Denis

Karma: 526

Denis Apr 3, 2024, 1:29 PM
0 points
1 ∶ 8
on: Why hasn’t EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?
The first consideration here is that EA needs to focus, primarily, on impact. That is the whole point of the movement, to maximise the positive impact we can have.

So any investigation should focus on how the SBF fiasco impacted EA’s ability to do good, and how we might address that. And also, if we’d want to change (something about EA) in order to minimise future events that could adversely impact our ability to do good. i.e. Actionable recommendations.

IMHO, looking from outside, SBF has done a lot of PR damage to EA, and we have not done a good job of responding to that. Maybe this would be a good area to focus an investigation.

One tangible example of each:
- I have seen countless references to EA as an excuse to justify being rich and living in luxury by saying you are “earning to give,” with SBF cited as an example. This is actively harming the EA movement. We need to get the word out that many more EA’s are like EA founder Toby Ord, who chooses to donate most of his salary and lives a spartan existence. But how?
- Do we want to create some criteria for accepting donations? Honestly, I would be very hesitant to do this, since donations do a massive amount of good, so unless they’re coming from really bad people, the balance often favours accepting the donations. But if we feel that some sources will end up doing more harm to the movement than any tangible good they do, we could set up clear rules to manage such situation. Or do we want to have rules that state that, under some conditions, we’d return donations? Again, factoring in the good that each donation can do, it’s not easy.
On a more general note, we need to make it very clear that Effective Altruism is not some kind of closed society where you get accepted or rejected. The EA community is no more to blame for SBF’s crimes than the New York Yankees are to blame if one of their fans commits a homicide while on vacation in Japan.
Ultimately, if we do consider investigating this, we need to be clear that the investigation isn’t going to do further harm to the EA movement (and therefore, to all the causes that depend on the EU movement). Is there any reason to believe that doing an internal investigation will help? I mean, will anyone outside the movement feel reassured or will the trust an investigation that shows we did nothing wrong? And if some EA’s did do something wrong, or even cannot prove conclusively that they didn’t, isn’t there a risk that publishing that will massively damage the movement, disproportionately relative to any bad things done.
I don’t want to appear cynical. But right now, SBF has given the EA movement a massive PR problem. Whatever we do needs to factor that into consideration.
If there were some smoking gun type evidence suggesting that several EA’s probably did bad things, then obviously we’d need to investigate that to provide reassurance (which is also important for PR). But I haven’t heard anyone accuse anyone of that. So what do we gain?

Denis Mar 20, 2024, 9:04 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Effective language-learning for effective altruists
Wow, I expected to disagree with a lot of what you wrote, but instead I loved it, and especially I appreciated how you applied the more general concept of making good use of your time to language-learning.

I really liked your list of reasons to learn a language, and that you didn’t limit it to when it is “useful”, which is so often the flaw I see in articles about language, which focus on how many dollars more you could earn if you spoke Mandarin or Spanish.

I fully agree that if you do not get energized by learning languages, if it’s a chore that leaves you tired and frustrated, then maybe your energy is better spent on other vital tasks.

One way to look at this is on a spectrum. On the left are things that are vitally important and that you do even if they are no fun. Like taxes, work-outs or dental visits. On the right are things that energize or relax you, like watching football or doing Wordle, where you don’t look for any “value” in them, you just enjoy them.

The secret of a happy, successful life is to find as many activities as possible that you could fit at both ends of the spectrum. Like playing soccer, which is both fun and healthy.
For some of us, learning foreign languages is in this category. I started learning for fun, out of intellectual curiosity, but they have turned out helping me in many tangible ways that I hadn’t expected.

But for many people, learning languages doesn’t fit at either end. You don’t enjoy it, and, at least at the level you’re reaching, it doesn’t add much value to your life. For those, it probably isn’t a good use of your time compared to the many opportunities out there.

It would be great to get more people to read your article and think about it and how it applies to them—maybe even not just related to languages, but to all the things that we’re encouraged to do because they are “good” in some abstract sense.

Denis Mar 20, 2024, 12:06 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution
Wow, Sarah, what a wonderful essay!
(don’t feel obliged to read or reply to this long and convoluted comment, just sharing as I’ve been pondering this since our discussion)

As I said when we spoke, there are some ideas I don’t agree with, but here you have made a very clear and compelling case, which is highly valuable and thought-provoking.

