I agree with the general point, but just want to respond to some of your criticism of the philosopher.
Also, why is he criticizing the relatively small numbers of people actually trying to improve the world and not the far larger sums of money that corportaions, governments, etc, are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects?
He might think it’s much easier to influence EA and Open Phil, because they share similar enough views to be potentially sympathetic to his arguments (I think he’s a utilitarian), actually pay attention to his arguments, and are even willing to pay him to make these arguments.
More to the point, wtf is he doing? He’s a seemingly competent guy who’s somehow a professor of philosophy/blogger instead of (eg) being a medical researcher on gene drives or earning-to-give to morally valuable causes. And he never seems to engage with the irony at all. Like wtf?
Convincing EAs/Open Phil to prioritize global health more (or whatever he thinks is most important) or to improve its cause and intervention prioritization reasoning generally could be higher impact (much higher leverage) from his POV. Also, he might not be a good fit for medical research or earning-to-give for whatever reason. Philosophy is pretty different.
I also suspect these criticisms would prove too much, and could be made against cause prioritization work and critique of EA reasoning more generally.
I also suspect these criticisms [..] would prove too much, and could be made against cause prioritization work and critique of EA reasoning more generally.
I think of all people, if any EA cause prioritization researchers do not at least seriously consider that their time might be spent better elsewhere than by doing cause prioritization, they suck at cause prioritization.
I hope my own research work is useful, but I have pretty high uncertainty here. As I mentioned elsewhere:
We would naively expect people who spend a lot of time on cause prioritization to systematically overrate (relative to the broader community) both the non-obviousness of the most important causes, and their esotericism.
But tbc, my critique above is about isolated demands for consequentialism/people not grappling with the relevant difficulties, not a claim that the correct all-things-considered view is that cause prio is useless. Obviously my own revealed (and stated) preferences are different.
I agree, but I don’t see evidence in your comment that the critique applies to the philosopher in particular, or enough to single them out for it. I don’t know what they’ve thought about their own career decisions, and your comment didn’t tell me anything about their thoughts (or lack thereof) on the topic, either. They could have good reasons for doing what they’re doing now over alternatives.
I’m not that invested in this topic, but if you have information you don’t want to share publicly and want to leave up the criticism, it may be worth flagging that, and maybe others will take you up on your offer and can confirm.
I agree with anonymizing. Even if you’re right about them and have good reasons for believing it, singling out people by name for unsolicited public criticism of their career choices seems unusual, unusually personal, fairly totalizing/promoting demandingness,[1] and at high risk of strawmanning them if they haven’t explicitly defended it to you or others, so it might be better not to do or indirectly promote by doing. Criticizing their public writing seems fair game, of course.
Someone might have non-utilitarian reasons for choosing one career over another, like they might have for having children. That being said, this can apply to an anonymous critique, too, but it seems much harsher when you name someone, because it’s like public shaming.
To be clear, I do not have private information, I just think this conversation is better had offline. To the extent singling them out in a comment is mean, explaining why I did so publicly might also be mean.
Just want to pick up on one thing that wasn’t picked up by anyone else:
I was talking to a fairly senior person at a prominent ML lab and they said that their lab is pretty skeptical of “longtermism.” I asked them how they would define “longtermism” and they said something like “caring about future interests at the expense of current ones.”
You put this person’s position on longtermism down to a “lack of reflection”, but I don’t think you should be that surprised that people have this impression of it (at least if you had this conversation recently, maybe not if you had it a year or two ago). It seems even before WWOTF came out, and definitely since, those hostile to longtermism have been framing it in precisely such a way, e.g: that it either literally means believing present people no moral value, that it’s based on crazy maths that has no grounding in reality, that it is the first step on the path to justifying genocide, eugenics etc. etc.
And I’ve seen basically no pushback at all from longtermist themselves. Perhaps this was driven by a view not to stoop down to a low level,[1] perhaps because there was a diffusion of responsibility, or perhaps because people thought the anti-longtermist memes[2] wouldn’t catch on. But I think with hindsight we can see that this strategy has failed. Outside of explicitly EA spaces, the term ‘longtermism’ has come to be seen in exactly the negative light that this senior person expressed.
