BenHoffman

Karma: 283

BenHoffman Nov 9, 2017, 12:18 AM
5 points
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on: In defence of epistemic modesty
To support a claim that this applies in “virtually all” cases, I’d want to see more engagement with pragmatic problems applying modesty, including:
- Identifying experts is far from free epistemically.
- Epistemic majoritarianism in practice assumes that no one else is an epistemic majoritarian. Your first guess should be that nearly everyone else is iff you are, in which you should expect information cascades due to the occasional overconfident person. If other people are not majoritarians because they’re too stupid to notice the considerations for it, then it seems a bit silly to defer to them. On the other hand, if they’re not majoritarians because they’re smarter than you are… well, you mention this, but this objection seems to me to be obviously fatal and the only thing left is to explain why the wisdom of the majority disagrees with the epistemically modest.
- The vast majority of information available about other people’s opinions does not differentiate clearly between their impressions and their beliefs after adjusting for their knowledge about others’ beliefs.
- People lie to maintain socially desirable opinions.
- Control over others’ opinions is a valuable social commodity, and apparent expertise gives one some control.
In particular, the last two factors (different sorts of dishonesty) are much bigger deals if most uninformed people copy the opinions of apparently informed people instead of saying “I have no idea”.

Overall, I agree that when you have a verified-independent, verified-honest opinion from a peer, one should weight it equally to one’s own, and defer to one’s verified epistemic superiors—but this has little to do with real life, in which we rarely have that opportunity!

BenHoffman May 21, 2017, 11:29 PM
4 points
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on: Expected value estimates we (cautiously) took literally—Oxford Prioritisation Project

Our prior strongly punishes MIRI. While the mean of its evidence distribution is 2,053,690,000 HEWALYs/$10,000, the posterior mean is only 180.8 HEWALYs/$10,000. If we set the prior scale parameter to larger than about 1.09, the posterior estimate for MIRI is greater than 1038 HEWALYs/$10,000, thus beating 80,000 Hours.

This suggests that it might be good in the long run to have a process that learns what prior is appropriate, e.g. by going back and seeing what prior would have best predicted previous years’ impact.

BenHoffman May 21, 2017, 11:26 PM
2 points
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on: Four quantitative models, aggregation, and final decision—Oxford Prioritisation Project

Regrettably, we were not able to choose shortlisted organisations as planned. My original intention was that we would choose organisations in a systematic, principled way, shortlisting those which had highest expected impact given our evidence by the time of the shortlist deadline. This proved too difficult, however, so we resorted to choosing the shortlist based on a mixture of our hunches about expected impact and the intellectual value of finding out more about an organisation and comparing it to the others.

[...]

Later, we realised that understanding the impact of the Good Food Institute was too difficult, so we replaced it with Animal Charity Evaluators on our shortlist. Animal Charity Evaluators finds advocates for highly effective opportunities to improve the lives of animals.

If quantitative models were used for these decisions I’d be interested in seeing them.

BenHoffman May 13, 2017, 2:22 AM
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in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: Fact checking comparison between trachoma surgeries and guide dogs
On the ableism point, my best guess is that the right response is to figure out the substance of the criticism. If we disagree, we should admit that openly, and forgo the support of people who do not in fact agree with us. If we agree, then we should account for the criticism and adjust both our beliefs and statements. Directly optimizing on avoiding adverse perceptions seems like it would lead to a distorted picture of what we are about.

BenHoffman May 13, 2017, 2:18 AM
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in reply to: PeterSinger’s comment on: Fact checking comparison between trachoma surgeries and guide dogs
If I try to steelman the argument, it comes out something like:

Some people, when they hear about the guide dog—tracheoma surgery contrast, will take the point to be that ameliorating a disability is intrinsically less valuable than preventing or curing an impairment. (In other words, that helping people live fulfilling lives while blind is necessarily a less worthy cause than “fixing” them.) Since this is not in fact the intended point, a comparison of more directly comparable interventions would be preferable, if available.

BenHoffman May 8, 2017, 6:33 PM
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in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
I imagine this has been stressful for all sides, and I do very much appreciate you continuing to engage anyway! I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the future.

BenHoffman May 8, 2017, 4:13 PM
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on: A mental health resource for EA community
Thanks for writing this! It’s really helpful to have the basics of what the medical community knows.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to help in ways that respect neurodiversity. Psychosis and mania, like other mental conditions, aren’t just the result of some exogenous force—they’re the brain doing too little or too much of some particular things it was already doing.

So someone going through a psychotic episode might at times have delusions that seem to their friends to be genuinely poetic, insightful, and important, and this impression might be right. And yet, they’re still having trouble tracking what’s real and what’s just a thought they had, worse at caring for themselves, and really need to eat and get a good night’s sleep and friends to help them remember to do this.

