Hi, I’m Ben! I’m a Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy, though all views I express here are my own.
Before OP I was an independent researcher in global health and biosecurity, and a Charity Entrepreneurship incubatee. I have an MD and undergrad degrees in philosophy, international relations, and neuroscience, all from the University of Sydney.
Just want to say I appreciate your commentary over the past 9 months. Having someone with legal expertise and (what seems to me) a pretty even-handed and sensible perspective is a really valuable contribution.
I weakly agree with the claim that the offense/defense balance is not a useful way to project the implications of AI. However, I disagree strongly with how the post got there. Considering only cyber-security and per-capita death rate is not a sufficient basis for the claim that there is “little historical evidence for large changes in the O/D balance, even in response to technological revolutions.”
There are good examples where technology greatly shifts the nature of war: castles favouring defense, before becoming negated by cannons. The machine gun and barbed wire are typically held as technologies that gave a significant defensive advantage in WWI, and were crucial in the development of trench warfare. Tanks similarly for offense. And so on. One would need to consider and reject these examples (which is certainly plausible, but needs to be actually engaged with).
I don’t think the per capita mortality from war is a very useful measure of the O/D balance—it will be driven by many other confounding factors, and as you point out technologies alter the decision calculus of both sides of a conflict. Part of the problem with the O/D theory is a lack of well-defined measures (e.g.). From my impression of the literature, it also appears to fail in empirical predictions (e.g.). Cyber-security is a good example of an arena where O/D theory applies poorly (e.g.). I think this section does well to support the claim that “shifting O/D balance doesn’t dominantly affect the frequency and intensity of war”, but it doesn’t show that “technologies don’t shift the O/D balance”.
So I disagree with the post by thinking that technologies can systematically favour aggressive vs. defensive actions and actors, but agree that this pattern doesn’t necessarily result in strong implications about the rate or intensity of large-scale conflict. However, I think there can still be implications for non-state violence, especially when the technology enables an ‘asymmetric weapon’ - a cheap way to inflict very costly damages or demand costly defence. The prototypical example here being terrorist use of improvised explosives. This is an important channel for worries about future bioweapons.
I think a common maladaptive pattern is to assume that the rationality community and/or EA is unusually good at “increasing our rationality, comprehending big problems”, and I really, really, really doubt that “the most “epistemically rigorous” people are writing blog posts”.
I thought this was a very useful review and would strongly encourage others to read it, if they’ve engaged with the previous posts on this subject. I wouldn’t have seen it without your post, so thanks! I think publishing on the forum in full (or relevant sections) would be great—though I’ll leave it to the author/others to decide.
Below are the vote scores of the October ‘Genetic Enhancement’ post from internet archive snapshots. The post saw an early negative reaction, then a robustly positive one over the following week (+38 change, at minimum). It remained positive for 4 months. On March 13, David Thorstad tweeted about it, which was correlated with a significant decline. The voting pattern does not suggest the EA community quickly and thoroughly rejected the post.
Oct 28 = +4
Oct 30 = −5
Oct 30 = −14
Nov 5 = +23
Nov 5 = +24
Nov 6 = +24
Nov 6 = +24
March 13 = +18
March 29 = −16
March 29 = −20
April 4 = −13
April 5 = −15
April 10 = −15
Promote stimulant use can be fine in some cases—eg “have you considered getting an ADHD diagnosis, maybe try mine for a day and see how you feel”
I think this is a bad idea. Suggesting someone ‘get a diagnosis’ is a terrible approach to health and medical advice. Giving someone your own prescribed medication is also a bad idea, and is exactly the kind of norm-crossing ickiness that should be reduced/eliminated. The version I would endorse is:
“Have you considered whether you might have ADHD? It might be a good idea to talk to a doctor about these issues you’re having, as medication can be helpful here.”
Thanks for a really valuable post—there are some great ideas and it’s well written. That said, I don’t know why “I expect this will end up being part 1 of , where this year.”
is phrased like that, instead of something like:
”I will probably write several posts with more ideas later this year.”
I think this is a case of unnecessary jargon—notable mainly because the rest of the post is a model of clarity.