So I don’t think you should blame their ability to reason or reflect (at least, not to the extent of pinning the whole blame on them). I think instead the blame should go to longtermists who underestimated the well being poisoned against them and did very little to counteract it, leading to longtermism being a persona non-grata idea outside of EA. All in all, I’m a little bit surprised that you were so flabbergasted.
If you want to discuss those over DMs instead of continuing with more comments on this Quick Take, feel free to reach out :)
Sorry I think the strikethrough was insufficiently obvious in signaling that I want to wait a while before representing this argument; I decided to delete the whole thing.
This post really helped me to visit this a bit differently thanks heaps I might make a few replies later, but my instinct is that this has the depth of thought that qualifies this to be a frontpagre post rather than a quick take and might get more visibility that way, but that’s up to you of course!
Thanks! I think if it’s a frontpage post I’d at least edit it to take some of the jabs out and/or be more emotionally even-keeled.
I’d also want a conclusion that’s more constructive and gives (practical) suggestions for improvement, instead of the current one that’s more aggressive than helpful.
[EDIT: name replaced with “the philosopher,” tracking Linch’s edits]
[The philosopher] recognizes in the comments that there are lots of people he could criticize on similar grounds:
It’s of course true that many other people never used cost-effectiveness analysis to guide their decisions, never gave to charity in the first place, gambled away all of their money, mounted a military coup, and so on. Many of these behaviors are wrong, and their wrongness could discussed elsewhere. Today, I want to focus on a different topic: the growing deprioritization of rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis within the effective altruism movement.
Blogging critical takes on EA is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job. I thought that particular post was unduly harsh at points, but it’s not unreasonable for him to choose to write a blog expressing his concerns about a specific, financially powerful charitable movement without expanding it to cover financial decisions he deems questionable (or worse) by every similarly monied entity/movement in the world. Division of labor is a good and necessary thing.
As for the comment about [the philosopher’s] career choice (“wtf”), there’s a difference between his position and EA’s position. To my knowledge, [the philosopher] isn’t claiming that teaching philosophy at an elite U.S. university is the maximally altruistic career decision he (or anyone else) could have made. He isn’t telling anyone that they should follow that career path. However, EAs are publicly making the claim that spending lots of money on AI Safety and other longtermist work is the maximally altruistic thing a charitably-inclined donor could do with their money, and the maximally altruistic career path they could choose. That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
Finallt, [the philosopher’s] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research. Although I think your quick take has some really good points, I think the “wtf” bullet point drags it down.
Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.
Moreover, as [...] noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career
Wait, US academia is funded by taxpayer dollars (including my own, which incidentally I have to pay to the US government even though I’m not a US citizen and do not have US citizen rights).
If anything, a higher percentage of a typical academic’s work is funded directly by taxpayer dollars than the (implicit) subsidy of foregone tax dollars.
That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
I agree about the direction, I disagree about the magnitude. I especially disagree if the tenor is more like righteous outrage and less like dispassionate normative analysis (akin to the “cheeseburger ethicist”). On a more personal level, I don’t personally appreciate being yelled at by people who I consider to be morally inferior.
Finallt, [...] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research.
I agree. I think I was responding more to (and trying to mirror) the general tenor of his righteous outrage than trying to claim that the arguments are wrong on the object-level for their merits.
(I’ve since anonymized him in my parent comment, feel free to do the same)
He is now at an elite private university and was previously at GPI. I would expect that the proportion of funding for philosophy departments at such universities that flows from government coffers is pretty low. The funding situation of public universities, low-end private universities designed to exploit the federal student aid program (ugh), and so on isn’t relevant in my view.
Plus, in my view he is writing his blog in his personal capacity and not as an employee of his university (just as each of us can write on the Forum on your personal without our views being attributed to our employers). Even if you attribute a few percentage of his salary as an entry-level philosophy prof to the blog, and guess what percentage of that salary is paid through taxpayer dollars, it’s still going to be really small potatoes next to Open Phil’s impact on the public fisc.
To emphasize, I’m not defending everything that was in the philosopher’s blog post. It was not, in my opinion, anywhere close to his best work.
