This year I donated to (in decreasing order of amount given):
The EA Animal Welfare Fund
Alex Boresâs congressional campaign
Forethought
Alex Semendinger đ¸
Karma: 118
Tie trainÂing can make DPO/âRLHF-trained AIs genÂerÂalÂize better
Emojis in display names feels like a Twitter-native phenomenon. I think it works on Twitter because of the distinction between a @username and a Twitter handle: the latter can change frequently and is often used for jokes or puns anyway.
So the orange diamond emoji fits in well on Twitterâeven âJeff Kaufman đ¸đđŁđđĄđâ, while a little over the top, wouldnât strike me as too unusual. But in most other settings (EA Forum, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), where thereâs less or no distinction between real names, usernames, and display names, an emoji stands out more. (Although đ¸ is visually simpler and more professional-looking than đ, at least.)
A candidate rule of thumb: use the đ¸ in situations where youâre fine with people using other emojis, and donât use it if it might start a slippery slope toward đ¸đđŁđđĄđ where that would be unwelcome. For me that means ⌠just Twitter, I think? And maybe the EA forum where itâs already catching on and doesnât seem to be spurring other emoji-use.
Unless Iâm misunderstanding, isnât this âjustâ an issue of computing Shapley values incorrectly? If kindling is important to the fire, it should be included in the calculation; if your modeling neglects to consider it, then the problem is with the modeling and not with the Shapley algorithm per se.
Of course, I say âjustâ in quotes because actually computing real Shapley values that take everything into account is completely intractable. (I think this is your main point here, in which case I mostly agree. Shapley values will almost always be pretty made-up in the best of circumstances, so they should be taken lightly.)
I still find the concept of Shapley values useful in addressing this part of the OP:
Impact does not seem to be a property that can sensibly be assigned to an individual. If an individual (or organisation) takes an action, there a number of reasons why I think that the subsequent consequences/âimpact canât solely be attributed to that one individual.
I read this as sort of conflating the claims that âimpact canât be solely attributed to one personâ and âimpact canât be sensibly assigned to one person.â Shapley values help with assigning values to individuals even when theyâre not solely responsible for outcomes, so it helps pull these apart conceptually.
Much more fuzzily, my experience of learning about Shapley values took me from thinking âimpact attribution is basically impossibleâ (as in the quote above) to âhuh, if you add a bit more complexity you can get something decent out.â My takeaway is to be less easily convinced that problems of this type are fundamentally intractable.
I agree with just about everything in this comment :)
(Also re: Shapley valuesâI donât actually have strong takes on these and you shouldnât take this as a strong endorsement of them. I havenât engaged with them beyond reading the post I linked. But theyâre a way to get some handle on cases where many people contribute to an outcome, which addresses one of the points in your post.)
Thanks for writing this! âEA is too focused on individual impactâ is a common critique, but most versions of it fall flat for me. This is a very clear, thorough case for it, probably the best version of the argument Iâve read.
I agree most strongly with the dangers of internalizing the âheavy-tailed impactâ perspective in the wrong way, e.g. thinking âthe top people have the most impact â Iâm not sure Iâm one of the top people â I wonât have any meaningful impact â I might as well give up.â (To be clear, steps 2, 3, and 4 are all errors: if thereâs a decent chance youâre one of the top, thatâs still potentially worth going for. And even if notâmost people arenâtâthat doesnât mean your impact is negligible, and certainly doesnât mean doing nothing is better!)
I mostly disagree with the post though, for some of the same reasons as other commenters. The empirical case for heavy-tailed impact is persuasive to me, and while measuring impact reliably seems practically very hard /â intractable in most cases, I donât think itâs in principle impossible (e.g. counterfactual reasoning and Shapley values).
Iâm also wary of arguments that have the form âeven if X is true, believing /â saying it has bad consequences, so we shouldnât believe /â say X.â I think there are usually ways to incorporate X while mitigating the downsides that might be associated with believing it; some of the links you included (e.g. Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians, Naive vs Prudent Utilitarianism) provide examples of this. Heavy-tailed impact is (if true) a very important fact about the world. So itâs worth putting in the effort to incorporate it into our beliefs effectively, doing our best to avoid the downsides you point out.
