Ben Millwood🔸

Karma: 4,682

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 20, 2024, 5:03 PM
13 points
8 ∶ 5
on: Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent
(this point is different enough I decided to make a separate comment for it)

I feel like when people talk about criticism on the Forum, they often point to how it can be very emotionally difficult for the person being criticised, and then I feel like they stop and say “this means there’s something wrong with how we do criticism, and we should change it until it’s not like this”.

I think this is overly optimistic. I find it highly implausible that there’s some way we could be, some tone we could set, that would make criticism not hurt. It hurts to be wrong, and it hurts more to hear this from other people, and it hurts more if you’re hearing it unexpectedly. These pains are dramatically worsened by hostility or insensitivity or other markers of bad criticism, but even if you do everything you’re supposed to in tone and delivery, the truth is going to hurt, and sometimes it’s going to hurt a lot.

So, even perfect criticism hurts. Moreover, it’s highly implausible that we can aspire to perfect criticism, or a particularly great approximation to it. Anywhere on the forum, people get misread, people fail to make their point clearly, people have tricky and complex ideas that take a lot of digesting to make sense. In criticism, all of that happens in an emotionally volatile environment. It takes a lot of discipline to stay friendly in that context, and I don’t think the fact that it sometimes doesn’t happen is a uniquely EA failure. No-one anywhere has criticism that stays clean and charitable all the time. If you’re thinking “how are we going to ensure that bad ideas don’t absorb attention and funding and other resources that could have gone to good ideas”, I really struggle to imagine a system that always avoids arguments and hostility, and I think the EA forum honestly does better than the peers I can think of.

We’re all here to do things we think are important and high-stakes, involving the suffering of those we care about. It’s going to be emotionally fraught. People who write critical comments should try hard to do so in a way that minimises the harm they cause. IMO there should also be more said on the Forum about how people can receive criticism in a way that minimises harm (primarily to them, but perhaps also to others). I do think that “sometimes just ignore the criticism” is good advice, actually. But I don’t think we should aspire to “people aren’t upset by what is said on the Forum”, or “posting about your project on the Forum doesn’t make you anxious”. Reduce these things as much as possible, but be realistic about how much is possible.

No desire to close down ideas for how to make things better. Please do continue to think and talk about whether criticism on the Forum could be done better. But I want better indicators of disease than “people are hurt when other people tell them they don’t like their work”.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 20, 2024, 4:08 PM
17 points
5 ∶ 5
on: Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent
I think if you experience EA primarily through the forum, you can end up feeling like “wow, EA has a lot of criticism in it, it should have more doing”. But there’s a strong selection effect: most of the doing is not on the forum, but most of the criticism is. The forum is an appropriate venue for criticism, and usually isn’t an appropriate venue for doing.

I’d probably go so far as to say that if I’m writing down a list of the key, essential purposes that the Forum serves, criticism is going to be one of them, probably like… one of the top four, alongside news, socialising, and the pretty small amount of “doing” that can be done through text conversation with other people.

From the other end, if you have a piece of criticism, and you ask “what kind of venue or environment would be ideal for this?” then I think the Forum is not only a place for criticism but usually the place for it, because of the breadth of audience and the shared infrastructure of norms, moderation, and archival / organization (e.g. tags).

So, there’s a lot of criticism here, and a lot of the best posts here are criticism. This just seems fine to me, and not an indication that something’s wrong. The EA forum is just a part of what the EA community is, and it’s naturally always going to be the most criticism-heavy part.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 20, 2024, 3:50 PM
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: vincenthuang🔸’s comment on: Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent
On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of people who are attracted by a self-skeptical attitude, having been deeply exasperated by so many alternatives that seem uninterested in the question of whether they are a complete waste of time or not.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 20, 2024, 3:35 PM
17 points
9 ∶ 3
in reply to: ethai’s comment on: Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent
obviously there’s not really any objective way to settle the matter, but I disagree that criticizers acquire more social capital than doers. When I think of the people who seem to me most prestigious in EA, it’s all people who got there by doing things, not by criticising anything.

I do agree that some people with a lot of social capital are seemingly oblivious to how that capital affects the weight of what they say, and I think it’s good to point out when this is happening, but the examples I can think of are still people who got that capital by doing things.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 17, 2024, 11:12 AM
11 points
3 ∶ 0
on: What wheels do EAs and rationalists reinvent?

concepts which become part of the community have close analogies that have been better studied in academic literature

If they got into the community from the academic literature, this isn’t reinventing the wheel, right? At worst it’s rebranding the wheel, which feels like a different thing.

For example, is conservation of expected evidence an instance of reinventing the wheel, because this particular name for it is (as far as I know) a LessWrong innovation? I’m sure they (we?) didn’t rediscover the theorem from basic principles.

I suppose you might still regard this as a point of criticism insofar as it creates jargon barriers, or insofar as you draw indirect (and IMO tenuous) inferences about a lack of collaboration with the mainstream (i.e. we can only get away with using different words because people who use the “normal” words don’t talk to us). But I wouldn’t want people drawing from this that LW is unfamiliar with mainstream probability theory.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 17, 2024, 11:06 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: What wheels do EAs and rationalists reinvent?
what wiki did you have in mind? wouldn’t it also be at risk of becoming outdated?

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 17, 2024, 10:59 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: It is time to start war gaming for AGI
I don’t know if this is what Caleb had in mind, but Intelligence Rising is in this genre I think.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 14, 2024, 7:49 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week

an important side effect of global-health funding is that it buys us a lot of goodwill and mainstream legibility

This seems like a pretty natural thing to believe, but I’m not sure I hear coverage of EA talk about the global health work a lot. Are you sure it happens?