[replying to two of your comments in one because it is basically the same point]
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
This seems pretty uncompelling to me. A private individual’s philanthropy reduces tax revenues relative to their buying yachts, but a private individual’s decision to pursue a lower-paid academic career instead of becoming a software engineer or banker or consultant (or whatever else their talents might favour) also reduces tax revenues. Yes, the academic might have deeply personal reasons for their career choice, but the philanthropist might also have deeply personal reasons for their philanthropy—or their counterfactual yacht buying.
The fact that Vanderbilt is a private university also seems like a weak defense—what are the funding sources for Vanderbilt? As far as I am aware they are largely 1) an endowment started by billionaire philanthropy 2) taxpayer funded research 3) taxpayer subsidized student loans and 4) tax deductible donations. If benefiting from tax expenditures is sufficient to invite scrutiny then few US academics are exempt.
To use an even clearer example: a married couple’s decision to file their taxes jointly potentially significantly reduces their taxes. But I think their decision to do so causes absolutely zero increase in the extent to which it is appropriate to criticize them.
I think a much weaker version of this argument—that making tax-deductable charitable donations invites scrutiny as to whether their object really is charitable vs being a mere vanity project—is valid. But the scope of charitable objectives in the tax rules is very broad (to the extent that often activism on both sides of a political issue qualify!).
.
I agree with the general point, but just want to respond to some of your criticism of the philosopher.
He might think it’s much easier to influence EA and Open Phil, because they share similar enough views to be potentially sympathetic to his arguments (I think he’s a utilitarian), actually pay attention to his arguments, and are even willing to pay him to make these arguments.
Convincing EAs/Open Phil to prioritize global health more (or whatever he thinks is most important) or to improve its cause and intervention prioritization reasoning generally could be higher impact (much higher leverage) from his POV. Also, he might not be a good fit for medical research or earning-to-give for whatever reason. Philosophy is pretty different.
I also suspect these criticisms would prove too much, and could be made against cause prioritization work and critique of EA reasoning more generally.
I think of all people, if any EA cause prioritization researchers do not at least seriously consider that their time might be spent better elsewhere than by doing cause prioritization, they suck at cause prioritization.
I hope my own research work is useful, but I have pretty high uncertainty here. As I mentioned elsewhere:
But tbc, my critique above is about isolated demands for consequentialism/people not grappling with the relevant difficulties, not a claim that the correct all-things-considered view is that cause prio is useless. Obviously my own revealed (and stated) preferences are different.
I agree, but I don’t see evidence in your comment that the critique applies to the philosopher in particular, or enough to single them out for it. I don’t know what they’ve thought about their own career decisions, and your comment didn’t tell me anything about their thoughts (or lack thereof) on the topic, either. They could have good reasons for doing what they’re doing now over alternatives.
I agree the stuff you say is possible, I just don’t think it’s likely. We can chat about this offline iff you want to.
Hmm on reflection maybe I should anonymize him the way I anonymized the ML lab person, out of politeness considerations?
I’m not that invested in this topic, but if you have information you don’t want to share publicly and want to leave up the criticism, it may be worth flagging that, and maybe others will take you up on your offer and can confirm.
I agree with anonymizing. Even if you’re right about them and have good reasons for believing it, singling out people by name for unsolicited public criticism of their career choices seems unusual, unusually personal, fairly totalizing/promoting demandingness,[1] and at high risk of strawmanning them if they haven’t explicitly defended it to you or others, so it might be better not to do or indirectly promote by doing. Criticizing their public writing seems fair game, of course.
Someone might have non-utilitarian reasons for choosing one career over another, like they might have for having children. That being said, this can apply to an anonymous critique, too, but it seems much harsher when you name someone, because it’s like public shaming.
To be clear, I do not have private information, I just think this conversation is better had offline. To the extent singling them out in a comment is mean, explaining why I did so publicly might also be mean.
I’ve anonymized. Can you do the same?
Done.
