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
Will the Zoom be recorded for those of us unable to join live? If so, would you be willing to post the link as a comment under this post?
Thanks so much for the feedback—just edited with the improved formatting. Regarding your thoughts:
Point well taken that MB likely receives a higher proportion of hours. However, it still seems plausible that its share of hours is too low; there a lot of people with full time positions dedicated to direct work (though insofar as these people are earning a salary for themselves that they’d have to earn in some position, not all of this time can be thought of as being spent on an EA cause unless we discount their salary from the ‘donation’ side of things). Also, seems that a reason that the main forms of MB are cheap is because MB isn’t well-funded. If AI safety was underfunded, the main forms of AI safety work would be cheap too.
Seems perfectly reasonable that the 80k podcast, etc. should consider entertainment, non-EA engagement, and similar considerations. That said, an unintended consequence might be that people like me get the wrong impression that more experienced folks have concluded that MB isn’t super important/neglected/tractable.
Yeah, the 10 vs 4 utils/dollar example might have been misleading and I agree with your point. One thought: perhaps this might be a sort of coordination problem, where it isn’t rational for an individual to fund MB in isolation, but everyone would prefer that everyone give more funding to MB if they could coordinate. Haven’t given this idea much thought though.
Good point that non-MB work has a sort of MB ‘externality.’ This has to be balanced against the obvious ways that MB helps direct causes.
Probably shouldn’t have used the Future Perfect example, as it was fallacious to think that funding was its main constraint. Thanks for the correction.
Thanks for all those references. Don’t know how I missed the 80,000 page on the topic, but that’s a pretty big strike against it being ignored. Regarding your second point, I largely agree but there are surely some MB interventions that don’t require full-time generalists. For example, message testing and advertising (I assume) can be mostly outsourced with enough money.
Very much agreed. https://algosphere.org/ for those interested.
Yes, this was a bit puzzling for me. Good to see it redeemed a bit. I could see the post being disliked for a few reasons:
An image of EA as focused on suffering might be bad for the movement
It’s preaching to the choir (which it definitely is)
Anyway, thanks for the reassuring comment!
Yes, I believe things would change a lot. Hopefully we can find some way to induce this kind of cognitive empathy without making people actually suffer for first hand experience.
You’re welcome and thanks for the comment. I too want to preserve what is good, but I can’t help but think that EAs tend to focus too much on preserving the good instead of reducing the bad, in large part because we tend to be relatively wealthy, privileged humans who rarely if ever undergo terrible suffering.
Effective Altruism Georgetown will be interviewing Rob Wiblin for our inaugural podcast episode this Friday! What should we ask him?
Taking the Boltzmann brain example, isn’t the issue that the premises that would lead to such a conclusion are incorrect, rather than the conclusion being “crazy” per se?
You’re right I didn’t make a full, airtight argument, and that severity of infection is indeed a crucial consideration. My extremely unqualified impression is that:
Long covid is real but no longer the main source of expected disvalue for the 3x-vax’d
A non-trivial number of 3x-vax’d people (20%?) who catch covid lose more than half productivity and/or quality of life for 4-21 days, and this is where most of the expected disvalue comes from
This is what my brain has decided on after being exposed to a bunch of unstructured information so the error bars are very large, and I should probably update toward your POV
Related to the funding point (note 4):
It seems important to remember that even if high status (for lack of a more neutrally-valenced term) longtermist interventions like AI safety aren’t currently “funding constrained,” animal welfare at large most definitely is. As just one clear example, an ACE report from few months ago estimated that Faunalytics has room for more than $1m in funding.
That means there remains a very high (in absolute terms) opportunity cost to longtermist spending, because each dollar spent is one not being donated to an animal welfare org. This doesn’t make liberal longtermist spending wrong, but it does make it costly in terms of expected nearterm suffering.
This is the main reason big longtermist spending gives me pause, even though I just about entirely buy the longtermist thesis. EA is, by and large, pretty good at giving due concern to non-salient opportunity costs, but this seems to be an area in which we’re falling short.
I’m not intending to, although it’s possible I’m using the term “opportunity cost” incorrectly or in a different way than you. The opportunity cost of giving a dollar to animal welfare is indeed whatever that dollar could have bought in the longtermist space (or whatever else you think is the next best option).
However, it seems to me that at least some parts of longtermist EA , some of the time, to some extent, disregard the animal suffering opportunity cost almost entirely. Surely the same error is committed in the opposite direction by hardcore animal advocates, but the asymmetry comes from the fact that this latter group controls a way smaller share of financial pie.
To clarify, are you also interested in proposals concerning animal welfare?
I think we may not disagree; I was focusing on their impact on mental health in particular, whereas most studies, including the Cochrane one, look only at physiological outcomes. From Examine:
And I combine this with this meta-analysis suggesting that EPA is more responsible for this antidepressant effect.
I haven’t looked into claims around heart health or mortality, so am agnostic there for now
Honestly I don’t have a great answer here other than my overall impression/intuition is that it’s probably bad to take arbitrarily high doses of these (unlike water soluble vitamins, at least out of some sort of precautionary principle) and I recall seeing some anecdotes from others saying that they actively prefer only taking one or the other.
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with taking both (say, 1g per day of each) though
Another type of intervention that could plausibly reduce the influence of malevolent actors is to decrease intergenerational transfer of wealth and power. If competent malevolence both (i) increases one’s capacity to gain wealth and/or power and (ii) is heritable, then we should expect malevolent families amass increasing wealth and power. This could be one reason that the global shift away from hereditary monarchies is associated with global peace (I sense that both of these things are correct, but am not positive).
For example, North Korea’s Kim family is almost certainly malevolent in the way that this post describes, and the country’s political structure enables this family to continually keep power.
On a broader scale, larger estate taxes and other economic policies to decrease wealth transfer might have a similar effect.