“I sometimes hear the outside view argument used as an argument for patient philanthropy, which it in fact is not.”
I don’t think this works quite in the way you think it does.
It is true that, in a similar vein to the arguments I give against being at the most influential time (where ‘influential’ is a technical term, excluding investing opportunities), you can give an outside-view argument against now being the time at which you can do the most good tout court. As a matter of fact, I believe that’s true: we’re almost certainly not at the point in time, in all history, at which one can do the most good by investing a given unit of resources to donate at a later date. That time could plausibly be earlier than now, because you get greater investment returns, or plausibly later than now, because in the future we might have a better understanding of how to structure the right legal instruments, specify the constitution of one’s foundation, etc.
But this is not an argument against patient philanthropy compared to direct action. In order to think that patient philanthropy is the right approach, you do not need to make the claim that now is the time, out of all times, when patient philanthropy will do the most expected good. You just need the claim that, currently, patient philanthropy will do more good than direct philanthropy. This is a (much, much) weaker claim to make.
And, crucially, there’s an asymmetry between patient philanthropy and direct philanthropy.
Suppose there are 70 time periods at which you could spend your philanthropic resources (every remaining year of your life, say), and that the scale of your philanthropy is small (so that diminishing returns can be ignored). Then, if the expected cost-effectiveness of the best opportunities varies substantially over time, there will be just one point in time at which your philanthropy will have the most impact, and you should try to max out your philanthropy at that time period, donating all your philanthropy at that time if you can. (Perhaps that isn’t quite possible because you are limited in how much you can take out debt against future income; but still, the number of times you will donate in your life will be small.) So, in 69 out of 70 time periods (or, even if you need to donate a few times, ~67 out of 70 time periods), you should be saving rather than donating. That’s why direct philanthropy needs to make the claim that now is the most, or at least one of the most, potentially-impactful times, out of the relevant time periods when one could donate, whereas patient philanthropy doesn’t.
Second, the inductive argument against now being the optimal time for patient philanthropy is much weaker than the inductive argument against now being the most influential time (in the technical sense of ’influential). It’s not clear there is an inductive argument against now being the optimal time for patient philanthropy: there’s at least a plausible argument that, on average, every year the value of patient philanthropy decreases, because one loses one extra year of investment returns. Combined with the fact that one cannot affect the past (well, putting non-causal decision theories to the side ;) ), this gives an argument for thinking that now will be higher-impact for patient philanthropy than all future times.
Personally, I don’t think that argument quite works, because you can still mess up patient philanthropy, so maybe future people will do patient philanthropy better than we do. But it’s an argument that’s much more compelling in the case of patient philanthropy than it is for the influentialness of a time.
Then, if the expected cost-effectiveness of the best opportunities varies substantially over time, there will be just one point in time at which your philanthropy will have the most impact, and you should try to max out your philanthropy at that time period, donating all your philanthropy at that time if you can.
Tho I note that the only way one would ever take such opportunities, if offered, is by developing a view of what sorts of opportunities are good that is sufficiently motivating to actually take action at least once every few decades.
For example, when the most attractive opportunity so far appears in year 19 of investing and assessing opportunities, will our patient philanthropist direct all their money towards it, and then start saving again? Will they reason that they don’t have sufficient evidence to overcome their prior that year 19 is not more attractive than the years to come? Will they say “well, I’m following the Secretary Problem solution, and 19 is less than 70/e, so I’m still in info-gathering mode”?
They won’t, of course, know which path had higher value in their particular world until they die, but it seems to me like most of the information content of a strategy that waits to pull the trigger is in when it decides to pull the trigger, and this feels like the least explicit part of your argument.
Compare to investing, where some people are fans of timing the market, and some people are fans of dollar-cost-averaging. If you think the attractiveness of giving opportunities is going to be unpredictably volatile, then doing direct work or philanthropy every year is the optimal approach. If instead you think the attractiveness of giving opportunities is predictably volatile, or predictably stable, then doing patient philanthropy makes more sense.
