BenHoffman

Karma: 283

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 1:24 AM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds

I would guess that $300k simply isn’t worth Elie’s time to distribute in small grants, given the enormous funds available via GoodVentures and even GiveWell direct and directed donations.

This is consistent with the optionality story in the beta launch post:

If the EA Funds raises little money, they can spend little additional time allocating the EA Funds’ money but still utilize their deep subject-matter expertise in making the allocation. This reduces the chance that the EA Funds causes fund managers to use their time ineffectively and it means that the lower bound of the quality of the donations is likely to be high enough to justify donations even without knowing the eventual size of the fund.

However, I do think this suggests that—to the extent to which GiveWell is already a known and trusted institution—for global poverty in particular it’s more important to get the fund manager with the most unique relevant expertise than a fund manager with the most expertise.

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 1:21 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds
On the other hand, it does seem worthwhile to funnel money through different intermediaries sometimes if only to independently confirm that the obvious things are obvious, and we probably don’t want to advocate contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. If Elie had given the money elsewhere, that would have been strong evidence that the other thing was valuable and underfunded relative to GW top charities (and also worrying evidence about GiveWell’s ability to implement its founders’ values). Since he didn’t, that’s at least weak evidence that AMF is the best global poverty funding opportunity we know about.

Overall I think it’s good that Elie didn’t feel the need to justify his participation by doing a bunch of makework. This is still evidence that channeling this through Elie probably gives a false impression of additional optimizing power, but I think that should have been our strong prior anyhow.

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 1:13 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds
Or to simply say “for global poverty, we can’t do better than GiveWell so we recommend you just give them the money”.

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 1:09 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Fluttershy’s comment on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds

I also dislike that you emphasize that some people “expressed confusion at your endorsement of EA Funds”. Some people may have felt that way, but your choice of wording both downplays the seriousness of some people’s disagreements with EA Funds, while also implying that critics are in need of figuring something out that others have already settled (which itself socially implies they’re less competent than others who aren’t confused).

I definitely perceived the sort of strong exclusive endorsement and pushing EA Funds got as a direct contradiction of what I’d been told earlier, privately and publicly—that this was an MVP experiment to gauge interest and feasibility, to be reevaluated after three months. If I’m confused, I’m confused about how this wasn’t just a lie. My initial response was “HOW IS THIS OK???” (verbatim quote). I’m willing to be persuaded, of course. But, barring an actual resolution of the issue, simply describing this as confusion is a pretty substantial understatement.

ETA: I’m happy with the update to the OP and don’t think I have any unresolved complaint on this particular wording issue.
What links here?
- Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount (Sep 1, 2022, 2:42 PM; 298 points)

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 12:58 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Introducing the EA Funds
Tell me about Nick’s track record? I like Nick and I approve of his granting so far but “strong track record” isn’t at all how I’d describe the case for giving him unrestricted funds to grant; it seems entirely speculative based on shared values and judgment. If Nick has a verified track record of grants turning out well, I’d love to see it, and it should probably be in the promotional material for EA Funds.

BenHoffman Apr 27, 2017, 12:54 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds

Will’s post introducing the EA funds is the 4th most upvoted post of all time on this forum.

Generally I upvote a post because I am glad that the post has been posted in this venue, not because I am happy about the facts being reported. Your comment has reminded me to upvote Will’s post, because I’m glad he posted it (and likewise Tara’s) - thanks!

BenHoffman Apr 25, 2017, 4:55 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
Yep! I think it’s fine for them to exist in principle, but the aggressive marketing of them is problematic. I’ve seen attempts to correct specific problems that are pointed out e.g. exaggerated claims, but there are so many things pointing in the same direction that it really seems like a mindset problem.

I tried to write more directly about the mindset problem here:

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/13w/matchingdonation_fundraisers_can_be_harmfully/

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-responsibility/

BenHoffman Apr 24, 2017, 2:29 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
If someone thinks concentrated decisionmaking is better, they should be overtly making the case for concentrated decisionmaking. When I talk with EA leaders about this they generally do not try to sell me on concentrated decisionmaking, they just note that everyone seems eager to trust them so they may as well try to put that resource to good use. Often they say they’d be happy if alternatives emerged.

BenHoffman Apr 24, 2017, 2:26 PM
22 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
It also seems to me that the time to complain about this sort of process is while the results are still plausibly good. If we wait for things to be clearly bad, it’ll be too late to recover the relevant social trust. This way involves some amount of complaining about bad governance used to good ends, but the better the ends, the more compatible they should be with good governance.

BenHoffman Apr 24, 2017, 2:23 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
I think sufficient evidence hasn’t been presented, in large part because the argument has been tacit rather than overt.

BenHoffman Apr 24, 2017, 4:06 AM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael_PJ’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
On (1) I agree that GiveWell’s done a huge public service by making many parts of decisionmaking process public, letting us track down what their sources are, etc. But making it really easy for an outsider to audit GiveWell’s work, while an admirable behavior, does not imply that GiveWell has done a satisfactory audit of its own work. It seems to me like a lot of people are inferring the latter from the former, and I hope by now it’s clear what reasons there are to be skeptical of this.

