ishaan

Karma: 853

ishaan 10 May 2019 23:53 UTC
25 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area
Quick Summary: Despite presumed benefits, legalization would likely not increase psychedelic use in low/middle income countries, while legalization in high income countries is way too expensive to be worth funging against conventional global poverty interventions, even with extreme optimism about the necessary budget to cause legalizing and the resulting increase in usage.
Long Summary: For the purposes of this, I’m going to boldly just assume that psychedelics are a very good thing, and treat “giving people who want psychedelics access to psychedelics” as an endpoint. I don’t have any strong opinions about whether they actually are good or not, but I see that plenty of other people are trying to answer that question.

Hypothesis 1 (high confidence): For most of the world, the bottlenecks to accessing psychedelics have nothing to do with the law, so fighting to “decriminalize” them is premature. Populations whose bottlenecks are primarily legal live in high income countries, so everything to do with helping them is rather more expensive than other interventions. It’s therefore highly unlikely that legalizing psychedelics would effectively impact global health. Considering the scale of lack of access to mental health resources, I don’t even think that it’s a particularly effective way to improve mental health specifically.

Hypothesis 2: If you do work on this, consider focusing on lobbying, which may be surprisingly cheap compared to research and clinical trials (low confidence, worth further research). Even if lobbying for legalization succeeds, for this to work there are possibly additional, possibly more expensive barriers that you have to sort of hope the market sorts out on its own for it to become like an ordinary drug.
...all of which hinges on psychedelics themselves being at all good or effective medically, which seems to be something which isn’t particularly certain. So, as far as being an “EA cause area”...well, I don’t think this is something we should be diverting fungible funds to, at least. If you had activities in mind that don’t divert significant funds, or don’t boil down to changing laws, this analysis may not apply.
Evidence
Part 1: Exactly how illegal are psychedelics, really?

Please review these maps summarizing the legality of shrooms, mdma, and ibogaine
Note that most of the world is GREY (no data) in all these maps. What does that mean?

To quote Wikipedia’s page on India, which I picked because it is a country with high population: “Psilocybin mushrooms are officially illegal but the police is largely unaware of their prohibition and are poorly enforced in India.”

Okay, so… based on all this, I’m going to tentatively conclude that psychedelics are basically an unenforced non-issue for the major population centers of the world, to the point where it takes a lot of work to even figure out their obscure legal status. Maybe if you actually started distributing psychedelics it would become an issue, but as of now it’s not even on the map.

Part 2: But what if it was available by prescription?

You know what else is available by prescription and probably helps mental health? Antidepressants! This are two articles about the global picture for antidepressant use. 1) Business Insider 2) The Guardian
Eyeballing these charts, it seems pretty clear that prescription antidepressant use would drop off pretty sharply outside high income countries. It ranges from 1.1% to 0.1% for the relatively well off countries on this chart and looking at the trend of this chart, i think it would be even lower than 0.1% in low income countries. I doubt that this is because the population of countries just don’t need anti-depressants—it’s probably an issue of access to medicine. So I’m pretty sure legalizing psychedelics is not actually going to help most people acquire psychedelics.
Part 3: Okay, but what about people for whom laws ARE a limiting factor? They matter equally!

Okay, lets just consider the United States as the case study, since it’s easy to get data about the USA.

