Also, on the topic of econ papers with much bigger effects than I was expecting: a very simple savings exercise gives maize farmers in Zambia ~1 month more of expenses to use during the hungry season, and this lets them then have a better harvest the next year.
Benjamin M.
Karma: 257
Eyal Frank (the guy behind the vultures paper) also has a paper finding pretty large effects from decreasing bat populations on infant mortality in the same vein- the channel here is that the bats eat insects that otherwise farmers use insecticide to treat, and the insecticide causes infant mortality (he doesn’t say how but I think it’s birth defects?). He also has one on killing sparrows leading to the Great Famine in China, but the solution to that problem is “don’t put Mao in charge of your economy” which doesn’t seem very relevant in a modern context.
I took a gander at looking into the vultures paper and my first impression is that their methodology isn’t unreasonable, but I wouldn’t expect the effects to be as big in other contexts. For one, a lot of the carrion in India apparently comes from cows, which are treated differently because of their status in Hindu religion and so are more likely to die naturally and less likely to be slaughtered. Plus, the mechanism they hypothesize is that dead animals end up in the water instead of being eaten by vultures, and so the effects would only hold up a) where water contamination is a major portion of the disease burden and b) where those animals can easily end up in the water instead of being eaten by vultures.
If people are interested, I might look into this further and write something up, but I’m not an expert on this and so far everything I saw looked like defensible choices.
If you ever want to start the EA Quaker schism or whatever, I’m down to join (and know one more person in the overlap of the two)
This is too tangential from the forecasting discussion to justify being a comment there so I’m putting it here:
Forecasting makes no sense as a cause area, because cause areas are problems, something like “people lack resources/basic healthcare/etc.”, “we might be building superintelligent AI and we have no idea what we’re doing”. Forecasting is more like a tool. People use forecasting to address AI, global poverty, and all sorts of more general problems, including ones that aren’t major EA focuses.
For instance, we could treat vaccines as a cause area. All the funding to some AI-x-biosecurity people, GAVI campaigns for existing vaccines, and people working on bird flu vaccines could be treated like they’re doing the same thing. And then we could argue about whether vaccines meet the funding bar. But that would be a pretty pointless argument, when really all those projects are trying to do different things with similar tools.
So I’d rather judge the AI forecasting by AI standards, the general-purpose forecasting by metascience standards, and the global development forecasting by global development standards, rather than trying to lump them in as a single entity. That being said, I do side with the view that there’s too much money and enthusiasm being spent on forecasting, but it’s a weakly held view, and that doesn’t mean that every forecasting project isn’t worth being funded, or even that they’re all equally inflated.
Not an expert on this/haven’t read all the prior discourse, but it seems like AIs acting like they’re humans is a major cause of “LLM psychosis” now and is implicated in a lot of future concerns about AI takeovers due to making it seem like people should trust the AIs more than they really should, plus anything about being worried about AIs turning evil due to the representation of scheming AIs in their training text (as well as concerns about handing over the future to AIs that aren’t actually moral patients). This work might make AIs act more human, or at least be useful for people who want to do that.
What mildest scenario do you consider doom?
I’m not sure if I buy 7 (10% of pop. killed, but no takeover) being doom, but I can see the case for it
This post also criticizes AI 2027 (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KgejNns3ojrvCfFbi/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models) and its critiques seem much more concerning? Including a bunch of links to papers that don’t really back up points is not great practice or anything but also we don’t have AI papers from 2027 yet, so I’d just presume that they were clumsily trying to go for something like “we’ll have a better version of this paper in 2027” from what you’ve said.
I was being purposely kind of vague, but let’s say people donating <100k a year? Whatever’s too small for the organizations that advise large donors.
Are there any organizations out there that would describe their niche as advising for small/medium-sized donors? I can’t think of any, and I’m wondering why not. I’m not exactly sure what organizations that claim to advise large donors actually do, but it seems plausible that some things are also effective for smaller donors just because there are larger numbers of those. I’m thinking of, for instance:
tax law advice for effective giving
will writing advice
compiling resources on charity evaluations
conducting charity evaluations
Yeah I forgot to mention that this seems heavily split by where I knew the people from, your anecdata seem true among younger/more educated people I know.