What seems odd to me is simultaneously holding the outside view sense that we have insufficient evidence to think that we’re correctly assessing a promising opportunity now, and having the sense that we should expect that we will correctly assess the promising opportunities in the future when they do happen.
My claim is that patient philanthropy is automatically making the claim that now is the time where patient philanthropy does wildly unusually much expected good, because we’re so early in history that the best giving opportunities are almost surely after us.
This comment of mine in particular seems to have been downvoted. If anyone were willing, I’d be interested to understand why: is that because (i) the tone is off (seemed too combative?); (ii) the arguments themselves are weak; (iii) it wasn’t clear what I’m saying; (iv) it wasn’t engaging with Buck’s argument; (v) other?
I can’t speak for why other people down-voted the comment but I down-voted it because the arguments you make are overly simplistic.
The model you have of philanthropy is that on an agent in each time period has the choice to either (1) invest or (2) spend their resources, and then getting a payoff depending on how influential″ the time is. You argue that the agent should then save until they reach the most influential″ time, before spending all of their resources at this most influential time.
I think this model is misleading for a couple of reasons. First, in the real world we don’t know when the most influential time is. In this case the agent may find it optimal to spend some of their resources at each time step. For instance direct philanthropic donations may give them a better understanding in the future of how influentialness varies (ie, if you don’t invest in AI safety researchers now, how will you ever know whether/when AI safety will be a problem?) You may also worry about “going bust”: if while you are being patient, an existential catastrophe (or value lock-in) happens, then the patient long-termist looses their entire investment.
Perhaps one way to phrase how important this knowledge problem is to finding the optimal strategy is to think about it as analogous to owning stocks in a bubble. You strategy is that we should sell at the market peak, but we can’t do that if we don’t know when that will be.
Second, there are very plausible reasons why now may be the best time to donate. If we can spend money today to permanently reduce existential risk, or to permanently improve the welfare of the global poor, then it is always more valuable to do that action ASAP rather than wait. Likewise we plausibly get more value by working on biorisk, AI safety, or climate change today then we will in 20 years.
Third, the assumption of no diminishing marginal returns is illogical. We should be thinking about how EAs as a whole should spend their money as a whole. As an individual, I would not want to hold out for the most influential time if I thought everyone else was doing the same, and of course as a community we can coordinate.
If we can spend money today to permanently reduce existential risk, or to permanently improve the welfare of the global poor, then it is always more valuable to do that action ASAP rather than wait.
This seems straightforwardly untrue, because you may be able to permanently reduce existential risk more cheaply in the future.
I also think (but am not sure) that Will doesn’t include solving the knowledge problem as part of “direct action”, and so your first critique is not very relevant to the choice between patient philanthropy and direct action, because probably you’ll want to gain knowledge in either case.
I agree with your criticism of my second argument. What I should have instead said is a bit different. There are actions whose value decreases over time. For instance, all else being equal it is better to implement a policy which reduces existential risk sooner rather than later. Patient philanthropy makes sense only if either (a) you expect the growth of your resources to outpace the value lost by failing to act now, or (b) you expect cheaper opportunities to arise in the future. I don’t think there are great reasons to believe either of these is true (or indeed false, I’m not very certain on the issue).
There are two issues with knowledge, and I probably should have separated them more clearly. The more important one is that the kind of decision-relevant information Will is asking for, that is, knowing when and how to spend your money optimally, may well just be unattainable. Optimal strategies with imperfect information probably look very different from optimal strategies with perfect information.
A secondary issue is that you actually need to generate the knowledge. I agree it is unclear whether Will is considering the knowledge problem as part of “direct” or “patient” philanthropy. But since knowledge production might eat up a large chunk of your resources, and since some types of knowledge may be best produced by trying to do direct work, plausibly the “patient philanthropist” ends up spending a lot of resources over time. This is not the image of patient philanthropy I originally had, but maybe I’ve been misunderstanding what Will was envisaging.
