AGB

Karma: 2,757

AGB 28 Sep 2014 19:56 UTC
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on: Introduce Yourself
Hi all, I’m Alex Gordon-Brown. I’m from the UK, and currently live and work in London. I started work at Jane Street Capital in September 2013.

The focus of my career is Earning To Give, and as a result I spend a lot of my free time thinking about questions of where and how to donate. I’m always happy to chat to others undertaking or considering EtG, especially those looking at finance.

AGB 28 Sep 2014 21:13 UTC
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in reply to: AlasdairGives’s comment on: Brainstorming thread: ideas for large EA funders
Thanks Alasdair; for what it’s worth I consider this very close to many variants on the ‘giving games’ idea, in terms of using the money to draw people in while still making sure it goes to a good cause. One plausible issue with donation matching instead here is that it seems fake if the money is going to be donated anyway (giving games of pretty much any variant give a genuine, if perhaps constrained, choice); do you have a sense of how people react to that?

Also, at some point in drafting this the word ‘boring’ was in inverted commas, as it is in your post. Not sure what happened to that...

AGB 29 Sep 2014 18:25 UTC
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in reply to: TopherHallquist’s comment on: Brainstorming thread: ideas for large EA funders
i understand you finding the premise odd. However, it became apparent to me in the course of casual conversations that many people do indeed have an intuition that you should be able to do something ‘clever’ with sums on this level. Evidence for that Is provided by most of the rest of the comments.

AGB 15 Oct 2014 17:22 UTC
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on: On Progress and Prosperity
“2. Why should progress continue indefinitely? Maybe there will be progress until 2100, and the level of sophistication in that year will determine the entire future?

This scenario just seems to strain plausibility. Again, almost all ways that progress could plausibly stop don’t depend on the calendar year, but are driven by human activities (and presumably some intermediating technological progress).”

I think this is where I disagree with you most: I don’t think this strains plausibility at all, and in fact I think the statement as given is basically true up to the year. Examples of events that seem determined by ‘calendar year’ rather than by the level of progress, but where likelihood of survival seems dependent on the level of progress:
1. First, second, or later contact with intelligent alien life (especially in a ‘they find us’ scenario, rather than vice-versa).
2. Asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, and another ‘natural’ disasters.
I’m sure people more imaginative than me can think of others.

You mentioned the latter category explicitly and noted that they are very rare. I agree. But ‘very rare’ still means ‘mathematically guaranteed eventually’, so eventually there will be a year X where the level of sophistication does in fact determine the entire future. 1 concerns me more than 2 though, since it seems more of a ‘make-or-break’ event, and more guaranteed (Aside: I’m always a bit surprised that contact with alien life doesn’t seem to turn up much in discussions of the very-far-future. It’s normally my primary consideration when thinking that far ahead, since I view it as incredibly important to what the long-run looks like and incredibly likely given sufficient time).

This is obviously related to a broader disagreement, which is whether the threats and constraints on humanity are primarily external (disease, cosmic issues, aliens, maybe even resource issues) or internal (AI, nukes, engineered microbes). I lean strongly towards external.

Against an unknown external threat, speeding up broad-based progress is a sensible response. It has so far been the case the primary things hurting humanity have been external, so up to now broad-based progress has been very powerful. You don’t appear to disagree with this. Your actual disagreement is, I think, contained in the sentence “For better or worse, almost all problems with the potential to permanently change human affairs are of our own making.”

Arguing against that would take me somewhat out of the scope of this thread and make this comment even longer than it already is. But it seems clear to me that that assertion is not one that many of those you are arguing against would agree with, and without it, I don’t think the rest of your argument holds.

AGB 16 Oct 2014 11:22 UTC
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in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity
Edited for TLDR:

TLDR; We can robustly increase the speed of progress. We can also establish that, contrary to the argument above, increasing the speed of progress has non-trivial very-long-run value. I don’t see how we can robustly change the direction of progress. I also don’t see how we could robustly know that the direction we move progress in is valuable, even if we could robustly change the direction of progress.

At the risk of stating something we both know, 0.01% per year is not at all ‘small’ in this context. My estimate would actually be lower, and I still think my argument holds. That’s because I think progress will continue for many thousands of years. I agree with you that eventually it has to stop or dwindle into insignificance. But all I need to establish is that there is a non-trivial chance that it does not stop before one of the make-or-break events. If progress is currently set to continue for at least 1000 more years and there is indeed a 0.01% chance per year, there is at least a 10% chance of that scenario (the one that you said ‘strains plausibility’). 1000 years just isn’t a very long time. And once I have that, speeding up progress becomes very valuable again.

“You would have to be very pessimistic about the plausible trajectory-changing impacts of available interventions before such a small effect was relevant.”

I am actually very pessimistic about these, because it’s not clear to me that we have any examples of trying to do more of this on the margin working. We do have examples of attempts to speed up progress on the margin working.

