My first question was “Why the assumption that all deaths are as cheap to prevent as the marginal one?” which I see AGB has already raised there. I’ll be interested to see an answer.
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffman’s central claim is not that people aren’t suffering preventable diseases. It is only that “drowning children” (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So they’re questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasn’t all that low hanging fruit of saving “drowning children” been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly can’t be “there’s simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning children” because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, there’s a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the “there’s just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and that’s why the price remains low” is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And that’s why it makes sense to assume that they’re all at the marginal price. The claim is that if you were truly purchasing all the low hanging lives saved, and your budget was that high, the marginal price should have gone up by now because you should have already bought up all the cheap life saving methods.
(I’m just exploring the thought process behind this particular subsection of the analysis, which is not to be taken as being agreement with the overall argument, in whole or in part.)
Also also, just want to register the observation that this post seems further evidence of my continuing claim that votes on LW/EAF/AF are boos/yays: at time of this writing here the score is 0 with 17 votes and on LW it’s 36 with 24 votes. I don’t want to detract from the direct discussion of the topic, but I find that discrepancy very interesting and clearer evidence than we’ve seen in the past of how voting patterns are a poor signal of post quality.
What do you mean by “better” here? That there is a discrepancy suggests to me that people are voting for different reasons between the two places, not that the voting is better in some universal way (compare the way “better” in economics could mean redistribution to things you like or more efficiency so everyone gets more of what they want).
Also, just further noting voting patterns, no disrespect intended to you kbog, but your comment contains little content (in a very straightforward sense: it is short) and is purely a statement of opinion with no justification provided (though some is implied), yet at time of writing has 6 votes for 14 karma, which relative to what I see on average comments on EAF, where more thorough comments receive less karma and less attention, suggests to me you hit an applause light and people are upvoting it for that reason rather than anything else.
None of this is to say people can’t vote the way they like or that you don’t deserve the karma. I merely seek to highlight how people seem to use voting today. The way people use voting is not aligned with how I would like voting to be used, hence why I mention these things and am interested in them, but it is also not up to me to shape this particular mechanism.
I think people use upvotes both to signal agreement and to highlight thoughtful, effortful, or detailed comments. I think it’s fairly clear that Kbog’s comments was upvoted because people agreed with it, not because people thought it was a particularly insightful comment. That doesn’t preclude people upvoting posts for being high quality.
If your point is more that people don’t generally upvote quality posts that they disagree with, then I would probably agree with that.
Most of the comments in the EA forum are pointing out serious factual errors in the post (or linking to such explanations). The LW comments are more positive. The simpler explanation to me seems like the issues with his posts were hard-to-find, and unsurprisingly people on the EA forum are better at finding them because they have thought more about EA.
I think we lack clear evidence to conclude that, though. I can just as easily believe the story, given what we’ve seen, that EAF users are more likely to downvote anything criticizing EA (just as LW users are more likely to downvote anything that goes against the standard interpretation of LW rationality). I’d be very interested to know if there are posts that both criticize something EA in a cogent way as this post does and don’t receive large numbers of downvotes.
Also, don’t forget many posts that have pro-EA results are about equally well reasoned as what we see here, but receive overwhelmingly positive votes, even if they receive criticism in the comments. So the question remains, why downvote this post when we respond to it and not downvote other posts when we criticize them?
I’d be very interested to know if there are posts that both criticize something EA in a cogent way as this post does and don’t receive large numbers of downvotes.
My article criticizing the EA Funds last year were both more cogent than this post, and the recipient of a much greater number of upvotes, than Ben’s here. I do in fact think it is the case here that this post is receiving downvotes because of the factual errors with it. Yet neither is this entirely separate from the issue of people downvoting the post simply because they don’t like it as a criticism of EA. That people don’t like the post is confounded by the fact the reason they don’t like it could be because they think it’s very erroneous.
Another ex-GiveWell’s employee post criticizing GiveWell and the EA community was recently highly upvoted. See also Ben’s old post Effective Altruism is Self-Recommending, which is currently at +30 (a solid amount given that it was posted on the old forum, where karma totals were much lower).
I think the reason this post is at near 0 karma is because it is objectively wrong in multiple ways, and is of negative value. I would say this is clear if you engage with the comments here, on Ben’s blog, and Jeff Kaufman’s reply.
I actually interpret the voting on this post to be too positive. I think it is because EAs tend to be wary of downvoting criticisms that might be good. Ben’s previous reputation for worthwhile criticism seems to be protecting him to a certain extent.
I’d be very interested to know if there are posts that both criticize something EA in a cogent way as this post does and don’t receive large numbers of downvotes.
To add to Ben’s example, one of the most upvoted posts of all time was critical of discrepancy between the message that working at EA org is a promising career path and the fact that it’s extremely hard to get a job at an EA org. There was probably an element of people empathising with the story but I still think it ‘criticised something EA in a cogent way’.
FWIW, I think the EA community is unusually good at engaging with critical commentary and updating accordingly.
