the thinking on how this spending will improve the talent in EA?
Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. Iâm not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/âpeople balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
Iâll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but weâre currently spending much less than $1m/âschool.
Yes, itâs obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OPâs survey), and we think itâs likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if youâre not actually going to be behind a really âmove the needleâ amount of campus spending.
Just as a casual observation, I would much rather hire someone who had done a couple of years at McKinsey than someone coming straight out of undergrad with no work experience. So Iâm not sure that diverting talented EAs from McKinsey (or similar) is necessarily best in the long run for expected impact. No EA organization can compete with the ability of McK to train up a new hire with a wide array of generally useful skills in a short amount of time.
I think the key point here is that it is unsually easy to recuirt EAs at uni compared to when theyâre at McKinsey. I think itâs unclear if a) among the the best things for a student to do is go to McKinsey and b) how much less likely it is that an EA student goes to McKinsey. I think itâs pretty unlikely going to McKinsey is the best thing to do, but I also think that EA student groups have a realtively small effect on how often students go into elite coporate jobs (a bad thing from my perspective) at least in software engineering.
Iâm not sure how clear it is that itâs much better for people to hear about EA at university, especially given there is a lot more outreach and onboarding at the university level than for professionals.
While itâs reasonable not to be able to provide an impact estimate for every specific small grant, I think there are some other things that could increase transparency and accountability, for example:
Publishing your general reasoning and heuristics explicitly on the CEA website.
Publishing a list of grants, updated with some frequency.
Giving some statistics on which sums went to what type of activitiesâagain, updated once in a while.
Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world.
Thatâs really interesting to me because Iâm currently thinking about potential recruitment efforts at CS departments for AI safety roles. I couldnât immediately find a source for the numbers you mention, do you remember where you got them from?
I also couldnât find much information on campus recruitment expenses for top firms. However, according to the US National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), in 2018 average cost-per-hire from US universities was $6,110.
FAANG and other top tier employers are likely to spend much more than the average.
For each of the companies, if you look at publicly available websites for the campus recruiting centre for one of the HYPS schools for these companies, and just look at the roster of public facing âambassadorsâ, who have significant skills and earning counterfactual (so fully burdened cost may be over 200K per head) itâs clear itâs a 7 figure budget for them once you include operations, physical offices, management and other oversight (which wonât appear on the PL per se).
1 mil is the low end.
I canât immediately pull up a link here as I am on mobile.
Hi Jack,
Just a quick response on the CEAâs groups team end.
We are processing many small grants and other forms of support for CB and we do not have the capacity to publish BOTECs on all of them.
However, I can give some brief heuristics that we use in the decision-making.
Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world. We would love for these students to instead focus on solving the worldâs biggest and most important problems.
Based on the current amount available in EA, its projected growth, and the value of getting people working in EA careers, we currently think that spending at least as much as McKinsey does on recruiting pencils out in expected value terms over the course of a studentâs career. There are other factors to consider here (i.e. double-counting some expenses) that mean we actually spend significantly less than this. However, as Thomas saidâeven small chances that dinners could have an effect on career changes make them seem like effective uses of money. (We do have a fair amount of evidence that dinners do in fact have positive effects on groups.)
As for your comment on funding student groups, we havenât sent money to any group that has not asked for it. It is plausible that one of us encouraged them to ask for more since we do think it is a good use of money and would like groups to think ambitiously. We have a list of common group expenses with some tips at the bottom (including considerations on optics).
Given the current landscape, we think missing out on great people and great opportunities is a huge loss. This is especially true if you think there are heavy tails in the amount of impact individuals have. We have thought a lot about our funding guidelines, and suggestions, and feel comfortable with our current status though we are constantly reviewing and updating as the landscape changes.
We appreciate your concern and are always eager for feedback. If you (or others) want to expand on this post with a more in-depth, comprehensive version of this feedback, weâd be open to responding to this in more depth as well.
(The below is copied from a comment by Max Dalton below and I am adding it here for visibility)
âBy the way, we are not planning to spend $50m on groups outreach in the near future. Our groups budget is $5.4m this year.
Also note that our focus university program is passing to Open Philanthropy.â
Hi Jessica,
Thanks for outlining your reasoning here, and Iâm really excited about the progress EA groups are making around the world.
I could easily be missing something here, but why are we comparing the value of CEAâs community building grants to the value of Mckinsey etc?