Americans may be the best case scenario in terms of post-legalization uptake, because, as per the previous articles, they use the most drugs. 1 in 6 Americans use prescriptive psychoactives of any kind.
This is promising! Maybe Americans would benefit from using more psychedelics, and they would do so if it was legal. Marijuana legalization did increase marijuana use...although ehhhh I suggest clicking on that link and eyeballing that chart, or going into the original paper and looking at the stats if you want to quantify this. Colorado is the most dramatic increase at ~11% to ~16% (eyeballing the chart) but e.g. Washington didn’t really see huge increases. The grayed-out lines are states that didn’t get legalized, and some of them saw increases to. Still, there are probably important differences between marijuana and various psychedelics in terms of ease of producing them and acquiring them.
Anyway, how much would it cost to do make it legal and available?
For the USA, full R&D to “marketing approval” of a random compound is estimated to cost 1.4b and increasing to 2.9b USD (2013 dollars) post-R&D cost. “Marketing approval” is a high standard. This means that you can openly advertise for it. For the USA, FDA approval for things (that have not been made illegal) costs 19m USD (2013 dollars.
But maybe the market would take care of that itself. What would be the lobbying costs?
Here’s a linkdump preliminary research on the landscape of current lobbying spending to legalize marijuana and end the War on Drugs in general. The numbers I’m seeing in these articles are inconsistent with each other (e.g some of Opensecret’s figures are lower than 1 million/year nationwide, yet this random article which is just about New Jersey is higher than 1 million?) but I admit I have not read this super carefully. I’m not going to summarize these further because I’ve set aside 1.5 hours to write this post, and that time is now up, but I will leave these sources for anyone who wishes to carry this forward. It’s possible that lobbying might actually be sort of affordable?
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=N09 https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/marijuana/
https://www.mcall.com/news/nation-world/mc-nws-new-jersey-marijuana-offshore-wind-lobby-20190304-story.html
We’ve taken USA as a case study, but it is probably cheaper to lobby other countries. (But, most of the countries for which legalization is a likely barrier are also high income countries...with smaller populations...and less prescription drug use)
But even if you succeeded at all of this in the United States...how many people would you really help? The US population is 327.2 million, and even if we really optimistically assume that the number of psychedelic users will grow to match the number of antidepressant users, that’s only 1.1% of them, so… around 3.6 million people, and let’s forget about those who would use psychedelics anyway. How much are you really willing to spend on accomplishing that? I mean, pick a realistic budget, and put it into here to compare it to some other stuff https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/impact-calculator
Let’s suppose you happen to spend a probably unrealistically low 5 million dollars on this problem, and you have an unrealistic high 100% chance of success, and as a result an unrealistically high 3.6 million people who weren’t motivated enough to buy illegal psychedelics are now free to use psychedelics a decade earlier than it otherwise would have been legalized without your intervention...you could have given 3.9 million people access to a year of clean water. Sort of—i don’t think this impact calculator takes room for more funding and scaling into account. But, just to be in the ballpark—Does that really seem at all equivalent? To me, it feels extremely not equivalent, by orders of magnitude. (Not to put too sharp a point on it, but I bet having access to clean running water also boosts creativity, problem solving, reduces stress, aids in healing from trauma, and all the other benefits listed.)
Epistemic status: all my knowledge on this topic was acquired during the 1.5 hours it took to research and write this post, and I admit that the research is extremely haphazard—aimed at establishing very rough “order of magnitude” type estimates. I have no prior stake or knowledge about this, I just quickly wrote it up because I felt like taking a shot at the prize. Nevertheless, I do feel fairly confident in the opinions expressed here.

>My current view is that psychedelics are an extremely promising altruistic cause area (on par with global health & x-risk reduction) – I’d like to learn more about how this might be mistaken.
A point of clarification: Your “on par with” phrasing perhaps inadvertently suggests that psychedelics are not a global health intervention. My analysis views psychedelics legalizations AS a global health intervention, and therefore subject to the same metrics. E.g. the way Givewell considers laws restricting and taxing tobacco a global health intervention).

ishaan 11 May 2019 17:21 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Elise’s comment on: Is preventing child abuse a plausible Cause X?
I don’t know what is the previous level of knowledge on this topic of you and other readers of this forum, and which parts of my knowledge would be obvious to you and which not;
I think it’s generally best to assume the level of common knowledge you’d expect from a graduate student in an unrelated field.
what would be, from the perspective of a cause, the benefit of being a “cause X” in the EA community
Right now I think the main effect would be more intellectual talent directed towards researching the various strategies that might further the cause. In particular: figuring out the bottlenecks to improving that area, attempting to measure how much those improvements cost (especially if the key bottleneck is “lack of funding”, but even otherwise), and attempting to measure the scope of how much we expect they improve quality of life.
If the outcomes of those analyses suggest that it’s promising, then some potential results would include: funding directed towards those strategies, advising of more people to acquire skills and take careers that directly contribute to those strategies, and more intellectual talent devoted to improving those strategies on a meta level.