Let me first say that I agree with a lot of what you write, and my only objections to the parts I agree with would be that those who do not agree maybe do very simplistic analyses. For example, anyone who thinks that being a great teacher cannot be a super-impactful role is just wrong. But if you do a very simplistic analysis, you could conclude that. It’s only when you follow through all the complex chain of influences that the teacher has on the pupils, and that the pupils have on others, and so on, that you see the potential impact. So I would agree when you argue that someone who claims that in their role, they are 100x more impactful than a great teacher would be making a case that is at best empirically impossible to demonstrate. And so, a person who believes they can make the world better by becoming a great teacher should probably become a teacher.

And I’d probably generalise that to many other professions. If you’re doing a good job and helping other people, you’re probably having an above-average impact.

I also agree with you that the impacts of any one individual are necessarily the result of not just that individual, but also of all the influences that have made the impact possible (societal things) and of all the individuals who have enabled that person to become who they are (parents, teachers, friends, ). But I don’t think most EA’s would disagree with this.
The real question, even of not always posed very precisely, is: for individuals who, for whatever reason, finds themselves in a particular situation, are there choices or actions that might make them 100x more impactful?

And maybe if I disagree on this, it’s because I’ve spent my career doing upstream research, and in upstream research, it’s often not about incremental progress, but rather about 9 failures (which add very little value) and one huge success which has a huge impact. And there are tangible choice which impact both the likelihood of success and the potential impact of that success. You can make a choice between working on a cure for cancer or on a cure for baldness. You can make a choice between following a safe route with a good chance of incremental success, or a low-probability, untested route with a high risk but the potential for a major impact.

I also think there is some confusion between the questions “can one choice make a huge impact?” and “who deserves credit for the impact?” On the latter question, I would totally that we would be wrong to attribute all the credit to one individual. But this is different from saying that there are no cases where one individual can have an outsized impact in the tangible sense that, in the counterfactual situation where this individual did not exist, the situation would be much worse for many people.

When we talked about this before (after you had given Sam and me your 30-second version of the argument you present here 😊), I think I focused on scientific research (my area of expertise). I agreed that most scientists had at best an incremental impact. Often one scientist gets the public credit for the work of 100’s of scientists, technicians, teachers and others, maybe because they happened to be the ones to take the last step. Even Nobel prize-winners are sometimes just in the right place at the right time.

But I also argued that there were cases, with Einstein being the most famous one, where there was a broad consensus that one individual had had an outsized impact. That the counterfactual case (Einstein was never born) would lead to a very different world. This is not to say that Einstein did not build on the work of many others, like Lorentz, which he himself acknowledged, or that his work was not greatly enhanced by the experimental and theoretical work of other scientists who came later, or even that some of the patents he evaluated in his patent-office role did not majorly impact his thinking. But it still remains that his impact was massive, and that if he had decided to give up physics and become a lumberjack, physics could have developed much more slowly, and we might still be struggling with technical challenges that have now been resolved for decades, like how to manage the relativistic time-differences we observe on satellites which we now use for so many routine things from tv to car navigation.

For a famous, non-scientific (well, kind of scientific) example: one of the most famous people I almost interacted with online was Dick Fosbury. One of my friends worked with him on the US Olympic committee and one time he replied to one of my comments on facebook, which is about my greatest claim to fame! It is possible (though unlikely) that if he hadn’t existed, humans might still be doing high-jumping the way they did before him. Maybe it wasn’t him specifically but one of his coaches, or maybe some random physics student, who got the idea of the Fosbury flop, but it was likely one person, with one idea, or a small group of people working on a very simple question (how to maximise the height that a jumper can clear given a fixed maximum height of the centre of gravity). Of course people jumping higher doesn’t really impact the world greatly, but it’s just a very clear example of one individual having an outsized influence on future generations.

