Thanksâvery interesting. Could an EA pay for drug medical studies in Portugal? It seems like there are millions of people working on marijuana legalization, and many critics of the war on drugs. I know you are looking more holistically, but overall it doesnât seem that neglected.
For those who think something else is more important, I would be very grateful if you could produce some (very rough) estimates of how many times more cost effective money to their preferred cause is than DPR.
Some people would say ~10^40 times (computer consciousnesses and spreading intergalactically). Of course there are many reasons why this vision may not pan out, but it does seem like we should have a non-negligible probability that we are alone in the galaxy (or even the visible universe) and that we can and have the will to colonize the stars if we donât destroy ourselves. These qualifiers might only take a few orders of magnitude off. Then even if you do not believe in the tractability of AI, there are many other concrete interventions that could reduce existential risk, like asteroid defense and alternate foods. So basically I do not believe the prior of cost effectiveness of global poverty interventions should be strong, so I donât think we should adjust these expected value calculations downward nearly as much as some proposed models have done.
Also, if one does not value the far future, there are other claims of cost effectiveness better than global poverty.
Hey Denkenberger, thanks for your comment. I too tend to weight the future heavily and I think there are some reasons to believe that DPR could have nontrivial benefits with this set of preferences. This was in fact why, as Michael mentions above:
âFWIW, I think the mental health impact of DPR is about 80% of itâs value, but when I asked Lee the same question (before telling him my view) I think he said it was about 30% (we were potentially using different moral philosophies).â
because I think DPRâs effects on the far future could be the source of most of its expected value.
DPR sits at the juncture between international development & economic growth, global & mental health, national & international crime, terrorism, conflict & security, and human rights. I think we should expect solving the world drug problem to improve some or all of these issues, as Michael argued in the series.
I think it could be easy to overlook the expected benefits of significant reductions in funding and motivation for crime, corruption, terrorism, and conflict for fostering a stable, trusting global system. My weak conjecture is that such reductions would bring an array of global benefits composed of reduced out-group fear (on community and international levels), stronger institutions, and richer societies.
DPR might thus offer a step in the right direction towards solving issues of global coordination, which in turn may increase our expectations for solving the coordination problem for AI and, thence, the long-term future. I admit this is a fairly hand-wavy notion and that the causal chains are undesirably long and uncertain, relying on unpredictable assumptions (such as the timing of an intelligence takeoff compared with the length of time it would take to observe the international social benefits, for a start). My confidence intervals are therefore commensurately wide, but still I struggle to think of ways in which it could be net negative for global coordination. So almost all of my probability weight is positive. Multiplied by humanityâs cosmic endowment, I weigh this relatively heavily. Of course, there may be other, more certain activities that we can do to improve the EV of humanityâs future, and I think there are, but I donât think DPR is obviously a waste of time if thatâs what we care about.
Thanksâvery interesting. Could an EA pay for drug medical studies in Portugal? It seems like there are millions of people working on marijuana legalization, and many critics of the war on drugs. I know you are looking more holistically, but overall it doesnât seem that neglected.
Some people would say ~10^40 times (computer consciousnesses and spreading intergalactically). Of course there are many reasons why this vision may not pan out, but it does seem like we should have a non-negligible probability that we are alone in the galaxy (or even the visible universe) and that we can and have the will to colonize the stars if we donât destroy ourselves. These qualifiers might only take a few orders of magnitude off. Then even if you do not believe in the tractability of AI, there are many other concrete interventions that could reduce existential risk, like asteroid defense and alternate foods. So basically I do not believe the prior of cost effectiveness of global poverty interventions should be strong, so I donât think we should adjust these expected value calculations downward nearly as much as some proposed models have done.
Also, if one does not value the far future, there are other claims of cost effectiveness better than global poverty.
Hey Denkenberger, thanks for your comment. I too tend to weight the future heavily and I think there are some reasons to believe that DPR could have nontrivial benefits with this set of preferences. This was in fact why, as Michael mentions above:
DPR sits at the juncture between international development & economic growth, global & mental health, national & international crime, terrorism, conflict & security, and human rights. I think we should expect solving the world drug problem to improve some or all of these issues, as Michael argued in the series.
I think it could be easy to overlook the expected benefits of significant reductions in funding and motivation for crime, corruption, terrorism, and conflict for fostering a stable, trusting global system. My weak conjecture is that such reductions would bring an array of global benefits composed of reduced out-group fear (on community and international levels), stronger institutions, and richer societies.
DPR might thus offer a step in the right direction towards solving issues of global coordination, which in turn may increase our expectations for solving the coordination problem for AI and, thence, the long-term future. I admit this is a fairly hand-wavy notion and that the causal chains are undesirably long and uncertain, relying on unpredictable assumptions (such as the timing of an intelligence takeoff compared with the length of time it would take to observe the international social benefits, for a start). My confidence intervals are therefore commensurately wide, but still I struggle to think of ways in which it could be net negative for global coordination. So almost all of my probability weight is positive. Multiplied by humanityâs cosmic endowment, I weigh this relatively heavily. Of course, there may be other, more certain activities that we can do to improve the EV of humanityâs future, and I think there are, but I donât think DPR is obviously a waste of time if thatâs what we care about.