AGB 🔸

Karma: 3,722

AGB 🔸 24 Dec 2024 13:29 UTC
38 points
12 ∶ 2
in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
Stylistically, some commenters don’t seem to understand how this differs from a normal cause prioritisation exercise. Put simply, there’s a difference between choosing to ignore the Drowning Child because there are even more children in the next pond over, and ignoring the drowning children entirely because they might grow up to do bad things. Most cause prioritisation is the former, this post is the latter.
As for why the latter is a problem, I agree with JWS’s observation that this type of ‘For The Greater Good’ reasoning leads to great harm when applied at scale. This is not, or rather should not be, hypothetical for EA at this point. No amount of abstract reasoning for why this approach is ‘better’ is going to outweigh what seems to me to be very clear empirical evidence to the contrary, both within EA and without.
Beyond that issue, it’s pretty easy to identify any person, grant, or policy as plausibly-very-harmful if you focus only on possible negative side effects, so you end up with motivated reasoning driving the answers for what to do.
For example, in this post Vasco recommends:
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals.
But why stop at farmed animals? What about wild animals, especially insects? What about the long-term future? If taking Expected Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism seriously as Vasco does, I expect these effects to dominate farmed animals. My background understanding is that population increase leads to cultivation of land for farming and reduces wild animal populations and so wild animal suffering quite a bit.. So I could equivalently argue:
In addition, I encourage Vasco to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on wild animals.
These would then tend to be the opposite set of interventions to the prior set. It just goes round and round. I think there are roughly two reasonable approcahes here:
1. Pick something that seems like a clear good - ‘save lives’, ‘end factory farming’, ‘save the world’ - and try to make it happen without tying yourself into knots about side-effects.
2. Really just an extension of (1), but if you come across a side effect that worries you, add that goal as a second terminal goal and split your resources between the goals.
By contrast, if your genuine goal is to pick an intervention with no plausible chance of causing significant harm, and you are being honest with yourself about possible backfires, you will do nothing.

