We may need to invest more to tackle future problems
Which types of “investments” are you talking about? Are they specifically financial investments, or a broader range of investments?
In case you mean a broader range of investments, such investments could include: building the EA movement, making good moral values a social norm, developing better technologies that could help us tackle unforseen problems in the future, improving the biological intelligence level of humans. This definition could get problematic since many of these investments are seperate cause areas themselves.
The relevant section of this post does appear to be discussing financial investments, or at least primarily focusing on that. But that wasn’t Trammell’s sole focus. As he states in his 80k interview:
Philip Trammell: [...] in this write-up, I do try to make it clear that by investment, I really am explicitly including things like fundraising and at least certain kinds of movement building which have the same effect of turning resources now, not into good done now, but into more resources next year with which good will be done. I would be just a little careful to note that this has to be the sort of movement building advocacy work that really does look like fundraising in the sense that you’re not just putting more resources toward the cause next year, but toward the whole mindset of either giving to the cause or investing to give more in two years’ time to the cause. You might spend all your money and get all these recruits who are passionate about the cause that you’re trying to fund, but then they just do it all next year.
Robert Wiblin: The fools!
Philip Trammell: Right. And I don’t know exactly how high fidelity in this respect movement building tends to be or EA movement building in particular has been. So that’s one caveat. I guess another one is that when you’re actually investing, you’re generally creating new resources. You’re actually building the factories or whatever. Whereas when you’re just doing fundraising, you’re movement building, you’re just diverting resources from where they otherwise would have gone.
Robert Wiblin: You’re redistributing from some efforts to others.
Philip Trammell: Yeah. And so you have to think that what people otherwise would have done with the resources in question is of negligible value compared to what they’ll do after the funds had been put in your pot. And you might think that if you just look at what people are spending their money on, the world as a whole… I mean you might not, but you might. And if you do, it might seem like this is a safe assumption to make, but the sorts of people you’re most likely to recruit are the ones who probably were most inclined to do the sort of thing that you wanted anyway on their own. My intuition is that it’s easy to overestimate the real real returns to advocacy and movement building in this respect. But I haven’t actually looked through any detailed numbers on this. It’s just a caveat I would raise.
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I’m currently working on two drafts relevant to these topics, with the working titles “A typology of strategies for influencing the future” and “Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations”. I’ll quote below my current attempt from one of those drafts to make a distinction between “present-influence” actions (this term may be replaced) and “punting to the future” actions. (I plan to adjust this attempt soon, or at least to add a causal diagram to make things clearer.)
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MacAskill has discussed whether we’re living at the “most influential time in history”, for which he proposed the following definition:
a time ti is more influential (from a longtermist perspective) than a time tj iff you would prefer to give an additional unit of resources,[1] that has to be spent doing direct work (rather than investment), to a longtermist altruist living at ti rather than to a longtermist altruist living at tj.
He writes that the most obvious implication of this is:
regarding what proportion of resources longtermist EAs should be spending on near-term existential risk mitigation versus what I call ‘buck-passing’ strategies like saving or movement-building. If you think that some future time will be much more influential than today, then a natural strategy is to ensure that future decision-makers, who you are happy to defer to, have as many resources as possible when some future, more influential, time comes.
FollowingTomasik, I’ll refer to “buck-passing” strategies as “punting to the future”.
There were many comments on MacAskill’s post about the difficulties of distinguishing “buck-passing” strategies from other strategies. It can also seem hard to distinguish this from the “narrow vs broad” dimension and an “object-level vs meta-level” dimension [these are two other distinctions I discuss in this draft]. But I think we can resolve these issues by drawing on this comment from Jan Brauner:
Punting strategies, in contrast, affect future generations [primarily] via their effect on the people alive in the most influential centuries.
Here are my proposed terms and definitions: There’s a continuum from present-influence actions to punting to the future actions. Present-influence actions are intended to “quite soon” result in “direct impacts”[...]. Relatively clear examples include:
Doing AI safety research yourself to directly reduce existential risk.
Providing productivity coaching to AI safety researchers.
Meanwhile, punting to the future actions are intended to result in “direct impacts” primarily via actions taken “a long time” from now, which the punting to the future actions somehow supported. [...]
