I’m a PhD student at UC Berkeley researching psychological biases in forecasting/​risk communication (~90% of my time) and human-AI interaction, especially people’s attitudes about digital sentience (~10% of my time). I also work part-time at the Forecasting Research Institute.
carter allen🔸
Karma: 150
Longview Emerging Challenges Fund, LessWrong, Wild Animal Initiative
Many global health interventions plausibly have negative effects on animal welfare (e.g., increasing factory farming). The inverse doesn’t seem as true.
Due to their neglectedness (and the lack of animal participation in markets) animal interventions are also probably more efficient at converting $$ → utils
This post pushed me to write a letter. Thanks!
I was imagining you could use the tools to assess people’s views about cause prioritization! In particular, I’m not sure whether you record users’ responses when they use either tool, but I’d be interested in seeing these data. It may also be valuable to recruit a more representative sample to see how most people react to moral uncertainty or otherwise engage with the tools.
Of course, I think a limitation in both these cases is that most people are pretty unfamiliar with moral uncertainty, and so a) probably a lot of people who use both tools are simply testing assumptions out and not necessarily expressing their true views, and b) I’m not sure whether recruiting people without a philosophical background would yield high-quality data. These might mean it’s not worth the effort, but I’m curious what the team’s thoughts are!
Do you plan to conduct empirical work on either of the tools you’ve released recently? Interested to hear any reasons you think this would or wouldn’t be especially valuable!
For future debate weeks, it might be nice if we could select comments that changed our view! I often find comments more informative than posts.
I want someone to write a post on bets as insurance. Sometimes, placing monetary bets against your own interests may help make worst-case scenarios less bad. For example, if one thinks Trump is an existential threat, they might bet money on Trump winning so they have more resources to deal with the fallout in the event that he does win. One could also bet against good news, e.g., last year I bet real money against the room-temperature superconductor stuff being legit, which ensured that either it was legit, or I’d make a bunch of money; I thought this guaranteed net good news in either case.
Someone could think through the risks and benefits of this approach and/​or create a larger list of promising insurance-bets.
Agree with everything here.
But the argument isn’t that people should spend the money they’d otherwise donate to charity on themselves/​flying business class, it’s that they should use it to further whatever their particular path to impact is.
This is a great summary! Just want to comment that I’m currently doing some empirical projects about whether/​how much people in fact discount estimates of interventions’ effectiveness when they know they’re selected from the extremes of uncertain distributions. If you know people involved in empirical work on this topic, I’d love to meet them! My email is carterallen@berkeley.edu.