AGB 🔸 24 Dec 2024 12:52 UTC
20 points
5 ∶ 0
on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
I appreciate you writing this up at the top level, since it feels more productive to engage here than on one of a dozen comment threads.
I have substantive and ‘stylistic’ issues with this line of thinking, which I’ll address in separate comments. Substantively, on the ‘Suggestions’ section:
At the very least, I think GiveWell and Ambitious Impact should practice reasoning transparency, and explain in some detail why they neglect effects on farmed animals. By ignoring uncertain effects on farmed animals, GiveWell and Ambitious Impact are implicitly assuming they are certainly irrelevant.
Why? It seems clear that you aren’t GiveWell’s target audience. You know that, and they know that. Unless someone gives me a reason to think that Animal Welfare advocates were expecting to be served by GiveWell, I don’t see any value in them clarifying something that seems fairly obvious.
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals.
Unless the differences on human welfare are incredibly narrow or the impacts on animal welfare are enormous, this seems like a very bad idea. In general, donating $100 to a charity with suboptimal impacts on human welfare but improved impacts on animal welfare is going to be strictly worse—for both human and animal welfare—than donating $90 to the best human welfare charity and $10 to the best animal welfare charity.
Similarly, investigating the exact size of the effects mostly seems like a waste of time to me. I wrote this up in more detail a few years ago; was addressing a longtermist cluelessness critique but you can pretty much cut/paste the argument. To save a click-through, the key passage is:
Similar thoughts would seem to apply to also other possible side-effects of AMF donations; population growth impacts, impacts on animal welfare (wild or farmed), etc. In no case do I have reason to think that AMF is a particularly powerful lever to move those things, and so if I decide that any of them is the Most Important Thing then AMF would not even be on my list of candidate interventions
GiveWell and Ambitious Impact could also offset the nearterm harm caused to farmed animals by funding the best animal welfare interventions. I calculate these are over 100 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities ignoring their effects on animals. If so, and some funding from GiveWell or Ambitious Impact is neutral due to negative effects on animals, these could be neutralised by donating less than 1 % (= ¹⁄₁₀₀) of that funding to the best animal welfare interventions.
Equally, GiveWell or AIM’s donors can offset if they are worried about this. That seems much better than GiveWell making the choice for all their donors.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 21:54 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelRipa’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
I think my if-the-stars-align minimum is probably around £45k these days. But then it starts going up once there are suboptimal circumstances like the ones you mention. In practice I might expect it to land at 125% to 250% of that figure depending how the non-salary aspects of the job look.
I’m curious about the motivation of the question; FWIW my figure here is a complicated function of my expenses, anticipated flexibility on those expenses, past savings, future plans, etc. in a way that I wouldn’t treat it as much of a guide to what anyone else would or should say.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 21:48 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
It does indeed depend a lot. I think the critical thing to remember is that the figure should be the minimum of what it costs to get a certain type of talent and how valuable that talent is. Clean Water is worth thousands of dollars per year to me, but if you turned up on my doorstep with a one-year supply of water for $1k I’d tell you to stop wasting my time because I can get it far more cheaply than that.
When assessing the cost of acquiring talent, the hard thing to track is how many people aren’t in the pool of applicants at all due to funding constraints. That sounds like it’s Abraham’s position and I think it’s more common than often given credit for; there’s something very low-status in EA about saying ‘I could be doing this more impactful thing, but I won’t because it won’t pay me enough’.
Funding isn’t the only constraint on salaries of course; appearances matter too. Once your org is paying enough that you can’t really pay more without getting a lot of sideways glances you don’t want to get, that’s when I would mostly stop calling you funding-constrained* and then I imagine this number can get really really high; cost of talent becomes ~infinite and we’re back to looking at ‘value’. Open Phil’s hiring is perhaps in approximately that position.
If you are still in a position where you could raise salaries if it weren’t for funding constraints, I tend to think this number struggles to make it out of low six figures. Possible exceptions are positions that want a very specific combination of skills and experiences, like senior leadership at central EA orgs.
*Assuming you are mostly turning money into people into impact, rather than e.g. money into nets into impact.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 21:25 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mjreard’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
I got very lucky that I was born in a city that is objectively one of the best places in the world to do what I do, so reasons to move location are limited.
More generally I don’t feel like I’m doing anything particularly out of the ordinary here compared to a world where I am not donating; I like money, more of it is better than less of it, but there are sometimes costs to getting more money that outweigh the money. Though I would say that as you go up the earnings curve it gets easier and easier to mitigate the personal costs, e.g. by spending money to save time.
Perhaps the biggest risk is that if I set my marginal tax + donation rate too high I am insufficiently incentivised to earn more, to the detriment of both me and the world. Still working on that one.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 21:11 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: GMcGowan’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
This really depends how broadly I define things; does reading the EA Forum count? In terms of time that feels like it’s being pretty directly spent on deciding, my sense is ~50 hours per year. That’s roughly evenly split between checking whether the considerations that inform my cause prioritisaition have changed—e.g. has a big new funder moved into a space—and evaluating individual opportunities.
I touched on the evaluation question in a couple of other answers.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 21:05 UTC
27 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
It’s either my 2014 donations to 80k or my 2015 donations to Charity Science, which eventually evolved into AIM. Both orgs were pretty small at the time, from memory we were >15% of their budgets in those years.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 20:05 UTC
14 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
My views have not changed directionally, but I do feel happier with them than I did at the time for a couple of reasons:
- I thought and continue to think that the best argument is some version of ‘clever arguments aside, from a layperson perspective what you’re doing looks awfully similar to what caused the GFC, and the GFC was a huge disaster which society has not learned the lessons from’.
  - If you talk to people inside finance, they will usually reject the second claim and say a huge amount has changed since the GFC.
  - In particular, regulatory pressure shifted many ‘interesting’ risks from too-big-to-fail banks to hedge funds and firms like Jane Street (JS), where I used to work. JS arguably has much better incentives to keep its house in order than the big banks did, and it shouldn’t have any call on public funds if it fails to do so.
  - But of course there was a reasonable question of whether JS and its ilk would actually succeed in doing this. And if they failed, would society pick up the tab somehow. As more time passes, the GFC looks more like the outlier event here.
- On the positive side of the ledger, most of my work at JS was improving the pricing of equity ETFs. When I started there I felt like almost nobody I spoke to outside JS knew what an ETF was and when I explained it they couldn’t really see the point. Now I feel like virtually all UK personal financial advice I see will mention ETFs as a solid option; a cheap and simple way to invest in a diversified fashion. I’m fine with having been a very small part of what made that happen.
With my more recent work it seems much too soon to say anything definitive about social impact, so I always try to acknowledge some chance that I’ll feel bad when I look back on this.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 19:47 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
It has varied. Giving both of us half the budget is in some ways most natural but we quickly noticed it was gameable to the extent we can predict each other’s actions, similar to what is described here. At the moment we’re much closer to ‘discuss a lot and fund based on consensus’.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 19:42 UTC
