Benjamin_Todd

Karma: 9,156

Benjamin_Todd Mar 28, 2023, 10:11 PM
6 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Correction to “The Value of Money Going to Different Groups”
Thank you—great to see work vetting & deepening the understanding of fundamental EA ideas like this.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 23, 2023, 11:28 AM
17 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: howdoyousay?’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
Isn’t the point of EA that we are responsive to new arguments? So, unlike Extinction Rebellion where belief that climate change is a real and imminent risk is essential, our “belief system” is rather more about openness and willingness to update in response to 1) evidence, and 2) reasonable arguments about other world views?
Yes—but the issue plays itself out one level up.
For instance, most people aren’t very scope sensitive – firstly in their intuitions, and especially when it comes to acting on them.
I think scope sensitivity is a key part of effective altruism, so appointing people who are less scope sensitive to boards of EA orgs is similar to XR appointing people who are less concerned about climate change.
Also I think a lot of the time when people say “value alignment”, they are in fact looking for signals like self-identification as EAs, or who they’re friends with or have collaborated / worked with. I also notice we conflate our aesthetic preferences for communication with good reasoning or value alignment; for example, someone who knows in-group terminology or uses non-emotive language is seen as aligned with EA values / reasoning (and by me as well often).
I agree and think this is bad. Another common problem is interpreting agreement on what causes & interventions to prioritise as ‘value alignment’, whereas what actually matters are the underlying principles.
It’s tricky because I think these things do at least correlate with with the real thing. I don’t feel like I know what to do about it. Besides trying to encourage people to think more deeply, perhaps trying one or two steps harder to work with people one or two layers out from the current community is a good way to correct for this bias.
Also to tackle your response, and maybe I’m reading between the lines too hard here / being too harsh on you here, but I feel there’s goalpost shifting in your original post about EA value alignment and you now stating that people who understand broader principles are also “value aligned”.
That’s not my intention. I think a strong degree of wanting to act on the values is important for the majority of the board. That’s not the same as self-identifying as an EA, but merely understanding the broad principles is also not sufficient.
(Though I’m happy if a minority of the board are less dedicated to acting on the values.)
(Another clarification from earlier is that it also depends on the org. If you’re doing an evidence-based global health charity, then it’s fine to fill your board with people who are really into global health. I also think it’s good to have advisors from clearly outside of the community – they just don’t have to be board members.)
Another reflection: the more we speak about “value alignment” being important, the more it incentivises people to signal “value alignment” even if they have good arguments to the contrary. If we speak about valuing different perspectives, we give permission and incentivise people to bring those.
I agree and this is unfortunate.
To be clear I think we should try to value other perspectives about the question of how to do the most good, and we should aim to cooperate with those who have different values to our own. We should also try much harder to draw on operational skills from outside the community. But the question of board choice is firstly a question of who should be given legal control of EA organisations.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 23, 2023, 11:02 AM
10 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role
A third question is:

3. What values should one morally advocate for?

The answers to this could be different yet again.
Much past longtermist advocacy arguably fits into the framework of trying to get people to increase their altruistic willingness to pay to help future generations, and I think make sense on those grounds. Though again perhaps could be clearer that the question of what governments should do all-considered given people’s current willingnesses to pay is a different question.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 23, 2023, 10:57 AM
24 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: peterhartree’s comment on: How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role
The message I take is that there’s potentially a big difference between these two questions:
1. Which government policies should one advocate for?
2. For an impartial individual, what are the best causes and interventions to work on?
Most of effective altruism, including 80,000 Hours, has focused on the second question.
This paper makes a good case for an answer to the first, but doesn’t tell us much about the second.
If you only value the lives of the present generation, it’s not-at-all obvious that marginal investment in reducing catastrophic risk beats funding GiveWell-recommended charities (or if animal lives are included, fighting factory farming). And this paper doesn’t make that case.
I think the mistake people have made is not to distinguish more clearly between these two questions, both in discussion of what’s best and in choice of strategy.
People often criticise effective altruism because they interpret the suggestions aimed at individuals as policy proposals (“but if everyone did this...”). But if community members are not clearly distinguishing the two perspectives, to some degree that’s fair – you can see from this paper why you would not want to turn over control of the government to strong longtermists. If the community is going to expand from philanthropy to policy, it needs to rethink what proposals it advocates for and how they are justified.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 22, 2023, 10:23 PM
24 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: $1.25/day—What does that mean?
It’s things like a house in a slum made from corrugated iron or mud, with no electricity and a shared latrine pit instead of plumbing, which gets periodically flooded. The rent for something like this in the US would be very cheap, but this option doesn’t exist since there’s so few people who are poor enough to pay for it (and it’s illegal too).
Likewise cheaper foods like cassava dough that you couldn’t find in stores in the US, dentistry from a random person without training, water that isn’t clean etc.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 22, 2023, 6:48 PM
19 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: howdoyousay?’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I agree that there’s a broader circle of people who get the ideas but aren’t “card carrying” community members, and having some of those on the board is good. A board definitely doesn’t need to be 100% self-identified EAs.
Another clarification is that what I care about is whether they deeply grok and are willing to act on the principles – not that they’re part of the community, or self-identify as EA. Those things are at best rough heuristics for the first thing.
This said, I think there are surprisingly few people out there like that. And due to the huge scope differences in the impact of different actions, there can be huge differences between what someone who is e.g. 60% into applying EA principles would do compared to someone who is 90% into it (using a made up scale).
I think a thing that wouldn’t make sense if for, say, Extinction Rebellion, to appoint people to their board who “aren’t so sold on climate change being the world’s biggest problem”. Due to the point above, you can end up in something that feels like this more quickly than it first seems or is intuitive.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 22, 2023, 6:33 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Grayden 🔸’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I’m definitely not saying value alignment is the only thing to consider.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 22, 2023, 6:31 PM
11 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
Sorry that’s what I meant. I was saying there are 5,000 community members. If you want the board to be controlled by people who are actually into EA, then you need ²⁄₃ to come from something like that pool. Another ¹⁄₃ could come from outside (though not without risk). I wasn’t talking about what fraction of the board should have specific expertise.

Another clarification, what I care about is whether they deeply grok and are willing to act on the principles – not that they’re part of the community, or self-identify as EA. Those things are at best rough heuristics for the first thing. I was using the number of community members as a rough indication for how many people exist who actually apply the principles – I don’t mind if they actively participate in the community or not, and think it’s good if some people don’t.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 21, 2023, 1:27 PM
64 points
23 ∶ 1
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices
I agree Will’s made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it’s the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
Maybe there’s some kind of internal conflict going on, but it seems more complicated than this makes out.
My hot take is that a bunch of the disagreement is about how much to prioritise something like the instrumental values of conventional status / broader appeal vs. proactively saying what you think even if it looks bad / being a highly able niche community.
My impression is that you’re relatively extreme in how much you rate the latter, so it makes sense to me you’d disagree with a bunch of Will’s decisions based on that.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 21, 2023, 1:06 PM
51 points
18 ∶ 9
in reply to: Jack Lewars’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
Non-profit boards have 100% legal control of the organisation– they can do anything they want with it.
If you give people who aren’t very dedicated to EA values legal control over EA organisations, they won’t be EA organisations for very long.
There are under 5,000 EA community members in the world – most of them have no management experience.
Sure, you could give up ¹⁄₃ of the control to people outside of the community, but this doesn’t solve the problem (it only reduces the need for board members by ¹⁄₃).

Benjamin_Todd Mar 21, 2023, 12:51 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
I think it’s mostly because these estimates aren’t properly adjusted for regression to the mean – there’s a ton of sources of model error, and properly factoring these in will greatly reduce the top interventions. There are also other factors like the top interventions quickly running out of capacity. I discuss this in the article. I put a lot more trust in GiveWell’s figures as an estimate of the real marginal cost-effectiveness. Though I agree there could be some interventions accessible to policy-makers that aren’t accessible to GiveWell.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 20, 2023, 4:53 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: FTX Community Response Survey Results
That’s great!