Assuming that by ‘anthropogenic climate change’ you essentially mean rising CO2 levels, I don’t actually rate climate change as an x-risk, so it’s not obvious to me that it belongs in this discussion. I rate it as something which could cause a great deal of suffering and, as a side-effect of that, slow down progress, but not as something that brings about the ‘end of the world as we know it’. If it is an x-risk, then in a sense my response is ‘well, that’s too bad’, since I also view it as inevitable; all the evidence I’m aware of suggests that we collectively missed the boat on this one some time ago. In fact, because we’ve missed the boat already, the best thing to do right now to combat it is very likely to be to speed up progress so as to be better placed to deal with the problems when they come.

AGB 16 Oct 2014 17:18 UTC
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in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity
“In the worst case, you personally saving money and spending it later (in the worst case, to hasten progress at a time when the annual risk of doom has increased!) seems very likely to beat 0.01%, unless you have pretty confident views about the future.”

I don’t disagree on this point, except that I think there are better ways to maximise ‘resources available to avert doom in year 20xx’ than simply saving money and gaining interest.

“How long progress goes on for before stopping seems irrelevant to its value, according to the model you described. The value of an extra year of progress is always the per annum doom risk.”

I basically agree, and I should have made that explicit myself. I only invoked specific numbers to highlight that 0.01% annual doom risk is actually pretty significant once we’re working on the relevant timescales, and therefore why I think it is plausible/likely that there will indeed be a year, one day, where the level of sophistication determines the entire future.

“Whether we’ve missed the boat on climate change or not, it would undermine your claim that historically the main problems have been nature-made and not man-made (which I find implausible), which you were invoking to justify the prediction that the same will hold true in the future.”

That wasn’t the prediction I was trying to make at all, though on re-reading my post I can see why you might have thought I was. But the converse of ‘almost all problems...are of our own making’ is not ‘most problems are not of our own making’. There’s a large gap in the middle there, and indeed it’s not clear to me which will dominate in the future. I think external has dominated historically and marginally think it still dominates now, but what I’m much more convinced of is that we have good methods to attack it.

In other words, external doesn’t need to be much bigger than internal in the future to be the better thing to work on, all it needs to be is (a) non-trivial and (b) more tractable.

The rest of your post is suggesting specific alternative interventions. I’m open to the possibility that there is some specific intervention that is both more targeted and that is currently being overlooked. I think that conclusion is best reached by considering interventions or classes of interventions one at a time. But as a prior, it’s not obvious to me that this would be the case.

And on that note, do you think that the above was the case in 1900? 1800? Has it always been the case that focusing on mitigating a particular category of risk is better than focusing on general progress? Or have we passed some kind of tipping point which now makes it so?

AGB 16 Oct 2014 17:44 UTC
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity
What would be an example? It’s quite possible I don’t disagree on this, because it’s very opaque to me what ‘improving institutional decision making’ would mean in practice.

AGB 30 Nov 2014 18:57 UTC
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in reply to: Fluttershy’s comment on: Open thread 5
“Actually, I can’t find any discussion of choosing a college major on the 80,000 Hours site, though there are a couple of threads on this topic posted to LessWrong.”

Not a tremendous excuse, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this is basically because 80k is UK-based, where there is no strong analogue to ‘choosing a major’ as practised by US undergraduates; by the time someone is an undergraduate in the UK (actually, probably many months before that, given application deadlines), they’ve already chosen their subject and have no further choices to make on that front except comparatively minor specialisation choices.

AGB 22 Dec 2014 22:59 UTC
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on: Help a Canadian give with a tax-deduction by swapping donations with them!
I strongly expect to give a large amount of money to AMF (>$10000) over the next few months. Happy to help.

I’m from the UK.

AGB 22 Dec 2014 23:08 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
In practice, isn’t it relatively easy to identify whether someone is already up the right tail in their giving? I don’t recall struggling with this in initial conversations. You can just ask whether they give abroad for instance, which will seemingly get you most of the way since most people don’t (i.e. it is true that those who do vastly skew the mean, but you can just exclude almost all of them ex ante...).

What you’re saying might be appropriate for mass marketing I suppose where you can’t cut off the right tail.

AGB 22 Dec 2014 23:15 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
“People respect and are impressed by those who are making big sacrifices for the benefit of others. Note how much attention and respect from important figures Toby Ord has gotten by pledging a large fraction of his income. Also the kudos generally given to doctors, soldiers, firefighters, Mother Teresa, etc.”

Attention and admiration, absolutely. But how much copying? I would expect people to be most drawn to people who seem to be only ‘one step’ more self-sacrificing than they are, in a conceptual framework that I suppose is analogous to the idea of inferential distance. For instance, I think Toby benefits in this from having an ‘ordinary’ income. Anything further away than that rapidly becomes too weird to be taking seriously. Note Jeff Kaufman has written about pretty much exactly this:

http://www.jefftk.com/p/optimizing-looks-weird

One weak support for the idea that these examples are sufficiently far away for most people to dismiss without much thought is the very fact media happily talks about them; this would make them less challenging and cognitive-dissonance inducing, so others’ dominant impressions on reading are to be impressed rather than unsettled.

AGB 22 Dec 2014 23:18 UTC
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on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
One reasonable starting point for this would be to get a list of ‘sufficient’ rather than ‘necessary’ conditions, which provide definition without being necessarily exclusionary. For instance, I think being in GWWC and keeping your pledge is a clear sufficient condition that we’re unlikely to want to change or contest. What are some others?

