What’s the incentive structure here? If I’m following the money, it seems likely that there’s a much higher likely return if you hype up your plausibly-really-important product, and if you believe in the hype yourself. I don’t see why Musk or Zuckerberg should ask themselves the hard questions about their mission given that there’s not, as far as I can see, any incentive for them to do so. (Which seems bad!)
What can be done? Presumably we could fund two FTE in-house at any given EA research organization to red-team any given massive corporate effort like SpaceX. But I don’t have a coherent theory of change as to what that would accomplish. Pressure the SEC to require annual updates to SEC filings? Might be closer...
“If I’m following the money, it seems likely that there’s a much higher likely return if you hype up your plausibly-really-important product, and if you believe in the hype yourself.”
Yep, I think that’s the case right now. But the reason for this is that people actually buy these arguments for some reason.
To the extent that we can convince people not to do that, I would assume the problem would be lessened.
What can be done?
First, we can make sure that EAs treat this stuff skeptically (a low bar, but still a bar). I’m not sure about second steps, but there are a lot of options.
80,000 Hours has done a really useful job (from what I can tell) improving the state of career decisions (for certain clusters of professionals). I could easily imagine corporate versions or similar, for example.
Open questions:
What’s the incentive structure here? If I’m following the money, it seems likely that there’s a much higher likely return if you hype up your plausibly-really-important product, and if you believe in the hype yourself. I don’t see why Musk or Zuckerberg should ask themselves the hard questions about their mission given that there’s not, as far as I can see, any incentive for them to do so. (Which seems bad!)
What can be done? Presumably we could fund two FTE in-house at any given EA research organization to red-team any given massive corporate effort like SpaceX. But I don’t have a coherent theory of change as to what that would accomplish. Pressure the SEC to require annual updates to SEC filings? Might be closer...
Yep, I think that’s the case right now. But the reason for this is that people actually buy these arguments for some reason.
To the extent that we can convince people not to do that, I would assume the problem would be lessened.
First, we can make sure that EAs treat this stuff skeptically (a low bar, but still a bar). I’m not sure about second steps, but there are a lot of options.
80,000 Hours has done a really useful job (from what I can tell) improving the state of career decisions (for certain clusters of professionals). I could easily imagine corporate versions or similar, for example.