BenHoffman May 8, 2017, 3:59 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
Kerry,

I think that in a writeup for the two funds Nick is managing, CEA has done a fine job making it clear what’s going on. The launch post here on the Forum was also very clear.

My worry is that this isn’t at all what someone attracted by EA’s public image would be expecting, since so much of the material is about experimental validation and audit.

I think that there’s an opportunity here to figure out how to effectively pitch far-future stuff directly, instead of grafting it onto existing global-poverty messaging. There’s a potential pitch centered around: “Future people are morally relevant, neglected, and extremely numerous. Saving the world isn’t just a high-minded phrase—here are some specific ways you could steer the course of the future a lot.” A lot of Nick Bostrom’s early public writing is like this, and a lot of people were persuaded by this sort of thing to try to do something about x-risk. I think there’s a lot of potential value in figuring out how to bring more of those sorts of people together, and—when there are promising things in that domain to fund—help them coordinate to fund those things.

In the meantime, it does make sense to offer a fund oriented around the far future, since many EAs do share those preferences. I’m one of them, and think that Nick’s first grant was a promising one. It just seems off to me to aggressively market it as an obvious, natural thing for someone who’s just been through the GWWC or CEA intro material to put money into. I suspect that many of them would have valid objections that are being rhetorically steamrollered, and a strategy of explicit persuasion has a better chance of actually encountering those objections, and maybe learning from them.

I recognize that I’m recommending a substantial strategy change, and it would be entirely appropriate for CEA to take a while to think about it.

BenHoffman May 8, 2017, 3:45 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Remmelt’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending

I don’t see why Holden also couldn’t have a supportive role where his feedback and different perspectives can help Open AI correct for aspects they’ve overlooked.

I agree this can be the case, and that in the optimistic scenario this is a large part of OpenAI’s motivation.

BenHoffman May 8, 2017, 3:41 PM
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in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
Thanks! On a first read, this seems pretty clear and much more like the sort of thing I’d hope to see in introductory material.

BenHoffman May 6, 2017, 8:28 PM
2 points
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in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending

There was a recent post by 80,000 hours (which annoyingly I now can’t find) describing how their founders’ approaches to doing good have evolved and updated over the years. Is that something you’d like to see more of?

Yes! More clear descriptions of how people have changed their mind would be great. I think it’s especially important to be able to identify which things we’d hoped would go well but didn’t pan out—and then go back and make sure we’re not still implicitly pitching that hope.

BenHoffman May 5, 2017, 8:45 PM
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Where should anti-paternalists donate?

But there are also factors pushing the other way—e.g. biases about spending on personal health, positive externalities etc—that counterbalance a presumption against paternalism.

It’s not obvious to me that the “near” bias about one’s own health is generically worse than our “far” bias about what to do about the health of people far away. For instance, we might have a bias towards action that’s not shared by, e.g., the children who feel sick after their worm chemo, or getting bit by mosquitos through their supposedly mosquito-proof bednets. (I’m not sure how bad either of these problems are relative to the benefits, and that’s the problem—we really don’t know. I’ll note that Living Goods does sell some deworming pills, so at least some people in poor countries think it’s in their interest to take them.)

It’s also not obvious that positive externalities are generically more likely with paternalistic interventions. For instance, in a recent Reddit AMA, GiveDirectly basic income recipients reported that there was much less social conflict in their community once people started receiving basic income—they started imposing fewer costs on each other once they were more secure in meeting their basic needs.

It does seem to me like each of these considerations—if it points in the right direction for any given comparison—could contribute to overcoming the paternalism objection.

BenHoffman May 5, 2017, 8:33 PM
1 point
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Where should anti-paternalists donate?
It sounds like we might be coming close to agreement. The main thing I think is important here, is taking seriously the notion that paternalism is evidence about the other things we care about, and thus an important instrumental proxy goal, not just something we have intrinsic preferences about. More generally the thing I’m pushing back against is treating every moral consideration as though it were purely an intrinsic value to be weighed against other intrinsic values.

I see people with a broadly utilitarian outlook doing this a lot, perhaps because people from other moral perspectives don’t have a lot of practice grounding their moral intuitions in a way that is persuasive to utilitarians. Autonomy in particular is something where we need to distinguish purely intrinsic considerations (e.g. factory farmed animals are unhappy because they have little physical autonomy) from instrumental pragmatic considerations (e.g. interventions that give poor people more autonomy preserve information by letting them use local knowledge that we do not have, while paternalistic interventions overwrite local information).

