What’s the difference between moderate and long term EA? I’m guessing x-risk would be long term and perhaps some kind of research, medium term?
As your second footnote suggested, I think that the short vs long term debate really boils down to a low vs high risk one. Just like people have different tastes for risk level in their financial investments, so to in their philanthropic investments. Long term goals such as developing technology or x-risk I don’t think anyone thinks are unimportant, they’re simply unpredictable (high risk), whereas GiveWell-type charities don’t fix systemic probs but more “safe.”
Related to #2 is diversification. People diversify their financial investments because low risk doesn’t yield that much whereas high yield is also high risk, so they hold various levels of risk in their portfolio (or even within the same risk level, it’s lower risk to have multiple investments, of course). This even makes sense if someone wanted to hold only high risk (long term) donations in their philanthropic portfolio: they may feel that putting all their money on, for instance, fighting corruption, is a long shot, so may feel comfort in giving half their donations to promoting morals. In this case, the risk level is still high, but it will give the donor the psychological comfort that he has TWO chances of improving the world, rather that just one!
You associate long term EA with weirdness, and I agree that the public would see AI, and some other forms of x-risk that way, but there are so many other long-term high impact pursuits that are not weird: research on behavioural economics; designing technologies that help the poor along with their distribution and marketing systems; decreasing corruption including political reform; restructuring our economic and monetary systems to make them more fair and egalitarian; promoting more moral or sustainable lifestyles like veganism; lobbying; green tech; medical tech. I don’t think people would find any of these weird.
As someone on the forum stated earlier, people tend to be more motivated to make the world better, rather than deal with sad things like extreme poverty. I think that’s probably true. When promoting EA, would it not be ideal to have a little “something for everybody”? ie. For those with bleeding hearts, immediate measures for helping the global poor; for tech-oriented people developing high-impact technologies; for “save the world from injustice” types, combating corruption. It’s unacceptable to me that someone would reject philanthropy or direct EA altogether because the person teaching her about it was dismissive of her place on the risk-type-duration spectrum. We should be empowering everyone, not trying to get them to conform to a specific form of EA!
See my reply to pappubahry above. The distinction is between (i) short-run EA (ii) moderate long-run EA and (iii) extreme long-run EA, not short vs. medium vs. long. I agree this is confusing, sorry!
Also, I don’t think the distinction boils down to high-risk vs. low-risk. It’s more about what kinds of evidence you use, and maybe some questions about values too.
What’s the difference between moderate and long term EA? I’m guessing x-risk would be long term and perhaps some kind of research, medium term?
As your second footnote suggested, I think that the short vs long term debate really boils down to a low vs high risk one. Just like people have different tastes for risk level in their financial investments, so to in their philanthropic investments. Long term goals such as developing technology or x-risk I don’t think anyone thinks are unimportant, they’re simply unpredictable (high risk), whereas GiveWell-type charities don’t fix systemic probs but more “safe.”
Related to #2 is diversification. People diversify their financial investments because low risk doesn’t yield that much whereas high yield is also high risk, so they hold various levels of risk in their portfolio (or even within the same risk level, it’s lower risk to have multiple investments, of course). This even makes sense if someone wanted to hold only high risk (long term) donations in their philanthropic portfolio: they may feel that putting all their money on, for instance, fighting corruption, is a long shot, so may feel comfort in giving half their donations to promoting morals. In this case, the risk level is still high, but it will give the donor the psychological comfort that he has TWO chances of improving the world, rather that just one!
You associate long term EA with weirdness, and I agree that the public would see AI, and some other forms of x-risk that way, but there are so many other long-term high impact pursuits that are not weird: research on behavioural economics; designing technologies that help the poor along with their distribution and marketing systems; decreasing corruption including political reform; restructuring our economic and monetary systems to make them more fair and egalitarian; promoting more moral or sustainable lifestyles like veganism; lobbying; green tech; medical tech. I don’t think people would find any of these weird.
As someone on the forum stated earlier, people tend to be more motivated to make the world better, rather than deal with sad things like extreme poverty. I think that’s probably true. When promoting EA, would it not be ideal to have a little “something for everybody”? ie. For those with bleeding hearts, immediate measures for helping the global poor; for tech-oriented people developing high-impact technologies; for “save the world from injustice” types, combating corruption. It’s unacceptable to me that someone would reject philanthropy or direct EA altogether because the person teaching her about it was dismissive of her place on the risk-type-duration spectrum. We should be empowering everyone, not trying to get them to conform to a specific form of EA!
See my reply to pappubahry above. The distinction is between (i) short-run EA (ii) moderate long-run EA and (iii) extreme long-run EA, not short vs. medium vs. long. I agree this is confusing, sorry!
Also, I don’t think the distinction boils down to high-risk vs. low-risk. It’s more about what kinds of evidence you use, and maybe some questions about values too.