Hi! My name is Charlie, and I am the new executive director of Effective Altruism Norway. I was born and raised in the USA, but I have lived in Norway now for the last 10 years and have dual citizenship.
My interests include animal welfare, future history, politics, and meta-EA questions
OK! Can you give an example of “make things better” that might make a culture exceptional here? I think most societies would be upset if you suggested that they didn’t care about future generations, even if you think they were not very good at it.
Thanks for this!
What would you do if Open Phil gave you a million dollars?
Would it mostly be cost effectiveness analyses? My impression is that CEAs are good if you decide SWB is the right metric and then deciding what is the best SWB intervention.
I am not sure that I see clearly in your argument for SWB (which is compelling) what the next steps are. What is the problem you are solving exactly and how?
Connected, but separate question: Do you have an idea of how to make DALYS and QALYS and WELLBYS commensurable? Do you have an idea for how to compare these metrics apples for apples?
I most enjoyed Tyler Cowen, but I thought that The Lunar Society was also worth a listen. The podcast also has a transcript on its website incase you prefer reading.
Do you mean their descendants?
Thanks Jonas! I agree, there is a lot more to talk about about how peacebuilding can be more effective. I hope the tractability section discusses that in my suggested areas for investment.
Regarding Rwanda: Its quite clear that the international community hesitated in Rwanda and could have done much more to stop the genocide. See Shake Hands With The Devil, written by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who led UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994.
Lots of the discussion here is that the debate surrounds counterfactuals. What could peacebuilding have done to prevent the South Sudan conflict? These questions can never be resolved, and point to additional thorny questions such as what conflicts has peacebuilding prevented? One area in which peacebuilding does have more concrete areas to discuss this is in areas where conflict has occurred but appears to have been stopped from being rekindled (so far). Examples here could include Northern Ireland, Nigeria, Western Africa , and East Timor.
As a further interesting source on more concrete efforts in peacebuilding, see the UN Peacebuilding Commission’s 2022 Programme of Work .
Regarding Ok and Excellent peacebuilding efforts, I think that there are degrees of success in every cause area. Not every malaria net that is distributed will be used, or used correctly, but that does not mean that the whole intervention is discarded. All interventions require a sincere effort to make them work before their effect can be fully evaluated.
Thanks for this, that was a great write up. I see the author hasn’t written anything since then, unfortunately.
How did you come across this?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the clarification! I am sorry i misunderstood your position. If I reflect on how I think I misunderstood the idea myself, I think its because I see a full time job as a type of relationship. Typically in a relationship there are not goals to meet or timeframes; I have never told a girlfriend, “I expect to feel Z way in 6 months so lets come back in 4 months and see if we are on track.”
Thats a dramatic comparison, but the dynamic is still a little skewed between me and the other person in the relationship in this situation. If I was friends with someone and they told me, “I like you, and I think we could be even better friends in 2 years if you do X,Y, Z, so lets come back to this in 1 year and see where you stand. Dont worry, this wont necessarily affect our friendship, its just something I could expect from you”, then I would struggle to see how failing at improving our relationship in this particular way would not negatively effect our relationship regardless of what you say.
To try to explain it another way, in the example above we are tying goals to the relationship, not setting goals “within” the relationship. The relationship becomes dependent on the goals.
This if of course also very normal in work, your job is very dependent on your performance, but I think framing it in this way can just have a strong interpersonal effect that I would struggle to wrap my head around. It is important for people to feel that they are good enough as they are, not just good enough as their last piece of work.
Saying that, I think goals are great and I love ambitious multiyear goals to keep people aligned and motivated. I think having a project as the primary framework for looking at the employment relationship can make the relationship more angsty than it needs to be.
Of course all of the nuances here could just be a language problem, and we are all working in the same spirit :) In fact, when you first said tours of service I thought of the management trainee programs larger corporations have where you try different departments and geographies in a 2 or 3 year period.
HI,
Could you clarify your section about connecting projects with journalists? I am not sure I understand entirely what you are looking for. Are there are particular journalists you have connections with already, is there a particular geography or topic you are thinking of, etc.?
Also, does this meant that CEA wants to coordinate and do outreach on behalf of all affiliated organizations and groups?
Thanks so much!
Charlie
Hi Ben,
While I appreciate the sentiment of a tour of service, I would also like to highlight the asymmmetrical power imbalance of a tour of service. As I understand it, the difference between contractual work and your tour of service is the spirit of the work relationship: a mutual understanding between the employed and the employer.
However, the only person in that relationship that could extend the relationship, or make it permanent, is the employer. This is to the disadvantage of the employee, and for all practical purposes is no different than a time-limited contract for the employee.
Why would it not be possible to have the spirit of the tour of service and still offer full-time employment? No one gives or accepts a full-time position with the anticipation that they will work their until the retire anyways, so I dont understand what advantages this has for the employee. If after two years an employee feels that their position isn’t worthwhile for them, then they can quit, as many do after 4 years regardless of their contract. A company can fire a person, in some countries, for their role being redundant if the work isn’t necessary anymore. In that case a person can file for unemployment, which they could not do under a time-limited contract.