Benjamin_Todd Mar 20, 2023, 4:52 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: FTX Community Response Survey Results
Thank, that’s very helpful!
(I’m not surprised satisfaction was higher in 2022 than 2020 before FTX.)

Benjamin_Todd Mar 18, 2023, 1:08 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 1
on: FTX Community Response Survey Results
Is it possible to compare overall satisfaction to previous EA surveys? As you say, all the methods for extracting the impact of FTX from this data seem a bit suspect. Satisfaction now vs. satisfaction 1-2 years ago is simpler and arguably more decision-relevant.

Benjamin_Todd Mar 18, 2023, 1:07 PM
35 points
12 ∶ 1
on: FTX Community Response Survey Results
I’d expect this to look significantly worse if done in March rather than Dec :(
Might it be possible to re-survey a subset of people just about overall satisfaction, to see if it’s moved?
What links here?
- How has FTX’s collapse impacted EA? by AnonymousEAForumAccount (Oct 17, 2023, 5:02 PM; 248 points)

Benjamin_Todd Feb 20, 2023, 11:45 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: firinn’s comment on: Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
I agree different comparisons are relevant in different situations.
A comparison with the median is also helpful, since it e.g. tells us the gain that the people currently doing the bottom 50% of interventions could get if they switched.
Though I think the comparison to the mean is very relevant (and hasn’t had enough attention) since it’s the effectiveness of what the average person donates to, supposing we don’t know anything about them. Or alternatively it’s the effectiveness you end up with if you pick without using data.
I think you’d need to show why this mean-over-median approach is correct to apply to strategy selection but incorrect to apply to cause area selection. Couldn’t you equally argue that regression to the mean indicates we’ll make errors in thinking some cause areas are 1000x more important or neglected than others?
Yes absolutely.
I think regression to the mean is a bigger issue for cause selection than solution selection. I’ve tried to take this into account when thinking about between-cause differences, but could have underestimated it.
Basically, I think it’s easier to pick the top 1% of causes than the top 1% of solutions, and there’s probably also greater variance between causes.
(One way to get an intuition for this is that only <0.001% of world GDP goes into targeted xrisk reduction or ending factory farming, while ~10% of world GDP is spent on addressing social issues in rich countries.)

Benjamin_Todd Feb 19, 2023, 4:26 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
One small extra data point that might be useful: I made a rough estimate for smallpox eradication in the post, finding it fell in the top 0.1% of the distribution for global health, so it seemed consistent.

Benjamin_Todd Feb 18, 2023, 4:02 PM
7 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
I’d also add it would be great if there was more work to empirically analyse ex ante and ex post spread among hits based interventions with multiple outcomes. I could imagine it leading to a somewhat different picture, though I think the general thrust will still hold, and I still thinking looking at spread among measurable interventions can help to inform intuitions about the hits based case.
One example of work in this area is this piece by OP, where they say they believe they found some 100x and a few 1000x multipliers on cash transfers to US citizens by e.g. supporting advocacy into land use reform. But this involves an element of cause selection as well as solution selection, cash transfers seem likely below the mean, and this was based on BOTECs that will contain a lot of model error and so should be further regressed. Overall I’d say this is consistent with within-cause differences of ~10x from top to mean, and doesn’t support > 100x differences.