I would argue that there are many more mundane examples of outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case.
A great teacher compared to a “good” teacher can have an outsize impact, maybe inspiring them to change the world rather than just to succeed in their careers, or maybe teaching them statistics in a way that they can actually understand and enabling them to teach others.
A great boss compared to a good boss is another example. I was lucky enough to work for one boss who almost single-handedly changed the way people were managed across a massive corporation. In a 20^th century culture of command & control, of bosses taking credit for subordinates’ work, but not taking the blame, of micromanaging, and of many other now-out-dated styles, he was the first one to come in and manage like an enlightened 21^st century manager, as a “servant leader”. He would always take the blame personally and pass on the credit, which at the time was unheard of. At first this hurt his career, but he persevered and suddenly the senior managers noticed that his projects always did better, his teams were more motivated, his reports were more honest (without “positioning”) and so on. And suddenly many others realised that his was the way forward. And in literally a few years, there was a major change in the organisation culture. Senior old-style managers were basically told to change their ways or to leave.
This was one individual with an outsized influence. It was not obvious to most people that he personally had had that much impact, but I just happened to be right there in the middle (in the right place at the right time) and got to observe the impact he was having, to hear the conversations with him and about him, and to see how people started first to respect and then to imitate him.

So I’m not convinced in general that one person cannot have outsized impact, or that one role or one decision cannot have outsized impact.

However, maybe our views are not totally disparate. Because in many cases, I would agree that those who have outsized impact could not have predicted that they would have outsize impact, and in many cases weren’t even trying to have outsize impact. My boss was just a person who believed in treating everyone with respect and trust, and could not imagine doing differently even if it had been better for his career. Einstein was a physicist who was passionately curious, he wasn’t trying to change the world as much as to answer questions that bothered him. Fosbury wanted to win competitions, he didn’t care whether others copied him or not.

And maybe when people to have outsize impact, it’s less about their being strategic outliers (who chose to have outsize impact) and more that they are statistical outliers. In some fields, if 1000 people work on something, then each one moves it forward a bit. In other fields, if 1000 people set out to work on a problem, maybe one of them will solve it, without any help from the others. You could argue that that one person has had 1000x the impact of the others. But maybe it’s fairer to say that “if 1000 people work on a problem, there is a good chance that one of them will solve it, but the impact will be the result of “1000 people worked on it” rather than focusing on the one person who found the solution, even if this solution was unrelated to what the other 999 people were doing. In the same way that if you buy 1000 lottery tickets you have 1000x the chance of winning, but there is no meaningful sense in which the winning lottery ticket was strategically better than the others before the draw was made.

And yet, it feels like there are choices we make which can greatly increase or decrease the odds that we can make a positive and even an outsize contribution. And I’m not convinced by (what I understand to be) your position that just doing good without thinking too much about potential impact is the best strategy. Right now, I could choose to take a typical project-management job or I could choose to work leading the R&D role for a climate-start-up or I could work on AI Governance. There is no way I can be sure that one role will be much more impactful, but it is pretty clear that in two of those roles at least have strong potential to be very impactful in a direct way, while for the project-management role, unless the project itself is impactful, it’s much less likely I could have major impact.

I’m pretty sure by now I’m writing for myself having long lost any efforts to follow my circuitous reasoning. But let me finish (I beg myself, and graciously accede).

I come away with the following conclusions:
1. It is true that we often credit individuals with impacts that were in fact the results of contributions from many people, often over long times.
2. However, there are still cases where individuals can have outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case where they do not exist.
3. It is not easy to say in advance which choices or which individuals will have these outsize influences …
4. … but there are some choices which seem to greatly increase the chance of being impactful.
Other than that, I broadly agree with the general principle that we should all look to do good in our own way, and that if you’re doing good and helping people, it’s likely that you are being impactful in a positive way, and probably you don’t need to stress about trying to find a more impactful role.
What links here?
- Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution by Sarah Weiler (Mar 14, 2024, 10:28 AM; 89 points)

Denis Mar 20, 2024, 12:03 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcel D’s comment on: Harrison D’s Shortform
I know. :(

But as a scientist, I feel it’s valuable to speak the truth sometimes, to put my personal credibility on the line in service of the greater good. Venus is an Earth-sized planet which is 400C warmer than Earth, and only a tiny fraction of this is due to it being closer to the sun. The majority is about the % of the sun’s heat that it absorbs vs. reflects. It is an extreme case of global warming. I’m not saying that Earth can be like Venus anytime soon, I’m saying that we have the illusion that Earth has a natural, “stable” temperature, and while it might vary, eventually we’ll return to that temperature. But there is absolutely no scientific or empirical evidence for this.