Ben & Alexander Gordon-Brown are having an interesting conversation in the comments of the Compass Rose version of this post.
My first question was “Why the assumption that all deaths are as cheap to prevent as the marginal one?” which I see AGB has already raised there. I’ll be interested to see an answer.
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffman’s central claim is not that people aren’t suffering preventable diseases. It is only that “drowning children” (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So they’re questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasn’t all that low hanging fruit of saving “drowning children” been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly can’t be “there’s simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning children” because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, there’s a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the “there’s just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and that’s why the price remains low” is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And that’s why it makes sense to assume that they’re all at the marginal price. The claim is that if you were truly purchasing all the low hanging lives saved, and your budget was that high, the marginal price should have gone up by now because you should have already bought up all the cheap life saving methods.
(I’m just exploring the thought process behind this particular subsection of the analysis, which is not to be taken as being agreement with the overall argument, in whole or in part.)
Also some interesting discussion on the LessWrong version.
Also also, just want to register the observation that this post seems further evidence of my continuing claim that votes on LW/EAF/AF are boos/yays: at time of this writing here the score is 0 with 17 votes and on LW it’s 36 with 24 votes. I don’t want to detract from the direct discussion of the topic, but I find that discrepancy very interesting and clearer evidence than we’ve seen in the past of how voting patterns are a poor signal of post quality.
My takeaway is that the EA forum’s voting is better than LessWrong’s.
What do you mean by “better” here? That there is a discrepancy suggests to me that people are voting for different reasons between the two places, not that the voting is better in some universal way (compare the way “better” in economics could mean redistribution to things you like or more efficiency so everyone gets more of what they want).
Also, just further noting voting patterns, no disrespect intended to you kbog, but your comment contains little content (in a very straightforward sense: it is short) and is purely a statement of opinion with no justification provided (though some is implied), yet at time of writing has 6 votes for 14 karma, which relative to what I see on average comments on EAF, where more thorough comments receive less karma and less attention, suggests to me you hit an applause light and people are upvoting it for that reason rather than anything else.
None of this is to say people can’t vote the way they like or that you don’t deserve the karma. I merely seek to highlight how people seem to use voting today. The way people use voting is not aligned with how I would like voting to be used, hence why I mention these things and am interested in them, but it is also not up to me to shape this particular mechanism.
I think people use upvotes both to signal agreement and to highlight thoughtful, effortful, or detailed comments. I think it’s fairly clear that Kbog’s comments was upvoted because people agreed with it, not because people thought it was a particularly insightful comment. That doesn’t preclude people upvoting posts for being high quality.
If your point is more that people don’t generally upvote quality posts that they disagree with, then I would probably agree with that.
My (small) update is also this, except confined to posts criticizing EA.
Most of the comments in the EA forum are pointing out serious factual errors in the post (or linking to such explanations). The LW comments are more positive. The simpler explanation to me seems like the issues with his posts were hard-to-find, and unsurprisingly people on the EA forum are better at finding them because they have thought more about EA.
I think we lack clear evidence to conclude that, though. I can just as easily believe the story, given what we’ve seen, that EAF users are more likely to downvote anything criticizing EA (just as LW users are more likely to downvote anything that goes against the standard interpretation of LW rationality). I’d be very interested to know if there are posts that both criticize something EA in a cogent way as this post does and don’t receive large numbers of downvotes.
Also, don’t forget many posts that have pro-EA results are about equally well reasoned as what we see here, but receive overwhelmingly positive votes, even if they receive criticism in the comments. So the question remains, why downvote this post when we respond to it and not downvote other posts when we criticize them?
Hallstead’s criticism of ACE seems like one example.
My article criticizing the EA Funds last year were both more cogent than this post, and the recipient of a much greater number of upvotes, than Ben’s here. I do in fact think it is the case here that this post is receiving downvotes because of the factual errors with it. Yet neither is this entirely separate from the issue of people downvoting the post simply because they don’t like it as a criticism of EA. That people don’t like the post is confounded by the fact the reason they don’t like it could be because they think it’s very erroneous.
Another ex-GiveWell’s employee post criticizing GiveWell and the EA community was recently highly upvoted. See also Ben’s old post Effective Altruism is Self-Recommending, which is currently at +30 (a solid amount given that it was posted on the old forum, where karma totals were much lower).
I think the reason this post is at near 0 karma is because it is objectively wrong in multiple ways, and is of negative value. I would say this is clear if you engage with the comments here, on Ben’s blog, and Jeff Kaufman’s reply.
I actually interpret the voting on this post to be too positive. I think it is because EAs tend to be wary of downvoting criticisms that might be good. Ben’s previous reputation for worthwhile criticism seems to be protecting him to a certain extent.
(views my own)
To add to Ben’s example, one of the most upvoted posts of all time was critical of discrepancy between the message that working at EA org is a promising career path and the fact that it’s extremely hard to get a job at an EA org. There was probably an element of people empathising with the story but I still think it ‘criticised something EA in a cogent way’.
FWIW, I think the EA community is unusually good at engaging with critical commentary and updating accordingly.