I think I agree with the comments on this post that job postings on the EA forum are not ideal, since if all the different orgs did it they would significantly clutter the forum.
The existing “Effective Altruism Job Postings” Facebook group and possibly the 80k job board should fulfill this purpose.
Thanks for your reply—I’m extremely confused if you think there is no ’intelligible sense in which 5 minor headaches spread among 5 people can involve more pain than 1 major headache had by one person” since (as has been discussed in these comments) if you view/define total pain as being measured by intensity-weighted number of experiences this gives a clear metric that matches consequentialist usage.
I had assumed you were arguing at the ‘which is morally important’ level, which I think might well come down to intuitions.
I hope you manage to work it out with kblog!
(Posted as top-level comment as I has some general things to say, was originally a response here)
I just wanted to say I thought this comment did a good job explaining the basis behind your moral intuitions, which I had not really felt a strong motivation for before now. I still don’t find it particularly compelling myself, but I can understand why others could find it important.
Overall I find this post confusing though, since the framing seems to be ‘Effective Altruism is making an intellectual mistake’ whereas you just actually seem to have a different set of moral intuitions from those involved in EA, which are largely incompatible with effective altruism as it currently practiced. Whilst you could describe moral differences as intellectual mistakes, this does not seem to be a standard or especially helpful usage.
The comments etc. then just seem to have mostly been people explaining why they don’t find your moral intuition that ‘non-purely experientially determined’ and ‘purely experientially determined’ amounts of pain cannot be compared compelling. Since we seem to have reached a point where there seems to be a fundamental disagreement about considered moral values, it does not seem that attempting to change each others minds is very fruitful.
I think I would have found this post more conceptually clear if it had been structured:
EA conclusions actually require an additional moral assumption/axiom—and so if you don’t agree with this assumption then you should not obviously follow EA advice.
(Optionally) Why you find the moral assumption unconvincing/unlikely
(Extra Optionally) Tentative suggestions for what should be done in the absence of the assumption.
Where throughout the assumption is the commensuratabilitly of ‘non-purely experientially determined’ and ‘purely experientially determined’ experience.
In general I am not very sure what you had in mind as the ideal outcome of this post. I’m surprised if you thought most EAs agreed with you on your moral intuition, since so much of EA is predicated on its converse (as is much of established consequential thinking etc.). But equally I am not sure what value we can especially bring to you if you feel very sure in your conviction that the assumption does not hold.
I just wanted to say I thought this comment did a good job explaining the basis behind your moral intuitions, which I had not really felt a strong motivation for before now. I still don’t find it particularly compelling myself, but I can understand why others could find it important.
Overall I find this post confusing though, since the framing seems to be “Effective Altruism is making an intellectual mistake” whereas you just actually seem to have a different set of moral intuitions from those involved in EA, which are largely incompatible with effective altruism as it currently practiced. Whilst you could describe moral differences as intellectual mistakes, this does not seem to be a standard or especially helpful usage.
The comments etc. then just seem to have mostly been people explaining why they don’t find your moral intuition that ‘non-purely experientially determined’ and ‘purely experientially determined’ amounts of pain cannot be compared compelling. Since we seem to have reached a point where there seems to be a fundamental disagreement about considered moral values, it does not seem that attempting to change each others minds is very fruitful.
I think I would have found this post more conceptually clear if it had been structured:
EA conclusions actually require an additional moral assumption/axiom—and so if you don’t agree with this assumption then you should not obviously follow EA advice.
(Optionally) Why you find the moral assumption unconvincing/unlikely
(Extra Optionally) Tentative suggestions for what should be done in the absence of the assumption.
Where throughout the assumption is the commensuratabilitly of ‘non-purely experientially determined’ and ‘purely experientially determined’ experience.
In general I am not very sure what you had in mind as the ideal outcome of this post. I’m surprised if you thought most EAs agreed with you on your moral intuition, since so much of EA is predicated on its converse (as is much of established consequential thinking etc.). But equally I am not sure what value we can especially bring to you if you feel very sure in your conviction that the assumption does not hold.
(Note I also made this as a top level comment so it would be less buried, so it might make more sense to respond (if you would like to) there)
We may just be seeing upvote inflation if the EA forum now has more readers than before
Thanks for the writeup, I was not aware of the Effect Foundation before now.
After reading the above I am still not sure exactly what kind of outreach you perform. Could you give me a quick rundown of how you think you influenced the donations, and what you plan to continue doing going forwards?
Thanks for writing this—it fits well with my experience of how a lot of people get increasingly involved with EA, bouncing between disparate programs by different orgs. This does unfortunately make evaluating impact much harder, but I think it is important to bear in mind when when designing resources for EA outreach or similar projects.