Personally, this solidifies my negative update over the past 6 months on the judgment and trustworthiness of the bulk of senior EAs. I mean trustworthiness on the basis of competence, not motive.
Thanks for this post! When I learned last year that GiveDirectly was including U.S. recipients I admit my naive reaction was disappointment. It’s great to hear it has worked out so well, and also a useful example where I failed to appreciate the complexity of a situation.
I agree with Luke that, for me at least, becoming veg*n has not detracted from my health or how I spend my time at all.
In addition to the deontological argument, you could also consider a virtue ethics approach—thinking about the overall life pattern rather than discrete decisions. You care a lot about the suffering of animals. The virtue approach might ask:
“How should someone who cares a lot about the suffering of animals live their daily life?”
I find encouragement in the feeling that I am living more in harmony with my ethical beliefs, and that feeling goes beyond the results of the ethical calculus behind each discrete decision.
Good points. The 38+ point uptick suggests a decent sized group of accounts that were pretty coordinated. Assuming they’re legit accounts that worries me about whatever this subgroup is. (Edit: actually, it looks like the post was on October 28 - so it was only 2 days old before it saw the uptick at some later point. It still seems likely that users would have to look for it to find it, but I’m less confident of that now)
This was enlightening and convincing. Plus a great read!
Holy moly thank you! I’m very honoured, especially given there were so many interesting and brilliant submissions. Congratulations to all the other winners!
I think you raise important questions on a complex topic. Regarding the dearth of the literal phrase ‘social justice’, I think this is probably an effect of two things:
1) an actual de-emphasis on the concept, either intentionally or by a larger relative focus on other ethical frameworks. My unfounded guess would be that there’d be a minority of people who would want to whole-heartedly reject social justice-related talk, a larger group who are open to it but consider it not as important as other ethical concepts to EA, and a minority of people who think it should be the dominant ethical concept.
and
2) an avoidance of the literal term ‘social justice’ because of its connotations in the ‘culture wars’, politics, etc. I think a lot of EA thought deals with the substance of social justice—examples might be the neartermist focus on low and middle-income countries, work on U.S. criminal justice reform, the international justice angle on climate change, or even the intergenerational justice angle on longtermism. This work is grappling with justice-related issues implicitly, but isn’t usually conceptualised or written out in terms of social justice. Whether it can or should be or not I don’t know.
How do you expect incubating for-profit orgs to differ from AIM’s experience incubating charities, and what do you plan to do to execute well despite these differences?
I think this outline needs major revisions to be improved.
It’s like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. It’s impossible for every single person in the community to believe that the community is not X enough
The above is the clearest example of why I think this post’s argument fails. It is definitely possible for all members to believe something about the community is inadequate. For example, say a sports team is bad at defence. And, every member of the team could believe that they need to improve their defence. The fact that all members believe it does not disprove the empirical fact that the team’s defence is inadequate.
Where this impossibility claim might have legs is where the group belief is about group belief itself. For example, it may be impossible for every member of the team to believe that every member of the team does not think about defence enough. But the examples you talked about are not like this—they concern actual action, not group belief.
You are conflating noticing/talking/writing about an action with the action itself. This is especially apparent for issues that are larger than individual action. For the example of systemic change: every member could believe sincerely that the community as a whole should ‘do more work on systemic change’, but reasonably continue their normal, everyday, non-systemic work. In that case, everyone agrees that more systemic change work is needed, but no systemic change work actually gets done.
I think this is fairly common in EA counter-criticism, where people point to an old blog post about issue X, proving that EAs are already aware about X, and so, they argue, the criticism fails. While relevant, awareness of X pales in comparison to actually dealing with X itself.
This argument is further weakened by the fact that few critical stances are endorsed by near-100% of the community. There are significant counter-parties to most interesting critical claims. So making a critical claim is usually not in the situation of ‘everyone already agrees with this’.
Finally, there’s the common sense rebuttal that if a criticism is being made by many, that should (all else equal) increase your credence that the criticism is true. Contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake is useful for checks and balances, but as a personal strategy is antithetical to epistemic modesty.
What proportion of the incidents described was the team unaware of?