AGB 🔸

Karma: 3,888

AGB 🔸Feb 14, 2021, 10:54 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Aditya Vaze’s comment on: In diversity lies epistemic strength
I’m claiming the latter, yes. I do agree it’s hard to prove, but I place high subjective credence (~88%) on it. Put simply, if I can directly observe factors that would tend to lower the representation of WEIRD ethnic minorities, I don’t necessarily need to have an estmate of the percentages of WEIRD people who are ethnic minorities, or even of the percentage of people in EA who are from ethnic minorities. I only need to think that the factors are meaningful enough to lead to meaningful differences in representation, and not being offset by comparably-meaningful factors in the other direction. Some of these factors are innocuous, some less so.
But if you’re interested in public attempts to take the direct comparison route, which I fully acknowledge would be stronger evidence if done well, you might find this post of relevance. (Note I’m not necessarily advocating for the concrete suggestions in the post, mostly linking for the counts at the start.)

AGB 🔸Feb 14, 2021, 10:43 AM
11 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Medium-term indirect impacts are certainly worth monitoring, but they have a tendency to be much smaller in magnitude than primary impacts being measured, in which case they don’t pose much of an issue; to be best of my current knowledge carbon emissions from saving lives are a good example of this.

Of course, one could absolutely think that a dollar spent on climate mitigation is more valuable than a dollar spent saving the lives of the global poor. But that’s very different to the cluelessness line of attack; put harshly it’s the difference between choosing not to save a drowning child because there is another pond with even more drowning children and you have to make a hard trolley-problem-like choice, versus choosing to walk on by because who even really knows if saving that child would be good anyway. FWIW, I feel like many people effectively arguing the latter in the abstract would not actually walk on by if faced with that actual physical situation, which if I’m being honest is probably part of why I find it difficult to take these arguments seriously; we are in fact in that situation all the time, whether we realise it or not, and if we wouldn’t ignore the drowning child on our doorstep we shouldn’t entirely ignore the ones half a world away...unless we are unfortunately forced to do so by the need to save even greater numbers / prevent even greater suffering.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 10:37 PM
11 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Thanks for the response, but I don’t think this saves it. In the below I’m going to treat your ranges as being about the far future impacts of particular actions, but you could substitute for ‘all the impacts of particular actions’ if you prefer.
In order for there to be useful things to say, you need to be able to compare the ranges. And if you can rank the ranges (“I would prefer 2 to 1” “I am indifferent between 3 and 4″, etc.), and that ranking obeys basic rules like transitivity, that seems equivalent to collapsing the all the ranges to single numbers. Collapsing two actions to the same number is fine. So in your example I could arbitrarily assign a ‘score’ of 0 to action 1, a score of 1 to action 2, and scores of 2 to each of 3 and 4.
Then my decision rule just switches from ‘do the thing with highest expected value’ to ‘do (one of) the things with highest score’, and the rest of the argument is essentially unchanged: either every possible action has the same score or it doesn’t. If some things have higher scores than others, then replacing a lower score action with a higher score action is a way to tractably make the far future better.
Therefore, claims that we cannot tractably make the far future better force all the scores among all actions being taken to be the same, and if the scores are all the same I think your scoring system is decision-irrelevant; it will never push for action A over action B.
Did I miss an out? It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about weak orderings..

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 10:02 PM
8 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Just to be clear I also think that we can tractably influence the far future in expectation (e.g. by taking steps to reduce x-risk). I’m not really sure how that resolves things.