Thus, we should think about requiring higher impact for paternalism interventions as building in a margin for error, not just outweighing the anti-paternalism intuition. If a paternalistic intervention has strong evidence of a large benefit, it makes sense to describe it as overcoming the paternalism objection, but not rebutting it—we should still be skeptical relative to a nonpaternalistic intervention with the same evidence, it’s just that sometimes we should intervene anyway.

BenHoffman May 5, 2017, 3:42 PM
1 point
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Where should anti-paternalists donate?
You’re assuming the premise here a bit—that the data collected don’t leave out important negative outcomes. In the particular cases you mentioned (tobacco taxes, mandatory seatbelt legislation, smallpox eradication, ORT, micronutrient foritification) my sense is that in most cases the benefits have been very strong, strong enough to outweigh a skeptical prior on paternalist interventions. But that doesn’t show that we shouldn’t have the skeptical prior in the first place. Seeing Like A State shows some failures, we should think of those too.

BenHoffman May 5, 2017, 9:08 AM
5 points
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on: Where should anti-paternalists donate?
Consider paternalism as a proxy for model error rather than an intrinsic dispreference. We should wonder whether maybe the things we do to people are more likely to cause hidden harm or lack supposed benefits, than things they do for examples.

Deworming is an especially stark example. The mass drug administration program is to go to schools and force all the children, whether sick or healthy, to swallow giant poisonous pills that give them bellyaches, because we hope killing the worms in this way buys big life outcome improvements. GiveWell estimates the effect at about 1.5% of what studies say, but EV is still high. This could involve a lot of unnecessary harm too via unnecessary treatments.

By contrast, the less paternalistic Living Goods (a recent GiveWell “standout charity”) sells deworming pills (at or near cost) so we should expect better targeting to kids sick with worms, and repeat business is more likely if the pills seem helpful.

I wrote a bit about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-not-no-brainer/

BenHoffman May 1, 2017, 11:56 PM
6 points
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in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
EffectiveAltruism.org’s Introduction to Effective Altruism allocates most of its words to what’s effectively an explanation of global poverty EA. A focus on empirical validation, explicit measurement and quantification, and power inequality between the developed and developing world. The Playpump example figures prominently. This would make no sense if I were trying to persuade someone to support animal charity EA or x-risk EA.

Other EA focus areas that imply very different methods are mentioned, but not in a way that makes it clear how EAs ended up there.

If you click “Donate Effectively,” you end up on the EA Funds site, which presents the four Fund categories as generic products you might want to allocate a portfolio between. Two of the four products are in effect just letting Nick Beckstead do what he thinks is sensible with the money, which as I’ve said above is a good idea but a very large leap from the anti-Playpump pitch. “Trust friendly, sensible-seeming agents and empower them to do what they think is sensible” is a very, very different method than “check everything because it’s easy to spend money on nice-sounding things of no value.”

The GWWC site and Facebook page have a similar dynamic. I mentioned in this post that the page What We Can Achieve mainly references global poverty (though I’ve been advised that this is an old page pending an update). The GWWC Facebook page seems like it’s mostly global poverty stuff, and some promotion of other CEA brands.

It’s very plausible to me that in-person EA groups often don’t have this problem because individuals don’t feel a moral obligation to give the most generically effective pitch for EA, but instead just talk about what they personally care about and find interesting.

BenHoffman May 1, 2017, 1:11 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Paul_Christiano’s comment on: Physical punishment of children: the neglected $3.6 trillion/year? problem
SlateStarScratchpad claims (with more engagement here) that the literature mainly shows that parents who like hitting their kids or beat them severely do poorly, and that if you control for things like heredity or harsh beatings it’s not obvious that mild corporal punishment is more harmful than other common punishments.

My best guess is that children are very commonly abused (and not just by parents—also by schools), but I don’t think the line between physical and nonphysical punishments is all that helpful for understanding the true extent of this.

BenHoffman Apr 28, 2017, 8:22 PM
2 points
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in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
I think 2016 EAG was more balanced. But I don’t think the problem in 2015 was apparent lack of balance per se. It might have been difficult for the EAG organizers to sincerely match the conference programming to promotional EA messaging, since their true preferences were consistent with the extent to which things like AI risk were centered.

The problem is that to the extent to which EA works to maintain a smooth, homogeneous, uncontroversial, technocratic public image, it doesn’t match the heterogeneous emphases, methods, and preferences of actual core EAs and EA organizations. This is necessarily going to require some amount of insincerity or disconnect between initial marketing and reality, and represents a substantial cost to that marketing strategy.

BenHoffman Apr 28, 2017, 2:48 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
The featured event was the AI risk thing. My recollection is that there was nothing else scheduled at that time so everyone could go to it. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t lots of other content (there was), nor do I think centering AI risk was necessarily a bad thing, but I stand by my description.

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 6:01 AM
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in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
I also originally saw the reply attributed to a different comment on Mobile.