When you say it’s widely accepted, whom do you mean?
I should have mentioned this in the original comment, but I was mostly concerned with effects on humans. I find the claim that there a big flow through effects on animals, see the poor meat eater problem, much more plausible.
(I also didn’t mean that I think that it’s implausible that AMF has high flow through effects, but that claiming that with high confidence seems quite off to me.)
Small changes to global civilization have large and potentially long-lasting effects. If, for example, preventing someone from getting malaria slightly speeds up scientific progress, that could improve people’s lives for potentially millions of years into the future; or if we colonize other planets, it could affect trillions or quadrillions of people per generation.
That’s why I was arguing from the individual child’s perspective: The effect on the child and their family is extremely positive, while it’s very unlikely that this child will make important scientific discoveries.
With the latter part of the quote you’re echoing roughly the same what I said, which is that the main effect of AMF is from causing existence to the child (and here, their descendants).
Now, even if you don’t believe AMF has large flow-through effects, how robust is the evidence for this belief? My basic argument still applies here: the claim that AMF has small flow-through effects is a pretty speculative claim, so we still can’t say with high confidence how big AMF’s impact is or whether it’s even net positive.
You were the one saying that the flow through effects are probably bigger than the direct impact.
When you say it’s widely accepted, whom do you mean?
I hear a lot of EAs claim that flow-through effects dominate direct effects, and I know a lot of people in person who believe this.
You were the one saying that the flow through effects are probably bigger than the direct impact.
Let’s assume for now that flow through effects are probably smaller than the direct impact. This is still a fairly speculative claim since we don’t have strong evidence that this is true. That means there’s a possibility that AMF has large negative flow-through effects that overwhelm it’s benefits. Even if we don’t think this possibility is very likely, it still means we can’t claim there’s a robust case for AMF having a clear net positive impact. I’m not saying AMF is very likely to be net harmful, I’m just saying it’s not astronomically unlikely, which means we can’t claim with high confidence that AMF is net beneficial. Does that make sense?
Let’s say the direct effect of a donation to AMF is +100 utilons, and the flow-through effects are normally distributed around 0 with st. dev. 50 utilons. That would seem to meet your criteria that it’s not astronomically unlikely that AMF is net harmful, but I can still claim with 97.5% confident that it’s net beneficial. Which personally I would call ‘high confidence’.
That all seems fairly obvious to me, which makes me think I’m probably not understanding your position correctly here. I also assume that your position isn’t that ‘we can never be 100% certain about anything and this is annoying’. But I’m not sure what ‘middle ground’ you are aiming for with the claim ‘everything is uncertain’.
I would also describe that scenario as “high confidence.” My best guess on the actual numbers is more like, the direct effect of a donation to AMF is +1 utilon, and flow-through effects are normally distributed around 100 with standard deviation 500. So it’s net positive in expectation but still has a high probability (~42% for the numbers given) of being net negative.
I appreciate that those would be your numbers, I’m just pointing out that you do actually need that high standard deviation (i.e. you need to believe that the flow through affects will likely be larger than the direct effects) in order to justify that claim. Which is what Denise was saying in the first place.
You appeared to think you could get away with allowing that flow through affects are probably smaller than direct impact and then make the much weaker claim ‘there’s a possibility that AMF has large negative flow-through effects that overwhelm its benefits’ to get to your conclusion that you can’t have high confidence in AMF being good. But I don’t think you can actually allow that; I’m fully capable of accepting that argument and still considering AMF ‘high confidence’ good.
Of course, you might just have a good argument for focusing on the flow-through effects, which would render this discussion moot.
Those seem really high flow through effects to me! £2000 saves one life, but you could easily see it doing as much good as saving 600!
How are you arriving at the figure? The argument that “if you value all times equally, the flow through effects are 99.99...% of the impact” would actually seem to show that they dominated the immediate effects much more than this. (I’m hoping there’s a reason why this observation is very misleading.) So what informal argument are you using?
