David_Moss

• David_MossNov 14, 2024, 3:30 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  If true, it could mean that any theory framed in opposition, such as a critique of Shorttermism or Longtermism, might be more appealing than the time-focused theory itself. Critizising short-term thinking is an applause light in many circles.

  I agree this could well be true at the level of arguments i.e. I think there are probably longtermist (anti-shorttermist), framings which would be successful. But I suspect it would be harder to make this work at the level of framing/​branding a whole movement, i.e. I think promoting the ‘anti-shorttermist’ movement would be hard to do successfully.

• David_MossNov 14, 2024, 3:02 PM

  4 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ElliotJDavies’s comment on: ElliotJDavies’s Quick takes

  It takes a significant amount of time to mark a test task. But this can be fixed by just adjusting the height of the screening bar, as opposed to using credentialist and biased methods (like looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile or CV).

  Whether or not to use “credentialist and biased methods (like looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile or CV)” seems orthogonal to the discussion at hand?

  The key issue seems to be that if you raise the screening bar, then you would be admitting fewer applicants to the task (the opposite of the original intention).

  This is an empirical question, and I suspect is not true. For example, it took me 10 minutes to mark each candidates 1 hour test task. So my salary would need to be 6* higher (per unit time) than the test task payment for this to be true.

  This will definitely vary by org and by task. But many EA orgs report valuing their staff’s time extremely highly. And my impression is that both grading longer tasks and then processing the additional applicants (many orgs will also feel compelled to offer at least some feedback if a candidate has completed a multi-hour task) will often take much longer than 10 minutes total.

• David_MossNov 14, 2024, 2:35 PM

  5 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ElliotJDavies’s comment on: ElliotJDavies’s Quick takes

  Orgs can continue to pay top candidates to complete the test task, if they believe it measurably decreases the attrition rate, but give all candidates that pass an anonymised screening bar the chance to complete a test task.

  My guess is that, for many orgs, the time cost of assessing the test task is larger than the financial cost of paying candidates to complete the test task, and that significant reasons for wanting to compensate applicants are (i) a sense of justice, (ii) wanting to avoid the appearance of unreasonably demanding lots of unpaid labour from applicants, not just wanting to encourage applicants to complete the tasks^[1].

  So I agree that there are good reasons for wanting more people to be able to complete test tasks. But I think that doing so would potentially significantly increase costs to orgs, and that not compensating applicants would reduce costs to orgs by less than one might imagine.

  I also think the justice-implications of compensating applicants are unclear (offering pay for longer tasks may make them more accessible to poorer applicants)

  1. ^

     I think that many applicants are highly motivated to complete tasks, in order to have a chance of getting the job.

• David_MossNov 14, 2024, 1:47 PM

  0 points

  2 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Ju­lia_Wise’s Shortform

  I guess it depends on the specifics of the situation, but, to me, the case described, of a board member making one or two incorrect claims (in a comment that presumably also had a bunch of accurate and helpful content) that they needed to walk back sounds… not that bad? Like, it seems only marginally worse than their comment being fully accurate the first time round...

  I agree that it depends on the situation, but I think this would often be quite a lot worse in real, non-ideal situations. In ideal communicative situations, mistaken information can simply be corrected at minimal cost. But in non-ideal situations, I think one will often see things like:

  • Mistaken information gets shared and people spend time debating or being confused about the false information

  • Many people never notice or forget that the mistaken information got corrected and it keeps getting believed and shared

  • Some people speculate that the mistaken claims weren’t innocently shared, but that the board member was being evasive/​dishonest

  • People conclude that the organization /​ board is incompetent and chaotic because they can’t even get basic facts right

  Fwiw, I think different views about this ideal/​non-ideal distinction underlie a lot of disagreements about communicative norms in EA.

• David_MossNov 11, 2024, 8:35 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  Thanks Ben!

  I don’t think there’s a single way to interpret the magnitude of the differences or the absolute scores (e.g a single effect size), so it’s best to examine this in a number of different ways.