(Comment 4⁄5)
The argument against patient philanthropy
“I sometimes hear the outside view argument used as an argument for patient philanthropy, which it in fact is not.”
I don’t think this works quite in the way you think it does.
It is true that, in a similar vein to the arguments I give against being at the most influential time (where ‘influential’ is a technical term, excluding investing opportunities), you can give an outside-view argument against now being the time at which you can do the most good tout court. As a matter of fact, I believe that’s true: we’re almost certainly not at the point in time, in all history, at which one can do the most good by investing a given unit of resources to donate at a later date. That time could plausibly be earlier than now, because you get greater investment returns, or plausibly later than now, because in the future we might have a better understanding of how to structure the right legal instruments, specify the constitution of one’s foundation, etc.
But this is not an argument against patient philanthropy compared to direct action. In order to think that patient philanthropy is the right approach, you do not need to make the claim that now is the time, out of all times, when patient philanthropy will do the most expected good. You just need the claim that, currently, patient philanthropy will do more good than direct philanthropy. This is a (much, much) weaker claim to make.
And, crucially, there’s an asymmetry between patient philanthropy and direct philanthropy.
Suppose there are 70 time periods at which you could spend your philanthropic resources (every remaining year of your life, say), and that the scale of your philanthropy is small (so that diminishing returns can be ignored). Then, if the expected cost-effectiveness of the best opportunities varies substantially over time, there will be just one point in time at which your philanthropy will have the most impact, and you should try to max out your philanthropy at that time period, donating all your philanthropy at that time if you can. (Perhaps that isn’t quite possible because you are limited in how much you can take out debt against future income; but still, the number of times you will donate in your life will be small.) So, in 69 out of 70 time periods (or, even if you need to donate a few times, ~67 out of 70 time periods), you should be saving rather than donating. That’s why direct philanthropy needs to make the claim that now is the most, or at least one of the most, potentially-impactful times, out of the relevant time periods when one could donate, whereas patient philanthropy doesn’t.
Second, the inductive argument against now being the optimal time for patient philanthropy is much weaker than the inductive argument against now being the most influential time (in the technical sense of ’influential). It’s not clear there is an inductive argument against now being the optimal time for patient philanthropy: there’s at least a plausible argument that, on average, every year the value of patient philanthropy decreases, because one loses one extra year of investment returns. Combined with the fact that one cannot affect the past (well, putting non-causal decision theories to the side ;) ), this gives an argument for thinking that now will be higher-impact for patient philanthropy than all future times.
Personally, I don’t think that argument quite works, because you can still mess up patient philanthropy, so maybe future people will do patient philanthropy better than we do. But it’s an argument that’s much more compelling in the case of patient philanthropy than it is for the influentialness of a time.
Tho I note that the only way one would ever take such opportunities, if offered, is by developing a view of what sorts of opportunities are good that is sufficiently motivating to actually take action at least once every few decades.
For example, when the most attractive opportunity so far appears in year 19 of investing and assessing opportunities, will our patient philanthropist direct all their money towards it, and then start saving again? Will they reason that they don’t have sufficient evidence to overcome their prior that year 19 is not more attractive than the years to come? Will they say “well, I’m following the Secretary Problem solution, and 19 is less than 70/e, so I’m still in info-gathering mode”?
They won’t, of course, know which path had higher value in their particular world until they die, but it seems to me like most of the information content of a strategy that waits to pull the trigger is in when it decides to pull the trigger, and this feels like the least explicit part of your argument.
Compare to investing, where some people are fans of timing the market, and some people are fans of dollar-cost-averaging. If you think the attractiveness of giving opportunities is going to be unpredictably volatile, then doing direct work or philanthropy every year is the optimal approach. If instead you think the attractiveness of giving opportunities is predictably volatile, or predictably stable, then doing patient philanthropy makes more sense.