Just want to pick up on one thing that wasn’t picked up by anyone else:
You put this person’s position on longtermism down to a “lack of reflection”, but I don’t think you should be that surprised that people have this impression of it (at least if you had this conversation recently, maybe not if you had it a year or two ago). It seems even before WWOTF came out, and definitely since, those hostile to longtermism have been framing it in precisely such a way, e.g: that it either literally means believing present people no moral value, that it’s based on crazy maths that has no grounding in reality, that it is the first step on the path to justifying genocide, eugenics etc. etc.
And I’ve seen basically no pushback at all from longtermist themselves. Perhaps this was driven by a view not to stoop down to a low level,[1] perhaps because there was a diffusion of responsibility, or perhaps because people thought the anti-longtermist memes[2] wouldn’t catch on. But I think with hindsight we can see that this strategy has failed. Outside of explicitly EA spaces, the term ‘longtermism’ has come to be seen in exactly the negative light that this senior person expressed.
So I don’t think you should blame their ability to reason or reflect (at least, not to the extent of pinning the whole blame on them). I think instead the blame should go to longtermists who underestimated the well being poisoned against them and did very little to counteract it, leading to longtermism being a persona non-grata idea outside of EA. All in all, I’m a little bit surprised that you were so flabbergasted.
If you want to discuss those over DMs instead of continuing with more comments on this Quick Take, feel free to reach out :)
That’s a separate issue, but I think this kind of approach to the media landscape was a very naïve one from senior EAs imo
In the original ‘ideas’ sense, not the viral joke sense
Sorry I think the strikethrough was insufficiently obvious in signaling that I want to wait a while before representing this argument; I decided to delete the whole thing.
This post really helped me to visit this a bit differently thanks heaps I might make a few replies later, but my instinct is that this has the depth of thought that qualifies this to be a frontpagre post rather than a quick take and might get more visibility that way, but that’s up to you of course!
Thanks! I think if it’s a frontpage post I’d at least edit it to take some of the jabs out and/or be more emotionally even-keeled.
I’d also want a conclusion that’s more constructive and gives (practical) suggestions for improvement, instead of the current one that’s more aggressive than helpful.
Fair enough makes complete sense.
And yes one of my comments was going to be about the jabs haha
[EDIT: name replaced with “the philosopher,” tracking Linch’s edits]
[The philosopher] recognizes in the comments that there are lots of people he could criticize on similar grounds:
Blogging critical takes on EA is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job. I thought that particular post was unduly harsh at points, but it’s not unreasonable for him to choose to write a blog expressing his concerns about a specific, financially powerful charitable movement without expanding it to cover financial decisions he deems questionable (or worse) by every similarly monied entity/movement in the world. Division of labor is a good and necessary thing.
As for the comment about [the philosopher’s] career choice (“wtf”), there’s a difference between his position and EA’s position. To my knowledge, [the philosopher] isn’t claiming that teaching philosophy at an elite U.S. university is the maximally altruistic career decision he (or anyone else) could have made. He isn’t telling anyone that they should follow that career path. However, EAs are publicly making the claim that spending lots of money on AI Safety and other longtermist work is the maximally altruistic thing a charitably-inclined donor could do with their money, and the maximally altruistic career path they could choose. That justifies applying a more critical standard in my book than I would apply to an individual’s own personal career choices.
Moreover, as [the philosopher] has noted in his billionaire philantrophy series, megadonor charitable activity comes at the cost of hundreds of millions in tax revenues. In my book, that makes public criticism of those donors’ choices much more appropriate than wtf’ing a private person’s choice to pursue an academic career. And there are often deeply personal reasons for one’s career choice.
Finallt, [the philosopher’s] critiques of longtermist EA spending are either right or wrong on their merits. They wouldn’t become more correct if he went into earning-to-give or gene therapy research. Although I think your quick take has some really good points, I think the “wtf” bullet point drags it down.
Wait just to clarify critical takes on EA is his day job. He’s a philosophy professor who worked at GPI and his body of work is mostly around EA. That’s fine and the critique is admittedly harsh but he’s not some third party person doing this casually. He himself has been funded by EA Infrastructure Fund and GPI and admitted he used his adjacency to AI as a hot topic.
