The link to “Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?” is broken and I can’t find it online but am keen to read it. Does anyone know where to find it? Thanks
Aidan Alexander
Karma: 748
Thank you for your response! Makes sense. I’m not 100% convinced on the last point, but a few of your articles and 80k podcast appearances have definitely shifted me from thinking that E2G is unambiguously the best way for me to maximise the amount of near-term suffering I can abate, to thinking that direct work is a real contender. So thanks!!
Hi there! Is there anywhere you can direct me to that makes the case that constant replacement occurs? In what sense do we stop existing and get replaced by a new person each moment? What is your reason for believing this? This is stated in the post but not justified anywhere. Apologies if I have missed it somewhere. I also tried googling ‘constant replacement’, ‘constant replacement self’, ‘constant replacement identity’ etc. and couldn’t find more on this.
+1 to this. I’ve been struggling figure out what seems wrong with every account of wellbeing and every form of utilitarianism I’d come across so far, and the answer was the lack of this account of wellbeing.
Preference utilitarianism, in which a ubiquitous preference is to have quality subjective experiences, and where the quality of subjective experience is understood in terms of tranquilism is by far the most accurate-seeming account of wellbeing I’ve come across so far
Defenders of objective list theories might object to the previous two monistic theories on the grounds that they are naively simplistic in holding that well-being can be reduced to a single element: life is far more complicated than that (Fletcher, 2013).
I don’t see how this objection makes sense. A desire (or preference) account of wellbeing effectively means that wellbeing is about maximising a very long, potentially infinite, list of values. It’s objective list theory that over-simplifies wellbeing by reducing it to a handful of values.
Exciting stuff! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I agree that the movement has not been systematic enough on cause prioritisation.
One thing I’m curious about.. where do you draw the line on:
(a) Where one cause ends and the other begins / how to group causes:
For example, aren’t fungal diseases, nuclear war and asteroids all sub-causes of global health, in that we only (or at least mainly) care about them insofar as they threaten global health? AI safety is the same (except that in addition to mattering because it threatens health, it also matters because it has the opportunity to bring about happiness).
(b) Where causes end and interventions begin:
You’re measuring the promise of these cause areas in DALYs per $100k, which means you’ve started thinking about the solutions already. Is CEARCH doing intervention exploration too?
Great stuff as always James!
Partial Identification, rest assured I downvoted because your comment is low quality
Well written! Super clear and concise
I’m probably being daft.. but what does this have to do with effective altruism?
Got it. FTX wasn’t Y-combinator incubated right? (A quick google doesn’t seem to suggest it was). Not that that nullifies your point—I’m just clarifying
Thanks for the thoughtful question Joel!
I’ll take this question in three parts:
(1) Why not just give the money to strong existing foundations whose values match your own?
Greater funder diversity is a good thing.
It contributes to worldview diversification within EA, and reduces the chance that important cause areas go unfunded (more on this below).Existing foundations don’t have the capacity to do everything.
The world is big—there are a lot of problems to solve, a lot of potential solutions to consider funding, and a lot that needs to be learned to do this well. As a result, most foundations make the wise decision of limiting their scope by some combination of cause area, geography and recipient organization size/maturity (e.g. GiveWell focuses on mature global health organizations that can absorb many millions in funding). In aggregate, the scopes of these foundations do not sufficiently cover all of the most important areas (see Joey’s post on specific funding gaps for example). So we need more organizations and more grantmakers working on figuring out what to fund!
I’d love to see new foundations started that address some subject matter gaps, e.g. “GiveWell, but for policy interventions” or “GiveWell, but for family planning”. I’d also love to see some foundations started that fill functional niches within the funding landscape, e.g. a foundation that specialises in regranting (i.e. where their comparative advantage is in vetting people, rather than projects).
(2) Shouldn’t we be skeptical of smaller/newer grantmaking organizations because it’s hard to compete with the likes of GiveWell on accuracy?
They don’t have to compete: They can focus on the many cause areas and intervention types outside of the scope of organizations like GiveWell.
Small funders play an important role that GiveWell can’t: Yes, the level of rigor that GiveWell puts into vetting projects is hard to compete with! But because they invest so much resources into each grant decision, GiveWell is only able to consider mature organizations that can absorb tens of millions in additional funding. Meanwhile, assessing smaller, less mature organizations is very important, because (a) if no one supports them they will never become mature enough for the likes of GiveWell, (b) there are likely be extremely cost-effective opportunities that can’t ever reach GiveWell’s scale requirements.
