Looking to advance businesses with charities in the vast majority shareholder position. Check out my TEDx talk for why I believe Profit for Good businesses could be a profound force for good in the world.
Brad Westđ¸
Of course, one subset of Christians or other religious believers believe that the subjects of their religious beliefs follow from (or at least accord with) their rationality. This would contrast with the position that you seem to be indicating, which I believe is called fideism, which would hold that some religious beliefs cannot be reached by rational thinking. I would be interested in seeing what portion of EAs hold their religious beliefs explicitly in violation of what they believe to be rational, but I suspect that it would be few.
In any case, I believe truthseeking is generally a good way to live for even religious people who hold certain beliefs in spite of what they take to be good reason. Ostensibly, they would simply not apply it to one set of their beliefs.
Thank you for this insightful post. While I resonate with the emphasis on the necessity of truthseeking, itâs important to also highlight the positive aspects that often get overshadowed. Truthseeking is not only about exposing flaws and maintaining a critical perspective; itâs also about fostering open-mindedness, generating new ideas, and empirically testing disagreements. These elements require significantly more effort and resources compared to criticism, which often leads to an oversupply of the latter and can stifle innovation if not balanced with constructive efforts.
Generating new ideas and empirically testing them involves substantial effort and investment, including developing hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing results. Despite these challenges, this expansive aspect of truthseeking is crucial for progress and understanding. Encouraging open-mindedness and fostering a culture of curiosity and innovation are essential. This aligns with your point about the importance of embracing unconventional, âweirdâ ideas, which often lie outside the consensus and require a willingness to explore and challenge the status quo.
Your post reflects a general EA attitude that emphasizes the negative aspects of epistemic virtue while often ignoring the positive. A holistic approach that includes both the critical and constructive dimensions of truthseeking can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of reality and drive meaningful progress. Balancing criticism with creativity and empirical testing, especially for unconventional ideas, can create a more dynamic and effective truthseeking community.
It may have not been totally clear from the post, which I will edit in a minute, but the intended reading order would be
âWhat is Profit for Goodâ, which is included in this post
InÂtroÂducÂing the Profit for Good Blog: TransÂformÂing BusiÂness for Charity
Yield and Spread is a Profit for Good business that provides financial advice, particularly to help further effective giving. All the profit the business generates goes to effective charities. Thought it would make sense to give them a shout out here.
This article made me wonder if we are undervaluing food labeling. Currently, if I understand correctly, there are many food labels, many of which donât correspond to meaningful animal welfare differences. Educating the public about labels that correspond to meaningful differences in treatment may be a promising path.
https://ââphys.org/âânews/ââ2024-05-reveals-consumers-animal-welfare-environmental.amp
Fair enough.
I still suspect that you may be underestimating marginal AI Safety funding opportunities.
This strikes me as remarkably counterintuitive, given the enormous disparity between funding between AI capabilities spending and AI safety spending. I was also under the impression that AI capabilities were not as funding-constrained.
To be clear, I am in favor of promoting offsetting in both contexts, although the benefits of veganism in avoiding contributing to factory farming demand, increasing demand for pro-social vegan products, and sending an important moral signal make it difficult to calculate an appropriate sum. Further, I think a deontological or virtue ethics concern with killing or eating the flesh of sentient beings also naturally arises.
In the case here though, your choices cash out in terms of your effect on X and S risks re AGI. I think an appropriate offset for the funding effect is able to reverse or more than reverse your effect without moral complication.
I honestly donât have much experience other than using GPT4, which I have found to be very helpful.
For me, ChatGPT greatly increases the productivity of myself and my team, whereas the very modest effect of a small amount of money from my subscription I find very unlikely to be seriously furthering the acceleration of AI.
I suspect that the productivity of EAs generally is very valuable and if EAs benefit from the tool it is likely not a good idea for them to stop using it.
Given that there is so much less money going to AI safety than AI capabilities, I would think that a more sensible request would be that those using ChatGPT and thus funding OpenAI fund promising AI safety efforts⌠this would likely more than offset the harm caused by your funding and enable you to keep using a valuable tool. And if the benefits for you are not worth the cost of the subscription + the offset, then perhaps the benefit is not, in that case worth the harm. I would suggest that people who know more about this stuff than me recommend an AI safety fund for offsetting ChatGPT use.
Vin, you incorporate helping save lives and better the world into so much of what you do. It is truly a privilege to work with someone so determined to do good.
Iâd also like to thank you for your courage in sharing your struggles with anxiety and depression. Youâve been there for me when Iâve struggled with depression and frustration. When Iâve had very bad days, talking to you in DMs on Slack was immensely helpful.
