Arepo

Karma: 4,305

Arepo 18 Sep 2014 7:41 UTC
12 points
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on: Introduce Yourself
Hi all, I wasn’t sure whether to use my real name here, but paranoia and probably having a bigger online presence with this one anyway won over. Anyway, I’m Sasha Cooper, currently self-studying programming after recently having completed a UK bootcamp, looking for an E2G coding role.

I’m an unrepentant scalar totalising hedonistic utilitarian, formerly an admin on Felicifia. Focus-wise, I lean towards movement building at the moment, then developing-world health. I’m an AI-risk and cause-prioritisation sceptic, though I take the possibility that either could be the best approach seriously.

Arepo 23 Oct 2014 7:53 UTC
6 points
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on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?
I don’t feel strongly about this, but moderately support a switch—it won’t affect my decision to pledge, which I’ll do so either way as soon as I can support myself while donating.

Community-wise, I support global poverty above other causes intellectually, but empathise more with transhumany types, so maybe I don’t have a horse in the race. I do feel as though GWWC is and should remain an important haven for those committed to poverty, who—in other EA orgs—often seem to be looked on as incomplete or fledgling EAs, an attitude which surely wouldn’t help if it developed within GWWC as well.(1)

If the pledge changes, I strongly support suggest emphasising the GWWC mission statement about being committed to fixing global poverty(1) as its first priority.

This is perhaps the most demanding pledge in the EA world, so it would make sense to allow EAs of all stripes to commit themselves to it, as long as the pledge stands apart from GWWC main.

On to pedantry—I feel like if you’re going to change the pledge at all, it would be a good time to sharpen the wording rather than just delete the word ‘developing’ throughout. It feels somewhat bloated, though I’m unsure about exactly how to change it. Some suggestions:
- I think ’10%′ would look much better than ‘ten percent’ - you could more easily pick it out when scanning the paragraph for a sense of what the org is about.
- ‘whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others’ feels wordier than it needs to be, but I can’t quite see how to trim it without losing anything significant.
- The first two clauses seem to overlap, and could probably be combined.
- ‘now and in the years to come’ could be shortened to ‘hereafter’ (or perhaps something less bureaucratic), but it’s also ambiguous and perhaps superfluous. If it refers to the pledging duration, it’s redundant given the ‘rest of my life … retirement’ line. If it refers to ‘orgs that … improve others’ then I’m not sure it adds anything anyway. Do we suppose that people would give to orgs expecting them to use the money as well as possible for 10 years then blow it on a party?
(1) That said, I feel like animal welfarists get even shorter shrift, with only one comparatively small organisation serving them and being the butt of similar attitudes. I wonder separately if there’s something to be gained by expanding GWWC’s broad remit to explicitly include them, even if in practice you leave all the research to ACE.

Arepo 23 Oct 2014 11:43 UTC
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?
‘Henceforth’ is another possibility. Swaps bureaucratic for pompous, maybe.

Arepo 23 Oct 2014 11:46 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vincent_deB’s comment on: Should Giving What We Can change its Pledge?

Very much agreed, that’s why I was concerned to see this comment.

FWIW, if that’s the Joey I think it is, I don’t think he meant to imply he agreed (IIRC he regards animal welfare causes most highly).

There are also quite a few CEA staff who do support the more traditional stuff, last I heard, though they’re probably a minority (but among the minority, unsurprisingly concentrated in GWWC).

Arepo 12 Jan 2015 18:16 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Increasing existential hope as an effective cause?
‘Existential opportunity’?

Arepo 12 Jan 2015 18:42 UTC
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Increasing existential hope as an effective cause?
Everything I can think of sounds mercantile: ‘Existential profit’ ‘Existential gain’

Arepo 31 Jan 2015 18:12 UTC
0 points
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on: Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism

Another reason is that consequentialism may be false. The importance of this possibility depends upon the probability we assign to it, but it must carry some weight unless it can be rejected absolutely, which is only plausible on the most extreme forms of moral subjectivism.

