I know this is a late reply to an old comment but it would be awesome to know in how far you think you have addressed the issues raised? Or if you did not address them what was you reason for discarding them?
I am working through the cause prio literature at the moment and I don’t really feel that 80k addresses all (or most) of the substantial concerns raised. For instance, the assessments of climate change and AI safety are great examples where 80k’s considerations can be quite easily attacked given conceptual difficulties in the underlying cause prio framework/argument.
This will mainly need to wait for a separate article or podcast, since it’s a pretty complicated topic.
However, my quick impression is that the issues Caspar mentions are mentioned in the problem framework article.
I also agree that their effect is probably to narrow the difference between AI safety and climate change, however I don’t think they flip the ordering, and our ‘all considered’ view of the difference between the two was already narrower than a naive application of the INT framework implies – for the reasons mentioned here – so I don’t think it really alters our bottom lines (in part because we were already aware of these issues). I’m sorry, though, that we’re not clearer that our ‘all considered’ views are different from ‘naive INT’.
Yeah, an article or podcast on the framework and possible pitfalls would be great. I generally like ITN for broad cause assessments (i.e., is this interesting to look at?) but the quantitative version that 80k uses does seem to have some serious limitations if one digs more deeply into the topic. I would be mostly concerned about people new to EA either having false confidence in numbers or being turned off by an overly simplistic approach. But you obviously have much more insight into peoples reactions and I am looking forward to how you develop and improve on the content in the future!
That’s a good piece—we thought about many of these issues when working on the framework, and I agree it’s not all clearly explained on the page.
I know this is a late reply to an old comment but it would be awesome to know in how far you think you have addressed the issues raised? Or if you did not address them what was you reason for discarding them?
I am working through the cause prio literature at the moment and I don’t really feel that 80k addresses all (or most) of the substantial concerns raised. For instance, the assessments of climate change and AI safety are great examples where 80k’s considerations can be quite easily attacked given conceptual difficulties in the underlying cause prio framework/argument.
This will mainly need to wait for a separate article or podcast, since it’s a pretty complicated topic.
However, my quick impression is that the issues Caspar mentions are mentioned in the problem framework article.
I also agree that their effect is probably to narrow the difference between AI safety and climate change, however I don’t think they flip the ordering, and our ‘all considered’ view of the difference between the two was already narrower than a naive application of the INT framework implies – for the reasons mentioned here – so I don’t think it really alters our bottom lines (in part because we were already aware of these issues). I’m sorry, though, that we’re not clearer that our ‘all considered’ views are different from ‘naive INT’.
Thanks for the quick reply!
Yeah, an article or podcast on the framework and possible pitfalls would be great. I generally like ITN for broad cause assessments (i.e., is this interesting to look at?) but the quantitative version that 80k uses does seem to have some serious limitations if one digs more deeply into the topic. I would be mostly concerned about people new to EA either having false confidence in numbers or being turned off by an overly simplistic approach. But you obviously have much more insight into peoples reactions and I am looking forward to how you develop and improve on the content in the future!