Isnât the relevant comparison CEAâs community building grants vs other EA spending, for example GiveWellâs marginally funded programs (around 5x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers)?
If CEA is getting funding from non-EA sources, however, this query would be irrelevant.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts :)
Iâm obviously not speaking for Jessica here, but I think the reason the comparison is relevant is that the high spend by Goldman ect suggests that spending a lot on recruitment at unis is effective.
If this is the case, which I think is also supported by the success of well funded groups with full or part time organisers, and that EA is in an adversarial relationship to with these large firms, which I think is large true, then it makes sense for EA to spend similar amounts of money trying to attract students.
The relvent comparison is then comparing the value of the marginal student recurited with malaria nets ect.
Thanks Nathan, that would make a lot of sense, and motivates the conversation about whether CEA can realisticly attract as many people through advertising as Goldman etc.
I guess the question is then whether:
a) Goldmanâs activities are actually effective at attracting students; and
b) This is a relevant baseline prior for the types of activities that local EA groups undertake with CEAâs funding (e.g. dinners for EA scholars students)
Iâm surprised to see CEA making such a strong claim. I think we should have strong priors against this stance, and I donât think Iâve seen CEA publish conclusive evidence in the opposite direction.
Firstly, note that these three companies come from very different sectors of the economy and do very different things.
Secondly, even if you assign high credence to the problems with these firms, it seems like there is a fair bit of uncertainty in each case, and you are proposing a quite harsh upper bound - âprobably at best neutralâ.
Thirdly, each of these are (broadly) free market firms, who exist only because they are able to persuade people to continue using their services. Itâs always possible that they are systematically mistaken, and that CEA really does understand social network advertising, management consulting, trading and banking better than these customers⊠but I think our prior should be a little more modest than this. Usually when people want to buy something it is because they want that thing and think it will be useful for them.
Finally, there are in fact for each of these firms a bunch of concrete benefits they provide. Rarely do I see these explicitly weighed in the calculus against the problems:
Facebook allows people to keep in touch with friends and relatives, to share their thoughts and news about their lives, and meet like-minded new friends. Certainly I have personally made many new friends over facebook, and engaged in many good discussions. It also allows advertisers to show their products to the people who are most likely to appreciate them, saving others from having their time wasted with irrelevant ads.
McKinsey provides advice and allows for the diffusion of best practices from leading firms to others in the economy. They can also help management overcome internal veto players and other opposition to change by helping supply credibility to decisions. For some types of consulting (though a little different to what McKinsey mainly does) we even have RCTs showing that they improve productive efficiency.
Goldmanâs trading arm provides a wide range of services to market participants, like research, prime brokerage and market making, that are necessary to help keep markets efficient. They also provide investment banking services, allowing companies and governments to raise money to finance projects, and retail banking, giving ordinary people higher interest rates than theyâd get from their legacy banks.
Itâs possible that these has been some explicit analysis of these firms to support your very strong statement. I searched on the forum for âMcKinseyâ to try to find it, but at least the first page or so of results were generally positive referencesâe.g. people quoting their work on climate change, or positively referencing how they would address a problem. 80k does have an old article with some cursory analysis of the harms of finance, but the analysis is seriously flawed, and it doesnât cover Management Consulting or Social Networks at all.
Curious if you disagree with Jessicaâs key claim, which is âMcKinsey << EA for impactâ? I agree Jessica is overstating the case for âMcKinsey â 0âł, but seems like best-case for McKinsey is still order(s) of magnitude less impact than EA.
Subpoints:
Current market incentives donât address large risk-externalities well, or appropriately weight the well-being of very poor people, animals, or the entire future.
McKinsey for earn-to-learn/âgive could theoretically be justified, but that doesnât contradict Jessicaâs point of spending money to get EAs
Most students require a justification for anyone charitable spending significant amounts of money on movement building & competing with McKinsey reads favorably
Agree we should usually avoid saying poorly-justified things when itâs not a necessary feature of the argument, as it could turn off smart people who would otherwise agree.
Sorry, I was trying to get a quick response to this post and I made a stronger claim than I intended. I was trying to say that I think that EA careers are doing much more good than the ones mentioned on average and so spending money is a good bet here. I wasnât intending to make a definitive judgment about the overall social impact of those other careers, though I know my wording suggests that. I also generally want to note that this element was a personal claim and not necessarily a CEA endorsed one.
This was a great comment and thoughtful reply and the top comment was great too.