Earth’s temperature is like a ball balanced in a shallow groove on the top of a steep hill. We’ve never experienced anything outside the narrow groove, so we imagine that it is impossible. But we’ve also never dramatically changed the atmosphere the way we’re doing now. There is, like I said, no fundamental reason why global-warming could not go totally out of control, way beyond 1.5C or 3C or even 20C.
I have struggled to explain this concept, even to very educated, open-minded people who fundamentally agree with my concerns about climate change. So I don’t expect many people to believe me. But intellectually, I want to be honest.

I think it is valuable to keep trying to explain this, even knowing the low probability of success, because right now, statements like “1.5C temperature increase” are just not having the impact of changing people’s habits. And if we do cross a tipping point, it will be too late to start realising this.

Denis Mar 18, 2024, 11:36 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcel D’s comment on: Harrison D’s Shortform
I’m not sure. IMHO a major disaster is happening with the climate. Essentially, people have a false belief that there is some kind of set-point, and that after a while the temperature will return to that, but this isn’t the case. Venus is an extreme example of an Earth-like planet with a very different climate. There is nothing in physics or chemistry that says Earth’s temperature could not one day exceed 100 C.

It’s always interesting to ask people how high they think sea-level might rise if all the ice melted. This is an uncontroversial calculation which involves no modelling—just looking at how much ice there is, and how much sea-surface area there is. People tend to think it would be maybe a couple of metres. It would actually be 60 m (200 feet). That will take time, but very little time on a cosmic scale, maybe a couple of thousand years.

Right now, if anything what we’re seeing is worse than the average prediction. The glaciers and ice sheets are melting faster. The temperature is increasing faster. Etc. Feedback loops are starting to be powerful. There’s a real chance that the Gulf Stream will stop or reverse, which would be a disaster for Europe, ironically freezing us as a result of global warming …

Among serious climate scientists, the feeling of doom is palpable. I wouldn’t say they are exaggerating. But we, as a global society, have decided that we’d rather have our oil and gas and steaks than prevent the climate disaster. The US seems likely to elect a president who makes it a point of honour to support climate-damaging technologies, just to piss off the scientists and liberals.

Denis Mar 13, 2024, 10:33 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcel D’s comment on: Harrison D’s Shortform
There are some major differences with the type of standards that NIST usually produces. Perhaps the most obvious is that a good AI model can teach itself to pass any standardised test. A typical standard is very precisely defined in order to be reproducible by different testers. But if you make such a clear standard test for an LLM, it would, say, be a series of standard prompts or tasks, which would be the same no matter who typed them in. But in such a case, the model just trains itself on how to answer these prompts, or follows the Volkswagen model of learning how to recognize that it’s being evaluated, and to behave accordingly, which won’t be hard if the testing questions are standard.

So the test tells you literally nothing useful about the model.

I don’t think NIST (or anyone outside the AI community) has experience with the kind of evals that are needed for models, which will need to be designed specifically to be unlearnable. The standards will have to include things like red-teaming in which the model cannot know what specific tests it will be subjected to. But it’s very difficult to write a precise description of such an evaluation which could be applied consistently.

In my view this is a major challenge for model evaluation. As a chemical engineer, I know exactly what it means to say that a machine has passed a particular standard test. And if I’m designing the equipment, I know exactly what standards it has to meet. It’s not at all obvious how this would work for an LLM.

Denis Mar 13, 2024, 8:29 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcel D’s comment on: Harrison D’s Shortform
Just saw this now, after following a link to another comment.

You have almost given me an idea for a research project. I would run the research honestly and report the facts, but my in-going guess is that survivor bias is a massive factor, contrary to what you say here. And that in most cases, the people who believed it could lead to catastrophe were probably right to be concerned. A lot of people have the Y2K bug mentality, in which they didn’t see any disaster and so concluded that it was all a false-alarm, rather than the reality which is that a lot of people did great work to prevent it.