28 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
Even with attempts to prevent it, I think annual risk of value drift for me is greater than the annual expected real return on equities, which tends to defeat the usual argument for giving later.
Another exercise I’ve done occasionally is to look at my donations from say 5-10 years ago and muse on whether I would rather have invested the money and given now. So far that hasn’t been close to true, and that’s in spite of an impressive bull market in stocks over the last decade. Money was just so much more of an issue back then. I thought this from Will MacAskill was a good reflection on just how money-constrained things were ‘in the old days’, for those who didn’t see it:
At the time, there was very little funding available in EA. Lunch was the same, every day: budget baguettes and plain hummus. The initial salaries offered by CEA were £15,000/yr pre-tax. When it started off, CEA was only able to pay its staff at all because I loaned them £7,000 — my entire life savings at the time. One of our first major donations was from Julia Wise, for $10,000, which was a significant fraction of the annual salary she received from being a mental health social worker at a prison.
Of course the directly relevant question is: When I look back on this relatively abundant period in 2034, will I feel the same way? I honestly don’t know, realistically the biggest factors will be what Good Ventures decides to do with their money and how well EA attracts other money.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 19:03 UTC
17 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
I sometimes think about whether we have or should have language for a mental health equivalent of Second-Impact syndrome. At the time I burned out I would say I was dealing with four ~independent situations or circumstances that most people would recognise as challenging, but my attitude to each one was ‘this is fine, I can handle this’. Taken one at a time that was probably true, all at once was demonstrably false.
Somehow I needed to notice that I was already dealing with one or two challenging situations and strongly pivot to a defensive posture to avoid taking on even more, similar to how you shouldn’t risk a second concussion shortly after your first one. I think this is a more helpful takeaway than ‘well make fewer missteps next time’, which was my first reaction.
I have taken that posture once or twice since then, but the nature of doing prevention correctly is that you never really know if what you’re doing is actually making a difference. Still, it seems the logical thing to do.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 18:47 UTC
21 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mjreard’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
This was a surprising question to me, because that’s not how I think about my donations. I think there are a few things going on there:
- I only listed the four largest recipients that account for around 2/3rds of the total, so smaller orgs were naturally not listed.
  - As it happens another cluster I very nearly mentioned was AIM. I’ve donated roughly 150k (10% of donations) to AIM / AIM’s predecessors / AIM-incubated charities.
- At the time I gave to 80k, in 2014-2018, they were much less of an ‘established institution’ and much more of a fast-expanding startup.
- Similarly, the bulk of the money I gave to GWWC was right as they were spinning up again in 2021.
Still, even with that said I think you’re pointing at something real; my approach has certainly been more institution-heavy than say EAIF. So to show some cards, I’m roughly of the opinion that the ‘give a promising individual a one-off grant’ setup that’s common in EA is pretty dysfunctional and I’m reluctant to pour much money into it. It requires a lot of evaluation time on the funder side and causes a lot of pain and heartache on the grantee side. There’s a reason most people prefer to be employees not contractors, and I think even contractors have way better average job security than the individuals and tiny orgs inside this model.
Then I’m also not sold the outputs are better as they would need to be to justify those non-financial costs. In the private sector my understanding is that large orgs are generally more productive than smaller ones, at least up to sizes way larger than all EA orgs, due to fixed overheads and better ability to allow employees to specialise.
None of this is a hard no, and clearly I have done this sometimes. AIM mitigates some of these issues about as well as I think they can be mitigated. Sometimes I’m just much closer to a grant opportunity than other funders and it makes sense for me to take it. But mostly I do end up preferring to give to institutions.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 18:24 UTC
47 points
8 ∶ 0
in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
EA’s relationship with earn-to-givers is weird.
On the one hand, my post from last year is currently the 2nd-highest-upvoted post of all time on this Forum. People in EA are mostly nice about what I do, especially online. And when EA comes in for criticism, I often feel like my donations are effectively being wheeled out as a defense. To be clear, in many ways this is reasonable; I probably wouldn’t have donated anything like as much if it weren’t for EA.
On the other hand, I’m sometimes reminded of the observation that it is ‘necessary to get behind someone in order to stab them in the back’. Some of the people and groups who are using me as a shield are the same groups who have spent the last several years trying to get me to stop earning to give or at least stop donating to Givewell charities, and this has had meaningful impacts on my motivation that I have mostly mitigated by talking to them less. In these cases I am doing what I do in spite of them, not because of them, and any lives I save aren’t theirs to claim.
I don’t want EA to stop thinking about questions whose answers may challenge people’s life choices, this seems too core to the project. I do want to flag that non-genuine support isn’t as useful or as harmless as people perhaps think it is. I don’t gain anything from someone praising my choices in public while privately thinking my choices are dumb, and would mostly encourage people not to do the former if they feel the latter. Trust is hard to regain once lost.
One obvious issue here is that if you’re earning to give you’re donating, and many people in EA are searching for money. So I get the incentives, but silence is also an option. Probably not a coincidence that the dynamics I’m describing here bear a lot of resemblance to what people much richer than me grumble about.
Pragmatically, I think the best path forward is for people on the Effective Giving/EtG side of things to support each other more and look to the wider movement less. There are some things starting to shift in this direction.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 17:55 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joel Tan🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
Would you say currently, the median EA should consider trying some E2G (or at least non-EA work while giving significantly) early on in their career?
That’s quite a cautious phrasing! Let me strengthen it a bit then respond to that:
As of 2024, should the median EA try some E2G (or at least non-EA work while giving significantly) early on in their career?
My thoughts on this now depend a fair bit on where you draw the boundaries of ‘EA’.
For the median EA survey taker, I pretty strongly lean ‘yes’ here. Full disclosure that I am moderately influenced by my partner’s experience of trying to get an ‘impactful’ job straight out of university, but I’ve seen a lot of others in similar spots, just they mostly aren’t married to EAs and they mostly bounce right out of the movement rather than writing it up.
For the median student or early-career EAG attendee in 2024, I am much less confident but lean no for ‘median’, my entirely guessed percentage would hover more around 35%. That’s a crowd which has roughly been selected for having the skills to contribute directly to important EA causes^[1].
Somewhere in between is the actual audience of this post, EA forum readers. I don’t have a clear lean here, but I would note the following:
- My understanding of my strengths and weaknesses today is not the same as it was 5 years ago, and it’s definitely not the same as it was when I graduated. I think this is a common way for people in their 30s to feel, and it makes committing ‘too early’ unlikely to work in my view.
- You can short-circuit the first bullet to a degree by deferring to a wider group of mostly-older people. Trying to get a job ‘the normal way’ does this to a significant degree! The job market is not perfect, but if you engage it will make at least some effort to place you where you are best-suited.
- The other classic-for-EAs way to beat that issue is to essentially defer to older EAs; 80k advisors, EAG admissions staff, people you meet through EAG or retreats, etc. This can work, but bear in mind that those people ultimately will not bear the consequences of mistaken advice, much less so than a firm which makes a mistake in hiring you^[2]. Look for ways to confirm those recommendations that involve someone else having skin in the game before you make life-altering decisions.
1. ^
  E.g., from recent post:
  
