I currently lead EA funds.
Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s.
You can give me positive and negative feedback here.
Thank you so much for giving really actionable feedback. I’ll add those notes but just address them here too
Percentage of the consumption decrease due to decreased smoking > prevalence” (cell A9) and “Percentage of lives saved due to quitting” (A14). Not sure exactly what those are referring to at the moment.
Percentage consumption decrease … is referring to the fact that some people will reduce their intensity and some people will quit (which we call a reduction in smoking). In our model quitters will experience improved health outcomes and people that reduce won’t (this is partly us trying to be conservative as we struggled to find good studies looking at the link between reduced intensity and health outcomes).
Percentage of lives saved … is because not all quitters will have improved health outcomes. Some will only quit after the damage has been done and there will be marginal differences to their exposure to risk. In the model this just discounts the effect of quitting.
I’ll have a think about how to go about coming up with more pessimistic guesses for costs/attribution etc. In any case, the feedback is useful. Our model admittedly just goes for a low number guided a by the opinion of some experts in the tobacco control space that we spoke to. Maybe in future we should look at surveying experts a wider variety of experts or using some kind of prediction market as this is a pretty key part of the model.
I think this post already has a link to that excellent post in the disclaimer in the third section.
Given this bias, this convenient convergence may not be as strong as my intuition tells me.
Thanks for writing this, it was really enjoyable to read and I don’t see very many short posts like this on the forum.
I agree with most of the points made in this article and I have come across people who have recently come across EA who have had similar reactions to the first paragraph.
I do think that there is a set of people for which the ‘vast differences in the goodness of different choices’ insight (which can lead to this problem of not feeling like you are doing the maximally good thing) is still very valuable. I don’t think this post argues against this but there is probably a trade-off between stressing this point and not making people bad that the thing they are doing may not be maximally good.
I haven’t read the original paper but I like this post and thought that your video was excellent. I thought it struck a good balance between being nuanced/informative and being engaging/sharable and I’d love to see more material like this from the community.
I’m not massively familiar with neoliberalism or your project but I’m struggling to understand where the specific recommendations/positions come from. To what degree are they derived from a set of clear principles or a philosophy as opposed to being the concensus of leaders in the inside of the movement or some other method?
I feel like EAs are generally strongly ‘bought in’ on there being a moral obligation to help other people if you can do so easily and it’s important to use evidence and reason when working out how to do good but beyond that I see most EA cause areas more like things that some EAs are interested in, I don’t think most EAs are strongly compelled by all mainstream cause areas. Would you say that neoliberals are generally strongly bought in at the policy level (e.g. we believe in a carbon tax) or a more fundamental level and do you think that you need to support all of those policies outlined in the first what we believe link to be a neoliberal?
I think it would be great if people who downvoted this post could explain why.
I didn’t vote but I suspect this was downvoted as it is not obvious how this relates to effective altruism. It might be better as part of your short-form or if you could explain the link at the start of the post.
Maybe they think that both movements are large enough such that they both ‘top out’ I.e. both movements have some people in the top 0.1% of students or the top 10 EA students are about as good as the top 10 libertarian students.
I’d still expect a larger movement to have more of the top 0.1% people, I’m not exactly sure what Bryan was describing here but if he expects that students are roughly normally distributed with regards to goodness it seems like a reasonably hypothesis to me.
By topping out I just meant that Bryan’s impression of students I saturated at an upper bounded for the best libertarian and EA students they met. This could be either be because the students that they met actually did have a very high and similar performance, or because their model/test for assessing how good people are had the best students scoring very highly (so their test was not well calibrated to show differences in top students).
I think this was probably a bit of an off hand remark, and Stefan is right in it being very weak evidence of the performance of top libertarian/EA students.
I personally agree with all of your comment and agree that the underlying distribution seems unlikely to be normal.
I think it is better to think of Karma as tracking the number of people that read and liked a post, rather than the value of a post relative to other posts.
i.e. people are generally thinking how much do I like the post rather than given the current karma, what change should I make to push it to the correct value.
Thanks for directing fellows towards the service!
We think that there is quite a lot of information to value to running this programme so the breakeven point is likely quite low in terms of justifying costs. That said I do hope that we get a lot of people using the service!
I am hopeful that it will cultivate curiosity/investigating confusion, and help address the deferral problem.
I think that it will be harder to know whether we achieve ‘cultivating curiosity’ than ‘helping people navigate EAs knowledge space’ but I am probably more excited about making progress on the former.