If the logic for the tour of service is due to the role being temporary or having uncertain funding, then I would suggest that the role is both in practice and spirit just a contracting gig, with all of the moral hazards that accompany those hiring practices.
TLDR: It would be a shame if we just cross our fingers and hope everything goes well in Space for the next 100 years. Also maybe we can all play nice and one day have a space elevator or 10. Its stimulating to imagine the far future when we are orbiting suns throughout the universe, but until then we first have to play nice and figure out how to reliably get off of Earth.
If the future of humanity is dependent on moving beyond earth, then any longterm plans are dependent on us being able to regularly escape Earth’s gravity well with ease and low cost, at least while we are still dependent on Earth.
Ignoring any Deus Ex Machina like an AGI that comes and sorts out all of our problems, we will have to make sure that escaping Earth’s atmosphere remains possible based on our own efforts and problem-solving. Not getting the next 100 years right could be a type of “lock in” that is frustrates future human flourishing.
Currently the main issues I see for access to outerspace.
Militarization of space, or the problem of states, or the problem of global coordination, the potential issue of ultrawealthy private actors
Satellite-killing missiles
Satellite-killing satellites
Rocket-killing missiles or rockets
Drones- murderbots for rockets or even aircraft
Rogue space development, aka the desire for glory. How do we manage potential net negatives that can be ignored due to the desire for glory?
The Kessler Syndrome—Garbage production in LEO could spiral out of control to the point that it is extremely risky, potentially impossible, to launch anything out of Earth’s atmosphere for a significant period of time (10s to 100s to 1000s of years).
The pure difficulty of exiting Earth’s gravity well
Cost
Technological hurdles
Access to appropriate launch sites
Control of powerful actors over access to space
Space Governance
Currently it is the Internationl Telecommunications Union which regulates Low Earth Orbit and sets the requirements for satellite retirement and safety.
Coordination
Planning out the future.
I cant imagine that we can afford many space elevators in the nearer future, so we will probably have to find a way to place nice here without causing any wars or destroying the elevator before it is built.
One (of many, surely) Assumption: Anthropcentric focus, I am not sure if I actually believe humanity should be separated categorically from our ecosystem. When I say ‘we’, I am saying whatever we decide is ‘us’ will probably go into space eventually.
If you are interested in this topic get in touch, I want to begin writing a series of posts first establishing why space is important and explaining immediate concrete issues that we need to address before becoming an extra-earth phenomenon. Its stimulating to imagine the far future when we are orbiting suns throughout the universe, but until then we first have to play nice and figure out how to reliably get off of Earth.
Hi Will,
How do you feel this book fits into the fidelity model of communication advocated by CEA?
Thanks!
I see in your guesstimate you used Expected Impact instead of Expected Value, could you please make your spreadsheets public so we can criticize them? I am not attacking you as a person, only your intelligence. Its for the good of the future of humanity.
We have a potential new member, Monica, who is an actual tram conductor. I am tired of philosophers telling me what to do, so we are recruiting experts into the community. She should be able to resolve the trolley problem in under 10,000 words with only one game theory matrix.
@IanDavidMoss, thanks for the reply. I would love if you could go a little deeper into what is an institution to you. How do you characterize it, and why is this nomenclature important? I just would like to go back to my apples to apples comparison question. My first instinct is that comparing Meta to Blackrock to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to the Office of the President of the USA to the CCP Central Commitee is going to create some false parallels and misunderstandings of degree of importance or possibility for change ( I will just call this power).
I would suspect that the amount of power of the President of the USA is orders of magnitude greater than the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. So while they might be on a long list together, they are a bit like comparing our moon and the Sun. So we would have a magnitude issue.
In addition we would have a capabilites issue. The office of the President is much more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg, I would argue, but Meta can also do things that the President could only dream of. Facebook has been an incredible tool for spreading information, both for good and nefarious purposes. The US government could only wish for that ability to reach peoples’ brains.
These thoughts lead me to imagine what you final recommendations will look like, and I am not sure. I suspect you will discover that you end up making very specific suggestions for different insitutions. Other than a standard 80k be flexible and build up your career capital suggestion, I think it might be difficult to give thematic recommendations that are equally useful in all of the types of organizations you tackle here.
It is an interesting analysis, but how do you propose to have any influence over these institutions? For example, how would you go about,”Ensuring that Alphabet’s corporate board of directors is well-educated about AI safety issues”? How would you influence Amazon? What would be the intention of the intervention? How would you influence the office of the President of the USA? The importance of these “institutions” seems self-evident, but what you would actually do to change things, and what exactly you would want to change, seem to be more salient questions.
Another question is if you comparing apples to apples when comparing Amazon to Congress. What makes them both institutions, and what is useful about creating a category that includes both of them? Would you use the same interventions?
Thanks for this!
The reason i brought up interventions that they would want to fund is that I figured that they were interested in improving the WELLBY metric. If they are planning on being a regranter, then thats a whole different story to me.
I agree that they might very well be incommensurable. However, I suspect that different organizations will want to use different metrics, and someone like OpenPhil or one day GiveWell might have to be able to compare the two somehow. d