(One interesting aspect of this is that I get the impression EA GH work is often not explicitly tied to EA, or is about supporting existing organisations that aren’t themselves explicitly EA. The charities incubated by Charity Entrepeneurship are perhaps an exception, but I’m not sure how celebrated they are, though I’m sure they deserve it.)

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 14, 2024, 7:40 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 6
on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger arguments[1] for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level.
1. Defined roughly as ‘the points I’m most likely to hear and give most weight to when discussing this with longtime EAs in person’.
I had some hope that the week would help me on this issue. Maybe the comments will, otherwise ‘see you next time’ I guess?

Sorry to distract from the object level a bit, but I had a reaction to the parts I quoted above as feeling pretty unfriendly and indirectly disparaging to the things other people have written on the forum.

I realise that you said (to paraphrase) “there are many strong arguments that were not raised”, and not “the arguments that were raised were not strong”. Maybe you meant that there had been good arguments already, but more were missing. (Maybe you meant not enough had been posted about GH at all.) But I don’t think it’s too surprising that I felt the second thing in the air, even if you didn’t say it, and I imagine that if I had written a pro-GH argument in the last week, I might feel kind of attacked.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 10, 2024, 1:26 AM
42 points
11 ∶ 3
on: Ways I see the global health → animal welfare shift backfiring
I’m surprised by how much of this post is in the future tense and framed as imagining what will happen if we do animal welfare reform. Animal welfare reform has been a part of EA for around as long as EA has existed, and there’s now more than a decade of track record to look at. So when you say things like:

Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.

Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies [...]

The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken [...] will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist. This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.

[...] there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity [...]

my response is, well, we already did all this stuff, did we see these negative side effects or not?

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 10:58 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Yeah, I didn’t intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the “intensity of experience” ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more “total experience” than wild animals.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 1:24 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I don’t think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don’t think it’s obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives—sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives—although they miss some things about the adult experience, it’s not so much to make them dramatically different).

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 1:17 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kay’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I haven’t thought too much whether all animal rights interventions also improve global health, but I think even if I believed that were true, it wouldn’t tell me whether they improved global health a comparable amount to working on global health directly, so it doesn’t feel like the right question for deciding what the highest priority project is, IMO.

(In fact I agree with your conclusion for other reasons, just wanted to flag why this argument didn’t feel convincing to me.)

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 1:09 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week

Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals,

This is surely true by number but I’m not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 1:07 AM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I wonder if we’d rather capture something like “how strongly this is true” (e.g. would $100m be much better spent on animals...) which captures both confidence and importance.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 1:04 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph_Chu’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week

Given these biases, I tend to weigh much more heavily interventions like bednets that save lives that would otherwise not be lived, over things that only improve lives like most animal welfare interventions.

Huh? Even if you weigh moments of happiness much more, that doesn’t always support maximising the number of lives. To use a somewhat farcical model that I hope is nevertheless illustrative, wouldn’t you prefer to add two moments of happiness to someone’s life than to create a new life that only experienced one moment of happiness? If so, I don’t see why you’d conclude that bednets are better than welfare reforms under these assumptions.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 12:55 AM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: CB🔸’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week

I also read sections of your link and skimmed through the rest, but I don’t see any justification that relates to the idea that helping animals is misguided.

The argument of the link is that moral progress has sometimes meant correctly regarding some previous moral concern as unnecessary or based on false belief. I think the relevance here is to resist the idea that moral concern for animals must be correct by a “more moral concern is always better” heuristic.

(I think it’s a useful argument to have in mind, but I think we have much better reasons to be morally concerned about animals.)

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 12:51 AM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: How do you deal with the “meat eater” problem

The amount of global spending on each cause is basically irrelevant if you think most of it is non-impactful.

(I realise this was posted a month ago but) this sounds to me like it overstates how bad global health aid is? I think all GiveWell top charities are existing organisations and programs that GiveWell only advocates increasing spending to, so surely effective aid existed before GiveWell did. Moreover, I have a not-particularly-concrete impression that e.g. vaccine distribution is only not an EA cause because it was already fully funded (at least in the easy cases) by non-EAs, so that our top charities are very much “top remaining” and not “best ever”.

I have the impression that even if EA and OpenPhil collectively tomorrow decided to move all of our global health funding to animals, there would still be a lot of effective global development aid—there would still be e.g. Gavi and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which sure, does ineffective things, but does effective things too) and many others. Wouldn’t that still meet the need you identified in your original answer for a compromise position?

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 12:30 AM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I think of GiveWell as being pretty skeptical of the average global health intervention. Curious if you agree, and if you have a sense of how that level of skepticism would play out on animal welfare interventions.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 9, 2024, 12:28 AM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I think “EA orthodoxy” pretty strongly supports this conclusion, so the main question is whether the orthodoxy is trustworthy on this question. One possible concern is that GiveWell’s estimates tend to follow a highly skeptical methodology, and I worry that most comparisons with GiveWell aren’t comparing apples to apples on that front. I could imagine there being orders of magnitude in this, but from skimming the other comments on the thread I would guess not enough orders of magnitude to bridge all of the gap (i.e. even a GiveWell-skeptical assessment of animal welfare interventions would still put them in the lead, though perhaps much less so). I haven’t used any quantitative methodology for this, though, so I don’t feel very comfortable with it.

I would be much more skeptical that the gap could be so large if I believed that a lot of quantitative analysis and prioritisation had gone into animal welfare already (like, why is everyone missing this?), but my impression is that really no-one is interested in doing it, so it seems plausible that a huge gap would have gone unnoticed. (This is in contrast to global health where I think it would be suspicious if GiveWell’s analysis was totally unlike any of the work done by government global aid departments, consultancies, etc. -- their work was much less unprecedented.)