I don’t think this is true. It’s perfectly possible to find some views (eq ‘the set of all nonconsequentialist moral views’) incoherent enough as to be impossible to consider (or at least, no more so than the negation of various axioms of applied maths and logic would be), but some others to be conceivable.

I basically adhere to that (in fact thinking it of the albeit poorly defined set of ‘non utilitarian moral views’); I don’t know (or much care) if people would describe me as a moral realist, but I doubt anyone would accuse me of being an extreme moral subjectivist!

Btw, I’m glad to see this post, and sad that it hasn’t been upvoted more. I have nothing against the more emotion-oriented content that seems to dominate the top-voted page on this forum, but it’s of little interest to me. I hope we begin to see more posts examining the logic and science behind EA.

Arepo 31 Jan 2015 18:22 UTC
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in reply to: Tom_Ash’s comment on: Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism

These two factors may partly explain why EAs are disproportionately consequentialist, but I’m not convinced they’re the main explanation. I don’t know what that explanation is...

I would guess the simpler option that (virtually all actually supported) forms of consequentialism imply EA, whereas other moral theories, if they imply anything relevant at all, tend to imply it’s optional.

One exception to consequentialisms implying EA, for e.g. is Randian Objectivism. And I doubt it’s a coincidence that the EA movement contains a very small number of (I know of 0) Randian Objectivists ;)

Arepo 19 Jul 2015 21:46 UTC
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in reply to: Denkenberger’s comment on: The Bittersweetness of Replaceability
+1

The idea that we could become saturated with money seems bizarre. It’s not like Givewell’s top charities have run out of RfMF, and even if they do, and all the top organisations are genuinely more talent- than money-constrained, it doesn’t follow that there’s a better option than putting money towards them.

You could potentially fund scholarships for people learning the skills they need—not that I would expect this to be a top-tier use of the money, but it seems likely to be as good or better use of your resources than either a) applying or studying for a highly ‘talent-constrained’ job which, if it’s that hard, there’s little reason to expect yourself to be be competent for, or b) sitting around and waiting for someone to show up.

Arepo 6 Feb 2016 13:45 UTC
0 points
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on: Being a tobacco CEO is not quite as bad as it might seem
Slight quibble:

This introduces another factor we need to control for. Yes, if you really are better than the alternative CEO you might sell more cigarettes, and yes the board clearly thought you were the best choice for CEO—but what if they’re wrong? We need to adjust by the probability that you are indeed the best choice for CEO, conditional on the board thinking you were.

This seems like a pretty hard probability to estimate. My guess is it is quite low—I would expect many potential applicants, and a relatively poor ability to discriminate between them—but in lieu of actual analysis lets just say 50%.

You seem to shift here between p(Best among applicants) and p(Better than the guy who would have been hired in lieu of you). Guesstimating 50% for the former sounds reasonable-ish to me, but I would guess it’s substantially higher for the latter.

Maybe this comes out in the wash, since the difference between you and your actual replacement is smaller in expectation than the difference between you and the best among all the applicants.

Arepo 21 Feb 2016 10:59 UTC
2 points
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on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?

Julian Simon, the incorrigible optimist, won the bet—with all five becoming cheaper in inflation adjusted terms.′

I hope he paid Stanislav Petrov off for that.

Less glibly, I lean towards agreeing with the argument, but very weakly—it seems far too superficial to justify turning people away from working on the subject if that’s where their skills and interests lie.

In particular in seems unclear that economic-philosophical research into GCR and X-risk has a greater chance of actually lowering such outcomes than scientific and technological research into technologies that will reliably do so once/if they’re available.

Yes, people can switch from one resource to another as each runs low, but it would be very surprising if in almost all cases the switch wasn’t to a higher-hanging fruit. People naturally tend to grab the most accessible/valuable resources first.