Looking at the other threads generated from the top comment, it looks like tiny turns of phrase in that top comment, produced (unreasonably) large amounts of discussion.
I think we all learned a valuable lesson about the importance of clarity and precision when commenting on the EA forum.
FYI I would have upvoted this if not for the final paragraph
I consider this to be a pretty weak argument, so it doesnât contribute much to my priors, which although weak (and so the particulars of a company matter much more), are probably centered near neutral on net welfare effects (in the short to medium term). I think a large share of goods people buy and things they do are harmful to themselves or others before even considering the loss of income/âtime as a result, or worse for them than the things they compete with. Itâs enough that I wouldnât have a prior strongly in favour of what profitable companies are doing being good for us. Here are reasons pushing towards neutral or negative impacts:
A lot of goods are mostly for signaling, especially signaling wealth, which often has negative externalities and Iâd guess little positive value for the individual. Brand name versions of things, clothing, jewelry, cars.
Many modern ways people spend their time (enabled by profitable companies) have probably made us less active, more indoor-bound, less close with others, and less pursuant of meaning and meaningful goals, which may conflict with peopleâs reflective preferences, as well as generally be bad for health, mental health and other measures of wellbeing. Basically a lot of the things we do on our computers and phones.
Many things are stimulating and addictive, and companies are optimizing for want, not welfare. Want and welfare can come apart when we optimize for want. So we get cigarettes, addictive video games, junk food, algorithms optimizing for clicks when weâd be better off stepping away from the internet or doing more substantial things online, and lots of salt, sugar and calories in our foods.
Media companies may optimize for revenue over accurate reporting. This includes outrage, playing to our fears, demonizing and polarization.
Some companies make us want their stuff for fear of missing out or social pressure, so it can be closer to coercion than providing a valuable opportunity.
Iâd guess relatively little is spent on advertisement for things that we have good evidence for improving our welfare, because most of those things are hard to profit from: basic healthy foods, exercise (although there are certainly exercise products and programs that get advertised, but less so just gym memberships, joining sports leagues, running outside), just spending more time with your friends and family (in cheap ways, although travel and amusement parks are advertised), pursuing meaning or meaningful goals, helping others (even charity ads are relatively rare). So, advertisement seems to push us towards things that are worse for us than the alternatives weâd have gone with. To capitalize on the things that do make us substantially better off, companies may sell us more expensive versions that arenât (much) better or things to go with them that donât substantially help.
Iâd expect a lot of hedonic adaptation for many goods and services, but not mental health (almost by definition), physical pain and to a lesser extent general health and mobility, which are worsened by a lot of the things companies provide, directly or indirectly by competing with the things that are better for health.
Company valuations donât usually substantially reflect their externalities, and shorting companies is riskier and more costly than buying and holding shares, so this biases markets towards positively valuing companies even if their overall value for the world is negative.
There are often negative externalities on nonhuman animals in particular, although the overall effects on nonhuman animals may be complicated when you also consider the effects on wild animals.
I do think itâs plausible McKinsey and Goldman have done and do more good than harm for humans in the short term, based on the arguments you give, but I donât have a strong view either way. It could depend largely on whether raising peopleâs consumption levels makes them better off overall (and how much) in the places where people are most affected by these companies. Measures of well-being do seem to positively correlate with income/âwealth/âconsumption at the individual level, and Iâd guess also at the aggregate level for developing countries, but Iâd guess not for developed countries, or at best weakly so. There are negative externalities for increasing an individualâs income on othersâ life satisfaction, although itâs possible a large share is due to rescaling, not actually thinking your life is worse absolutely than otherwise. See:
Haushofer, J., Reisinger, J., & Shapiro, J. (2019). Is your gain my pain? Effects of relative income and inequality on psychological well-being.
Based on GiveDirectly in Kenya. They had multiple measures of wellbeing, but negative effects were only observed for life satisfaction for non-recipient households of cash transfers in the same village. See Table A5.
This table from Veenhoven, R. (2019). The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course., reproduced in this post.
This graph, reproduced in this post.
Other writing on the Easterlin Paradox.
Some companies may also contribute to relative inequality or even counterfactually make the median or poor person absolutely poorer through their political activities.
The categories of things Iâm optimistic about for human welfare in the short to medium term are:
Things that save us time, so we can spend more time on things that actually make us better off.
Things that improve or protect our health (including mental health).
Things that make us (feel) safer/âmore secure (physically, financially, etc.).