Benjamin_Todd Feb 18, 2023, 1:55 PM
21 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
Hey, thanks for the comments. Here are some points that might help us get on the same page:
1) I agree this data is missing difficult-to-measure hits based interventions, like research and advocacy, which means it’ll understate the degree of spread.
I discuss that along with other ways it could understate the differences here:
https://80000hours.org/2023/02/how-much-do-solutions-differ-in-effectiveness/#ways-the-data-could-understate-differences-between-the-best-and-typical-interventions
2) Aside: I’m not sure conjunction of multipliers is the best way to illustrate this point. Each time you add a multiplier it increases the chance it doesn’t work at all. I doubt the optimal degree of leverage in all circumstances is “the most possible”, which is why Open Philanthropy supports interventions with a range of degree of multipliers (including those without), rather than putting everything into the most multiplied thing possible (research into advocacy into research into malaria..). (Also if adding multipliers is the right way to think about it, this data still seems relevant, since it tells you the variance of what you’re multiplying in the first place.)
3) My comparison is between the ex ante returns of top solutions and the mean of the space.
Even if you can pick the top 1% of solutions with certainty, and the other 99% achieve nothing, then your selection is only ~100x the mean. And I’m skeptical we can pick the top 1% in most cause areas, so that seems like an upper bound. E.g. in most cases (esp things like advocacy) I think there’s more than a 1% chance of picking something net harmful, which would already take us out of the top 1% in expectation.
4) There are also major ways the data overstates differences in spread, like regression to the mean.
The data shows the top are ~10x the mean. If you were optimistic about getting a big multiplier on those, that maybe could get you to 1,000x. But then when we take into account regression to the mean, that can easily reduce spread another 10x, getting us back to something like 100x.
That seems plausible but pretty optimistic to me. My overall estimate for top vs. mean is ~10x, but with a range of 3-100x.
5)
>This also seems to potentially lead to biased comparisons between solution variance and cause level variance given how strongly differences in cause level variance are driven by expected value calculations (value of the future, etc.) that are far more extreme / speculative to what people comparing interventions on single interventions would have data on.
I agree estimates of cause spread should be regressed more than solution spread. I’ve tried to take this into account, but could have underestimated it.
In general I think regression to the mean is a very interesting avenue for developing a critique of core EA ideas.

Benjamin_Todd 12 Feb 2023 17:30 UTC
28 points
6 ∶ 1
on: There can be highly neglected solutions to less-neglected problems
A couple of comments that might help readers of the thread separate problems and solutions:
1) If you’re aiming to do good in the short-term, I think this framework is useful:
expected impact = problem effectiveness x solution effectiveness x personal fit
I think problem effectiveness varies more than solution effectiveness, and is also far less commonly discussed in normal doing good discourse, so it makes sense for EA to emphasise it a lot.
However, solution effectiveness also matters a lot too. It seems plausible that EAs neglect it too much.
80k covers both in the key ideas series: https://80000hours.org/articles/solutions/
If you can find a great solution to a second tier problem area, that could be more effective than working on the average solution in a top tier area.
This circumstance could arise if you’re comparing a cause with a lot of effectiveness-focused people working on it (where all the top solutions are taken already) vs. a large cause with lots of neglected pockets; or due to personal fit considerations.
Personally, I don’t think solution effectiveness varies enough to make climate change the top thing to work on for people focused on existential risk, but I’d be keen to see 1-5% focused on the highest-upside and most neglected solutions to climate change.
2) If you’re doing longer-term career planning, however, then I think thinking in terms of specific solutions is often too narrow.
A cause is broad enough that you can set out to work on one in 5, 10 or even 20 years, and usefully aim towards it. But which solutions are most effective is normally going to change too much.
For longer-term planning, 80k uses the framework: problem effectiveness x size of contribution x fit
Size of contribution includes solution effectiveness, but we don’t emphasise it – the emphasise is on finding a good role or aptitude instead.
3) Causes or problem areas can just be thought of as clusters of solutions.
Causes are just defined instrumentally, as whatever clusters of solutions are useful for the particular type of planning you’re doing (because require common knowledge and connections).
E.g. 80k chooses causes that seem useful for career planning; OP chooses causes based on what it’s useful for their grantmakers to specialise in.
You can divide up the space into however many levels you like e.g.
International development → global health → malaria → malaria nets → malaria nets in a particular village.
Normally we call the things on the left ‘problem areas’ and on the left ‘solutions’ or ‘interventions’, but you can draw the line in different places.
Narrower groups let you be more targeted, but are more fragile for longer-term planning.
4) For similar reasons, you can compare solutions with similar frameworks to cause areas, including by using INT.
I talk more about that here: https://80000hours.org/articles/solutions/