This is just a note that I still intend to respond to a lot of comments, but I will be slow! (I went into labour as I was writing my previous batch of responses and am busy baby cuddling now.)
Denise_Melchin
Karma: 3,288
On your second bullet point what I would add to Carl’s and Ben’s posts you link to is that suffering is not the only type of disvalue or at least “nonvalue” (e.g. meaninglessness comes to mind). Framing this in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, suffering is only addressing the care/harm foundation.
Also, I absolutely value positive experiences! More so for making existing people happy, but also somewhat for creating happy people. I think I just prioritise it a bit less than the longtermists around me compared to avoiding misery.
I will try to respond to the s-risk point elsewhere.
Thank you everyone for the many responses! I will address one point which came up in multiple comments here as a top-level comment, and otherwise respond to comments.
Regarding the length of the long-term future: My main concern here is that it seems really hard to reach existential security (i.e. extinction risks falling to smaller and smaller levels), especially given that extinction risks have been rising in recent decades. If we do not reach existential security the future population is much smaller accordingly and gets less weight in my considerations. I take concerns around extinction risks seriously—but they are an argument against longtermism, not in favour of it. It just seems really weird to me to jump from ‘extinction risks are rising so much, we must prioritize them!’ to ‘there is lots of value in the long-term future’. The latter is only true if we manage to get rid of those extinction risks.
The line about totalitarianism is not central for me. Oops. Clearly should not have opened the section with a reference to it.
I think even with totalitarianism reaching existential security is really hard—the world would need to be permanently locked into a totalitarian state.
I recommend reading this shortform discussion on reaching existential security.
Something that stood out to me in that discussion (in a comment by Paul Christiano: “Stepping back, I think the key object-level questions are something like “Is there any way to build a civilization that is very stable?” and “Will people try?” It seems to me you should have a fairly high probability on “yes” to both questions.”)
as well as Toby’s EAG Reconnect AMA is how much of the belief that we can reach existential security might be based on a higher level of baseline optimism than I have about humanity.
Thanks for trying to summarise my views! This is helpful for me to see where I got the communication right and where I did not. I’ll edit your summary accordingly where you are off:
You have person-affecting tendencies which make you
unconcernedless concerned with reducing extinction risks than longtermists, although you are still concerned about the nearterm impacts and put at least some value on the loss of future generations (which also depends on how long/big we can expect the future to be)You are suffering-focused [Edit: I would not have previously described my views that way, but I guess it is an accurate enough description]
You don’t think humanity is very good now nor that it is likely to be in the future under a sort of ‘business as usual’ path, which makes you
unenthusiasticwant to prioritiseaboutmaking the future good over making it long or bigYou don’t think the future will be long
(unless we have totalitarianism)which reduces the scope for doing good by focusing on the futureYou’re
scepticalclueless whether there are lock-in scenarios we can affect within the next few decades, and don’t think there is much point of trying to affect them beyond this time horizon
Why I am probably not a longtermist
Wow. I am still reading through this, but I am impressed with the quality input the UK government has clearly received and how well they wrote up their considerations and conclusions. Maybe this is normal for the reference class for UK gov strategy documents (if so I was unaware), but it is not something I was expecting.
More on that qualitative feedback: While people generally react quite positively to winning the prize, few people have explicitly told us it made them want to write more (even when we asked directly), and our surveys of the Forum’s userbase haven’t found many people saying that the chance of winning a prize leads them to invest more time in writing.
Previously I think I responded that it did not motivate me to write more/better, but in retrospect I think this is just false. At least to me, it feels very arrogant to be hopeful that I could win a prize and therefore encourages dishonesty with myself. I expect this to be similar for other people.
Thank you, this was really interesting! I voted already, mostly based on global aid, refugee, animal welfare and climate change considerations, but I would have wanted to look at pandemic considerations too if I had known a quick way to do it at the time. So I expect this to be a very helpful overview for others!
I agree with the gist of this comment, but just a brief note that you do not need to do direct work to be “part of the EA community”. Donating is good as well. :-)
I didn’t originally, but then did when I could not get an offer for an EA job.
I do think in many cases EA org jobs will be better in terms of impact (or more specifically: high impact non-EA org jobs are hard to find) so I do not necessarily consider this approach wrong. Once you fail to get an EA job, you will eventually be forced to consider getting a non-EA job.
Thank you for providing more colour on your view, that’s useful!
I am still confused whether you are talking about full-time work. I’d very much hope a full-time community builder produces more value than a donation of a couple of thousand dollars to the EA Funds.
But if you are not discussing full-time work and instead part-time activities like occasionally hosting dinners on EA related themes it makes sense to compare this to 10% donations (though I also don’t know why you are evaluating 10% donations at ~$2000, median salary in most rich countries is more than 10 times that).
But then it doesn’t make sense to compare the 10% donations and part-time activities to the very demanding direct work paths (e.g. AI safety research). Donating $2000 (or generally 10%, unless they are poor) requires way less dedication than fully focussing your career on a top priority path.
Someone who would be dedicated enough to pursue a priority path but is unable to should in many cases be able to donate way more than $2000. Let’s say they are “only” in the 90th percentile for ability in a rich country and will draw a 90th percentile salary, which is above £50,000 in the UK (source). If they have the same dedication level as someone in a top priority path they should be able to donate ~£15,000 of that. That is 10 times as much as $2000!
I think I agree that the cutoff is if anything higher than top 3% which is why I said originally ‘at best’. The smaller that top number is the more glaring is the oversight not to mention this explicitly everytime we have conversations on this topic.
