I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
I have largely similar thoughts, but one disagreement:
“On the first level, you could say that money is really valuable…Against that you could argue that, well, we have an insane amount of money for the size of the movement” [cant see block quote option]
Yes, and I’d argue this (I.e. the interaction between these two levels) is where marginal changes and critiques should be directed because it’s where in practice reasons-responsive decisions about gazzilions of dollars are made.
That is, “EA” (really, a number of different people to different degrees, some of whom have >$10^9) have decided not to fully fund [both of our top charities] this coming year for some set of reasons having to do with cause prioritization. At the top, “EA” can decide that the next marginal dollar should go to GiveWell instead of wherever it’s implicitly going now. Unless I’m missing something it really is a $1-$1 tradeoff
But afaik saving $100 on total top-down EA Global-related spending doesn’t result in $100 going to GiveWell. I don’t understand the funding landscape/mechanisms well enough to know where it goes, but I’d guess it essentially winds up in slightly more slack in the system at the top, which might result in, i don’t know, $5 (?) going to GiveWell, and $95 (??) coming back down in the form of nicer food at some retreat in 2024 (or something, I really don’t know)
If I have this mostly right, I think the main implication is that any argument against waste should mostly be an argument about where money gets directed some number of layers up.
As with Jordan, correct me if/where I’m wrong!
If it’s not too late (and apologies if asked elsewhere)
Is there a (probably true) evolutionary story for why our brains “beat themselves up?”
If so, when or in what circumstances is this cluster of emotions/actions/moods useful (at least in some sense)?
Assuming this cluster is indeed generally counterproductive, is this mostly because we live in an environment very unlike the ancestral one, or more because the goals we’re talking about (like “write a good EA Forum post”) aren’t highly correlated with “maximize reproductive fitness”?
Really good post, and I feel like I have way too many thoughts for this one comment. But anyway here are a few...
Maybe I’m the odd one out (or wrong about my intuition) but I don’t think I ever got the sense-even intuitively or in a low-fidelity way- that “agency” was identical to/implied/strongly overlapped with “a willingness to be social domineering or extractive of others’ time and energy”
Insofar as I have something like a voice in my head giving me corrective advice on this front, it saying asking “if not you than who?” much more than it’s saying “go get it!”
Of course,”if not you, then who?” isn’t always rhetorical; sometimes, you really should refrain from doing something you’re not qualified to do or don’t understand!
Worth distinguishing between being a “team player” in a vibes/aesthetic sense and in a moral/functional sense. If skipping school meant that you were getting out of, say, a tutoring commitment that you had signed up for, I’d say that yeah, you should think hard about whether it’s worth reneging
But what you wrote seems to imply that there was no functional or causally attributable harm to anyone from your missing school. If so, I think doing the weird rationalist thing and resisting the dysfunctional social norm of going to school was completely the right thing to do.
Also, while emotional reactions often encode valuable information, I think the negative emotional reaction you got from being scolded by your teachers was more like a non-functional misfiring due to being out of the evolutionary context; in a 100 person tribe, being scolded by two others indicates that your behavior is indeed likely to harm you, and in a pseudo-moral sense may be meaningfully uncooperative. In this case, (probably) it’s fine for you, your teachers, and whomever else if your teachers don’t think highly of you
[Meta] A bunch of my screen looks like this—not sure if anyone else having the same issue
Wow awesome analysis! Haven’t read super carefully just yet but does seem to point in the opposite direction of the evidence I present insofar as it relates to uni CB. I think this would be worth making a normal high-level post! Blame it on me and link this comment if anyone disagrees lol
My only super brief thought, which I don’t think is controversial but I’ll make explicit, is that reverse causality (i.e. Stanford signal->success metric) is one reason you might not want to take this as knockdown evidence in favor of “Ivies select for talent,” though I really don’t have a great guess as to how much this is indeed the case
Good post! I mostly agree with sections. (2) and (4) and would echo other comments that various points made are under-discussed.
My “disagreement”—if you can call it that—is that I think the general case here can be made more compelling by using assumptions and arguments that are weaker/more widely shared/more likely to be true. Some points:
The uncertainty Will fails to discuss (in short, the Very Repugnant Conclusion) can be framed as fundamental moral uncertainty, but I think it’s better understood as the more prosaic, sorta-almost-empirical question “Would a self-interested rational agent with full knowledge and wisdom choose to experience every moment of sentience in a given world over a given span of time?”