Things that make us more confident, but without substantially net negative externalities (negative externalities may come from positional goods, costly signaling, peer pressure).
Things that help us make better decisions, without important negative effects.
Iâm neutral to optimistic about these (possibly neutral because they just replace cheaper versions of themselves that would be just as good):
In-person activities with friends/âfamily.
Things for hobbies or projects.
Restaurants.
Iâm about neutral and pretty uncertain about screen-based entertainment (TV, movies, video games), and recreational substances that arenât extremely addictive or harmful (alcohol, marijuana).
Iâm pessimistic about:
Social media.
Status-signaling goods/âpositional goods/âluxuries.
Processed foods.
Cigarettes.
There are also a lot of externalities that act at least equally on humans, like carbon emissions, promotion of ethnic violence, or erosion of privacy. Those are all examples off the top of my head for Facebook specifically.
I upvoted Larksâ comment, but like you I think this particular argument, âpeople buy from these firmsâ, is weak.
Ok. Larkâs response seems correct.
But surely, the spirit of the original comment is correct too.
No matter which worldview you have, the value of a top leader moving into EA is overwhelmingly larger than the the social value of the same leader ârowingâ in these companies.
Also, at the risk of getting into politics (and really your standard internet argument) gesturing at âfree marketâ is really complicated. You donât need to take the view of Matt Stoller or something to notice that the benefits of these companies can be provided by other actors. The success of these companies and their resources that allow recruitment with 7 figure campus centres probably has a root source different than pure social value.
The implication that this statement requires CEA to have a strong model of these companies seems unfair. Several senior EAs, who we wonât consider activists or ideological, have deep experiences in these or similar companies. They have opinions that are consistent with the parent commentâs statement. (Being too explicit here has downsides.)
I think the main crux here is that even if Jessica/âCEA agrees that the sign of the impact is positive, it still falls in the neutral bracket because on the CEA worldview the impact is roughly negligible relative to the programs that they are excited about.
If you disagree with this maybe you agree with the weaker claim of the impact being comparatively negligible weighted by the resources these companies consume? (thereâs some kind of nuance to âconsuming resourcesâ in profitable companies, but I guess this is more gesturing at a leaving value on the table framing as opposed to just is the organisation locally net negative or positive.
Do you think people are better off overall than otherwise because of Facebook (and social media generally)? You may have made important connections on Facebook, but many people probably invest less in each connection and have shallower relationships because of social media, and my guess is that mental health is generally worse because of social media (I think there was an RCT on getting people to quit social media, and I wouldnât be surprised if there were multiple studies. I donât have them offhand). Iâd guess social media is basically addictive for a lot of people, so people often arenât making well-informed decisions about how much to use, and itâs easy for it to be net negative despite widespread use. People joining social media pressures others to join, too, making it more costly to not be on it, so FB creates a problem (induces fear of missing out) and offers a solution to it. Cancel culture, bubbles/âecho chambers, the spread of misinformation, and polarization may also be aggravated by social media.
That being said, maybe FB was really important for the growth of the EA community. I mostly got into EA through FB initially, although itâs not where I was first exposed to EA. If we think the EA community is important enough, then this plausibly dominates. And, of course, itâs where Open Philâs funding came from, but that seems to be historical luck, not really anything special about Facebook, except the growth of its market cap.
On the other hand, FB accelerated the development of AI capabilities, e.g. PyTorch was primarily built by FB. But maybe we should also consider this to be only weakly related to FBâs role in social media, and more related to the fact that itâs just a large tech company.
There are also multiple counterfactuals we could consider: no Facebook + people spend less time on social media, and no Facebook + people spend about as much time on social media (possibly on one similar to FB, or whatever other options there are now). In the first case, I think itâs hard to make a balanced argument for FB being robustly net positive. In the second case, the impact is closer to 0, from either direction, and itâs harder to evaluate its sign. Then thereâs the counterfactual impact of FB getting a more productive hire, or one who is otherwise more valued by FB.
I think McKinsey and Goldman would have other firms step into their spaces if they werenât around.
I donât think this is persuasive. I think most actions people take either increase or decrease x-risk, and you should start with a ~50% prior for which side of neutrality a specific action is on (though not clearly true; see discussion here). I agree thereâs some commonsensical notions that economic growth is good, including for the LT future, but I personally find arguments in the opposite direction to be slightly stronger. Your own comment to an earlier post is one interesting item on the list of arguments Iâd muster in that direction.
