Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifold.markets. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin
Karma: 412
Thanks for your responses!
I’m not sure that “uniqueness” is the right thing to look at.
Mostly, I meant: the for-profit world already incentivizes people to take high amounts of risk for financial gain. In addition, there are no special mechanisms to prevent for-profit entities from producing large net-negative harms. So asking that some special mechanism be introduced for impact-focused entities is an isolated demand for rigor.
There are mechanisms like pollution regulation, labor laws, etc which apply to for-profit entities—but these would apply equally to impact-focused entities too.
We should be cautious about pushing the world (and EA especially) further towards the “big things happen due to individuals following their local financial incentives” dynamics.
I think I disagree with this? I think people following local financial incentives is always going to happen, and the point of an impact market is to structure financial incentives to be aligned with what the EA community broadly thinks is good.
Agree that xrisk/catastrophe can happen via eg AI researchers following local financial incentives to make a lot of money—but unless your proposal is to overhaul the capitalist market system somehow, I think building a better competing alternative is the correct path forward.
Hm, naively—is this any different than the risks of net-negative projects in the for-profit startup funding markets? If not, I don’t think this a unique reason to avoid impact markets.
My very rough guess is that impact markets should be at a bare minimum better than the for-profit landscape, which already makes it a worthwhile intervention. People participating as final buyers of impact will at least be looking to do good rather than generate additional profits; it would be very surprising to me if the net impact of that was worse than “the thing that happens in regular markets already”.
Additionally—I think the negative externalities may be addressed with additional impact projects, further funded through other impact markets?
Finally: on a meta level, the amount of risk you’re willing to spend on trying new funding mechanisms with potential downsides should basically be proportional to the amount of risk you see in our society at the moment. Basically, if you think existing funding mechanisms are doing a good job, and we’re likely to get through the hinge of history safely, then new mechanisms are to be avoided and we want to stay the course. (That’s not my current read of our xrisk situation, but would love to be convinced otherwise!)
In July 2022, there still aren’t great forecasting systems that could deal with this problem. The closest might be Manifold Markets, which allows for the fast creation of different markets and the transfer of funds to charities, which gives some monetary value to their tokens. In any case, because setting up such a system might be laborious, one could instead just offer to set such a system up only upon request.
Manifold would be enthusiastic about setting up such a system for improving grant quality, through either internal or public prediction markets! Reach out (austin@manifold.markets) if you participate in any kind of grantmaking and would like to collaborate.
The primary blocker, in my view, is a lack of understanding on our team on how the grantmaking process operates—meaning we have less understanding of the the use case (and thus how to structure our product) than eg our normal consumer product. A few members of OpenPhil have previously spoken with us; we’d love to work more to understand how we could integrate.
A lesser blocker is the institutional lack of will to switch over to a mostly untested system. I think here “Prediction Markets in the Corporate Setting” is a little pessimistic wrt motives; my sense is that decisionmakers would happily delegate decisions, if the product felt “good enough”—so this kind of goes back to the above point.
Hey Filip! I’ve been working on an implementation of QF for Manifold! Preview: https://prod-git-quadfund-mantic.vercel.app/charity
Specifically, we actually DO have a matching pool, but there are some properties of fixed-matching-pool QF that is not super desirable; aka it turns into a zero-sum competition for the fixed pool. We’re trying to address this with a growing matching pool, would love to see if your mechanism here is the right fix. More discussion: https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold/pull/486#issuecomment-1154217092
Very cool! Manifold has been considering quadratic funding for a couple situations:
distributing payouts to charities http://manifold.markets/charity
allocating “tips” on the comments of a particular market
And in the latter scenario, we had been thinking of a matching pool-less approach of redistributing contributions according to the quadratic funding equation. But of course, the downside of “I wanted to tip X but the commenter is getting less!” always is kind of weird. I like this idea of proportionally increasing commitments out of a particular limit, it seems like a much easier psychological sell.
Really appreciate the animations btw—super helpful for giving a visual intuition for how this works!
For reference—malaria kills 600k a year. Covid has killed 6m to date.