The FTX collapse took place in November 2022. Among other things, this resulted in a lot of negative media attention on EA.
Itâs also worth noting that this immediately followed a large (very positive, on the whole) media campaign around Will MacAskillâs book What We Owe the Future in summer 2022, which I imagine caused much of the growth earlier that year.
Many of the songs associated with Secular Solstice[1] have strong EA themes, or were explicitly written with EA in mind.
A few of the more directly EA songs that I like:âBrighter Than Today,â the prototypical Solstice song, about the possibility of a brighter future.
âThe Circle,â about the expanding moral circle (more literal /â less subtle than âDraw the Circle Wide,â which I also like!)
âFive Thousand Yearsâ and âHere and Nowâ for longtermism.
âHymn to Breaking Strainâ (a setting of a Kipling poem) is not about doing good per se, but feels extremely EA to me.
- ^
Lots of resources at that link, also an overlapping list of solstice songs here.
Setting Beeminder goals for the number of hours worked on different projects has substantially increased my productivity over the past few months.
Iâm very deadline-motivated: if a deadline is coming up, I can easily put in 10 hours of work in a day. But without any hard deadlines, it can take active willpower to work for more than 3 or 4 hours. Beeminder gives me deadlines almost every day, so it takes much less willpower now to have productive days.
(Iâm working on a blog post about this currently, which I expect to have out in about two weeks. If I remember, Iâll add a link back to this comment once itâs out.)Update: This strategy only worked for a few months before I got pretty burnt out; having non-negotiable deadlines every day eventually became more draining than motivating. Beeminder has still helped me a ton overall, but itâs very important to get the goals right and tweak them if they stop working!
Interesting post! But Iâm not convinced.
Iâll stick to addressing the decision theory section; I havenât thought as much about the population ethics but probably have broadly similar objections there.
(1) What makes STOCHASTIC better than the strategy âtake exactly N tickets and then stopâ?
Both avoid near-certain death (good!)
Both involve, at some point, turning down what looks like a strictly better option
To me, STOCHASTIC seems to do this at the very first round, and all subsequent rounds. (If I played STOCHASTIC and drew a non-black ball first, I think Iâd be pretty disappointed. This indicates to me that I didnât actually want to randomize on that round.) Or you could just view STOCHASTIC as doing this on the round when you stop accepting tickets.
This very fact makes these strategies about as puzzling as the ârecklessâ or âtimidâ strategies to meâat some point, youâre deliberately choosing the worse option, by your own lights! Thatâs at least weird, right?
âTake exactly Nâ has the advantage of letting you decide the exact level of risk you want to take on, while STOCHASTIC involves an additional layer of uncertainty, which gets you âŚ.???[1]
I get that youâre trying to avoid totalizing theoretical frameworks, but you also seem to be saying itâs better in some way that makes it worth choosing, at least for you. But why?
(2) In response to
But, well, you donât have to interpret my actions as expressing attitudes towards expected payoffs. I mean this literally. You can just ⌠not do that.
Iâm having trouble interpreting this more charitably than âwhen given a choice, you can just ⌠choose the option with the worse payoff.â Sure, you can do that. But surely youâd prefer not to? Especially if by âactionsâ here, weâre not actually referring to what you literally do in your day-to-day life, but a strategy you endorse in a thought-experiment decision problem. Youâre writing as if this is a heavy theoretical assumption, but Iâm not sure itâs saying anything more than âyou prefer to do things that you prefer.â
(3) In addition to not finding your solution to the puzzle satisfactory,[2] Iâm not convinced by your claim that this isnât a puzzle for many other people:
Either youâre genuinely happy with recklessness (or timidity), or else you have antecedent commitments to the methodology of decision theory â such as, for example, a commitment to viewing every action you take as expressing your attitude to expected consequences.
To me, the point of the thought experiment is that roughly nobody is genuinely happy with extreme recklessness or timidity.[3] And as I laid out above, Iâd gloss âcommitment to viewing every action you take as expressing your attitude to expected consequencesâ here as âcommitment to viewing proposed solutions to decision-theory thought experiments as expressing ideas about what decisions are goodâ â which I take to be nearly a tautology.