AGB 22 Dec 2014 23:33 UTC
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on: Where are you giving and why?
Denise and I are looking at AMF and the CEA-nexus of charities (Effective Altruism Outreach, Giving What We Can, 80000 hours) primarily. I actually think EAO is the most promising of these on what it wants to do with it’s planned funding (http://eao.causevox.com/), but I also fully expect it to meet its target.

AGB 24 Dec 2014 15:20 UTC
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on: Why “Changing the World” is a Horrible Phrase
Slightly off-topic, but this:

“I believe that ‘Changing the World’ is promoted by TED, but internally acts mostly as a shelling point. Agreeing on the importance of ‘changing the world’ is a good way of coming to a consensus without having to decide on moral philosophy.”

reminded me of a video I found amusing recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IsO8y-4AmU

AGB 24 Dec 2014 15:28 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: What should an effective altruist be committed to?
Sorry, pretty unclear post on my part. Owen basically got it right though; if we’re talking practically rather than theoretically, you don’t have to decide to always focus on effectiveness or always focus on quantity. You can choose, and your choice can be influenced by the information you have about your audience.

Since most individual people are around the median/mode and a long way below the mean, for most individual people talking about effectiveness is correct. There are a few exceptions to this (those ‘up the right tail’), and then you can talk about amount...or just accept that you aren’t going to achieve that much here and find more people where you can talk about effectiveness!

This is obviously dependent on how much ability you have to discriminate based on your audience, which in turn depends on context, hence my ‘mass marketing’ point.

AGB 27 Dec 2014 19:42 UTC
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on: The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
Not to nitpick, but this:

“Given this, my guess for the value of a marginal hour for a tech worker is something between a quarter and a half of their average salary. Again, this is enough of a difference that we could be significantly misled by valuing their time at their average hourly wage, as the examples above do.”

read like a bit of a strawman to me, because I’d read a couple of the examples and hadn’t noticed it. When I tried to go to the linked examples to discover whether they did in fact use average, rather than marginal, wage, the first link is broken and the fourth seems to link to the third (the third, as far as I can tell, doesn’t discuss voting).

With respect to kidney donation, all I see is talk about ‘lost wages’ in a somewhat opaque way that could mean marginal or average, but the implication is marginal (e.g. it talks about paid leave greatly lessening this cost) and so I think the charitable interpretation would be to assume marginal.

Finally, with respect to vegetarianism, I don’t see any explicit discussion of time/wage cost at all? In fact Katja’s explicit calculation all seems to be in dollars, as you (correctly, in my view) recommend.

I do of course agree that we should be thinking on the margin, and apologise if I’ve missed something.

AGB 28 Dec 2014 12:41 UTC
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in reply to: ruthie’s comment on: The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
I see, I didn’t look at the comments section. I agree that there people are talking about average wage.

AGB 1 Jan 2015 15:33 UTC
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in reply to: xccf’s comment on: Blind Spots: Compartmentalizing
I agree with pretty much all of this, especially the last two paragraphs.

That last comparison also highlights that the argument against abortion in the popular space is overwhelmingly deontological, rather than consequentialist; it revolves around whether ‘foetuses are people’ or not, and therefore whether ‘abortion is murder’ or not, with the assumption granted (on both sides) that murder is automatically wrong. Which is why the popular space doesn’t make the link between women having abortions and women simply choosing not to have children.

And if you are deontological in your thinking, the argument about moral uncertainty is pretty strong; a 10% chance (say) of committing murder sounds terrible.

But for me personally, as I’ve become more consequentialist in my thinking (which EA has been a part of, though not the only part), it’s actually pushed me more and more pro-abortion.

AGB 2 Jan 2015 11:21 UTC
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in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Blind Spots: Compartmentalizing
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I actually don’t think I missed that point at all if you read to the end of my post.

The whole point is that I’m not certain that consequentialism is correct but that my internal probability of it being so has been sharply rising, which is why “as I’ve become more consequentialist in my thinking...it’s actually pushed me more and more pro-abortion”. The ‘more’ implies lack of certainty/conviction here both for my current and (especially) my past self.

I’m claiming that deontology broadly provides more of the anti-abortion arguments than consequentialism does, certainly in the popular space. So it’s reasonable for more consequentialist groups (like EAs) to be more pro-abortion.

AGB 2 Jan 2015 11:31 UTC
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in reply to: pappubahry’s comment on: Problems and Solutions in Infinite Ethics
“No-one responds to the drowning child by saying, “well there might be an infinite number of sentient life-forms out there, so it doesn’t matter if the child drowns or I damage my suit”. It is just not a consideration.”

“It is not an issue for altruists otherwise—everyone saves the drowning child.”

I don’t understand what you are saying here. Are you claiming that because ‘everyone’ does do X or because ‘noone’ does not do X (putting those in quotation marks because I presume you don’t literally mean what you wrote, rather you mean the ‘vast majority of people would/would not do X’), X must be morally correct?

That strikes me as...problematic.