But maybe you don’t consider this much evidence, if you posit that Nick Bostrom specifically has unusually high discernment, specifically enough to donate to things in the band of activities that are “speculative/weird/non-legible” from the perspective of the relevant donors, but not speculative/weird/non-legible enough that the donor lottery administration won’t permit this.
My reasoning here is indeed based specifically on the track record of Nick Bostrom. (Also, I’m imagining here a theoretical donor lottery where the winner has 100% control over the money that they won.)
I guess my rejoinder here is just an intuitive sense of disbelief? Several (say >=3?) orders of magnitude above 1 million gets you >1B, and as can be deduced in the figures in the post above, this is already well over the annual long-termist spending every year. If we believe that Nick Bostrom can literally accomplish much more good with 1 million than money allocated by the rest of the longtermist EA movement combined (including all money sent to FHI, where he works), isn’t this really wild?
I was not comparing $1M in the hands of Bostrom to $1B in the hands of a random longtermism-aligned person. (The $1B would plausibly be split across many grants, and it’s plausible that Bostrom would end up controlling way more than $1M out of it.)
As an aside, without thinking about it much, it seems to me that the EV from the publication of the book Superintelligence is plausibly much higher than the total EV from everything else that was accomplished by the rest of the longtermist EA movement so far. (I can easily imagine myself updating away from that if I try to enumerate the things that were accomplished by the longtermist EA movement).
Also why aren’t we sending more money to Nick Bostrom to regrant?
To answer this I think that the word “we” should be replaced with something more specific. Why grantmakers at longtermism-aligned grantmaking orgs don’t send more money to Bostrom to regrant? One response is that there is probably nothing analogous to the efficient-market hypothesis for EA grantmaking (see the last paragraph here). Also, the grantmakers are in an implicitly completion with each other over influence on future grant funds. A grantmaker who makes grants that are speculative, weird, non-legible or have a high probability of failing may tend to lose influence over future grant funds, and perhaps reduce the amount of future longtermist funding that their org can give.
Imagine that Bostrom uses the additional $1M to hire another assistant, or some manager for FHI, that simply results in Bostrom being a bit more productive. Looking at this from the lens of the grantmakers’ incentives, how would that $1M grant compare to the average LTFF grant?
I’m confused about what you’re saying here. P(B| do A) is not evidence against P(A|B), except in very rare circumstances.
If we estimate P(A|B) based on a correlation that we observe between A and B then the existence of a causal relationship from A to B is indeed evidence that should update our estimate of P(A|B) towards a lower value.
My reasoning here is indeed based specifically on the track record of Nick Bostrom. (Also, I’m imagining here a theoretical donor lottery where the winner has 100% control over the money that they won.)
I was not comparing $1M in the hands of Bostrom to $1B in the hands of a random longtermism-aligned person. (The $1B would plausibly be split across many grants, and it’s plausible that Bostrom would end up controlling way more than $1M out of it.)
As an aside, without thinking about it much, it seems to me that the EV from the publication of the book Superintelligence is plausibly much higher than the total EV from everything else that was accomplished by the rest of the longtermist EA movement so far. (I can easily imagine myself updating away from that if I try to enumerate the things that were accomplished by the longtermist EA movement).
To answer this I think that the word “we” should be replaced with something more specific. Why grantmakers at longtermism-aligned grantmaking orgs don’t send more money to Bostrom to regrant? One response is that there is probably nothing analogous to the efficient-market hypothesis for EA grantmaking (see the last paragraph here). Also, the grantmakers are in an implicitly completion with each other over influence on future grant funds. A grantmaker who makes grants that are speculative, weird, non-legible or have a high probability of failing may tend to lose influence over future grant funds, and perhaps reduce the amount of future longtermist funding that their org can give.
Imagine that Bostrom uses the additional $1M to hire another assistant, or some manager for FHI, that simply results in Bostrom being a bit more productive. Looking at this from the lens of the grantmakers’ incentives, how would that $1M grant compare to the average LTFF grant?
If we estimate P(A|B) based on a correlation that we observe between A and B then the existence of a causal relationship from A to B is indeed evidence that should update our estimate of P(A|B) towards a lower value.