If you believe creating an extra life is worth about the same as preventing an extra death (very controversial, but I hold something like this) then increasing fertility is an excellent cause area.
Missing-but-wanted children now substantially outnumber unwanted births. Missing kids are a global phenomenon, not just a rich-world problem. Multiplying out each country’s fertility gap by its population of reproductive age women reveals that, for women entering their reproductive years in 2010 in the countries in my sample, there are likely to be a net 270 million missing births—if fertility ideals and birth rates hold stable. Put another way, over the 30 to 40 years these women would potentially be having children, that’s about 6 to 10 million missing babies per year thanks to the global undershooting of fertility.
Haha thanks for pointing this out! I’m glad this isn’t an original idea; you might say robustness itself is pretty robust ;)
It becomes clear that there’s a lot of value in really nailing down your intervention the best you can. Having tons of different reasons to think something will work. In this case, we’ve got:
It’s common sense that not being bit by mosquitos is nice, all else equal.
The global public health community has clearly accomplished lots of good for many decades, so their recommendation is worth a lot.
Lots of smart people recommend this intervention.
There are strong counterarguments to all the relevant objections, and these objections are mostly shaped like “what about this edge case” rather than taking issue with the central premise.
Even if one of these fails, there are still the others. You’re very likely to be doing some good, both probabilistically and in a more fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down sense.
I really liked this framing, and think it could be a post on it’s own! It points at something fundamental and important like “Prefer robust arguments”.
You might visualize an argument as a toy structure built out of building blocks. Some kinds of arguments are structured as towers: one conclusion piled on top of another, capable of reaching tremendous heights. But: take out any one block and the whole thing comes crumbling down.
Other arguments are like those Greek temples with multiple supporting columns. They take a bit more time to build, and might not go quite as high; but are less reliant on one particular column to hold its entire weight. I call such arguments “robust”.
One example of a robust argument that I particularly liked: the case for cutting meat out of your diet. You can make a pretty good argument for it from a bunch of different angles:
Animal suffering
Climate/reducing emissions
Health and longevity
Financial cost (price of food)
By preferring robustness, you are more likely to avoid Pascalian muggings, more likely to work on true and important areas, more likely to have your epistemic failures be graceful.
Some signs that an argument is robust:
Many people who think hard about this issue agree
People with very different backgrounds agree
The argument does a good job predicting past results across a lot of different areas
Robustness isn’t the only, or even main, quality of an argument; there are some conclusions you can only reach by standing atop a tall tower! Longtermism feels shaped this way to me. But also, this suggests that you can do valuable work by shoring up the foundations and assumptions that are implicit in a tower-like argument, eg by red-teaming the assumption that future people are likely to exist conditional on us doing a good job.
Thanks, this was really interesting; I love the visualization of how diets are changing over time!
I was inspired to start a prediction market on how my own diet will change (I’m currently pescatarian): https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-will-my-diet-look-like-over-th
Sinclair has been working on allowing authors to embed Manifold prediction markets inside of a LessWrong/EA Forum post! See: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/4907
So ideally, you could set up a prediction market for each of these things eg“How many epistemic corrections will the author issue in the next week?”
“Will this post win an EA Forum prize?”
“Will this post receive >50 karma?”
“Will a significant critique of this post receive >50 karma?”
“Will this post receive a citation in major news media?”
And then bet on these directly from within the Forum!
I actually do think that getting Flynn elected would be quite good, and would be open to other ways to contribute. eg if phonebanking seems to be the bottleneck, could I pay for my friends to phonebank, or is there some rule about needing to be “volunteers”?
I have donated $2900, and I’m on the fence about donating another $2900. Primarily, I’m not sure what the impact of a marginal dollar to the campaign will accomplish—is the campaign still cash-constrained?
My very vague outsider sense was that the Flynn campaign had already blanked the area with TV ads, so that additional funding might not do that much, eg from local coverage from a somewhat hostile source
Thank you so, so much for writing up your review & criticism! I think your sense of vagueness is very justified, mostly because my own post is more “me trying to lay out my intuitions” and less “I know exactly how we should change EA on account of these intuitions”. I had just not seen many statements from EAs, and even less among my non-EA acquaintances, defending the importance of (1), (2), or (3) - great breakdown, btw. I put this post up in the hopes of fostering discussion, so thank you (and all the other commenters) for contributing your thoughts!