If you think you can tractably impact the far future in expectation, AMF can impact the far future in expectation. At which point it’s reasonable to think that those far future impacts could be predictably negative on further investigation, since we weren’t really selecting for them to be positive. I do think trying to resolve the question of whether they are negative is probably a waste of time for reasons in my first comment, and it sounds like we agree on that, but at that point it’s reasonable to say that ‘AMF could be good or bad, I’m not really sure, because I’ve chosen to focus my limited time and attention elsewhere’. There’s no deep or fundamental uncertainty here, just a classic example of triage leading us to prioritise promising-looking paths over unpromising-looking ones.
For the same reason, I don’t see anything wrong with that quote from Greaves; coming from someone who thinks we can tractably impact the far future and that the far future is massively morally relevant, it makes a lot of sense. If it came from someone who thought it was impossible to tractably impact the future, I’d want to dig into it more.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 5:13 PM
4 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
I’m not sure how to parse this ‘expectation that is neither positive nor negative or zero but still somehow impacts decisions’ concept, so maybe that’s where my confusion lies. If I try to work with it, my first thought is that not giving money to AMF would seem to have an undefined expectation for the exact same reason that giving money to AMF would have an undefined expectation; if we wish to avoid actions with undefined expectations (but why?), we’re out of luck and this collapses back to being decision-irrelevant.
I have read the paper. I’m surprised you think it’s well-explained there, since it’s pretty dense. Accordingly, I won’t pretend I understood all of it. But I do note it ends as follows (emphasis added):
It is not at all obvious on reflection, however, what the phenomenon of cluelessness really amounts to. In particular, it (at least at first sight) seems difficult to capture within an orthodox Bayesian model, according to which any given rational agent simply settles on some particular precise credence function, and the subjective betterness facts follow. Here, I have explored various possibilities within an ‘imprecise-credence’ model. Of these, the most promising account – on the assumption that the phenomenon of cluelessness really is a genuine and deep one – involved a ‘supervaluational’ account of the connection between imprecise credences and permissibility. It is also not at all obvious, however, how deep or important the phenomenon of cluelessness really is. In the context of effective altruism, it strikes many as compelling and as deeply problematic. However, mundane, everyday cases that have a similar structure in all respects I have considered are also ubiquitous, and few regard any resulting sense of cluelessness as deeply problematic in the latter cases. It may therefore be that the diagnosis of would-be effective altruists’ sense of cluelessness, in terms of psychology and/or the theory of rationality, lies quite elsewhere.
And of course Greaves has since said that she does think we can tractably influence the far future, which resolves the conflict I’m pointing to anyway. In other words, I’m not sure I actually disagree with Greaves-the-individual at all, just with (some of) the people who quote her work.
Perhaps we could find some other interventions for which that’s the case to a much lesser extent. If we deliberately try to beneficially influence the course of the very far future, can we find things where we more robustly have at least some clue that what we’re doing is beneficial and of how beneficial it is? I think the answer is yes.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 1:49 PM
2 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
So yes we are in fact predictably influencing the far future by giving to AMF, in that we know we will be affecting the number of people who will live in the future. However, I wouldn’t say we are influencing the far future in a ‘tractable way’ because we’re not actually making the future better (or worse) in expectation
If we aren’t making the future better or worse in expectation, it’s not impacting my decision whether or not to donate to AMF. We can then safely ignore complex cluelessness for the same reason we would ignore simple cluelessness.
Cluelessness only has potential to be interesting if we can plausibly reduce how clueless we are with investigation (this is a lot of Greg’s point in the OP); in this sense the simple/complex difference Greaves identifies is not quite the action-relevant distinction. If, having investigated, far future impacts meaningfully alter the AMF analysis, this is precisely because we have decided that AMF meaningfully impacts the far future in at least one way that is good or bad in expectation, i.e. we can tractably impact the far future.
Put simply, if we cannot affect the far future in expectation at all, then logically AMF cannot affect the far future in expectation. If AMF does not affect the far future in expectation, far future effects need not concern its donors.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 12:28 PM
6 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
I think there’s a difference between the muddy concept of ‘cause areas’ and actual specific charities/interventions here. At the level of cause areas, there could be overlap, because I agree that if you think the Most Important Thing is to expand the moral circle, then there are things in the animal-substitute space that might be interesting, but I’d be surprised and suspicious (not infinitely suspicious, just moderately so) if the actual bottom-line charity-you-donate-to was the exact same thing as what you got to when trying to minimise the suffering of animals in the present day. Tobias makes a virtually identical point in the post you link to, so we may not disagree, apart from perhaps thinking about the word ‘intervention’ differently.
Most animal advocacy efforts are focused on helping animals in the here and now. If we take the longtermist perspective seriously, we will likely arrive at different priorities and focus areas: it would be a remarkable coincidence if short-term-focused work were also ideal from this different perspective.⁵
Similarly, I could imagine a longtermist concluding that if you look back through history, attempts to e.g. prevent extinction directly or implement better governance seem like they would have been critically hamstrung by a lack of development in the relevant fields, e.g. economics, and the general difficulty of imagining the future. But attempts to grow the economy and advance science seem to have snowballed in a way that impacts the future and also incidentally benefits the present. So in that way you could end up with a longtermist-inspired focus on things like ‘speed up economic growth’ or ‘advance important research’ which arguably fall under the ‘near-term human-centric welfare’ area on some categorisations of causes. But you didn’t get there from that starting point, and again I expect your eventual specific area of focus to be quite different.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 12:10 PM
6 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
If we have good reason to expect important far future effects to occur when donating to AMF, important enough to change the sign if properly included in the ex ante analysis, that is equivalent to (actually somewhat stronger than) saying we can tractably influence the far future, since by stipulation AMF itself now meaningfully and predictably influences the far future. I currently don’t think you can believe the first and not the second, though I’m open to someone showing me where I’m wrong.