I have been thinking about the initiative bit, thank you for bringing it up. It seems to me that ability and initiative/independentmindedness somewhat tradeoff against each other, so if you are not on the top 3% (or whatever) for ability, you might be able to still have more impact through direct work than donations with a lot of initiative. Buck argues along these lines in his post on doing good through non-standard EA career paths.
That would also be my response to ‘but you can work in government or academia’. As soon as “impact” is not strictly speaking in your job description and therefore your impact won’t just come from having higher aptitude than the second best candidate, you can possibly do a lot of good by showing a lot of initiative.
The same can be said re. what Jonas said below:
I’m also thinking that there seem to be quite a few exceptions. E.g., the Zurich ballot initiative I was involved in had contributors from a very broad range of backgrounds. I’ve also seen people from less privileged backgrounds make excellent contributions in operations-related roles, in fundraising, or by welcoming newcomers to the community. I’m sure I’m missing many further examples. I think these paths are harder to find than priority paths, but they exist, and often seem pretty impactful to me.
If you are good at initiative you are maybe able to find the high impact paths which are harder to find than the priority paths and “make up” for lower ability this way.
Hm, I agree that the most impactful careers are competitive, but the different careers themselves seem to require very different aptitudes and abilities so I’m not sure the same small group would be at the top of each of these career trajectories.
I agree with this. But I think adding all of these groups together won’t result in much more than the top 3% of the population. You don’t just need to be in the top 3% to be an AI safety researcher in terms of ability/aptitude for ML research, this will be much more selective. Say it’s 0.3%. Same goes for directing global aid budgets efficiently. While these paths require somewhat different abilities/aptitudes, proficiency in them will be very correlated with each other.
In my view the majority of people currently involved in EA could develop a skillset that’s quite useful for direct work.
I don’t disagree with this, but this is not the bar I have in mind. I think it’s worth trying your aptitude for direct work even if you are likely not in the top ~3% (often you won’t even know where you are!) but with the expectation that the majority of your impact may likely still come from your donations in the long term.
The first thing that comes to mind here is that replaceability is a concern for direct work, but not for donations. Previously, the argument has been that replaceability does not matter as much for the very high impact roles as they are likely heavy tailed and therefore the gap between the first and second applicant large.
But that is not true anymore once you leave the tails, you get the full impact from donations but less impact from direct work due to replaceability concerns. This also makes me a bit confused about your statement that income is unusually heavy-tailed compared to direct work—possibly, but I am specifically not talking about the tails, but about everyone who isn’t in the top ~3% for “ability”.
Or looking at this differently: for the top few percent we think they should try to have their impact via direct work first. But it seems pretty clear (at least I think so?) that a person in the bottom 20% percentile in a rich country should try to maximise income to donate instead of direct work. The crossover point where one should switch from focusing on direct work instead of donations therefore needs to be somewhere between the 20% and 97%. It is entirely possible that it is pretty low on that curve and admittedly most people interested in EA are above average in ability, but the crossover point has to be somewhere and then we need to figure out where.
For working in government policy I also expect only the top ~3% in ability have a shot at highly impactful roles or are able to shape their role in an impactful way outside of their job description. When you talk about advocacy I am not sure whether you still mean full-time roles. If so, I find it plausible that you do not need to be in the top ~3% for community building roles, but that is mostly because we have plenty of geographical areas where noone is working on EA community building full-time, which lowers the bar for having an impact.
[Focusing on donations vs. impact through direct work]
This is somewhat of a followup to this discussion with Jonas (where I think we mostly ended up talking past each other) as well as a response to posts like this one by Ben T.
In the threads above the authors are arguing that it makes more sense for “the community” to,say, focus on various impacts through direct work than through donations. I think this answer is the right type of answer for the question in which direction the community should be steered to maximise impact, so particularly relevant for people who have a big influence on the community.
But I am thinking about the question of how we can maximise the potential of current community members. For plenty of them, high impact job options like becoming a grantmaker directing millions of dollars or meaningfully influencing developing world health policy will not be realistic paths.
In Ben’s post, he discusses how even if you are trying to aim for such high impact paths you should have backup options in mind which I completely agree with.
What I would add is that if high impact direct job options do not work out for you, most of the time you should focus on donations instead. To be clear, I think it is worth trying high impact direct work paths first!
My impression is that at best the top 3% of people in rich countries in terms of ability (intelligence, work ethic, educational credentials) are able to pursue such high impact options. What I have a less good sense of is whether other people agree with this number.
It is easy to do a lot of good by having a job with average pay and donating 10-20% of your income. To me, it seems really hard to do much more good than that unless you are in the top 3% in terms of ability and put in a lot of effort to enter such a high impact path.
I would like to understand better whether other people disagree with this number or whether they are writing for the top ~3% as their target audience. If it’s the first then I am wondering whether this is from a different assessment for how common high impact roles are or how difficult they are.
In case you didn’t know it yet, you can access a user list of the EA Forum here, where you can see and sort by karma, post count and comment count.
I am not Larks, but I really like having the Forum as a space where appearance is ~irrelevant. There are not many such (EA) spaces and I do not want the main one where only thoughts matter being taken away. In my experience, people including EAs do treat you differently based on how you look. It is nice not to have to deal with that for once.
I am not a fan either. Something I’d much rather like to see is more encouragement to use identifiable user names. Many people do, especially longer term users, but increasingly many people do not.
I would be interested to read this!