Really pretty much everything Sam says in that section sounds reasonable to me, though I’d love to see some numbers/%s about what animal-related giving he/FTX are doing.
In general I don’t think individuals should worry too much about their cause “portfolio”: IMHO there are a lot of reasonable problems to work on (eg on the reliable-but-lower-EV to unreliable-higher-EV spectrum) - though also many other problems that are nowhere near that efficient frontier. But like it’s fine for the deworming specialist (or donor) to mostly just stay focused on that rather than fret about how much to think about chickens, pandemics, AI… 100 specialists will achieve more than 100 generalists, etc.
This just becomes less true for a behemoth donor like Sam/FTX, or leaders like MacAskill & Ord. They have such outsized influence that if they don’t fine-tune their “portfolio” a bit, important issues can end up neglected. And at the level of the EA movement, or broader society itself, the weighting of the portfolio becomes key.
My underlying thesis above is that the movement may be underweighting animals/factory farming right now, relative to longtermism, due to the biases I laid out. I didn’t explicitly argue this: my post is about “biases to be aware of,” not “proof that these biases are currently resulting in misallocation”—perhaps another day. But anyway even if this thesis is correct, it doesn’t imply that a) risks like AI safety and pandemic prevention don’t deserve a significant chunk of our portfolio (I think they do), or that b) broader society isn’t hugely underweight those risks (I think it is).
This is great, thank you! I’m so behind...
Really pretty much everything Sam says in that section sounds reasonable to me, though I’d love to see some numbers/%s about what animal-related giving he/FTX are doing.
In general I don’t think individuals should worry too much about their cause “portfolio”: IMHO there are a lot of reasonable problems to work on (eg on the reliable-but-lower-EV to unreliable-higher-EV spectrum) - though also many other problems that are nowhere near that efficient frontier. But like it’s fine for the deworming specialist (or donor) to mostly just stay focused on that rather than fret about how much to think about chickens, pandemics, AI… 100 specialists will achieve more than 100 generalists, etc.
This just becomes less true for a behemoth donor like Sam/FTX, or leaders like MacAskill & Ord. They have such outsized influence that if they don’t fine-tune their “portfolio” a bit, important issues can end up neglected. And at the level of the EA movement, or broader society itself, the weighting of the portfolio becomes key.
My underlying thesis above is that the movement may be underweighting animals/factory farming right now, relative to longtermism, due to the biases I laid out. I didn’t explicitly argue this: my post is about “biases to be aware of,” not “proof that these biases are currently resulting in misallocation”—perhaps another day. But anyway even if this thesis is correct, it doesn’t imply that a) risks like AI safety and pandemic prevention don’t deserve a significant chunk of our portfolio (I think they do), or that b) broader society isn’t hugely underweight those risks (I think it is).