Thanks for the post, as a minor nitpick, shouldn’t the maximal DALY cost of doing something for an hour a day be 1⁄16, since there are only 16 waking hours in a day and presumably the period whilst asleep does not contribute?
Ah good point on the researcher salary, it was definitely just eyeballed and should be higher.
I think a reason I was happy to leave it low was as a fudge to take into account that the marginal impact of a researcher now is likely to be far greater than the average impact if there were 10,000 working on x-risk, but I should have clarified that as a separate factor.
In any case, even adjusting the cost of a researcher up to $500,000 a year and leaving the rest unchanged does not significantly change the conclusion, with the very rough calculation still giving ~$10 per QALY (but obviously leaves less wiggle room for skepticism about the efficacy of research etc.)
This still does not obviously ring true to me as an advantage over one long article vs a series covering the same content. Still, it is written up now, and I think you will have your hands full replying to the other comments, so I am happy to let it be :)
I am very confused by this reading, it was not what I got from the comment at all.
The ‘Strike a balance between dismissing accusations and witch-hunting people’ is about how to act given that accusations have some small (but non-negligible) chance of being false. If we instead learned that the true rate differed strongly from this, it seems reasonable that the advice would also change. (E.g. if it turned out that there were never any false accusations, we could act much more strongly on the basis of accusations).
I also think generally if a piece of writing states a fact you think is false, it is reasonable and should be encouraged to bring it up in the comments, even if it is not central to the argument’s conclusion.
I am not sure I understand your reasoning for having this as one long post instead of (say) a series of three posts, still covering all the content. This would still allow people to be linked back to it as a foundational resource (either by linking to the most relevant post for them, or just to the start of the series, telling them to read them all).
Glad to hear about the formatting :)
The post explicitly talks about false rape accusations, so his second point does not seem irrelevant to me? (Although it is clearly irrelevant to the 6% figure).
Thanks for writing this, I had not seen any public posts on this topic before, and the loss of productivity considerations etc. are novel arguments to me.
I have no object level comments, but a few meta level ones:
As Denise mentioned, this post is very long, and I think would probably benefit from being split into multiple shorter posts.
In particular the two strands of ‘preventing sexual violence within EA’ and ‘preventing sexual violence in the rest of the world’ seem suitably different in both arguments for their importance and calls to action that clearly splitting them into two posts might add clarity. (Although they clearly share some backbone in the discussion of the effects and severity of sexual violence).
I found the post structure not especially clear, and on multiple occasions was somewhat confused about what exactly was being discussed (an example of which is the “Observations about sexual violence in the EA network” section). I also found the formatting a bit confusing and this made reading somewhat more challenging.
I find writing lengthy posts like this very challenging, and I am not trying to claim any objective problems, just that I often found it difficult to keep track. (Note, since I read the post a table of contents has been added, which should help).
Whilst you were very careful to try and discuss the uncertainty when numbers were first introduced, I think you occasionally later used them in more ‘soundbite’ form without sufficient qualifiers (or at least less than I would feel comfortable with). (Examples are the ‘Inside EA: A 1:6 ratio means 7 rapes per 6 women on average.’ section and the “rough estimate of 103 − 607 male rapists in EA” quote, when these depend strongly on assumptions about the relationships of demographics and criminality etc.).
This may just be a matter of taste, as as I said you do already go to lengths to discuss the uncertainty, and I seem to to favour much more discussion/labeling of uncertainty than average.
I think 2&3 might somewhat explain why you seem to have felt that other commenters had not read the post.
Thanks for writing this up! Having resources like this explaining ideas seems pretty uncontroversially good.
I have organized retreat/conferency things before and would probably be up for organizing something like this if there was interest. I can contact some people and see if they think it would be worthwhile, I am not sure what I expect attendance to be like though (would 20 people be optimistic?)
I cannot see the inconsistency there either, the whole section seems a bit strange as his “no death” example starts also containing death again about half way through.
(Note your first line seems to be missing some *’s)
(Distinct comment on survivorship bias as it seems like a pretty separate topic)
I currently think good knowledge about what drives people away from EA would be valuable, although obviously fairly hard to collect, and can’t remember ever seeing a particularly large collection of reasons given.
I am unsure as to how much we should try and respond to some kinds of complaints though, for things such as people being driven away by weirdness for instance, it is not clear to me that there is much we can do to make EA more inclusive to them without losing a lot of the value of EA (pursuing arguments even if they lead to strange conclusions etc.)
In particular do you know of anyone who left because they only cared about e.g. global poverty and did not want to engage with the far future stuff, who you think would have stayed if EA had been presented to them as including far future stuff from the start? It seems like it might just bring the point when they are put off earlier.
Ah that looks great thanks, I had not heard about that before!