What seems odd to me is simultaneously holding the outside view sense that we have insufficient evidence to think that we’re correctly assessing a promising opportunity now, and having the sense that we should expect that we will correctly assess the promising opportunities in the future when they do happen.
My claim is that patient philanthropy is automatically making the claim that now is the time where patient philanthropy does wildly unusually much expected good, because we’re so early in history that the best giving opportunities are almost surely after us.
This comment of mine in particular seems to have been downvoted. If anyone were willing, I’d be interested to understand why: is that because (i) the tone is off (seemed too combative?); (ii) the arguments themselves are weak; (iii) it wasn’t clear what I’m saying; (iv) it wasn’t engaging with Buck’s argument; (v) other?
I can’t speak for why other people down-voted the comment but I down-voted it because the arguments you make are overly simplistic.
The model you have of philanthropy is that on an agent in each time period has the choice to either (1) invest or (2) spend their resources, and then getting a payoff depending on how influential″ the time is. You argue that the agent should then save until they reach the most influential″ time, before spending all of their resources at this most influential time.
I think this model is misleading for a couple of reasons. First, in the real world we don’t know when the most influential time is. In this case the agent may find it optimal to spend some of their resources at each time step. For instance direct philanthropic donations may give them a better understanding in the future of how influentialness varies (ie, if you don’t invest in AI safety researchers now, how will you ever know whether/when AI safety will be a problem?) You may also worry about “going bust”: if while you are being patient, an existential catastrophe (or value lock-in) happens, then the patient long-termist looses their entire investment.
Perhaps one way to phrase how important this knowledge problem is to finding the optimal strategy is to think about it as analogous to owning stocks in a bubble. You strategy is that we should sell at the market peak, but we can’t do that if we don’t know when that will be.
Second, there are very plausible reasons why now may be the best time to donate. If we can spend money today to permanently reduce existential risk, or to permanently improve the welfare of the global poor, then it is always more valuable to do that action ASAP rather than wait. Likewise we plausibly get more value by working on biorisk, AI safety, or climate change today then we will in 20 years.
Third, the assumption of no diminishing marginal returns is illogical. We should be thinking about how EAs as a whole should spend their money as a whole. As an individual, I would not want to hold out for the most influential time if I thought everyone else was doing the same, and of course as a community we can coordinate.
This seems straightforwardly untrue, because you may be able to permanently reduce existential risk more cheaply in the future.
I also think (but am not sure) that Will doesn’t include solving the knowledge problem as part of “direct action”, and so your first critique is not very relevant to the choice between patient philanthropy and direct action, because probably you’ll want to gain knowledge in either case.
I agree with your criticism of my second argument. What I should have instead said is a bit different. There are actions whose value decreases over time. For instance, all else being equal it is better to implement a policy which reduces existential risk sooner rather than later. Patient philanthropy makes sense only if either (a) you expect the growth of your resources to outpace the value lost by failing to act now, or (b) you expect cheaper opportunities to arise in the future. I don’t think there are great reasons to believe either of these is true (or indeed false, I’m not very certain on the issue).
There are two issues with knowledge, and I probably should have separated them more clearly. The more important one is that the kind of decision-relevant information Will is asking for, that is, knowing when and how to spend your money optimally, may well just be unattainable. Optimal strategies with imperfect information probably look very different from optimal strategies with perfect information.
A secondary issue is that you actually need to generate the knowledge. I agree it is unclear whether Will is considering the knowledge problem as part of “direct” or “patient” philanthropy. But since knowledge production might eat up a large chunk of your resources, and since some types of knowledge may be best produced by trying to do direct work, plausibly the “patient philanthropist” ends up spending a lot of resources over time. This is not the image of patient philanthropy I originally had, but maybe I’ve been misunderstanding what Will was envisaging.