Among people who call themselves vegans who I’ve met irl, about a third were actually some form of reducetarian already. One ate dairy and eggs that had some form of ethical certification, one ate fish (I believe only certain wild-caught species) and honey, and another was a strict vegan for a while (I think?) but then shifted to identifying as plant-based and eating chicken. Some of them were more vegan for health reasons than for animal welfare reasons, and for some I know health concerns were why they weren’t strictly vegan. So I think that this is more a debate for highly online/enfranchised vegans, while a lot of people have already gone ahead and adopted looser standards for veganism.
I do think there’s also a significant chance of a larger bubble, to be fair, affecting the big AI companies. But my instinct is that a sudden fall in investment into small startups and many of them going bankrupt would get called a bubble in the media, and that that investment wouldn’t necessarily just go into the big companies.
What is the probability that the U.S. AI industry (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and others) is in a financial bubble — as determined by multiple reliable sources such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or The Economist — that will pop before January 1, 2031?
I’m not exactly sure about the operationalization of this question, but it seems like there’s a bubble among small AI startups at the very least. The big players might be unaffected however? My evidence for this is some mix of not seeing a revenue pathway for a lot of these companies that wouldn’t require a major pivot, few barriers to entry for larger players if their product becomes successful, and having met a few people who work in AI startups who claim to be optimistic about earnings and stuff but can’t really back that up.
I think you’re right that frugality is good, but I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that it isn’t discussed any, although it maybe could use a bit more discussion on the margin. I also think the main con is that it would alienate people who aren’t willing to be particularly frugal, but will donate some anyways. The personal finance tag has some posts you might be interested in.
This might not fit the idea of a prioritization question, but it seems like there are a lot of “sure bets” in global development, where you can feel highly confident an intervention will be useful, and not that many in AI-related causes (high chance it either ends up doing nothing or being harmful), with animal welfare somewhere in between. It would be interesting to find projects in global development that look good for risk-tolerant donors, and ones in AI (and maybe animal welfare or other “longtermist” causes) that look good for less risk-tolerant donors.
Not really a criticism of this post specifically, but I’ve seen a bunch of enthusiasm about the idea of some sort of AI safety+ group of causes and not that much recognition of the fact that AI ethicists and others not affiliated with EA have already been thinking about and prioritizing some of these issues (particularly thinking of the AI and democracy one, but I assume it applies to others). The EA emphases and perspectives within these topics have their differences, but EA didn’t invent these ideas from scratch.
For me at least, that implies an institute founded or affiliated with somebody named Petrov, not just inspired by somebody, and it would seem slightly sketchy for it not to be.
I’d be doing less good with my life if I hadn’t heard of effective altruism
The only thing I think EA has actually done counterfactually for me is encourage me to cut out eggs from my diet. I’m pretty confident that everything else I could have gotten from non-EA sources; a class my freshman year taught by somebody who afaik isn’t an EA but had independently come to agree with a lot of the principles was pretty impactful on my life since it led to me changing my major.
Edit: Oh and I’ve won small-ish amounts of money in random Metaculus contests, which I probably heard about through EA?
I wrote up something for my personal blog about my relationship with effective altruism. It’s intended for a non-EA audience—at this point my blog subscribers are mostly friends and family—so I didn’t think it was worth cross posting as I spend a lot of time trying to explain what effective altruism is exactly, but some people might still be interested. My blog mostly is about books and whatnot, not effective altruism, but if I do write some more detailed stuff on effective altruism I will try to post it to the forum also.
I like this post. I’m coming from an American perspective, where we have four branches of Quakerism and I’m in the one most similar to the British Quakers (liberal FGC), but we at least (and maybe British Quakers?) have something called worship sharing that might be a little more useful for EA stuff than true Meeting for Worship. Usually how it works is that people read some quotations or something like that and a couple of prompts, and then they do something Meeting-for-Worship-like for a bit of time (I think it shoul be ~15 minutes but some people seem to like shorter ones), and then everybody goes around in a circle sharing as they feel lead, if you have enough time people can share multiple times. Afterwards people can discuss stuff if they want but at least among Quakers I’m familiar with it operates on something kinda like Chatham House Rules, where you should keep the exact substance of people’s comments private.
On a side note, I’m a bit surprised the reception to EA among Quakers is so positive? At least in my experience in the US Quakers tend to be against the quantification/measurement side of EA, although they definitely agree among altruism. Some of that is probably just my personal experience though.