  An applicant might be rejected if: They do not seem well-placed to take impactful actions as a result of the event....
  EAG is first and foremost a professional networking event.
2. ^
  I think young people really don’t always realise this, so to say it outright: bad hires are expensive. Even in countries like the UK/US with minimal worker protections. Personally I knew this in the abstract but it wasn’t until I became a manager that I really ‘got’ this.

AGB 🔸 17 Dec 2024 17:36 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joel Tan🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give
How do you balance your earning to give/effective giving commitments with your family commitments? (e.g. in my own experience, one’s partner may disapprove of or be stressed out by you giving >=10%, and of course with a mortgage/kids things get even tougher)
To your last observation, I actually think this has gotten easier over the years. When I was younger I had so much uncertainty about my life/career trajectory that I found it difficult to understand the marginal value of both spending and saving. What if I save too little and then turn down an opportunity to move abroad as a result? What if I save too much and then my interest in EA turns out to be a youthful fad? What if I need to spend more to network effectively?
It’s not that such uncertainty is totally gone, but in general I expect it does diminish as you get older. Allan Saldanha made similar observations in his podcast^[1].
My partner is independently very on board with EA, so I can’t speak much to challenges there. Our kids don’t know much about it, but as long as we’re appropriately planning for their futures and our retirement there is some sense in which it isn’t much to do with them. I do lean generous/conservative in later life planning though; given the amount we’ve donated I would really hate to ever end up in a spot where I was leaning on my kids for financial support, even more than I expect most parents would.
1. ^
  Comes up at a few points, but e.g.:
  I don’t know if I would have taken the pledge right after university—there’s so much more uncertainty now, you don’t have jobs for life like you might have 30-40 years ago.

AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give

AGB 🔸10 Dec 2024 22:12 UTC

115 points

31 comments1 min readEA link

AGB 🔸 21 Nov 2024 21:47 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Ben_West’s Shortform
That sounds plausible. I do think of ACX as much more ‘accelerationist’ than the doomer circles, for lack of a better term. Here’s a more recent post from October 2023 informing that impression, below probably does a better job than I can do of adding nuance to Scott’s position.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate
Second, if we never get AI, I expect the future to be short and grim. Most likely we kill ourselves with synthetic biology. If not, some combination of technological and economic stagnation, rising totalitarianism + illiberalism + mobocracy, fertility collapse and dysgenics will impoverish the world and accelerate its decaying institutional quality. I don’t spend much time worrying about any of these, because I think they’ll take a few generations to reach crisis level, and I expect technology to flip the gameboard well before then. But if we ban all gameboard-flipping technologies (the only other one I know is genetic enhancement, which is even more bannable), then we do end up with bioweapon catastrophe or social collapse. I’ve said before I think there’s a ~20% chance of AI destroying the world. But if we don’t get AI, I think there’s a 50%+ chance in the next 100 years we end up dead or careening towards Venezuela. That doesn’t mean I have to support AI accelerationism because 20% is smaller than 50%. Short, carefully-tailored pauses could improve the chance of AI going well by a lot, without increasing the risk of social collapse too much. But it’s something on my mind.
What links here?
- Ben Millwood🔸's comment on Ben Millwood’s Quick takes by Ben Millwood🔸 (22 Nov 2024 12:21 UTC; 16 points)

AGB 🔸 20 Nov 2024 18:47 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Ben_West’s Shortform
Slightly independent to the point Habryka is making, which may well also be true, my anecdotal impression is that the online EA community / EAs I know IRL were much bigger on ‘we need to beat China’ arguments 2-4 years ago. If so, simple lag can also be part of the story here. In particular I think it was the mainstream position just before ChatGPT was released, and partly as a result I doubt an ‘overwhelming majority of EAs involved in AI safety’ disagree with it even now.
Example from August 2022:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress
So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies...
This is the most common question I get on AI safety posts: why isn’t the rationalist / EA / AI safety movement doing this more? It’s a great question, and it’s one that the movement asks itself a lot...
Still, most people aren’t doing this. Why not?
Later, talking about why attempting a regulatory approach to avoiding a race is futile:
The biggest problem is China. US regulations don’t affect China. China says that AI leadership is a cornerstone of their national security—both as a massive boon to their surveillance state, and because it would boost their national pride if they could beat America in something so cutting-edge.
So the real question is: which would we prefer? OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040? Or Facebook gets superintelligence in 2044? Or China gets superintelligence in 2048?
Might we be able to strike an agreement with China on AI, much as countries have previously made arms control or climate change agreements? This is . . . not technically prevented by the laws of physics, but it sounds really hard. When I bring this challenge up with AI policy people, they ask “Harder than the technical AI alignment problem?” Okay, fine, you win this one.
I feel like a generic non-EA policy person reading that post could well end up where the congressional commission landed? It’s right there in the section that most explicitly talks about policy.