So Iâm still having trouble imagining anyone the puzzles arenât supposed to apply to.
- ^
The only case I can make for STOCHASTIC is if you canât pre-commit to stopping at the N-th ticket, but can pre-commit to STOCHASTIC for some reason. But now weâre adding extra gerrymandered premises to the problem; it feels like weâve gone astray.
- ^
Although if you just intend for this to be solely your solution, and make no claims that itâs better for anyone else, or better in any objective sense then ⌠ok?
- ^
This is precisely why itâs a puzzleâthereâs no outcome (always refuse, always take, take N, stochastic) that I can see any consistent justification for.
Another podcast episode on a similar topic came out yesterday, from Rabbithole Investigations (hosted by former Current Affairs podcasts hosts Pete Davis, Sparky Abraham, and Dan Thorn). They had Joshua Kissel on to talk about the premises of EA and his paper âEffective Altruism and Anti-Capitalism: An Attempt at Reconciliation.â
This is the first interview (and second episode) in a new series dedicated to the question âIs EA Right?â. The premise of the show is that the hosts are interested laypeople who interview many guests with different perspectives, in the hopes of answering their question by the end of the series.
Iâm optimistic about this podcast as another productive bridge between the EA and lefty worlds; their intro episode gave me a lot of hope that theyâre approaching this with real curiosity.
(Iâm posting this more to recommend /â mention the series rather than the particular episode though; the episode itself spent most of its runtime covering intro-EA topics in what I felt was a pretty standard way, which most people here probably donât need. That said, it did a good job of what it was aiming for, and Iâm looking forward to the real heavy-hitting critiques and responses as the series continues.)
I read this piece a few months ago and then forgot what it was called (and where it had been posted). Very glad to have found it again after a few previous unsuccessful search attempts.
I think all the time about that weary, determined, unlucky early human trying to survive, and the flickering cities in the background. When I spend too long with tricky philosophy questions, impossibility theorems, and trains to crazytown, itâs helpful to have an image like this to come back to. Iâm glad that guy made it. Hopefully we will too!
An important principle of EA is trying to maximize how much good you do, when youâre trying to do good. So EAs probably wonât advise you to base most of your charitable giving on emotional connection (which is unlikely to be highly correlated with cost-effectiveness) -- instead, according to EA, you should base this on some kind of cost-effectiveness calculation.
However, many EAs do give some amount to causes they personally identify with, even if they set aside most of their donations for more cost-effective causes. (People often talk about âwarm fuzziesâ in this context, i.e. donations that give you a warm fuzzy feeling.) In that sense, some amount of emotion-based giving is completely compatible with EA.
There have been a few posts discussing the value of small donations over the past year, notably:
Benjamin Todd on âDespite billions of extra funding, small donors can still have a significant impactâ
a counterpoint, AppliedDivinityStudies on âA Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donationsâ
a counter-counterpoint, Michael Townsend on âThe value of small donations from a longtermist perspectiveâ
Thereâs a lot of discussion here (especially if you go through the comments of each piece), and so plenty of room to come to different conclusions.
Hereâs roughly where I come out of this:
Whatâs the relevant counterfactual? Many of these comment threads turn into discussions about earning-to-give vs direct work, but if you have $1000 in your hand, ready to donate, thatâs not the relevant question. Rather, you should ask, âif I donât donate this, what would I do with it instead, and how much impact would that have?â
You say âI know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they arenât funding more projects, but arenât out of dollars.â I think this frames the issue incorrectly. Itâs not that big funders know that other projects arenât cost-effective, itâs that they donât currently have enough projects that clear a certain cost-effectiveness bar. But crucially, that bar is still far above zero!
This means
there are probably many opportunities that are just as cost-effective that they havenât found (potentially you have information they donât that you could exploit; see this section of the above ADS post)
marginal donations should have a cost-effectiveness at worst just below that bar, which means youâre only doing a little worse than the big funders. (This point taken from Benjamin Todd here.)
Hank Green has done this on YouTube, and has a video discussing the economics (about $1000/âmonth! although already having an audience presumably helped).