Thanks—that was specifically a reference to blogging. If I’m not mistaken, the blog isn’t even referenced on his professional website or listed on his CV, which to me is evidence that blogging “is not his day job, nor likely to do much for him in his day job.” I think that’s relevant to what I take as the implied claim here (i.e., that [edit: the philosopher] is somehow unreasonably picking on EA by not also blogging about other entities that spend money questionably [at best] in his view).
As far as his academic work, longtermists are making philosophical claims that they seek to be taken seriously. “[C]orportaions, governments, etc,” who “are wasting on ~morally neutral vanity projects” are, as a rule, not doing that. It’s understandable that a philosopher would focus on people who are making and acting on such claims.
I am referring to the blogging. It does do things for his day job. His ability to get outside grants is a sizeable chunk of getting a tenure track job. His blog has been funded on manifund and referenced in other grants as justification. I don’t think he’s beholdened to EA in anyway but to act like he doesn’t benefit in anyway from this bent on a professional level is a weird claim to make. His blog posts are often drafts of his academic critiques and distillations of critiques too.
Narrow point: my understanding is that, per his own claims, the Manifund grant would only fund technical upkeep of the blog, and that none of it is net income to him.
Sorry for the dead response, I think I took the secondary claim he made that extra money would go towards a podcast as the warrant for my latter claim. Again I don’t feel any which way about this other than we should fund critics and not let the external factors that are just mild disdains from forum posters as determinative about whether or not we fund him.
Wait, US academia is funded by taxpayer dollars (including my own, which incidentally I have to pay to the US government even though I’m not a US citizen and do not have US citizen rights).
If anything, a higher percentage of a typical academic’s work is funded directly by taxpayer dollars than the (implicit) subsidy of foregone tax dollars.
I agree about the direction, I disagree about the magnitude. I especially disagree if the tenor is more like righteous outrage and less like dispassionate normative analysis (akin to the “cheeseburger ethicist”). On a more personal level, I don’t personally appreciate being yelled at by people who I consider to be morally inferior.
I agree. I think I was responding more to (and trying to mirror) the general tenor of his righteous outrage than trying to claim that the arguments are wrong on the object-level for their merits.
(I’ve since anonymized him in my parent comment, feel free to do the same)
He is now at an elite private university and was previously at GPI. I would expect that the proportion of funding for philosophy departments at such universities that flows from government coffers is pretty low. The funding situation of public universities, low-end private universities designed to exploit the federal student aid program (ugh), and so on isn’t relevant in my view.
Plus, in my view he is writing his blog in his personal capacity and not as an employee of his university (just as each of us can write on the Forum on your personal without our views being attributed to our employers). Even if you attribute a few percentage of his salary as an entry-level philosophy prof to the blog, and guess what percentage of that salary is paid through taxpayer dollars, it’s still going to be really small potatoes next to Open Phil’s impact on the public fisc.
To emphasize, I’m not defending everything that was in the philosopher’s blog post. It was not, in my opinion, anywhere close to his best work.
.
[replying to two of your comments in one because it is basically the same point]
This seems pretty uncompelling to me. A private individual’s philanthropy reduces tax revenues relative to their buying yachts, but a private individual’s decision to pursue a lower-paid academic career instead of becoming a software engineer or banker or consultant (or whatever else their talents might favour) also reduces tax revenues. Yes, the academic might have deeply personal reasons for their career choice, but the philanthropist might also have deeply personal reasons for their philanthropy—or their counterfactual yacht buying.
The fact that Vanderbilt is a private university also seems like a weak defense—what are the funding sources for Vanderbilt? As far as I am aware they are largely 1) an endowment started by billionaire philanthropy 2) taxpayer funded research 3) taxpayer subsidized student loans and 4) tax deductible donations. If benefiting from tax expenditures is sufficient to invite scrutiny then few US academics are exempt.
To use an even clearer example: a married couple’s decision to file their taxes jointly potentially significantly reduces their taxes. But I think their decision to do so causes absolutely zero increase in the extent to which it is appropriate to criticize them.
I think a much weaker version of this argument—that making tax-deductable charitable donations invites scrutiny as to whether their object really is charitable vs being a mere vanity project—is valid. But the scope of charitable objectives in the tax rules is very broad (to the extent that often activism on both sides of a political issue qualify!).