On (3), here’s why I’m worried about increasing overt reliance on the argument from “believe me”:

The difference between making a direct argument for X, and arguing for “trust me” and then doing X, is that in the direct case, you’re making it easy for people to evaluate your assumptions about X and disagree with you on the object level. In the “trust me” case, you’re making it about who you are rather than what is to be done. I can seriously consider someone’s arguments without trusting them so much that I’d like to give them my money with no strings attached.

“Most effective way to donate” is vanishingly unlikely to be generically true for all donors, and the aggressive pitching of these funds turns the supposed test of whether there’s underlying demand for EA Funds into a test of whether people believe CEA’s assurances that EA Funds is the right way to give.

BenHoffman Apr 17, 2017, 7:36 PM
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
The nature of the correction, I think, is that I underestimated how much individual caution there was in coming up with the original numbers. I was suggesting some amount of individual motivated cognition in generating the stitched-together dataset in the first place, and that’s what I think I was wrong about.

I still think that:

(1) The stitching-together represents a big problem and not a minor one. This is because it’s basically impossible to “sanity check” charts like this without introducing some selection bias. Each step away from the original source compounds this problem. Hugging the source data as tightly as you can and keeping track of the methodology is really the only way to fight this. Otherwise, even if there is no individual intent to mislead, we end up passing information through a long series of biased filters, and thus mainly flattering our preconceptions.

I can see the appeal of introducing individual human gatekeepers into the picture, but that comes with a pretty bad bottlenecking problem, and substitutes the bias of a single individual for the bias of the system. Having experts is great, but the point of sharing a chart is to give other people access to the underlyling information in away that’s intuitive to interpret. Robin Hanson’s post on academic vs amateur methods puts the case for this pretty clearly:

A key tradeoff in our methods is between ease and directness on the one hand, and robustness and rigor on the other. [...] When you need to make an immediate decision fast, direct easy methods look great. But when many varied people want to share an analysis process over a longer time period, more robust rigorous methods start to look better. Easy direct easy methods tend to be more uncertain and context dependent, and so don’t aggregate as well. Distant others find it harder to understand your claims and reasoning, and to judge their reliability. So distant others tend more to redo such analysis themselves rather than building on your analysis. [...]

You might think their added freedom would result in amateurs contributing proportionally more to intellectual progress, but in fact they contribute less. Yes, amateurs can and do make more initial progress when new topics arise suddenly far from topics where established expert institutions have specialized. But then over time amateurs blow their lead by focusing less and relying on easier more direct methods. They rely more on informal conversation as analysis method, they prefer personal connections over open competitions in choosing people, and they rely more on a perceived consensus among a smaller group of fellow enthusiasts. As a result, their contributions just don’t appeal as widely or as long.

GiveWell is a great example of an organization that keeps track of sources so that people who are interested can figure out how they got their numbers.

(2) It’s weird and a little sketchy that there’s not a discontinuity around 80%. This could easily be attributable to Milanovic rather than CEA, but I still think it’s a problem that that wasn’t caught, or—if there turns out to be a good explanation—documented.

(3) It’s entirely appropriate to hold CEA’s CEO (the one who used this chart at the start of the controversy you’re responding to by adding helpful information) to be held to a much higher standard than some amateur or part-time EA advocate who got excited about the implications of the chart. For this reason, while I think you’re right that it’s hard to avoid amateurs introducing large errors and substantial bias by oversimplifying things, that doesn’t seem all that relevant to the case that started this.

BenHoffman Apr 12, 2017, 4:44 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
I’m glad I was mistaken about at least part of this—if the stitching-together was originally meant to avoid overstating what percentile someone was in, and originally intended for point estimates rather than to illustrate a trend, then that seems pretty reasonable.

In that context (which I didn’t have, and I hope it’s clear to you how without that context I’d have drawn the opposite conclusion), using the existing stitched-together data to make a chart seems like a neutral error, the sort of thing someone does because that’s the dataset they happen to have lying around. (Unless, of course, someone would have been more likely to notice and flag a chart with a suppressed trend than a chart with an exaggerated one. That sort of bias is very hard to overcome.)

This is why things like keeping track of sources are so important, though. Without that, a decision intended to make a tool more conservative ended up being used in a graph where it could be expected to exaggerate a trend, and no one seems to have noticed until you went digging (for which, again, thank you). I’m glad you intend to do better with your version.

BenHoffman Apr 11, 2017, 6:00 PM
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
On reflection, it’s not clear to me that anyone has the appropriate level of urgency around this. Two distinct datasets were stitched together at the 80th percentile. The dataset used for the above-80 figures was chosen specifically because it had higher numbers. This chart was then used specifically to illustrate how unequally the quantity was distributed.