Perhaps the global economy is advancing fast enough or faster than enough to keep pace with the increasing difficulty of switching resource-bases, but that feels like a potential house of cards—if something badly damages the global economy (say, a resource irreplaceably running out, or a project to replace one unexpectedly failing), the gulf between several other depleting resources and their possible replacements could effectively widen. The possible cascade from this is a GCR in itself, and one that numerous people seem to consider a serious one. I feel like we’d be foolish to dismiss the large number of scientifically literate doomsayers based on non-expert speculation.

Arepo 22 Feb 2016 17:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
(reposted from slightly divergent Facebook discussion)

I sometimes wonder if the ‘neglectedness criterion’ isn’t overstated in current EA thought. Is there any solid evidence that it makes marginal contributions to a cause massively worse?

Marginal impact is a product of a number of factors of which the (log of the?) number of people working on it is one, but the bigger the area the thinner that number will be stretched in any subfield—and resource depletion is an enormous category, so it seems unlikely that the number of people working on any specific area of it will exceed the number of people working on core EA issues by more than a couple of orders of magnitude. Even if that equated to a marginal effectiveness multiplier of 0.01 (which seems far too pessimistic to me), we’re used to seeing such multipliers become virtually irrelevant when comparing between causes. I doubt if many X-riskers would feel deterred if you told them their chances of reducing X-risk was comparably nerfed.

Michael Wiebe commented on my first reply:

No altruism needed here; profit-seeking firms will solve this problem.

That seems like begging the question. So long as the gap between a depleting resource and its replacement is sufficiently small, they probably will do so, but if for some reason it widens sufficiently, profit-seeking firms will have little incentive or even ability to bridge it.

I’m thinking of the current example of in vitro meat as a possible analogue—once the technology for that’s cracked, the companies that produce it will be able to make a killing undercutting naturally grown meat. But even now, with prototypes appearing, it seems too distant to entice more than a couple of companies to actively pursue it. Five years ago, virtually none were—all the research on it was being done by a small number of academics. And that is a relatively tractable technology that we’ve (I think) always had a pretty clear road map to developing.

Arepo 22 Feb 2016 18:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
But the question I am concerned with is whether it’s the most valuable problem to work on. The considerations above, and current prices for such goods make me think the answer is no.

Sure. I mean, we basically agree, except that I feel much lower confidence (and anxiety at the confidence with which non-specialists make these pronunciations). Going into research in general is something that I’ve mostly felt more pessimistic about as an EA approach than 80K are, but if someone already partway down the path to a career based on resource depletion showed promise and passion in it, I’d think it plausible it was optimal for them to continue.

Certainly there are many natural scientists who have that attitude. I used to place more stock in their pronouncements. However, three things reduced my trust:
- Noticing that market prices—a collective judgement of millions of informed people in these industries—seemed to contradict their concerns. Of course anyone could be wrong, but I place more weight on market prices than individual natural scientists who lack a lot of relevant knowledge.
I would probably trust the market over a single scientist, but I would trust the collective judgement of a field of scientists over the market. I don’t see what mechanism is supposed to make the market a reliable predictor of anything if not a reflection of the scientific understanding of the field with individual randomness mostly drowned out.
- Many of these natural scientists show an astonishing lack of understanding of economics when they comment on these things. This made me think that while they may be good at identifying potential problems, they cannot be trusted to judge our processes for solving them, because academic specialisation means they are barely even aware of them.
I’ve seen the same, but my own sense is that the reverse problem—economists having an astonishing lack of understanding of science—is much more acute. Also, I find scientists more scrupulous about the limits of their predictive ability. To give specific examples two of which are by figures close to the EA movement, Stephen Landsburg informing Stephen Hawking that his understanding of physics is ’90% of the way there’, Robin Hanson arguing without a number in sight that ‘Most farm animals prefer living to dying; they do not want to commit suicide’ and therefore that vegetarianism is harmful, and Bjorn Lomborg’s head-on collision with apparently the entire field of climate science in The Skeptical Environmentalist.
- Looking into specific cases and trends (e.g. food yields or predictions of peak oil) and coming away unconvinced the data supports pessimism.
I can’t opine on this, except that I still feel greater epistemic humility is worthwhile. If your conclusions are right, it seems worth trying to get them published in a prominent scientific journal (or if not by you then by an academic who shares your views—and perhaps hasn’t already alienated the journal in question) - even if you don’t manage, one would hope you’d get decent feedback on what they perceived as the flaws in your argument.

