Great post!
This framing doesn’t seem to capture the concern that even slight misspecification (e.g. a reward function that is a bit off) could lead to x-catastrophe.
I think this is a big part of many people’s concerns, including mine.
This seems somewhat orthogonal to the Saint/Sycophant/Schemer disjunction… or to put it another way, it seems like a Saint that is just not quite right about what your interests actually are (e.g. because they have alien biology and culture) could still be an x-risk.
Thoughts?
capybaralet
Karma: 124
Idea: “Change the World University”
[Question] When is cost a good proxy for environmental impact? How good and why?
[Question] Any EAs familiar with Partha Dasgupta’s work?
Trying to help coral reefs survive climate change seems incredibly neglected.
Idea: an AI governance group colocated with every AI research group!
I think you guys are already aware of RadicalXChange. It’s a bit different in focus, but I know they are excited about trying out mechanisms like QV/QF in institutional settings.
People are motivated both by:
competition and status and
cooperation and identifying with the successes of a group. I think we should aim to harness both of these forms of motivation.
Overall, I’m intrigued and like this general line of thought. A few thoughts on the post:
If you’re using earn.com, it’s not really email anymore, right? So maybe it’s better to think about this as about “online messaging”.
Another (complementary) way to improve email is to make it like facebook where you have to agree to connect with someone before they can message you.
Like many ideas about using $$ as a signal, I think it might be better if we instead used a domain-specific credit system, where credits are allotted to individuals at some fixed rate, or according to some rules, and cannot be purchased. People can find ways of subverting that, but they can also subvert the paid email idea (just open all their emails and take the $$ without reading or responding meaningfully).
Thanks for this update, and for your valuable work.
I must admit I was frustrated by reading this post. I want this work to continue, and I don’t find the levels of engagement you report surprising or worth massively updating on (i.e. suspending outreach).
I’m also bothered by the top-level comments assuming that this didn’t work and should’ve been abandoned. What you’ve shown is that you could not provide strong evidence of the type that you hoped for the programs effectiveness, NOT that it didn’t work!
Basically, I think there should be a strong prior that this type of work is effective, and I think the question should be how to do a good job of it. So I want these results to be taken as a baseline, and for your org to continue iterating and trying to improve your outreach, rather than giving up on it. And I want funders to see your vision and stick with you as you iterate.
I’m frustrated by the focus on short-term, measurable results here. I don’t expect you to be able to measure the effects well.
Overall, I feel like the results you’ve presented here inspire a lot of ideas and questions, and I think continued work to build a better model of how outreach to high schoolers works seems very valuable. I think this should be approached with more of a scientific/tinkering/start-up mindset of “we have this idea that we believe in and we’re going to try our damndest to make it work before giving up!” I think part of “making it work” here includes figuring out how to gauge the impact. How do teachers normally tell if they’re having an impact? Probably they mostly trust their gut. So is there a way to ask them (obvious risk is they’ll tell you a white lie). Maybe you think continuing this work is not your comparative advantage, or you’re not the org to do it, which seems fine, but I’d rather you try and hire a new “CEO”/team for SHIC in that case (if possible), and not throw away existing institutional knowledge, rather than suspend the outreach.
-------------------------
RE evaluating effectiveness:
I’d be very curious to know more about the few students who did engage outside of class. In my mind, the evidence for effectiveness hinges to a significant extent on the quality and motivation of the students who continue engaging.
I think there are other ways you could gauge effectiveness, mostly by recruiting teachers into this process. They were more eager for your material than you expected (well, I think it makes sense, since its less work for them!) So you can ask for things in return: follow-up surveys, assignments, quiz questions, or any form of evaluation from them in terms of how well the content stuck and if they think it had any impact.
A few more specific questions:
- RE footnote 3: why not use “EA” in the program? This seems mildly dishonest and liable to reduce expected impact.
- RE footnote 7: why did they feel inappropriate?
Idea: Resumes for Politicians
[Question] What’s a good reference for finding (more) ethical animal products?
What you describe is part of what I meant by “jadedness”.
”If they were actually trying to change the world—if they were actually strongly motivated to make the world a better place, etc. -- the stuff they learn in college wouldn’t stop them.”
^ I disagree. Or rather, I should say, there are a lot of people who are not-so-strongly motivated to make the world a better place, and so get burned out and settle into a typical lifestyle. I think this outcome would be much less likely at a place like “Change the World University”, both because it would feel worse to give up on that goal (you would constantly be reminded of that), and because your peers would be (self-/)selected for being passionate about changing the world.
Out of 55 2-sample t-tests, we would expect 2 to come out “statistically significant” due to random chance, but I found 10, so we can expect most of these to point to actually meaningful differences represented in the survey data.
Is there a more rigorous form of this argument?
EA essay contest for <18s
[Question] Has anyone wrote something using moral cluelessness to “debunk” anti-consequentialist thought experiments?
Reminds me of The House of Saud (although I’m not saying they have this goal, or any shared goal):
”The family in total is estimated to comprise some 15,000 members; however, the majority of power, influence and wealth is possessed by a group of about 2,000 of them. Some estimates of the royal family’s wealth measure their net worth at $1.4 trillion”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud
Reiterating my other comments: I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the evidence showed it made sense to give up. As others have mentioned, there are measurement issues here. So this is a case where absence of evidence is not strong evidence of absence.
I recommend changing the “climate change” header to something a bit broader (e.g.”environmentalism” or “protecting the natural environment”, etc.). It is a shame that (it seems) climate change has come to eclipse/subsume all other environmental concerns in the public imagination. While most environmental issues are exacerbated by climate change, solving climate change will not necessarily solve them.
A specific cause worth mentioning is preventing the collapse of key ecosystems, e.g. coral reefs: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YEkyuTvachFyE2mqh/trying-to-help-coral-reefs-survive-climate-change-seems
I have a recommendation: try to get at least 3 people, so you aren’t managing your manager. I think accountability and social dynamics would be better that way, since:
- I suspect part of why line managers work for most people is because they have some position of authority that makes you feel obligated to satisfy them. If you are in equal positions, you’d mostly lose that effect.
- If there are only 2 of you, it’s easier to have a cycle of defection where accountability and standards slip. If you see the other person slacking, you feel more OK with slacking. Whereas if you don’t see the work of your manager, you can imagine that they are always on top of their shit.