This is not a problem on the level of “someone could potentially be misled”. This is a problem on the level of “this chart was cooked up specifically to favor the intended conclusion.” When you’re picking and choosing sources for part of a trend, it stops mattering that the chart was originally based on real data.

It’s entirely possible for someone to make this sort of error thoughtlessly rather than maliciously, but now that the error has been discovered, the honest thing to do is promptly and prominently retract the chart, with an explanation.

It’s also possible I’m somehow misunderstanding. For instance, I’m confused about why there isn’t at least a small discontinuity around the 80th percentile—substantially differing methodologies shouldn’t get the exact same numbers.

BenHoffman Apr 8, 2017, 10:10 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
I’m looking forward to it whenever it’s ready.

As an aside, one advantage to Tufte-style information-dense charts is that they can be interesting enough to engage readers with more of the details of the content, and not just say “yeah, OK” to your main point. For instance, the first graph in your post rewards additional attention. When readers engage with the details, they may learn more valuable things from the data than the ones you’d had in mind.

BenHoffman Apr 8, 2017, 9:21 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?
Thanks for writing this! This is a helpful overview of some of the challenges in coming up with a single quantitative view.

Overall, I think this suggests two things about how to display and interpret the relevant data.

First, when using purely quantitative estimates of distributions in currency terms to illustrate an overall trend, use a variety of different consistent estimates. It seems like when the whole thing you’re trying to estimate is income inequality, stitching together different sources for the portions below and above the 80th percentile is very likely to introduce problems. For instance, if your above-80% source is better at detecting income, or otherwise biased upwards relative to your below-80% source, then this will substantially overestimate income inequality.

I would have liked to instead see the whole curve drawn from PovCalNet numbers, with the trendline from Milanovic overlaid on it. Or, ideally, as many different estimated lines as you can measure on the same axis. It’s fine to merely footnote or link to explanations for exactly why the lines differ, how they were generated, and your thoughts on which ones are better estimates for which quantiles, but when you use a single graph, people are likely to assume that it’s an authoritative illustration of a single data source, whereas showing multiple estimates makes it clearer that there is uncertainty about the details, but not about the fact that the distribution is very unequal.

If you’re worried that this would lead to a too-noisy graph, I highly recommend Edward Tufte’s books for advice on how to visually display a large amount of quantitative information elegantly.

Second, we shouldn’t use these numbers directly to make judgments about specific programs to help poor people. Instead, when trying to evaluate any particular decision, we should make sure we understand how a difference in dollar figures relates to a difference in material conditions, since this will not be perfectly consistent.

For instance, if you use “purchasing power parity” figures, you may get a better estimate of how big differences in material circumstances are, but at the cost of obscuring things like what percentage of someone’s income a cash transfer of a certain size will constitute. For this reason, the work charities like GiveDirectly and JPAL are doing directly reporting on what happens as a result of various interventions is extremely important.

BenHoffman Apr 5, 2017, 6:29 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
On what basis was this expertise assessed?

BenHoffman Apr 2, 2017, 7:46 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: Intuition Jousting: What It Is And Why It Should Stop

if the person is coming up with a novel Y, or even one that hasn’t been made salient to the person in this context, it actually seems really useful

For a related example, see Carl’s comment on why presentism doesn’t have the implications some people claim it does.

BenHoffman Apr 2, 2017, 7:39 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Intuition Jousting: What It Is And Why It Should Stop
Why does this confusion persist among long-time EA thought leaders after many years of hashing out the relevant very simple principles? “Beings currently alive” is a judgment about which changes are good in principle, “benefits the next 50 years” is an entirely different pragmatic scope limitation, and people keep bringing up the first in defense of things that can only really be justified by the second.

I understand how someone could be initially confused about this—I was too, initially. But, it seems like the right thing to do once corrected is to actually update your model of the world so you don’t generate the error again. Presentism without negative utilitarianism suggests that we should focus on some combination of curing aging, real wealth creation sufficient to extend this benefit to as many currently alive people as we can, and preventing deaths before we manage to extend this benefit, including due to GCRs likely to happen during the lives of currently living beings.

As it is, we’re not making intellectual progress, since the same errors keep popping up, and we’re not generating actions based on the principles we’re talking about, since people keep bringing up principles that don’t actually recommend the relevant actions. What are we doing, then, when we talk about moral principles?

BenHoffman Feb 17, 2017, 6:53 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Daniel May: “Open Science: little room for more funding”
Thanks for doing this!

I don’t follow the argument that only one funder implies little RFMF:

I agree with gwern that it is concerning that the small number of Open Science orgs are mostly all funded by LJAF, despite the general awareness of the problems. For our purposes, this probably means that OS has little RFMF right now, because the opportunities are already filled by LJAF.

Could you say more about this?

I think Catherio’s response to Gwern on that LessWrong thread is also worth reading. The gist is that the replication effort was already underway but unfunded when Arnold decided to fund it. So if you’re looking for things to help with funding, you might want to ask around about other attempts within a high-value profession to coordinate around better standards.