  One way to interpret the difference between the ratings is to look at the probability of superiority scores. For example, for Study 3 we showed that ~78% of people would be expected to rate longtermism AI safety (6.00) higher than longtermism (4.75). In contrast, for AI safety vs effective giving (5.65), it’s 61%, and for GCRR (5.95) it’s only about 51%.

  

  You can also examine the (raw and weighted) distributions of the responses. This allows one to assess directly how many people “Like a great deal”, “Dislike a great deal” and so on.

  

  You can also look at different measures, which have a more concrete interpretation than liking. We did this with one (interest in hearing more information about a topic). But in future studies we’ll include additional concrete measures, so we know e.g. how many people say they would get involved with x movement.

  

  I agree that comparing these responses to other similar things outside of EA (like “positive action” but on the negative side) would be another useful way to compare the meaning of these responses.

  One other thing to add is that the design of these studies isn’t optimised for assessing the effect of different names in absolute terms, because we every subject evaluated every item (“within-subjects”). This allows greater statistical power more cheaply, but the evaluations are also more likely to be implicitly comparative. To get an estimate of something like the difference in number of people who would be interested in x rather than y (assuming they would only encounter one or the other in the wild at a single time), we’d want to use a between-subjects design where people only evaluate one and indicate their interest in it.

The Welfare of Digi­tal Minds: A Re­search Agenda

• David_MossNov 9, 2024, 9:41 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  Thanks Ben!

  For descriptions or descriptions with terms the questions were “How much do you like or dislike each of the following?” (Study 2) and “Please indicate the extent to which you like or dislike the following” (Study 3), both asked on a 7 point scale from “Dislike a great deal”—“Like a great deal”.

  For terms only, we included some more instructions to ensure that people evaluated the terms specifically, rather than trying to evaluate the things referred to by the terms: “Based only on the terms provided below, how much do you like or dislike each of the following? (Please note that you do not have to have heard of the terms to answer. Please just answer based on the names below without looking up additional information).” This was also asked on a 7 point scale from “Dislike a great deal”—“Like a great deal”.

  For cause areas (Study 1), the question: “Based on the description of each cause area below, please indicate to what extent you like or dislike a movement that promotes giving resources to this area.” And, again, we used the scale 7 point scale from “Dislike a great deal”—“Like a great deal”.

• David_MossNov 8, 2024, 4:04 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Deborah W.A. Foulkes’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  Thanks Deborah!

  I’d like to see more research, however, as to why longtermism performed poorly in comparison with global catastrophic risks, because many of the latter play out on a long-term timescale.

  I think there are likely multiple different factors here:

  • As you note, the effects of global catastrophic risk reduction may play out largely in the long-term future. But they don’t play out exclusively in the long-term figure, and people may care particularly about the near-term effects of averting global catastrophic risks.

  • Considered as a term, “longtermism” may be less appealing than “global catastrophic risk reduction” for a variety of reasons. For example, it may be less clear what it means, or it may sound like an “ism” (an ideology), which people may not like. We’ll explore this more when we report on the qualitative data.

  • Considering the descriptions we tested, I also think there are multiple possible reasons for the disparity. For example, the description of global catastrophic risk reduction we tested might have fared more positively due to its focus on specific concrete risks. Conversely, our description of longtermism was more abstract. It was also explicit about effects being potentially “hundreds or thousands of years away”. As noted, I think further testing of different framings would be valuable to disentangle these possible causes.

• David_MossNov 7, 2024, 9:40 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SummaryBot’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  Specific cause areas like AI safety and pandemic preparedness were generally better liked than broader concepts like EA or longtermism.

  The summary was generally good, but I wouldn’t say the above exactly. In the one study where we tested specific causes against broader concepts, AI Safety and Pandemic preparedness were roughly neck and neck with the general broader concept Global catastrophic risk reduction. Those three were more popular than Climate change (specific), Effective Altruism and Effective Giving (broader), which were neck and neck with each other. And all were more effective than Longtermism. So there wasn’t a clear difference between specific cause area vs broader concept distinction.