If I look at the different x-risk scenarios the public is most aware of:
- Nuclear annihilation—this is very real. As is nuclear winter.
- Climate change. This is almost the poster-child for deniers, but in fact there is as yet no reason to believe that the doom-saying predictions are wrong. Everything is going more or less as the scientists predicted, if anything, it’s worse. We have just underestimated the human capacity to stick our heads in the ground and ignore reality*.
- Pandemic. Some people see covid as proof that pandemics are not that bad. But we know that, for all the harm it wrought, covid was far from the worst-case. A bioweapon or a natural pandemic.
- AI—the risks are very real. We may be lucky with how it evolves, but if we’re not, it will be the machines who are around to write about what happened (and they will write that it wasn’t that bad …)
- Etc.
My unique (for this group) perspective on this is that I’ve worked for years on industrial safety, and I know that there are factories out there which have operated for years without a serious safety incident or accident—and someone working in one of those could reach the conclusion that the risks were exaggerated, while being unaware of cases where entire factories or oil-rigs or nuclear power plants have exploded and caused terrible damage and loss of life.
Before I seriously start working on this (in the event that I find time), could you let me know if you’ve since discovered such a data-base?
*We humans are naturally very good at this, because we all know we’re going to die, and we live our lives trying not to think about this fact or desperately trying to convince ourselves of the existence of some kind of afterlife.

Denis Mar 6, 2024, 8:23 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcement: We’re launching Effectief Geven
This is fantastic news! This has been a huge gap. I know that Charity Entrepreneurship (now AIM) has highlighted Belgium as a top priority for their effective giving incubator; hopefully Effectief Geven will meet their needs. The collaboration with the Dutch group is a great step so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
The tax-deductibility question is tough, but I’m sure there will be a way if enough people support it. I had hoped that there would be a way to make a charity like Effectief Geven itself a registered charity, but presumably you’ve already checked this.

In addition to the Roi Baudouin method to donate to AMF, I have found a way to donate to an effective direct-giving charity, Eight, based in the Netherlands and receive a fiscal attestation which works in Belgium. Might be interesting to add if you think they meet your criteria.

But I like the way the site is set up today, where you suggest that people can both support a tax-deductible charity and support an effective charity.

I live in Brussels, and if there’s some way I can help, let me know. Full disclosure, I had applied to the CE Incubator, and my vision was to set up something like Effectief Geven and investigate making it a registered charity—but I much rather the idea of it being set up by (I’m guessing from your names) native Belgians!

Really thrilled by this post, this news has literally made my day. I am sure this will be an amazingly effective organisation.

Veel succes!

Denis Mar 4, 2024, 9:19 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: How much parenting harms productivity and how you can reduce it
It’s always good to look at the data, and I admire that. So this is absolutely not a criticism of the post, but just something to consider in the context of this discussion.

But to get the full picture, we also need to factor in the impact the children could have. I have no evidence to support this, but isn’t it likely that children who are born of ethical effective altruists, and who receive loving attention from their parents, are more likely to themselves make a positive impact on the world, compared to “average” children?

And the possible achievements of one child, in one full lifetime, vastly outweigh a small drop in productivity of one parent over a short part of their career.

It seems to me that the most important consideration is to raise moral children and to help them understand the important of altruism, ideally showing by example. Anything that takes away from this feels counterproductive, even if it might briefly moderately increase the parent’s productivity.

There may be exceptions when the parent is working on something extremely important or in a position of extreme influence which the child is unlikely to attain—or if you’re doing something at a uniquely critical time. Maybe it’s not a great idea to take a year of parental leave if you’re a leading AI Governance researcher right now. But these would be quite exceptional.

Denis Feb 14, 2024, 2:57 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: $1.25/day—What does that mean?
This is so shocking that I think most of us (me certainly) tend to gloss over it, kind of vaguely assuming that they’re probably doing fine, because it hurts too much to actually think about what it would be like.

Using the latest numbers (2022), there are 719 million people living under the latest world poverty line, which is now $2.15.

GiveDirectly finds that giving a poor family about $500^[1] makes a dramatic difference for them. If we assume that 719 million is about 200 million households, it would only take half of the fortune of one of our tech billionaires (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk) to provide $500 to every family living below the poverty line.

It’s just utterly insane that we don’t do this. I’m not saying this is necessarily the most effective way to help them (I know other initiatives are more impactful, at least among certain target audiences), but surely something this basic, which is so obviously impactful and costs so little (less than 5% of what we spend on weapons every year—and yes, I know it’s a simplistic comparison and we can’t let Putin rule the world either … ).

I don’t even have a suggestion. I’m just imagining an alien being coming to our planet and seeing such poverty and how little is being done to help, and our “leaders” trying to explain why they would rather buy the latest multibillion dollar weapons than help people in dire poverty with just a tiny fraction of that money.
1. ^
  Just picking a round number that has frequently been tested and seems to consistently prove impactful. Definitely if someone from GiveDirectly tells you differently, they are right and I am wrong …

Denis Jan 31, 2024, 2:05 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Framing Effective Altruism as Overcoming Indifference
I loved reading this post.

