if the value of welfare scales something-like-linearly
I think this is a critically underappreciated crux! Even accepting the other parts, it’s far from obvious that the intuitive approach of scaling value linearly in the near-term and locally is indefinitely correct far out-of-distribution; simulating the same wonderful experience a billion times certainly isn’t a billion times greater than simulating it once..
You can’t know with certainty, but any decision you make is based on some implicit guesses. This seems to be pretending that the uncertainty precludes doing introspection or analysis—as if making bets, as you put it, must be done blindly.
Strongly both agree and disagree—it’s incredibly valuable to have saving, it should definitely be prioritized, and despite being smart, it’s not a donation!
So if you choose to save instead of fulfilling your full pledge, I think that’s a reasonable decision, though I’d certainly endorse trying to find other places to save money instead. But given that, don’t claim it’s charitable, say you’re making a compromise. (Moral imperfection is normal and acceptable, if not inevitable. Trying to justify such compromises as actually fully morally justified, in my view, is neither OK, nor is it ever necessary.)
Yeah, now that I’m doing payroll donations I have not been recording the data. I guess it would be good to fill in the data, for EDIT: GWWC’s records?
The way I managed this in the past was having a separate bank account for charity, and splitting my income when I was paid, then making donation decisions later—often at year end, or when there was a counterfactual match, etc.
Understood, and reasonable. The problem is that I’m uncomfortable with “the most good” as the goal anyways, as I explained a few years ago; https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f9NpDx65zY6Qk9ofe/doing-good-best-isn-t-the-ea-ideal
So moving from ‘doing good better’ to ‘do the most good’ seems explicitly worse on dimensions I care about, even if it performs better on approval.
I would be careful with this—it might be an improvement, but are we sure that optimizing short-term messaging success is the right way to promote the ideas as being important long-term conceptual changes to how people approach life and charity?
Lots of other factors matter, and optimizing one dimension, especially using short term approval, implicitly minimizes other important dimensions of the message. Also, as a partial contrast to this point, see “You get about five words.”
Strongly agree based on my experiences talking to political operatives, in case additional correlated small n anecdata is helpful.
“Without causing inflation” seems hard to support based on this study, given the short timeframe and large external effects which aren’t being controlled for.
That said, it seems very plausible that the localized economic impact of more cash wouldn’t drive large price change if the economy was integrated with other regions; critical inputs such as grain prices are driven by global markets more than local demand. And the surveyed markets shown are mostly for global goods.
You’re right, they made the problem easier with geofencing, but the data from Waymo isn’t ambiguous, and despite your previous investigations, is now published https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents/safety/Safety%20Impact%20Crash%20Type%20Manuscript.pdf
This example makes it clear that the approach works to automate significant human labor, with some investment, without solving AGI.
For autonomous driving, current approaches which “can’t deal with novelty” are already far safer than human drivers.
AI will hunt down the last remaining human, and with his last dying breath, humanity will end—not with a bang, but with a “you don’t really count as AGI”
Thank you for this—as someone who lives with my wife and kids on the other side of the world from the “optimal” place to live, around the corner from the grandparents and cousins, I very much appreciate people raising the flag for this being an acceptable choice in the community.
That said, I think there’s another aspect that is worth flagging; the implicit expectation that the commitment for EA is utilitarian, and so you won’t have your own priorities other than the minimum needed to keep yourself happy and motivated, or if not, at least the (mistaken) interpretation of “giving 10%” where it means you are supposed to do at least 10% as much good as you can possibly do. I have said repeatedly in the past that this is unhealthy as a community norm, and we should normalize people prioritizing other things, alongside their commitment to EA. (And it’s very clear to me that the community has not always done this well in the past!)
I’ll point to my dated but still relevant counterpoint: the way that EA has been built is worrying, and EA as a global community that functions as a high-trust collaborative society is bad. This conclusion was tentative at the time, and I think has been embraced to a very limited extent since then—but the concerns seem not to be noted in your post.
One application of this line of reasoning here is, as @Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸 has said more than once, including here, is that being friends and part of a single community seems to have dampened people’s ability to fight over what people should do, and oppose the labs.
...it occurs to me that it’s worrying in very different directions if FRED changes what or how they report. If they stop reporting or data collection is halted for political reasons, I’d expect that we either pick an arbiter to make the call, or agree to call the bet off.
I would have been happy to get better odds, obviously!
I’ve updated substantially towards this view—the practical issues with renting CPUs make them far less of a fungible commodity than I was assuming, and as you pointed out, contra my understanding, there are effective restrictions on Chinese companies getting their hands on large amounts of compute.
I often advise doing this, albeit slightly differently—talk to their recently graduated former PhD students, who have a better perspective on what the process led to and how valuable it was in retrospect. I think similar advice plausibly applies in corresponding cases—talk to people who used to work somewhere, instead of current employees.