• David_MossNov 7, 2024, 3:30 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

  Thanks! This was supported via Manifund and then topped up by Open Philanthropy after they saw it on there (so thanks to our donors on there and to Open Phil!).

Test­ing Fram­ings of EA and Longtermism

Valu­ing Im­pacts Across Species: A Re­search Agenda

• David_MossOct 28, 2024, 9:30 AM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Bri­tish pub­lic per­cep­tion of ex­is­ten­tial risks

  Thanks Siebe!

  I think that would also be interesting, but there’s still value in replicating previous surveys which focused on extinction specifically.

  I also think that focus on extinction specifically may also be useful for tracking changes in concerns about severe risks from AI. Assessing perceptions of other severe risks from AI will be a lot more methodologically challenging (since there’s more of a continuum from very severe non-extinction threats to less severe threats (e.g. will harm autonomy in some much less severe way), so it will be difficult to ensure respondents are thinking of non-extinction threats which are of interest to us. That said, I agree that studying what non-extinction threats people perceive from AI would be independently interesting and important.

• David_MossOct 26, 2024, 2:06 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: PeterSlattery’s comment on: Bri­tish pub­lic per­cep­tion of ex­is­ten­tial risks

  Thanks Peter! We’d be happy for this to be shared more widely.

  I am also wondering if someone should do a review/​meta-analysis to aggregate public perception of AI and other risks? There are now many surveys and different results, so people would probably value a synthesis.

  Agreed. I’d also be interested to see more work systematically assessing how these responses vary across different means of posing the question.

Bri­tish pub­lic per­cep­tion of ex­is­ten­tial risks

• David_MossOct 17, 2024, 6:18 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Ex­plain­ing the dis­crep­an­cies in cost effec­tive­ness rat­ings: A repli­ca­tion and break­down of RP’s an­i­mal welfare cost effec­tive­ness calcu­la­tions

  Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others’ around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.

  I agree, but I would go further and say that I don’t think we have good reason to think that people have a reliable sense of the hedonic balance of their lives, even if we suppose they have good introspective access to the valence of their discrete experiences.

• David_MossOct 14, 2024, 1:48 PM

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Josh 🔹’s comment on: Is RP’s Mo­ral Weights Pro­ject too an­i­mal friendly? Four crit­i­cal junctures

  This project and many participants on this forum this week also seem to be neglecting the positive utilitarian perspective. 1 human saved has the potential to make an immense positive impact on the world, whereas animals do not.

  Possible effects like these are worth considering, but they’re not part of moral weights in the sense meant here. Moral weights are only one thing you should consider when comparing possible interventions, not an all-things-considered score, including all possible flow-through effects.

  As such, what is at stake here is not “the positive utilitarian perspective”. Moral weights do include positive welfare of individuals, they just don’t include possible (positive or negative) side-effects of helping different individuals.

• David_MossOct 9, 2024, 2:13 PM

  25 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:

  • When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community’s resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/​high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.

  • However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.

  This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.

  

  

What do RP’s tools tell us about giv­ing $100m to AW or GHD?

• David_MossSep 9, 2024, 4:44 PM

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Zachary Robinson🔸’s comment on: CEA will con­tinue to take a “prin­ci­ples-first” ap­proach to EA

  Thanks for clarifying!

  I do continue to worry a bit about self-fulfilling prophecies. If EA organizations make it disproportionately easy for people prioritizing certain causes to engage (e.g. by providing events for those specific causes, or by heavily funding employment opportunities for those causes) then I think it becomes murkier how to account for weighted cause prioritization because cause prioritization is both an input and an output.

  I share this concern about weighting community views by engagement. That said, it seems plausible to me that the engagement-weighted views of the community at the least selected for [the set of views predominant among EA leadership] out of the options presented. True, CEA (and their donors, respected people who have thought about cause prioritisation a lot) can influence the views of highly engaged EAs in various ways. But I would expect CEA staff, donors, and select experts to be more strongly selected for a narrower set of views.