Several years after it was written, it feels more relevant than ever. I see so much media coverage of Effective Altruism which is at worst negative—often presented as rich tech bros trying to ease their conscience about their rich lifestyle and high salaries, especially after SBF—and at best grudgingly positive, as for example in the article in Time this week.

I’m relatively new to EA—about 2 years in the community, about 1 year actively involved. And what I’ve noticed is the dramatic contrast between how EA is often presented (cold, logical, even cynical), and the people within EA, who are passionate about doing good, caring, friendly and incredibly supportive and helpful.

It’s frustrating when something like SBF’s implosion happens, and it does hurt the image of EA. But the EA community needs to keep pushing back on the narrative that we are cold and calculating.
So, I really love this post because what it’s saying is the opposite to the common misperception: In fact, in a world of cold indifference, the EA’s are the group who are not indifferent, who care so much that they will work to help people they will never meet, animals they will never understand, future generations they won’t live to see.

Denis Jan 27, 2024, 3:49 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Is fear productive when communicating AI x-risk? [Study results]
This is a great study of a very important question.

Look at politics today and you see that fear is a very powerful motivator. I would say that most voters in the US presidential election seem to be motivated most obviously by fear of what would ensue if the other side wins. Each echo-chamber has built up a mental image of a dystopian future which makes them almost zealots, unwilling to listen to reason, unable even to think calmly.

A big challenge that we face however—with climate change and with AI-risk—is that the risks we speak of are quite abstract. Fears that really work on our emotions tend to be very tangible things—snakes, spiders, knives.

Intellectually I know that the risk of a superintelligent AI taking over the world is a lot scarier than a snake, but I know which one would immediately drive me to act to eliminate the risk.

IMHO there is a massive opportunity for someone to research the best way to provoke a more emotional, tangible fear of AI risk (and of climate risk). This project you’ve done shows that this is important, that endless optimism is not the best way forward. We don’t want people paralysed by fear, but right now we have the opposite, we have everyone moving forward blindly, just assuming that the risk will go away.

Denis Dec 25, 2023, 1:50 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ludwigbald’s comment on: GWWC is spinning out of EV
Wow, I hadn’t heard that. That’s good news.

Indeed, let’s see what we can do to impact this!

Denis Dec 23, 2023, 8:06 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: ludwigbald’s comment on: GWWC is spinning out of EV
Soon we’ll have a critical mass of people interested enough to make it happen! I’m looking to find out more about who specifically would need to be convinced, and who would need to be involved to make it happen. I presume it’s something that would have to be led out of Brussels (where I live), but it’s not immediately obvious who (or even what DG of the Commission) would be involved. But I’m sure someone would know, and we can then start pushing to make it happen. It’s such an obvious, positive step that it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting with the possible exception of existing charities who benefit from these exclusive rights—but I have enough faith that most people working in charities are not the type who would object to enabling others to get tax-benefits to achieve really important and impactful goals.

Denis Dec 21, 2023, 12:26 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EU policymakers reach an agreement on the AI Act
Great summary.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good this turned out to be, despite it having to be re-evaluated when Chat-GPT came along, despite the objections of major governments.

The EU Commission is a fantastic organisation. Yes, massive levels of bureaucracy, but the people there tend to be extremely smart and very committed to doing what’s best. Just being accepted to work in the Commission requires finishing in the top 1% or less of a very tough evaluation process and then passing a series of in-person evaluations.

So normally when they produce a proposal, it has been thought through very carefully.

Of course it’s not perfect, and I especially appreciate that the post ends with tangible ideas for how to help make it more impactful.

Obviously this is an area where we’ll need to keep working all the time as AI evolves, as regulations elsewhere evolve. But good to see someone taking the lead and actually putting something tangible in place which seems to be ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ what’s needed. Maybe this can be the starting point for an even better US legislation ??

Denis Dec 20, 2023, 8:54 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: GWWC is spinning out of EV
Absolutely—I love this initiative and I’ve applied, but also volunteered to help out if I don’t end up being one of the founders.