AGB 🔸Feb 13, 2021, 9:21 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Aditya Vaze’s comment on: In diversity lies epistemic strength
FWIW, I don’t think your argument goes through for ethnic diversity either; EA is much whiter than its WEIRD base. I agree aiming to match the ethnic diversity of the world would be a mistake.

(Disclaimer: Not white)

AGB 🔸Feb 12, 2021, 11:05 PM
25 points
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in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: 80,000 Hours one-on-one team plans, plus projects we’d like to see
Spitballing here, but have you considered putting some thoughts to this effect on your website? Currently, the relevant part of the 80k website reads as follows.
Why wasn’t I accepted?
Unfortunately, due to overwhelming demand, we can’t advise everyone who applies. However, we’re confident that everyone who is reading this has what it takes to lead a fulfilling, high impact career. Our key ideas series contains lots of our best advice on this topic – we hope you’ll find it useful.
If you’re thinking of re-applying, you can improve your chances by:
1. Reading our key ideas series.
2. Using our planning tool, which we developed to help people think through their own decisions.
You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
This is ok as far as it goes, but to me does feel a little like a fake-positive ‘I’m sure you’ll do just fine, whoever-you-are!‘. Pointing out things like the fact that you have very little information to go on, and that you’re optimising for people you can help most rather than making some kind of pure ‘how valuable is this person’ call, seems like it could help soften the blow the margin, though I appreciate it’ll never make that large a difference given the other things you mentioned.

AGB 🔸Feb 12, 2021, 1:45 PM
60 points
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on: Complex cluelessness as credal fragility
Many of the considerations regarding the influence we can have on the deep future seem extremely hard, but not totally intractable, to investigate. Offering naive guestimates for these, whilst lavishing effort to investigate easier but less consequential issues, is a grave mistake. The EA community has likely erred in this direction.
***
Yet others, those of complex cluelessness, do not score zero on ‘tractability’. My credence in “economic growth in poorer countries is good for the longterm future” is fragile: if I spent an hour (or a week, or a decade) mulling it over, I would expect my central estimate to change, although my remaining uncertainty to be only a little reduced. Given this consideration has much greater impact on what I ultimately care about, time spent on this looks better than time further improving the estimate of immediate impacts like ‘number of children saved’. It would be unwise to continue delving into the latter at the expense of the former. Would that we do otherwise.
At current, I straightforwardly disagree with both of these claims; I do not think it is a good use of ‘EA time’ to try and pin down exactly what the long term (say >30 years out) effects of AMF donations are, or for that matter any other action originally chosen for its short term benefits (such as...saving a drowning child). I feel very confused about why some people seem to think it is a good use of time, and would appreciate any enlightenment offered on this point.
The below is somewhat blunt, because at current cluelessness arguments appear to me to be almost entirely without decision-relevance, but at the same time a lot of people who I think are smarter than me appear to think they are relevant and interesting for something and someone, and I’m not quite clear what the something or who the someone is, so my confidence is necessarily more limited than the tone would suggest. Then again, this thought is clearly not limited to me, e.g. Buck makes a very similar point here. I’d really love to get an example, even a hypothetical one, of where any of this would actually matter at the level of making donation/career/etc. decisions. Or if everybody agrees it would not impact decisions, an explanation of why it is a good idea to spend any ‘EA time’ on this at all.
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For the challenge of complex cluelessness to have bite in the case of AMF donations, it seems to me that we need something in the vicinity of these two claims:
1. The expected long term consequences of our actions dominate the expected short term consequences, in terms of their moral relevance.
2. We can tractably make progress on predicting what those those long term consequences are, beyond simple 1-to-1 extrapolation from the short term consequences, by considering those consequences directly.
In short, I claim that once we truly believe (1) and (2) AMF would no longer be on our list of donation candidates.
For example, suppose you go through your suggested process of reflection, come to the conclusion AMF will in fact tractably boost economic growth in poorer countries, that such growth is one of the best ways to improve the longterm future, and that AMF’s impact on growth is morally far more important than the considerations which motivated the choice of AMF in the first place, namely its impact on child mortality in the short term. Satisfied that you have now met the challenge of cluelessness, should you go ahead and click the ‘donate’ button?
I think you obviously shouldn’t. It seems obvious to me that at minimum you should now go and find an intervention that was explicitly chosen for the purpose of boosting long term growth by the largest amount possible. Since AMF was apparently able to predictably and tractably impact the long term via incidentally impacting growth, it seems like you should be able to do much better if you actually try, and for the optimal approach to improve the long term future to be increasing growth via donating to AMF would be a prime example of Surprising and Suspicious Convergence. In fact, the opening quote from that piece seems particularly apt here:
Oliver: … Thus we see that donating to the opera is the best way of promoting the arts.
Eleanor: Okay, but I’m principally interested in improving human welfare.
Oliver: Oh! Well I think it is also the case that donating to the opera is best for improving human welfare too.
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.
Indeed, none of the people I know who think that the far future is massively morally important and that we can tractably impact it focus their do-gooding efforts on AMF, or anything remotely like AMF. To the extent they give money to AMF-like things, it is for appearences’ sake, for personal comfort, or a hedge against their central beliefs about how to do good being very wrong (see e.g. this comment by Aaron Gertler). As a result, cluelessness arguments appear to me to be addressing a constituency that doesn’t actually exist, and attempts to resolve cluelessness are a ‘solution looking for a problem’.
If cluelessness arguments are intended have impact on the actual people donating to short term interventions as a primary form of doing good, they need to engage with the actual disagreements those people have, namely the questions of whether we can actually predict the size/direction of the longterm consequences despite the natural lack of feedback loops (see e.g. KHorton’s comment here or MichaelStJules’ comment here), or the empirical question of whether the impacts of our actions do in fact wax or wane over time (see e.g. reallyeli here), or the legion of potential philosophical objections.
Instead, cluelessness arguments appear to me to assume away all the disagreements, and then say ‘if we assume the future is massively morally relevant compared to the present, that we can tractably and predictably impact said future, and a broadly consequentalist approach, one should be longtermist in order to maximise good done’. Which is in fact true, but unexciting once made clear.
What links here?
- Denise_Melchin's comment on Doing good is as good as it ever was by Denise_Melchin (Feb 19, 2021, 7:18 PM; 4 points)