Ahh, interesting argument! I wasnât thinking about the argument that these firms might (e.g.) slightly accelerate economic growth, which might then cause an increase in x-risk (if safety is not equivalently accelerated). In general I feel sufficiently unclear about such considerationsâlike maybe literally 50:50 equipoise is a reasonable priorâthat I am loath to let them overwhelm a more concrete short-term impact story in our cost-benefit analysis, in the absence of a clear causal link to a long run impact in the opposite direction, as you suggest in the article.
In this case I think my argument still goes through, because the claim Iâm objecting to is so strongâthat there is in some sense a >50% probability that every reasonable scenario has all three firms being negative.
Thanks Jessica, this is helpful, and I really appreciate the speed at which you replied.
A couple of things that might be quick to answer and also helpful:
is there an expected value of someone working in an EA career that CEA uses? The rationale above suggests something like âwe want to spend as much as top tier employersâ but presumably this relates to an expected value of attracting top talent that would otherwise work at those firms?
I agree that itâs not feasible to produce, let alone publish, a BOTEC on every payout. However, is there a bar that youâre aiming to exceed for the manager of a group to agree to a spending request? Or a threshold where youâd want more consideration about granting funding? Iâm sure there are examples of things you wouldnât fund, or would see as very expensive and would have some rule-of-thumb for agreeing to (off-site residential retreats might be one). Or is it more âthis seems within the range of things that might help, and we havenât spent >$1m on this school yet?â
is there any counterfactual discounting? Obviously a lot of very talented people work in EA and/âor have left jobs at the employers you mention to work in EA. So whatâs the thinking on how this spending will improve the talent in EA?
Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. Iâm not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/âpeople balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
Iâll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but weâre currently spending much less than $1m/âschool.
Yes, itâs obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OPâs survey), and we think itâs likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Overall, CEA is planning to spend ~$1.5mil on uni group support in 2022 across ~75 campuses, which is a lot less than $1mil/âcampus. :)
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
Indeed :-) I had understood from this post (https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââFjDpyJNnzK8teSu4J/ââ) that this was the destination, though, so the current rate of spending would be less relevant than having good heuristics before we get to that scale.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if youâre not actually going to be behind a really âmove the needleâ amount of campus spending.
Just as a casual observation, I would much rather hire someone who had done a couple of years at McKinsey than someone coming straight out of undergrad with no work experience. So Iâm not sure that diverting talented EAs from McKinsey (or similar) is necessarily best in the long run for expected impact. No EA organization can compete with the ability of McK to train up a new hire with a wide array of generally useful skills in a short amount of time.
I think the key point here is that it is unsually easy to recuirt EAs at uni compared to when theyâre at McKinsey. I think itâs unclear if a) among the the best things for a student to do is go to McKinsey and b) how much less likely it is that an EA student goes to McKinsey. I think itâs pretty unlikely going to McKinsey is the best thing to do, but I also think that EA student groups have a realtively small effect on how often students go into elite coporate jobs (a bad thing from my perspective) at least in software engineering.
Iâm not sure how clear it is that itâs much better for people to hear about EA at university, especially given there is a lot more outreach and onboarding at the university level than for professionals.
Hi, thanks for your comment.
While itâs reasonable not to be able to provide an impact estimate for every specific small grant, I think there are some other things that could increase transparency and accountability, for example:
Publishing your general reasoning and heuristics explicitly on the CEA website.
Publishing a list of grants, updated with some frequency.
Giving some statistics on which sums went to what type of activitiesâagain, updated once in a while.
Thatâs really interesting to me because Iâm currently thinking about potential recruitment efforts at CS departments for AI safety roles. I couldnât immediately find a source for the numbers you mention, do you remember where you got them from?
I also couldnât find much information on campus recruitment expenses for top firms. However, according to the US National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), in 2018 average cost-per-hire from US universities was $6,110.
FAANG and other top tier employers are likely to spend much more than the average.
For each of the companies, if you look at publicly available websites for the campus recruiting centre for one of the HYPS schools for these companies, and just look at the roster of public facing âambassadorsâ, who have significant skills and earning counterfactual (so fully burdened cost may be over 200K per head) itâs clear itâs a 7 figure budget for them once you include operations, physical offices, management and other oversight (which wonât appear on the PL per se).
1 mil is the low end.
I canât immediately pull up a link here as I am on mobile.