One relatively clear example of a punting to the future action is investing money so that, decades from now, you’ll be able to donate to support AI safety research or movement-building. I also think it makes sense to imagine punting to your own future self, such as by doing a PhD so you can have more impact in “direct work” later, rather than doing “direct work” now.
However, the division isn’t sharp, because:
all actions would have their influence at least slightly in the future
many actions will have multiple pathways to impact, some taking little time and others stretching over longer times
For example, AI safety movement-building and existential risk strategy research could be intended to result in “direct impacts” (after several steps) both decades from now and within years, although probably not within weeks or months. Such actions could be seen as landing somewhere in the middle of the “present-influence to punting” dimension, and/or as having a “present-influence” component in addition to a “punting to the future” component. Indeed, even some people doing AI safety research themselves may be doing so partly or entirely for movement-building reasons, such as to attract funding and talent by showing that progress on these questions is possible and concrete work is being done (see Ord).
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If anyone would like to see (and perhaps provide feedback on) either or both of those drafts I’m working on, let me know.
Which types of “investments” are you talking about? Are they specifically financial investments, or a broader range of investments?
In case you mean a broader range of investments, such investments could include: building the EA movement, making good moral values a social norm, developing better technologies that could help us tackle unforseen problems in the future, improving the biological intelligence level of humans. This definition could get problematic since many of these investments are seperate cause areas themselves.
They are referring to financial investments (stocks, bonds, etc) as covered in the linked podcast episode with Philip Trammell.
The relevant section of this post does appear to be discussing financial investments, or at least primarily focusing on that. But that wasn’t Trammell’s sole focus. As he states in his 80k interview:
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I’m currently working on two drafts relevant to these topics, with the working titles “A typology of strategies for influencing the future” and “Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations”. I’ll quote below my current attempt from one of those drafts to make a distinction between “present-influence” actions (this term may be replaced) and “punting to the future” actions. (I plan to adjust this attempt soon, or at least to add a causal diagram to make things clearer.)
---
MacAskill has discussed whether we’re living at the “most influential time in history”, for which he proposed the following definition:
He writes that the most obvious implication of this is:
Following Tomasik, I’ll refer to “buck-passing” strategies as “punting to the future”.
There were many comments on MacAskill’s post about the difficulties of distinguishing “buck-passing” strategies from other strategies. It can also seem hard to distinguish this from the “narrow vs broad” dimension and an “object-level vs meta-level” dimension [these are two other distinctions I discuss in this draft]. But I think we can resolve these issues by drawing on this comment from Jan Brauner:
Here are my proposed terms and definitions: There’s a continuum from present-influence actions to punting to the future actions. Present-influence actions are intended to “quite soon” result in “direct impacts”[...]. Relatively clear examples include:
Doing AI safety research yourself to directly reduce existential risk.
Providing productivity coaching to AI safety researchers.
Meanwhile, punting to the future actions are intended to result in “direct impacts” primarily via actions taken “a long time” from now, which the punting to the future actions somehow supported. [...]
One relatively clear example of a punting to the future action is investing money so that, decades from now, you’ll be able to donate to support AI safety research or movement-building. I also think it makes sense to imagine punting to your own future self, such as by doing a PhD so you can have more impact in “direct work” later, rather than doing “direct work” now.
However, the division isn’t sharp, because:
all actions would have their influence at least slightly in the future
many actions will have multiple pathways to impact, some taking little time and others stretching over longer times
For example, AI safety movement-building and existential risk strategy research could be intended to result in “direct impacts” (after several steps) both decades from now and within years, although probably not within weeks or months. Such actions could be seen as landing somewhere in the middle of the “present-influence to punting” dimension, and/or as having a “present-influence” component in addition to a “punting to the future” component. Indeed, even some people doing AI safety research themselves may be doing so partly or entirely for movement-building reasons, such as to attract funding and talent by showing that progress on these questions is possible and concrete work is being done (see Ord).
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If anyone would like to see (and perhaps provide feedback on) either or both of those drafts I’m working on, let me know.
Thanks for the clarification, Brendon!