AGB 🔸Feb 10, 2021, 10:55 PM
6 points
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on: Retention in EA—Part III: Retention Comparisons
So my first reaction to the Youth Ministry Adherence data was the basically the opposite of yours, in that I looked at it and thought ‘seems like they are doing a (slightly) better job of retention’. Reviewing where we disagree, I think there’s a tricky thing here about distinguishing between ‘dropout’ rates and ‘decreased engagement’ rates. Ben Todd’s estimates which you quote are explicitly trying to estimate the former, but when you compare to:
those listed as “engaged disciples” who continue to self-report as “high involvement”
...I think you might end up estimating the latter. ‘High involvement’ was the highest of four possible levels, and ‘Engaged disciple’ was also the highest of four possible levels. By default I’d look at the number who are neither moderately nor highly involved, i.e. 8% rather than 42%.
More generally, my understanding is that Ben was counting someone as not having dropped out if they were still doing something as engaged as fulfulling as GWWC pledge, based on quote below. So if you start at a much higher level than that (like...attending the Weekend Away), there’s a lot of room to decrease engagement substantially while still being above the bar and not having ‘dropped out’. Which in turn means I’d generally be aiming to have similar leeway for ‘regression to the mean’ in the comparisons. Or you can compare everything to Ben’s GWWC dropout number of 40%, which has no such leeway, as you do with the similarly-no-leeway case of vegetarianism.
I appreciate this is a highly subjective call though, this is very much just my two cents. I could easily imagine changing my mind if I looked at the Youth Ministry information more closely and decided that ‘Engaged Disciple’ actually constituted some kind of ‘super-high-involvement’ category.
The list contains 69 names. Several of the team went over the names checking who is still involved. We started with our own knowledge, and then checked our own engagement data for ambiguous cases.
We counted someone as ‘still involved’ if they were doing something as engaged as fulfilling a GWWC pledge.
On this basis, we counted about 10 people we think have ‘dropped out’, which is 14% of the total in 6 years.