It’s true that the fruit we will switch to are higher now. But technological progress is constantly lowering the metaphorical tree. In some cases the fruit will be higher at the future time, in other cases it will be lower. My claim is that I don’t see a reason for it to be higher overall, in expectation.

Perhaps, but I don’t feel like you’ve acknowledged the problem that technological progress relies on technological progress, such that this could turn out to be a house of cards. As such, it needn’t necessarily be resource depletion that brings it crashing down—any GCR could have the same effect. So work on resource depletion provides some insurance against such a multiply-catastrophic scenario.

Arepo 3 Apr 2016 0:00 UTC
0 points
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on: If tech progress might be bad, what should we tell people about it?
If it’s not a force for good, and if you believe investment banking and similar roles damage the economy, that makes earning to give via them look more attractive.

Arepo 28 Oct 2017 9:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA
Please let’s not give people any more incentives to game the karma system than they already have.

Against neglectedness

Arepo1 Nov 2017 23:09 UTC

14 points

18 comments12 min readEA link

Arepo 3 Nov 2017 16:54 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: Against neglectedness

then surely lots of the problems actually go away? (i.e. thinking about diminishing marginal returns is important and valid, but that’s also consistent with the elasticity view of neglectedness, isn’t it?)

Can you expand on this? I only know of elasticity from reading around it after’s Rob’s in response to the first draft of this essay, so if there’s some significance to it that isn’t captured in the equations given, I maybe don’t know it. If it’s just a case of relabelling, I don’t see how it would solve the problems with the equations, though—unused variables and divisions by zero seem fundamentally problematic.

But because lots of other people work on climate change, if you hadn’t done your awesome high-impact neglected climate change thing, someone else probably would have since there are so many people working in something adjacent (bad)

But [

this only holds to the extent that the field is proportionally less neglected—a priori you’re less replaceable in an area that’s ¹⁄₃ filled than one which is half filled, even if the former has a far higher absolute number of people working in it.

]

which is just point 6 from the ‘Diminishing returns due to problem prioritisation’ section applied. I think all the preceding points from the section could apply as well—eg the more rational people tend to work on (eg) AI-related fields, the better comparative chance you have of finding something importantly neglected within climate change (5), your awesome high-impact neglected climate change thing might turn out to be something which actually increases the value of subsequent work in the field (4), and so on.

To be clear, I do think neglectedness will roughly track the value of entering a field, ceteris literally being paribus. I just think it’s one of a huge number of variables that do so, and a comparatively low-weighted one. As such, I can’t see a good reason for EAs having chosen to focus on it over several others, let alone over trusting the estimates from even a shallow dive into what options there are for contributing to an area.

Arepo 6 Nov 2017 19:36 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Against neglectedness

To be clear, I do think neglectedness will roughly track the value of entering a field, ceteris literally being paribus.

On reflection I don’t think I believe this. The same assumption of rationality that says that people will tend to pick the best problems in a cause area to work on suggests that (a priori) they would tend to pick the best cause area to work on, in which case more people working on a field would indicate that it was more worth working on.

Arepo 6 Nov 2017 20:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Caspar Oesterheld’s comment on: Against neglectedness
Just read this. Nice point about future people.

It sounds like we agree on most of this, though perhaps with differing emphasis—yy feeling is that neglectedness such a weak heuristic that we should abandon it completely, and at the very least avoid making it a core part of the idea of effective altruism. Are there cases where you would still advocate using it?

Arepo 6 Nov 2017 20:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Against neglectedness
Ta Holly—done.