My take is that these projects are not super information hazardy and what could be useful is for a subset of these projects (super PPE/sterilization?/countermeasures?) is a bunch of smart, entrepreneurial people who are reasonably aligned who can spend a few months bashing out ideas in a lab/office space somewhere.
I think that iGem is pretty entrepreneurial, it tends to attract a bunch of smart, motivated people who are psyched about working on synthetic biology (at least in my limited experience). Competitors tend to design projects around tracks and I could imagine $100k could buy influence to set up a track or (launch some other programme) to get ~400 working on these problems for 3 months (6000 competitors/(13 tracks + ‘our preventing pandemics’ track)). This works out at ~$250 per 3 person-months work which seems pretty reasonable. I could imagine it being an order of magnitude worse but it still seems like a good bet.
I’d expect for something like 80 projects to be investigated and 5 of them to be useful. There seems to be little downside counterfactual harm wise as they would be doing synbio stuff anyway. It’s plausible to me that directing them towards biosec projects has bad worst-case scenarios relative to synbio—I have thought very little about this, but I’d be surprised if these particularly bad projects weren’t caught by their biosec team.
iGem even seems to care quite a lot about biosecurity and I know that there are some links between open phil and the iGem biosec team so it’s plausibly even low cost to investigate.
Awesome, are there any US citizens who would be happy donation swapping with me?
The legality of donation swapping seems pretty unclear to me. My limited and insufficient understanding is there’s no actually exchange of goods, and you can’t verify whether someone will actually carry through with the match.
On reflection it’s not obvious to me that the small chance of a public comment being picked up and casting negative light on a campaign (particularly if I am wrong and donation swapping in this case is not legal) wouldn’t offset a fairly small donation to a campaign making the activity negative in expectation. I’ll retract my previous comment.
Apologies for not replying to this earlier but thank you for posing your question.
I had a few thoughts on the points that you made about why consumer surplus might not be a small factor.
This may be true but I think these people are by far in the minority. Tobacco taxes do not target people who enjoy smoking but are of course applied to the whole population (assuming full compliance).
I am not entirely sure what this claim is based on. I think that this may well not be true and may be less relevant to this project for a few reasons.
1. The health effects can be hard to understand, partly because of the tobacco industry pushing pseudo-science to prevent tobacco control laws from being passed.
2. Even if people do fully understand the effect of addiction means that people keep choosing to smoke even if they want to quit. My understanding is that the majority of smoker do want to quit.
3. In many LMICs, I think this is an unreasonable expectation particularly when the tobacco industry pedals misinformation around the harmful effects of smoking and that many countries don’t have warnings on packages (unlike in the UK/USA).
So far the evidence does seem to point that way. There is still considerable debate around whether nicotine delivery systems are helpful or not (particularly in countries which aren’t equipped to regulate them) but generally, e-cig adoption is lesser in LMICs and tax structures can penalise more harmful products over lesser ones to encourage switching which would mitigate this risk.
I have not read through this paper fully but I have a few remarks for it’s applicability to tobacco control (please do let me know if you think I misunderstand the paper).
1. Tobacco taxes reduce the number of people who smoke partly by reducing the incentive for people to take up smoking. This paper seems to examine only the case where the person is already addicted and is choosing whether to go ‘cold turkey’ to quit not whether a person should become addicted. I think given the above points it is sensible to say that the higher expected value option in most cases is not to start smoking.
2. The paper states that “present-oriented individuals are potentially more addicted to harmful goods than future-oriented individuals” but does not seem to say that it is rational to give in to addiction, more that given people’s individual time preferences some people rationally become addicted to harmful products (e.g. people with a more myopic view who discount the future) and continue to use them. I don’t think this really makes a statement about whether this behaviour is good or bad in itself, more an explanation of how some but not necessarily all rational agents can exhibit addictive properties (under their definition of rationality).
It is probably also useful to mention the large number of people that experience problems due to second-hand smoke (where the consumer surplus argument probably would not apply).
I don’t believe that the killing of Eric Garner is really attributable to increased tobacco taxes. Even if it were I am not sure that similar cases are common enough to outweigh the huge number of lives saved by this tax.
I have given some thought to the consumer surplus but have not formally modelled this mostly because I think it would take a long time and I trying to focus my attention on our pilot. If you were to build a quantitative model in guesstimate or similar I would love to take a look!