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
Aside from RP, what is your best guess for the org that is morally best to give money to?
Idea/suggestion: an “Evergreen” tag, for old (6 months month? 1 year? 3 years?) posts (comments?), to indicate that they’re still worth reading (to me, ideally for their intended value/arguments rather than as instructive historical/cultural artifacts)
As an example, I’d highlight Log Scales of Pleasure and Pain, which is just about 4 years old now.
I know I could just create a tag, and maybe I will, but want to hear reactions and maybe generate common knowledge.
Thanks! Let me write them as a loss function in python (ha)
For real though:
Some flavor of hedonic utilitarianism
I guess I should say I have moral uncertainty (which I endorse as a thing) but eh I’m pretty convinced
Longtermism as explicitly defined is true
Don’t necessarily endorse the cluster of beliefs that tend to come along for the ride though
“Suffering focused total utilitarian” is the annoying phrase I made up for myself
I think many (most?) self-described total utilitarians give too little consideration/weight to suffering, and I don’t think it really matters (if there’s a fact of the matter) whether this is because of empirical or moral beliefs
Maybe my most substantive deviation from the default TU package is the following (defended here):
“Under a form of utilitarianism that places happiness and suffering on the same moral axis and allows that the former can be traded off against the latter, one might nevertheless conclude that some instantiations of suffering cannot be offset or justified by even an arbitrarily large amount of wellbeing.”
Moral realism for basically all the reasons described by Rawlette on 80k but I don’t think this really matters after conditioning on normative ethical beliefs
Nothing besides valenced qualia/hedonic tone has intrinsic value
I think that might literally be it—everything else is contingent!
Some shrinsight (shrimpsight?) from the comments:
I’m pretty happy with how this “Where should I donate, under my values?” Manifold market has been turning out. Of course all the usual caveats pertaining to basically-fake “prediction” markets apply, but given the selection effects of who spends manna on an esoteric market like this I put a non-trivial weight into the (live) outcomes.
I guess I’d encourage people with a bit more money to donate to do something similar (or I guess defer, if you think I’m right about ethics!), if just as one addition to your portfolio of donation-informing considerations.
Done, thanks!
Even given no electricity, copies stored physically in e.g. a flash drive or hard drive would persist until electricity could be supplied, I’m almost certain
Just chiming in to say I have a similar situation, although less extreme. Was vegan for 4 years and eventually concluded it wasn’t sustainable or realistic for me. Main animal products I buy are grass fed beef, grass fed whey protein, eggs from brands that at least go to decent lengths to make themselves seem non-horrible (3rd party humane certified, outdoor access) and a bit of conventional dairy (cheese, butter). I’d be lying if I said I’ve never bought anything “worse” than those, though.
I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)
I have only a vague idea what this means but yeah, whatever facilitates access/storage. Is there anything I should do?
It’s actually been a little while since I made it, but places most likely to both (1) not be direct targets of a nuclear attack and (2) be uncorrelated with the fates of major datacenters plausibly holding the information currently
I tried making a shortform → Twitter bot (ie tweet each new top level ~quick take~) and long story short it stopped working and wasn’t great to begin with.
I feel like this is the kind of thing someone else might be able to do relatively easily. If so, I and I think much of EA Twitter would appreciate it very much! In case it’s helpful for this, a quick takes RSS feed is at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/shortform?format=rss
Pardon my french but
Seems like the forces that turn people crazy are the same ones that lead people to do anything good and interesting at all. At least for EA, a core function of orgs/elites/high status community members is to make the kind of signaling you describe highly correlated with actually doing good. Of course it seems impossible to make them correlate perfectly, and that’s why setting with super high social optimization pressure (like FTX) are gonna be bad regardless.
But (again for EA specifically) I suspect the forces you describe would actually be good to increase on the margin for people not living in Berkeley and/or in a group house which is probably a majority of self-identified EAs but a strong minority of the people-hours OP interacts with irl.
Hypothesis: from the perspective of currently living humans and those who will be born in the currrent <4% growth regime only (i.e. pre-AGI takeoff or I guess stagnation) donations currently earmarked for large scale GHW, Givewell-type interventions should be invested (maybe in tech/AI correlated securities) instead with the intent of being deployed for the same general category of beneficiaries in <25 (maybe even <1) years.
The arguments are similar to those for old school “patient philanthropy” except now in particular seems exceptionally uncertain wrt how to help humans because of AI.
For example, it seems plausible that the most important market the global poor don’t have access to is literally the NYSE (ie rather than for malaria nets), because ~any growth associated with (AGI + no ‘doom’) will leave the global poor no better off by default (i.e. absent redistribution or immigration reform) unlike e.g., middle class westerners who might own a bit of the S&P500. A solution could be for e.g. OpenPhil to invest on their behalf.
(More meta: I worry that segmenting off AI as fundamentally longtermist is leaving a lot of good on the table; e.g. insofar as this isn’t currently the case, I think OP’s GHW side should look into what kind of AI-associated projects could do a lot of good for humans and animals in the next few decades.)
Made a podcast feed with EAG talks. Now has both the recent Bay Area and London ones:
Full vids on the CEA Youtube page
Not OP but here are some “user problems” either I have or am pretty sure a bunch of people have:
Lots of latent, locked up insight/value in drafts
Implicitly high standards discourage posting these as normal posts, which is good for avg post quality and bad for total quality
Would want to collaborate on either an explicit idea or something tbd, but making this happen as is takes a bunch of effort
Reduces costs to getting and giving feedback
Currently afaik there’s no market where feedback buyers and sellers can meet—just ad hoc Google doc links
In principle you can imagine posts almost being written like a Wikipedia page: lots and lots of editors and commenters contributing a bit here and there
Here’s a post of mine that should be a public draft, for example. But as things stand I’d rather it be a shitty public post than a probably-perpetual private draft (if anyone wants to build on it, go to town!)
Definitely part of the explanation, but my strong impression from interaction irl and on Twitter is that many (most?) AI-safety-pilled EAs donate to GiveWell and much fewer to anything animal related.
I think ~literally except for Eliezer (who doesn’t think other animals are sentient), this isn’t what you’d expect from the weirdness model implied.
Assuming I’m not badly mistaken about others’ beliefs and the gestalt (sorry) of their donations, I just don’t think they’re trying to do the most good with their money. Tbc this isn’t some damning indictment—it’s how almost all self-identified EAs’ money is spent and I’m not at all talking about ‘normal person in rich country consumption.’
Note: this sounds like it was written by chatGPT because it basically was (from a recorded ramble)🤷
I believe the Forum could benefit from a Shorterform page, as the current Shortform forum, intended to be a more casual and relaxed alternative to main posts, still seems to maintain high standards. This is likely due to the impressive competence of contributors who often submit detailed and well-thought-out content. While some entries are just a few well-written sentences, others resemble blog posts in length and depth.
As such, I find myself hesitant to adhere to the default filler text in the submission editor when visiting this page. However, if it were more informal and less intimidating in nature, I’d be inclined to post about various topics that might otherwise seem out of place. To clarify, I’m not suggesting we resort to jokes or low-quality “shitposts,” but rather encourage genuine sharing of thoughts without excessive analysis.
Perhaps adopting an amusing name like “EA Shorterform” would help create a more laid-back atmosphere for users seeking lighter discussions. By doing so, we may initiate a preference falsification cascade where everyone feels comfortable enough admitting their desire for occasional brevity within conversations. Who knows? Maybe I’ll start with posting just one sentence soon!
What’s are some questions you hope someone’s gonna ask that seem relatively unlikely to get asked organically?
Bonus: what are the answers to those questions?