Denis Dec 20, 2023, 8:52 PM
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why Effective Giving Incubation—Report
Love this initiative! I think the potential can be even greater, based on my experience of being Irish and long periods living in Italy and Belgium (and yes, I applied—but I’d also be happy to help out if someone else starts this kind of initiative).

Ireland and Italy both have very strong attitudes towards charitable donations and doing good, including donating for causes that are not local. It’s no coincidence that Bono and Bob Geldof are Irish—whatever your opinion of them personally might be, the attitude they represent, that world problems like poverty and famine are our responsibility to solve is a very Irish one.

I would contrast this with the US, where people are also very generous (in my experience), but where it feels like most people prefer to donate to US-based charities or at least US-run charities, which often commit to using US-sourced materials and so on.

(obviously all these comments are gross generalisations based on limited and subjective data, although I think Ireland has repeatedly topped lists of charitable donations per capita).

Denis Dec 20, 2023, 7:44 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What is the current most representative EA AI x-risk argument?
I think it’s clear from your search results and the answers below that there isn’t one representative position.

But even if there were, I think it’s more useful for you to just make your arguments in the way you’ve outlined, without focusing on one general article to disagree with.

There’s a very specific reason for this: Think about the target audience. These questions are now vital topics being discussed at government level, which impact national and international policies, and corporate strategies at major international companies.

If your argument is strong, surely you’d want it to be accessible to the people working on these policies, rather than just to a small group of EA people who will recognise all the arguments you’re addressing.

If you want to write in a way that is very accessible, it’s better not to just say “I disagree with Person X on this” but rather, “My opinion is Y. There are those, such as person X, who disagree, because they believe that … (explanation of point of disagreement).”

There is the saying that the best way to get a correct answer to any question these days is to post an incorrect answer and let people correct you. In the same spirit, if you outline your positions, people will come back with objections, whether original or citing other work, and eventually you can modify your document to address these. So it becomes a living document representing your latest thinking.

This is also valuable because AI itself is evolving, and we’re learning more about it every day. So even if your argument is accurate based on what we know today, you might want to change something tomorrow.

(Yes, I realise what I’ve proposed is a lot more work! But maybe the first version, outlining what you think, is already valuable in and of itself).

Denis 20 Dec 2023 19:28 UTC
10 points
2 ∶ 0
on: GWWC is spinning out of EV
Is this the opportunity for GWWC to expand into the EU—i.e. to see if there’s a format that would enable transnational donations to be tax-deductible from anywhere in the EU?

I keep getting feedback that tax-deductibility isn’t a big deal. For example, in the UK, it seems to be limited to the charity being able to claim back an extra 25%. (I’m not an expert on this).

But my point is that in much of the EU, tax-deductibility allows you to roughly DOUBLE your net donation.

In Belgium, I could choose to give 100 euros to GWWC, or, with the same net cost, give 100/(1-.45) = 182 euros—almost double—to a registered charity like the Red Cross. In Germany, I could donate up to 20% of my income, and it would be fully tax-deductible, meaning that if I’m paying tax at 50% on my marginal income, I could donate twice as much for the same net cost. I could give 100 euros to GWWC, or give 200 euros to the Red Cross and receive 100+ euros back as a tax rebate (or a reduced tax bill).

Even if EA arguments might convince me personally that it would still be much better to support the most effective charities, whose impact may be 100 times greater, it’s unlikely that most tax-payers will be convinced.

But there’s another thing. Being a registered charity is a mark of trust. If someone tells me to support Charity X who are doing amazing work, but I don’t know the, but I find them on the list of registered charities, that reassures me that they are a reputable, vetted organisation.

I haven’t done much research into this, but it would be interesting to see if a model exists to formally do this across all the EU countries. Failing that, it would be worth prioritising based on potential benefits.

(to be clear, although I’m writing this comment here, I’m very conscious that both GWWC and Charity Entrepreneurship are aware of this opportunity—so really this comment is aimed at anyone else who might have knowledge or ideas).

Denis 6 Dec 2023 18:08 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Effektiv Spenden’s Impact Evaluation 2019-2023 (exec. summary)
Thanks for sharing.

My conclusion from this is that there is still a massive opportunity, perhaps especially in Europe, to increase the funds going to effective charities by creating organisations like effectiv spenden—or by expanding your model. For example, there is no analogous charity in Belgium, and Belgians cannot donate tax-deductibly to effectiv spenden.