AGB 🔸Feb 7, 2021, 4:03 PM
2 points
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on: Retention in EA—Part III: Retention Comparisons
Cool series, thanks for sharing on the forum. One nitpick:
ACE estimates that the average vegetarian stays vegetarian for 3.9-7.2 years, implying a five-year dropout rate of 14-26%.
I’m not sure how your rate is being calculated from ACE’s figures here, but at first pass it seems wrong? Since 5 years is within but slightly towards the lower end of the range given for how long the average vegetarian stays vegetarian, I’d assume we’d end up with something more like a ~45% five-year dropout rate. By contrast, a 14-26% five-year dropout rate would suggest that >50% of vegetarians are still vegetarian after two such periods, i.e. 10 years.
If I’m misunderstanding either stat, just let me know and will happily retract.

AGB 🔸Jan 30, 2021, 12:55 PM
8 points
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on: Introduction to Longtermism
Thank you for this! This is not the kind of post that I expect to generate much discussion, since it’s relatively uncontroversial in this venue, but is the kind of thing I expect to point people to in future.

I want to particularly draw attention to a pair of related quotes partway through your piece:
I’ve tried explaining the case for longtermism in a way that is relatively free of jargon. I’ve argued for a fairly minimal version — that we may be able to influence the long-run future, and that aiming to achieve this is extremely good and important. The more precise versions of longtermism from the proper philosophical literature tend to go further than this, making some claim about the high relative importance of influencing the long-run future over other kinds of morally relevant activities.
***

Please note that you do not have to buy into strong longtermism in order to buy into longtermism!

AGB 🔸Jan 23, 2021, 5:11 PM
9 points
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on: Money Can’t (Easily) Buy Talent
I was surprised to discover that this doesn’t seem to have already been written up in detail on the forum, so thanks for doing so. The same concept has been written up in a couple of other (old) places, one of which I see you linked to and I assume inspired the title:

Givewell: We can’t (simply) buy capacity
80000 Hours: Focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps
The 80k article also has a disclaimer and a follow-up post that felt relevant here; it’s worth being careful about a word as broad as ‘talent’:
Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term ‘talent gaps’ in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We’ve written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it’s much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about ‘talent constraints’ in general terms. This page may be misleading if it’s not read in conjunction with our clarifications.

AGB 🔸Jan 21, 2021, 2:05 PM
4 points
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in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: richard_ngo’s Shortform
But for the purposes of my questions above, that’s not the relevant factor; the relevant factor is: does someone know, and have they made those arguments [that specific intervention X will wildly outperform] publicly, in a way that we could learn from if we were more open to less quantitative analysis?

I agree with this. I think the best way to settle this question is to link to actual examples of someone making such arguments. Personally, my observation from engaging with non-EA advocates of political advocacy is that they don’t actually make a case; when I cash out people’s claims it usually turns out they are asserting 10x − 100x multipliers, not 100x − 1000x multipliers, let alone higher than that. It appears the divergence in our bottom lines is coming from my cosmopolitan values and low tolerance for act/omission distinctions, and hopefully we at least agree that if even the entrenched advocate doesn’t actually think their cause is best under my values, I should just move on.

As an aside, I know you wrote recently that you think more work is being done by EA’s empirical claims than moral claims. I think this is credible for longtermism but mostly false for Global Health/Poverty. People appear to agree they can save lives in the deveoping world incredibly cheaply, in fact usually giving lower numbers than I think are possible. We aren’t actually that far apart on the empirical state of affairs. They just don’t want to. They aren’t refusing to because they have even better things to do, because most people do very little. Or as Rob put it:
Many people donate a small fraction of their income, despite claiming to believe that lives can be saved for remarkably small amounts. This suggests they don’t believe they have a duty to give even if lives can be saved very cheaply – or that they are not very motivated by such a duty.
I think that last observation would also be my answer to ‘what evidence do we have that we aren’t in the second world?’ Empirically, most people don’t care, and most people who do care are not trying to optimise for the thing I am optimising for (in many cases it’s debateable whether they are trying to optimise at all). So it would be surprising if they hit the target anyway, in much the same way it would be surprising if AMF were the best way to improve animal welfare.

AGB 🔸Jan 21, 2021, 9:10 AM
2 points
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in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: richard_ngo’s Shortform
I think we’re still talking past each other here.

You seem to be implicitly focusing on the question ‘how certain are we these will turn out to be best’. I’m focusing on the question ‘Denise and I are likely to make a donation to near-term human-centric causes in the next few months; is there something I should be donating to above Givewell charities’.