You exemplify heroism perhaps more than anyone else I know. Looking forward to seeing you kick ass next month on your bike!
A Linkpost to VinÂcent van der Holstâs TEDx Talk- How Profit for Good BusiÂnesses Can TransÂform PhilanÂthropy and Save Lives â
I agree. I do not view the wealthy in general as an âenemy.â
I agree that the accumulation of wealth often corresponds with the production of social value. It is interesting that you bring up the issue of rent-seeking as a problem but not that a lot of ârent-seekingâ is perfectly legal and is often a component of accumulation of wealth even where part of it would be attributable to socially valuable production.
For instance, I am an attorney who (among other matters) litigates personal injuries and workerâs compensation claims. There is a component of general social value that is produced through my activity: aiding in the resolution of disputes and serving as a helpful piece of a functioning legal system. However, there is also a ârent-seekingâ component of my job, I am looking to transfer wealth or prevent the transferring of wealth from an opponent to my client. The degree of my compensation, or the ability of me to accumulate wealth, corresponds more strongly to my rent-seeking ability than that of my ability to generate general social value (because I am paid by my clients on the basis of being able to resolve disputes on more favorable terms for them, not by the judicial system generally). Thus, in relation to my social value created, I (or rather, the firm that I work for) is likely overcompensated. The same is true in many other extremely lucrative industries, such as finance.
One quibble with the mode of analysis for taxation. The way to evaluate the impact, positive or negative, of government spending, would be the effect of the spending vs the average counterfactual effect of retention. Thus, for impact analysis, we would not be comparing the utility generated from government spending to the cost-effectiveness of a marginal dollar to a Givewell-endorse charity, but rather the utility generated by the counterfactual retention of the funds by the taxpayer base. In any case, that bar is much easier for government spending to clear.
I could imagine a few things:
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Pledging may have some combination the effect of (a) actually increasing peopleâs lifetime donations to effective charities and (b) causing people to advertise giving they already were going to do. To the extent that a pledge is b rather than a, getting someone to pledge the same amount as you is not double your impact.
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Many of the people who you cause to become pledgers might have become pledgers later, thus you probably just accelerated their pledge, greatly decreasing your actual impact vs if you cause someone to pledge (and this pledge causes them to donate more rather than encompasses donation that would otherwise happen).
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Thereâs a possibility that you could anchor someone to donate less. Potentially someone could see your celebrated 10% pledge and view that as adequate, lowering their donations. Here, there is a risk of harm from the pledge.
All that said, I still think the pledge is an awesome way to promote and normalize effective giving.
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It is really great to know that the pledge allows pledgers to use their judgment as to what organizations qualify as highly-effective organizations. In light of this, I may make a 20% pledge.
We all pay for the governmentâs ability to protect the wealthy by yielding to the government its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In a âstate of natureâ most of those with the skills or luck to accumulate wealth would either enjoy it fleetingly or pay significantly higher costs for its retention than taxes under governments. If a system of law and order enables the lucky to be so much better off regarding their wealth, it strikes me as quite fair that the unlucky should share in the benefits of society as well.
I understand we may not be as far apart on policy, but this is why I bristle at the ânecessary evilâ framing of taxation.
One of the things that moved me away from the libertarian view of all distribution as violence is the notion of government in any form as protecting the wealthy against existences in which there would be much more violence and in which they could not be secure in their wealth and comfort. Essentially, no matter how self-made, oneâs wealth is almost always enabled by a functioning form of government. It seems reasonable for those whom government enables to be very wealthy and comfortable to require some contribution so that others might have minimal comfort or opportunities.
It looks like you are looking for advice on how to fundraise, particularly in a way that contributes to creating a norm or culture of giving.
Substantively, as a step one, trying to convince someone to donate all of their income above a certain threshold is likely to be met with a degree of defensiveness, internally, if not externally. If someone is not already considering such a step, it is probably very difficult to persuade the person to make that step. If you are a part of a community of relatively wealthy people, being a part of it and forming friendships with people might be a place to start. You can make it clear that giving effectively is part of your identity without explicitly trying to pitch them on effective giving, which may influence people. You could introduce people to Giving What We Can, and let them know the pledge that you have taken. However, being influential of other people in this way is likely very hard and would involve skills that are likely very difficult to learn.
On a meta-level, you might want to include in the title of your post the kind of help that you are looking for. âEA, I love youâ tells people who might want to help you virtually nothing about the kind of help you are looking for.
Good luck persuading/âinfluencing people to use the power they can to significantly better the world.