I actually do have some amount of confidence in this view, and do think we should think about fulfilling past preferences—but totally agree that I have not made those counterpoints, alternatives, or further questions available. Some of this is: I still just don’t know—and to that end your review is very enlightening! And some is: there’s a tradeoff between post length and clarity of argument. On a meta level, EA Forum posts have been ballooning to somewhat hard-to-digest lengths as people try to anticipate every possible counterargument; I’d push for a return to more of Sequences-style shorter chunks.
I think (2) is just false, if by utility we have in mind experiences (including experiences of preference-satisfaction), for the obvious reason that the past has already happened and we can’t change it. This seems like a major error in the post. Your footnote 1 touches on this but seems to me to conflate arguments (2) and (3) in my above attempted summary.
I still believe in (2), but I’m not confident I can articulate why (and I might be wrong!). Once again, I’d draw upon the framing of deceptive or counterfeit utility. For example, I feel that involuntary wireheading or being tricked into staying in a simulation machine is wrong, because the utility provided is not a true utility. The person would not actually realize that utility if they were cognizant that this was a lie. So too would the conversationist laboring to preserve biodiversity feel deceived/not gain utility if they were aware of the future supplanting their wishes.
Can we change the past? I feel like the answer is not 100% obviously “no”—I think this post by Joe Carlsmith lays out some arguments for why:
Overall, rejecting the common-sense comforts of CDT, and accepting the possibility of some kind of “acausal control,” leaves us in strange and uncertain territory. I think we should do it anyway. But we should also tread carefully.
(but it’s also super technical and I’m at risk of having misunderstood his post to service my own arguments.)
In terms of one specific claim: Large EA Funders (OpenPhil, FTX FF) should consider funding public goods retroactively instead of prospectively. More bounties and more “this was a good idea, here’s your prize”, and less “here’s some money to go do X”.
I’m not entirely sure what % of my belief in this comes from “this is a morally just way of paying out to the past” vs “this will be effective at producing better future outcomes”; maybe 20% compared to 80%? But I feel like many people would only state 10% or even less belief in the first.
To this end, I’ve been working on a proposal for equity for charities—still in a very early stage, but as you work as a fund manager, I’d love to hear your thoughts (especially your criticism!)
Finally (and to put my money where my mouth is): would you accept a $100 bounty for your comment, paid in Manifold Dollars aka a donation to the charity of your choice? If so, DM me!
I deeply do not share the intuition that younger versions of me are dumber and/or less ethical. Not sure how to express this but:
17!Austin had much better focus/less ADHD (possibly as a result of not having a smartphone all the time), and more ability to work through hard problems
17!Austin read a lot more books
17!Austin was quite good at math
17!Austin picked up new concepts much more quickly, had more fluid intelligence
17!Austin had more slack, ability to try out new things
17!Austin had better empathy for the struggles of young people
This last point is a theme in my all-time favorite book, Ender’s Game—that the lives of children and teenagers are real lives, but society kind of systematically underweights their preferences and desires. We stick them into compulsory schooling, deny them the right to vote and the right to work, and prevent them from making their own choices.
Thanks—this comparison was clarifying to me! The point about past people being poorer was quite novel to me.
Intuitively for me, the strongest weights are for “it’s easier to help the future than the past” followed by “there are a lot of possible people in the future”, so on balance longtermism is more important than “pasttermism” (?). But I’d also intuit that pasttermism is under-discussed compared to long/neartermism on the margin—basically the reason I wrote this post at all.
What We Owe the Past
Manifold for Good: Bet on the future, for charity
Yup, I think that should be possible. Here’s a (very wip) writeup of how this could work: https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Charity-Equity-2bc1c7a411b9460b9b7a5707f3667db8
I think impact markets should be viewed in that experimental lens, for what it’s worth (it’s barely been tested outside of a few experiments on the Optimism blockchain). I’m not sure if we disagree much!
Curious to hear what experiments and better funding mechanisms you’re excited about~