Listing unaccounted-for second order effects is relevant for the first, but not decision-relevant until the effects are predictable-in-direction and large; it needs to actually impact my EV meaningfully. Currently, I’m not seeing a clear argument for that. ‘Might have wildly large impacts’, ‘very rough estimates’, ‘policy can have enormous effects’...these are all phrases that increase uncertainty rather than concretely change EVs and so are decision-irrelevant. (That’s not quite true; we should penalise rough things’ calculated EV more in high-uncertainty environments due to winners’ curse effects, but that’s secondary to my main point here).

Another way of putting it is that this is the difference between one’s confidence level that what you currently think is best will still be what you think is best 20 years from now, versus trying to identify the best all-things-considered donation opportunity right now with one’s limited information.

So concretely, I think it’s very likely that in 20 years I’ll think one of the >20 alternatives I’ve briefly considered will look like it was a better use of my money that Givewell charities, due to the uncertainty you’re highlighting. But I don’t know which one, and I don’t expect it to outperform 20x, so picking one essentially at random still looks pretty bad.

A non-random way to pick would be if Open Phil, or someone else I respect, shifted their equivalent donation bucket to some alternative. AFAIK, this hasn’t happened. That’s the relevance of those decisions to me, rather than any belief that they’ve done a secret Uber-Analysis.

AGB 🔸Jan 20, 2021, 4:20 PM
9 points
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in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: richard_ngo’s Shortform
Thanks for the write-up. A few quick additional thoughts on my end:
- You note that OpenPhil still expect their hits-based portfolio to moderately outperform Givewell in expectation. This is my understanding also, but one slight difference of interpretation is that it leaves me very baseline skeptical that most ‘systemic change’ charities people suggest would also outperform, given the amount of time Open Phil has put into this question relative to the average donor.
- I think it’s possible-to-likely I’m mirroring your ‘overestimating how representative my bubble was’ mistake, despite having explicitly flagged this type of error before because it’s so common. In particular, many (most?) EAs first encounter the community at university, whereas my first encounter was after university, and it wouldn’t shock me if student groups were making more strident/overconfident claims than I remember in my own circles. On reflection I now have anecdotal evidence of this from 3 different groups.
- Abstaning on the ‘what is the best near-term human-centric charity’ question, and focusing on talking about the things that actually appear to you to be among the best options, is a response I strongly support. I really wish more longtermists took this approach, and I also wish EAs in general would use ‘we’ less and ‘I’ more when talking about what they think about optimal opportunities to do good.

AGB 🔸Jan 16, 2021, 11:59 AM
12 points
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: My mistakes on the path to impact
(Disclaimer: I am OP’s husband)

As it happens, there are a couple of examples in this post where poor or distorted versions of 80k advice arguably caused harm relative to no advice; over-focus on working at EA orgs due to ‘talent constraint’ claims probably set Denise’s entire career back by ~2 years for no gain, and a simplistic understanding of replaceability was significantly responsible for her giving up on political work.

Apart from the direct cost, such events leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and so can cause them to dissociate from the community; if we’re going to focus on ‘recruiting’ people while they are young, anything that increases attrition needs to be considered very carefully and skeptically.

I do agree that in general it’s not that hard to beat ‘no advice’, rather a lot of the need for care comes from simplistic advice’s natural tendency to crowd out nuanced advice.

I don’t mean to bash 80k here; when they become aware of these things they try pretty hard to clean it up, they maintain a public list of mistakes (which includes both of the above), and I think they apply way more thought and imagination to the question of how this kind of thing can happen than most other places, even most other EA orgs. I’ve been impressed by the seriousness with which they take this kind of problem over the years.

AGB 🔸Jan 12, 2021, 8:12 AM
35 points
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: The Folly of “EAs Should”
The ‘any decent shot’ is doing a lot of work in that first sentence, given how hard the field is to get into. And even then you only say ‘probably stop’.

There’s a motte/bailey thing going on here, where the motte is something like ‘AI safety researchers probably do a lot more good than doctors’ and the bailey is ‘all doctors who come into contact with EA should be told to stop what they are doing and switch to becoming (e.g.) AI safety researchers, because that’s how bad being a doctor is’.

I don’t think we are making the world a better place by doing the second; where possible we should stick to ‘probably’ and communicate the first, nuance and all, as you did do here but as Khorton is noting people often don’t do in person.

AGB 🔸

Why wasn’t I accepted?