I more or less made up the numbers on the spot. I expect flow-through effects to dominate direct effects, but I don’t know if I should assume that they will be astronomically bigger. The argument I’m making here is really more qualitative. In practice, I assume that AMF takes $3000 to save a life, but I don’t put much credence in the certainty of this number.
When you say it’s widely accepted, whom do you mean?
I should have mentioned this in the original comment, but I was mostly concerned with effects on humans. I find the claim that there a big flow through effects on animals, see the poor meat eater problem, much more plausible.
(I also didn’t mean that I think that it’s implausible that AMF has high flow through effects, but that claiming that with high confidence seems quite off to me.)
That’s why I was arguing from the individual child’s perspective: The effect on the child and their family is extremely positive, while it’s very unlikely that this child will make important scientific discoveries. With the latter part of the quote you’re echoing roughly the same what I said, which is that the main effect of AMF is from causing existence to the child (and here, their descendants).
You were the one saying that the flow through effects are probably bigger than the direct impact.
I hear a lot of EAs claim that flow-through effects dominate direct effects, and I know a lot of people in person who believe this.
Let’s assume for now that flow through effects are probably smaller than the direct impact. This is still a fairly speculative claim since we don’t have strong evidence that this is true. That means there’s a possibility that AMF has large negative flow-through effects that overwhelm it’s benefits. Even if we don’t think this possibility is very likely, it still means we can’t claim there’s a robust case for AMF having a clear net positive impact. I’m not saying AMF is very likely to be net harmful, I’m just saying it’s not astronomically unlikely, which means we can’t claim with high confidence that AMF is net beneficial. Does that make sense?
What’s ‘high confidence’?
Let’s say the direct effect of a donation to AMF is +100 utilons, and the flow-through effects are normally distributed around 0 with st. dev. 50 utilons. That would seem to meet your criteria that it’s not astronomically unlikely that AMF is net harmful, but I can still claim with 97.5% confident that it’s net beneficial. Which personally I would call ‘high confidence’.
That all seems fairly obvious to me, which makes me think I’m probably not understanding your position correctly here. I also assume that your position isn’t that ‘we can never be 100% certain about anything and this is annoying’. But I’m not sure what ‘middle ground’ you are aiming for with the claim ‘everything is uncertain’.
I would also describe that scenario as “high confidence.” My best guess on the actual numbers is more like, the direct effect of a donation to AMF is +1 utilon, and flow-through effects are normally distributed around 100 with standard deviation 500. So it’s net positive in expectation but still has a high probability (~42% for the numbers given) of being net negative.
I appreciate that those would be your numbers, I’m just pointing out that you do actually need that high standard deviation (i.e. you need to believe that the flow through affects will likely be larger than the direct effects) in order to justify that claim. Which is what Denise was saying in the first place.
You appeared to think you could get away with allowing that flow through affects are probably smaller than direct impact and then make the much weaker claim ‘there’s a possibility that AMF has large negative flow-through effects that overwhelm its benefits’ to get to your conclusion that you can’t have high confidence in AMF being good. But I don’t think you can actually allow that; I’m fully capable of accepting that argument and still considering AMF ‘high confidence’ good.
Of course, you might just have a good argument for focusing on the flow-through effects, which would render this discussion moot.
Those seem really high flow through effects to me! £2000 saves one life, but you could easily see it doing as much good as saving 600!
How are you arriving at the figure? The argument that “if you value all times equally, the flow through effects are 99.99...% of the impact” would actually seem to show that they dominated the immediate effects much more than this. (I’m hoping there’s a reason why this observation is very misleading.) So what informal argument are you using?
I more or less made up the numbers on the spot. I expect flow-through effects to dominate direct effects, but I don’t know if I should assume that they will be astronomically bigger. The argument I’m making here is really more qualitative. In practice, I assume that AMF takes $3000 to save a life, but I don’t put much credence in the certainty of this number.