Being small comes with other comparative advantages: For example, moving more quickly to respond to time-sensitive opportunities.
(3) Shouldn’t people who have ended up in the position of disbursing funds by random chance (e.g. through inheritance) just defer to others to make the grantmaking decisions?
It’s true that a person with a lot of funds does not by default have the skills, time or interest needed to do an excellent job at disbursing it. But:
In many cases they do have these qualities!
This program isn’t just for the owner of the funds—it is for key decision-makers within grantmaking organizations, like executive directors, senior grantmaking staff and program officers.
If the owner of the funds decides to defer to somebody else, there’s no getting around the need for them to make some key decisions themselves, for example who to hire to disburse the funds for them (i.e. who to defer to), or what they mean by ‘impact’ or ‘doing good’. We hope that our program will better equip participants to make these decisions.
Thanks so much for this interesting post—this framing of wellbeing had never occurred to me before. On the first example you use to explain why you find the capabilities framing to be more intuitive than a preference framing: can’t we square your intuition that the second child’s wellbeing is better with preference satisfaction by noting that people often have a preference to have the option to do things they don’t currently prefer? I think this preference comes from (a) the fact that preferences can change, so the option value is instrumentally useful, and (b) it feels better to do what you’d prefer freely than to do so with no other option. You can account for the second example the same way.
The example of women reporting to be happier in the 70s (which lets take to be true for the sake of argument) is interesting, but for me that’s a point against hedonic accounts of wellbeing, not preference accounts of wellbeing: our happiness is just one (albeit very very important!) thing we care about. So whilst women might have been happier in the US in the 70s, they may well have had preferences thwarted by discrimination… and even if their preferences were satisfied as in your first two examples (e.g. suppose they preferred playing the economic role they were forced by discrimination to play) they presumably would have preferred to have more options, and to choose freely.
I don’t purport to have shown why the capabilities account of wellbeing is wrong, but rather to show why I’m not convinced that the holes (in the preference account of wellbeing) it’s supposed to fill, exist in the first place.
[Sorry for the scrappy writing—written on my phone whilst walking]
I think OP’s idea is not to get longermists to switch back, but to insulate neartermists from the harms that one might argue come from sharing a broader movement name with the longtermist movement.
Very pleased to see this! I’d love to see more focus from EA orgs (and others of course) on the fundamentals of being an effective nonprofit (e.g. having a strong, well-evidenced theory of change, and using M&E to test the weakest links in that theory of change and measure impact).
In particular, on theory of change, I’d like to add the following impassioned rant:
A non-profit’s theory of change is analogous to a business model in the for-profit world. Just as you wouldn’t found a company without a clear business model (and nobody would fund you), one shouldn’t found or fund a charity without a strong theory of change.
In fact, theory of change is more important for charities than business models are for businesses, because businesses have better feedback loops. If a for-profit is based on a bad idea, or has bad execution, it will see poor revenue and profits and it will soon go out of business. If a charity is ineffective on the other hand, it may limp along for years without having any impact, squandering limited funding and talent in the process.
I’m getting a 404 error at that link
The idea makes a lot of sense, but my guess is that the circumstance where the cost is driven by the intervention itself isn’t that common: In the context of charities, we’re thinking about applying RCTs to test whether an intervention works. Generally the intervention is happening anyway. The cost of RCTs then doesn’t come from applying the intervention to the treatment group—it comes from establishing the experimental conditions where you have a randomised group of participants and the ability to collect data on them.
I would use this! I go back and forth on whether I should give money to beggars. Whilst I think the answer to this question depends on the specific location and context, this app would make the “but I should rather give that discretionary money to an effective charity” option a lot more realistic.
You’re right, and so It is a top priority! Others can say more as to the current hypotheses on how to do so
Hi there!
I’m a bit confused about the claim that the bottleneck is ways to deploy funding rather than funding itself.
In global poverty and health cause areas for example, there are highly scalable EA-endorsed interventions like insecticide treated bed nets, deworming and cash transfers, and there are still plenty of people with malaria, children to deworm, and folks below the poverty line who could receive cash transfers. As far as I’m aware, AMF, Deworm the World / SCI and GiveDirectly could deploy more funds, and to the extent that they needed to hire more people to do so, I hypothesise they would be able to easily given that, as I understand it, there is a lot of competition to get jobs at organisations like these. What am I missing?
Thanks in advance!