Very interesting, thanks. I read this as more saying ‘we need to be prepared to back unlikely but potentially impactful things’, and acknowledging the uncertainty in longtermism, rather than saying ‘we don’t think expected value is a good heuristic for giving out grants’, but I’m not confident in that reading. Probably reflects my personal framing more than anything else.
Asking if FTX have done something as explicit as a BOTEC for each grant or if it’s more a case of “this seems plausibly good” (where both use expected value as a heuristic)
If there are BOTECs, requesting they write them all up in a publicly shareable form
Implying that the larger the pot, the more certain you should be (“these things have a much higher than average chance of doing harm. Most mistaken grants will just fail. These grants carry reputational and epistemic risks to EA.”)
I thought Sam’s comments served as partial responses to each of these points. You seem to be essentially challenging FTX to be a lot more certain about the impact of their grants (tell us your reasoning so we can test your assumptions and help you be more sure you’re doing the right thing, hire more staff like Open Phil so you can put a lot more work into these evaluations, reduce the risk of potential downsides because they’re pretty bad) and Sam here essentially seems to be responding “I don’t think we need to be that certain.” I can’t see where the expected value heuristic was ever called into question? Sorry if you thought that’s how I was reading this.
[Edit: Maybe when you say “plausibly good” you mean “negative in expectation but a decent chance of being good”, whereas I read it as “good in expectation but not as the result of an explicit BOTEC”? That might be where the confusion lies. If so, with my top-level comment I was trying to say “This is why FTX might be using heuristics that are even rougher than BOTECs and why they have a much smaller team than Open Phil and why they may not take the time to publish all their reasoning” rather than “This is why they might not be that bothered about expected value and instead are just funding things that might be good”. Hope that makes sense.]
Very interesting, thanks. I read this as more saying ‘we need to be prepared to back unlikely but potentially impactful things’, and acknowledging the uncertainty in longtermism, rather than saying ‘we don’t think expected value is a good heuristic for giving out grants’, but I’m not confident in that reading. Probably reflects my personal framing more than anything else.
Oh, I read it as more the former too!
I read your post as:
Asking if FTX have done something as explicit as a BOTEC for each grant or if it’s more a case of “this seems plausibly good” (where both use expected value as a heuristic)
If there are BOTECs, requesting they write them all up in a publicly shareable form
Implying that the larger the pot, the more certain you should be (“these things have a much higher than average chance of doing harm. Most mistaken grants will just fail. These grants carry reputational and epistemic risks to EA.”)
I thought Sam’s comments served as partial responses to each of these points. You seem to be essentially challenging FTX to be a lot more certain about the impact of their grants (tell us your reasoning so we can test your assumptions and help you be more sure you’re doing the right thing, hire more staff like Open Phil so you can put a lot more work into these evaluations, reduce the risk of potential downsides because they’re pretty bad) and Sam here essentially seems to be responding “I don’t think we need to be that certain.” I can’t see where the expected value heuristic was ever called into question? Sorry if you thought that’s how I was reading this.
[Edit: Maybe when you say “plausibly good” you mean “negative in expectation but a decent chance of being good”, whereas I read it as “good in expectation but not as the result of an explicit BOTEC”? That might be where the confusion lies. If so, with my top-level comment I was trying to say “This is why FTX might be using heuristics that are even rougher than BOTECs and why they have a much smaller team than Open Phil and why they may not take the time to publish all their reasoning” rather than “This is why they might not be that bothered about expected value and instead are just funding things that might be good”. Hope that makes sense.]