I personally find this framing more compelling because it puts one in the position of answering something more along the lines of “would I live the life of a fish that dies by asphyxiation?” than”does some (spooky-seeming) force called ‘moral outweighing’ exist in the universe”
Even a fully-committed total utilitarian who would maintain that all amounts of suffering are in principle outweighable can have this kind of quasi-empirical uncertainty of where the equilibrium moral balance lies
More, utilitarians of all types would find it better to create less future suffering, all else equal, which is a question I don’t recall Will directly addressing.
Maybe this is relying too much on generalizing from my own intuitions/beliefs, but I’d also guess that objecting to the belief that it’s “good to make happy people” both weakens the argument as a whole and distracts from its most compelling points
You can agree with Will on all his explicit claims made in the book (as I think I do?) and still think he made a pretty major sin of omission by failing to discuss whether the creation of happiness can/does/will cause and justify the creation of suffering
80k great as always! Though I wish, of all episodes, this one was longer
Added, thanks for the suggestion!
Tl;dr [edit]
Granular evidence from my own high school indicates that many, and likely most, of the smartest students US college applicants (proxied by SAT) will get rejected from:
any particular top school they apply to
all of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Princeton (as an arbitrary example)
There’s more overlap between “great,” “good,” and “decent” schools in terms of students’ academic capability than one might expect (and I certainly expected), mostly because the top ~quarter of students at dozens of schools look pretty similar.
Therefore
The base rate of acceptance to any top US school among very top (99.5th+ percentile SAT-scoring, which is >median at all such schools) students, is low, maybe on the order of 20%; Phrased another way, using Princeton as an example random example:
Scott Aaronson’s rejection at 15, “from all five of “HYPMS” despite a 1600 SAT and a single-author paper in a major computer science conference” is an illustrative example, not an exception to it.
Literally true for me, down to the physical motion of cringing (maybe more like a grimace lol), a minute ago when I stared into the abyss.
Thanks to the 13 people who gave it a like to spare me some trauma at the time, though; in all seriousness, if it had gotten 3 karma instead of 20 I don’t think I would have tried again
Ooh I <3 data. Late to the party, but I cleaned up the raw data by throwing away a small amount of information and stacking into a few columns (variable names self-explanatory). I also adjusted dollar amounts for inflation using that month’s CPI. Don’t count on this to be absolutely solid just yet!
I must have messed with some settings bc can’t embed links, but:
I love unsolicited feedback (not being sarcastic haha)!,
Yeah idk why adding TL;DR didn’t cross my mind. Will to get on that soon, thanks
Thanks, great post, and far better and more specific than mine. After looking a bit into the issue, and pending and pending seeing arguments or evidence to the contrary, I think wild fish slaughter is the single [non-longtermism-motivated, object level] cause most deserving of marginal resources.
If there was a charity (or subset of HSA) working on this, It’d be my default go-to for individual giving.
A few things bits from my research I think complement this post well
[1] I estimate that wild fish slaughter accounts for 68 million years of extreme fish suffering (given that fish are sentient) per year. Further, using neuron count as a proxy for capacity to suffer, I estimate this is the moral equivalent of 680,000 years of human torture …
[2] n 2019, OpenPhil did make a grant (~$570k at the time of conversion) to the Humane Slaughter Foundation to work on this very issue...
[3] A whole additional set of interventions are those that reduce the number of wild fish killed without causing enough other suffering to offset this effect [such as] subsidizing humane farmed fishing (with humane slaughter, which I believe is easier in aquaculture settings), which would then (I assume?) reduce the number of wild fish killed.
You might no longer endorse it, but I (in a weaker form) do!
I’d bet there’s a positive correlation between SAT/IQ/whatever and, say, the dummy variables “has completed intro EA fellowship” controlling for campus attended
Though my intuition and credence is way stronger for more normal, bigger school with high SAT variance than top 10 unis and small liberal arts colleges.
:) thank you, and for sure I feel very fortunate to be accepted there and am very glad I went!
Huh, interesting and thanks for sharing.
Completely the opposite, though, I do think that the average student at, say, Yale is indeed smarter than the average Georgetown student to a non-trivial degree, and I never seriously considered that this might not be the case.
Oh yeah I totally agree, but not in the “well roundedness” sense. Like “Olympian” or “world’s best youth chess player” would be seen more favorably than a laundry list of less-dramatic things
Haha thanks! But be sure to only read this comment if it’s a good use of your time