This all makes sense to me—I am fairly new but I also think that EAs already think a lot about the downsides of their actions (the pattern of “advantages of x minus disadvantages of x mean that the expected value is Y” seems pretty common, and rethink priorities portfolio builder tool (https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/portfolio-builder-tool) also has “expected negative value” bits, and pe ple seem to care a lot about downstream ripple effects from e.g. health interventions. Are there some specific examples of EAs ignoring downsides that motivated this post?
crunk004
Karma: 15
Are there ripple effects from GHD outside of economic growth that you are thinking about? I think my initial reaction was that there seem to be very durable, reliable ways to increase economic growth which likely are much more effective than GHD. Some of my thoughts came from this here , but also direct cash transfers or even investing in the stock market would (I think) be a more reliable way to increase economic growth than GHD.
This may be out of scope of the debate week question, but I feel like if the case for GHD is (suffering reduction + flow through effects which seem to mostly be downstream of economic growth) I think the fact that there are other reliable, durable, (probably) more cost-effective interventions to achieve economic growth means that the existence of ripple effects shouldn’t alter my decisionmaking, unless there is a unique ripple effect from GHD that other interventions would not capture.I think a worldview diversification argument makes sense here—if having more humans is intrinsically valuable for non-hedonic reason, or we might be wrong and non-human animals aren’t sentient, or if there is a lot of uncertainty around either the value of economic growth or the effectiveness of other interventions on economic growth I think that a case for GHD totally makes sense. Curious if you had anything in mind for a ripple effect unique to GHD that couldn’t be achieved by another intervention or if you had other thoughts!
This post asks a similar question! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZT9FjRehCouvrRXz/seeking-ripple-effects
I personally think that we shouldn’t weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions—if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.
This reminded me of this older post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/omoZDu8ScNbot6kXS/beware-surprising-and-suspicious-convergence
I feel like while ripple effects from health/animal welfare interventions are certainly something to consider, I wouldn’t base too much of my decision on those because there are likely other more effective methods to achieve those impacts—for example, if the case for health is reducing suffering+ ripple effects in economic/technological growth, I would suspect that doing animal interventions (for suffering) and tech/growth interventions (for tech/growth) would do a better job at achieving both outcomes than making a single intervention which you hope will solve both.
Animal welfare seems likely more tractable, substantially more important, and vastly more neglected.
Is there any scenario where only voting for your first choice would be wise? I don’t think there is any downside to listing a second choice, assuming that you do actually prefer that second choice over any of the other options should your first choice be eliminated.