AGB 🔸 18 Oct 2024 21:58 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
For the record, I have a few places I think EA is burning >$30m per year, not that AW is actually one of them. Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears? Though unsurprisingly they don’t agree about where the money is getting burned..

So from where I stand I don’t recognise your guess of how people respond to that situation. A few things I believe that might help explain the difference:
1. Most of the money is directed by people who don’t read or otherwise have a fairly low opinion of the forum.
2. Posting on the forum is ‘not for the faint of heart’.
3. On the occasion that I have dug into past forum prioritisation posts that were well-received, I generally find them seriously flawed or otherwise uncompelling. I have no particular reason to be sad about (1).
4. People are often aware that there’s an ‘other side’ that strongly disagrees with their disagreement and will push back hard, so they correctly choose not to waste our collective resources in a mud-slinging match.
I don’t expect to have capacity to engage further here, but if further discussion suggests that one of the above is a particularly surprising claim, I may consider writing it up in more detail in future.

AGB 🔸 18 Oct 2024 21:45 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
If you weigh desires/preferences by attention or their effects on attention (e.g. motivational salience), then the fact that intense suffering is so disruptive and would take priority over attention to other things in your life means it would matter a lot.
Recently I failed to complete a dental procedure because I kept flinching whenever the dentist hit a particularly sensitive spot. They needed me to stay still. I promise you I would have preferred to stay still, not least because what ended up happening was I had to have it redone and endured more pain overall. My forebrain understood this, my hindbrain is dumb.
(FWIW the dentist was very understanding, and apologetic that the anesthetic didn’t do its job. I did not get the impression that my failure was unusual given that.)
When I talk about suffering disrupting enjoyment of non-hedonic goods I mean something like that flinch; a forced ‘eliminate the pain!’ response that likely made good sense back in the ancestral environment, but not a choice or preference in the usual sense of that term. This is particularly easy to see in cases like my flinch where the hindbrain’s ‘preference’ is self-defeating, but I would make similar observations in some other cases, e.g. addiction.
If you don’t weigh desires by attention or their effects on attention, I don’t see how you can ground interpersonal utility comparisons at all
I don’t quite see what you’re driving at with this line of argument.
I can see how being able to firmly ‘ground’ things is a nice/helpful property for an theory of ‘what is good?’ to have. I like being able to quantify things too. But to imply that measuring good must be this way seems like a case of succumbing to the Streetlight Effect, or perhaps even the McNamara fallacy if you then downgrade other conceptions of good in the style of below quote.
Put another way, it seems like you prefer to weight by attention because it makes answers easier to find, but what if such answers are just difficult to find?
The fact that ‘what is good?’ has been debated for literally millenia with no resolution in sight suggests to me that it just is difficult to find, in the same way that after some amount of time you should acknowledge your keys just aren’t under the streetlight.
But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.
To avoid the above pitfall, which I think all STEM types should keep in mind, when I suspect my numbers are failing to capture the (morally) important things my default response is to revert in the direction of Common sense (morality). I think STEM people who fail to check themselves this way often end up causing serious harm^[1]. In this case that would make me less inclined to trade human lives for aminal welfare, not more.
I’ll probably leave this post at this point unless I see a pressing need for further clarification of my views. I do appreciate you taking the time to engage politely.
1. ^
  SBF is the obvious example here, but really I’ve seen this so often in EA. Big fan of Warren Buffet’s quote here:
  It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.

AGB 🔸

AMA: 10 years of Earn­ing To Give

AMA: 10 years of Earning To Give