It’s hard to see how the writeup could have had a negative effect.
It seems plausible that people who gave to ALLFED, volunteered for ALLFED, worked for ALLFED, etc. due in part to Gleave’s report would otherwise have done better things with their resources.
The report may also have led to EAs/global catastrophic risk researchers/longtermists talking about ALLFED more often and more positively, which could perhaps negative effect on perceptions of those communities, e.g. because:
Papers associated with them often present explicit quantitative models and estimates about very uncertain things (which some people are just averse to in general)
ALLFED and those models sometimes make claims that can seem intuitively fairly unlikely
That’s a comment from Denkenberger rather than ALLFED as an insitutition, but ALLFED-related papers make similar claims
Those models do seem to have some noticeable issues
Though I’d personally say that this is to be expected with any models, and a great thing about models is that they often make it easier to identify and correct specific issues, and I personally still basically agree with the qualitative conclusions drawn from the models)
A big part of ALLFED’s focus is making a catastrophe less bad if it does happen, which could seem callous to some people
I think it’s unlikely that the donor lottery report would have those downsides to a substantial extent.
I’m just disagreeing with the claim “It’s hard to see how the writeup could have had a negative effect.” I basically think most longtermism-related things could plausibly have negative effects, since they operate on variables that we think might be important for the long-term future and we’re really bad at predicting precisely how the effects play out. (But this doesn’t mean we just try to “do nothing”, of course! Something with some downside risk can still be very positive in expectation.)
I’m not sure how often my 80% confidence interval would include negative effects, nor whether it’d include them in the ALLFED case. So maybe this is just a nit-pick about your specific phrasing, and we’d agree on the substance of your model/estimate.
When I made my comment, I think I kind-of had in mind “negative total effect”, rather than “at least one negative effect, whether or not it’s offset”. But I don’t think I’d explicitly thought about the distinction (which is a bit silly), and my comment doesn’t make it totally clear what I meant, so it’s a good question.
I think my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup. But I think my 95% confidence interval would.
Reasons why my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup, despite what I said in my previous comment:
I think we should have some degree of confidence that, if there’s more public discussion by people with fairly good epistemics and good epistemic and discussion norms, that’ll tend to update people towards more accurate beliefs.
(Not every time, but more often than it does the opposite.)
As such, I think we should start off skeptical of claims like “An EA Forum post that influenced people’s beliefs and behaviours substantially influenced those things in a bad way, even though in theory someone else could’ve pointed that out convincingly and thus prevented that influence.”
And then there’s also the fact that Gleave later got a role on the LTFF, suggesting he’s probably good at reasoning about these things.
And there’s also my object-level positive impressions of ALLFED.
It seems plausible that people who gave to ALLFED, volunteered for ALLFED, worked for ALLFED, etc. due in part to Gleave’s report would otherwise have done better things with their resources.
The report may also have led to EAs/global catastrophic risk researchers/longtermists talking about ALLFED more often and more positively, which could perhaps negative effect on perceptions of those communities, e.g. because:
Papers associated with them often present explicit quantitative models and estimates about very uncertain things (which some people are just averse to in general)
ALLFED and those models sometimes make claims that can seem intuitively fairly unlikely
E.g., “AGI safety, alternative foods, and interventions for losing electricity/industry (and probably other interventions) likely save lives in the present generation more cost-effectively than GiveWell top charities.”
That’s a comment from Denkenberger rather than ALLFED as an insitutition, but ALLFED-related papers make similar claims
Those models do seem to have some noticeable issues
Though I’d personally say that this is to be expected with any models, and a great thing about models is that they often make it easier to identify and correct specific issues, and I personally still basically agree with the qualitative conclusions drawn from the models)
A big part of ALLFED’s focus is making a catastrophe less bad if it does happen, which could seem callous to some people
I think it’s unlikely that the donor lottery report would have those downsides to a substantial extent.
And I’m personally quite positive about ALLFED, David Denkenberger, and their work, and ALLFED is one of the three places I’ve donated the most to (along with GCRI and the Long-Term Future Fund).
I’m just disagreeing with the claim “It’s hard to see how the writeup could have had a negative effect.” I basically think most longtermism-related things could plausibly have negative effects, since they operate on variables that we think might be important for the long-term future and we’re really bad at predicting precisely how the effects play out. (But this doesn’t mean we just try to “do nothing”, of course! Something with some downside risk can still be very positive in expectation.)
I’m not sure how often my 80% confidence interval would include negative effects, nor whether it’d include them in the ALLFED case. So maybe this is just a nit-pick about your specific phrasing, and we’d agree on the substance of your model/estimate.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Do you think that it is hard for the writeup to have a negative total effect?
When I made my comment, I think I kind-of had in mind “negative total effect”, rather than “at least one negative effect, whether or not it’s offset”. But I don’t think I’d explicitly thought about the distinction (which is a bit silly), and my comment doesn’t make it totally clear what I meant, so it’s a good question.
I think my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup. But I think my 95% confidence interval would.
Reasons why my 80% confidence interval probably wouldn’t include an overall negative impact of the writeup, despite what I said in my previous comment:
I think we should have some degree of confidence that, if there’s more public discussion by people with fairly good epistemics and good epistemic and discussion norms, that’ll tend to update people towards more accurate beliefs.
(Not every time, but more often than it does the opposite.)
As such, I think we should start off skeptical of claims like “An EA Forum post that influenced people’s beliefs and behaviours substantially influenced those things in a bad way, even though in theory someone else could’ve pointed that out convincingly and thus prevented that influence.”
And then there’s also the fact that Gleave later got a role on the LTFF, suggesting he’s probably good at reasoning about these things.
And there’s also my object-level positive impressions of ALLFED.
I have nothing to disagree about here :)