ishaan 13 May 2019 23:23 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area
I’m arguing that more spending on psychedelic research & some advocacy work (in particular, helping the rollout of FDA approval of MDMA & psilocybin go smoothly) would be leveraged.
I guess what it boils down to, is how much EA money do you think would need to go into accomplishing this, and for what expected outcome? I’d like to make the distinction that if you can recruit some talent from the EA community to use money provided by, say, Clarity Health Fund (which is earmarked for psychedelics anyway) to further psychedelics related causes in a more effective way, then I am absolutely all for it and in full support. But we ultimately want high impact with fairly small amounts of EA money, or via the use of free EA talent, or EA talent that is paid in ways other than EA money, because of the high counterfactual price tag on EA money. Calculating the expected outcome of this is tough, but possible, and I would change my mind if I saw a plausible estimate that came out as being impactful.
I think that I understand why you think this will work, and hopefully the next few paragraphs demonstrate that understanding. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that GiveWell (by their own admission) did not account for leverage in their early evaluations, and this may have created some undesirable anchoring / lock-in effects with respect to Effective Altruism recommended activities.
And I agree that “leverage” can mean that causes that seem “less efficient” in terms of a strict “direct impact” / “resources spent” metric may have been unjustifiably ignored by the EA community, especially if the form of “leverage” involved is more complex than a simple fundraiser. Moderately efficient causes could benefit from an EA mindset, so long as resources are being redirected from less efficient to more efficient areas and not the other way around. Most of the world’s resources either can’t (due to logistics) or won’t (due to the priorities of power structures and individual donors) be directed towards the most high impact causes. If you can recruit those resources, with a realistic assessment of your impact being greater than what those resources would otherwise have gone to, it would still be worthy of the name effective altruism, and you would still have more direct impact at the end of the day, using resources that would otherwise have gone somewhere with less direct impact.

In fact, when you put it that way, there’s a whole host of cause areas you might consider. While trying to “End Homelessness in America” doesn’t beat distributing mosquito nets to low income countries on a “direct impact” / “resources spent” metric, there is plenty of money that you might think of as effectively “earmarked” for USA purposes only, or earmarked for a certain type of intervention. If you redirect resources that would be otherwise spent on something less impactful, a high difference in impact means that you have done a good job, because of leverage. I think many in the EA community recognize this to some extent, and Givewell is currently investigating opportunities to influence government policy and improve government spending. The concept of leverage really broadens the scope of what “EA” could mean, and potentially does open the door to sometimes helping people in high income countries or furthering causes that don’t boast efficiency per dollar, although I would guess generally not financially helping but rather via skills or spreading a message (e.g. influence donors who are of a less global mindset to donate to more effective cause within the local parameters they care about, or help organizations that aren’t necessarily focused on doing the absolute maximum good per dollar still become more effective within the narrower scope of their goals, etc...). One could consider psychedelics legalization to be potentially a part of such activities.

Now that I’ve (hopefully) shown that I understand where you’re coming from here, let me explain why I still don’t think this will work, and what it would take to change my mind.

From the perspective of an individual, the act of recruiting EA money to your cause is also a form of “leverage”. This applies to everyone and everything, not just psychedelics: if you believe that EA is generally on the right track, then the less “EA resources” you leverage to your cause, and the more otherwise inefficient resources you leverage to your cause, the better your (counterfactually informed) impact will be. Even people doing global poverty should preferentially recruit non-EA funds, if they believe that EA funds are otherwise well allocated.

I would (from my currently naive perspective) agree with you that investing in key research goals probably would be “leveraged” impact, in the sense that direction some EA-money to this might lead to other resources being redirected to this down the line. If we’re talking about potentially diverting funding from other EA causes, we’ll need to be super stringent about impact-per-dollar. We can and should include “leverage” in those calculations, but said calculations must occur.

From what I understand, you’re essentially suggesting just a little bit of research and advocacy, on a reasonable expectation that it will catalyze some sort of tipping point, redirecting funds from various non-EA sources towards the problem. But as long as you’re working within an EA framework, it’s important to quantify your estimate of the impact of that investment.

To estimate the...counterfactual-blind?… impact of your (research, advocacy, whatever) actions, you’d have to estimate the expected impact on policy outcome (how much earlier do we estimate the relevant FDA approvals, policy changes, etc happen as a result of the diverted funds) and the expected value of those policy outcomes (how many people will get better treatment as a result of those outcomes, relative to the treatment they otherwise would have gotten). In other words, how many people benefited?

And then, you have to introduce the counterfactual question of what those resources could be spent on instead. You have to first calculate the counterfactual impact of any EA-resources, which (unless EAs are misguided) have a particularly heavy counterfactual impact price tag (At least when it comes to asking for money? Judging from what I’ve seen posted about the EA job market recruiting EA talent could still be a good move). After that, you’d have to calculate the counterfactual impact of all the other resources you leveraged (though I think it would be okay to just place that at zero for now, to keep the models simple enough to use).
And…despite non-EA leverage, I just don’t think these numbers will come out that way, for all the reasons described in the previous comment. Even if you make brilliant use of leverage to mostly set aside the fact that the countries that are in a position to benefit from this are expensive to operate in, you’d still have to deal with the fact that the lack of research and attending policy changes has little to do with global bottlenecks to access…which means that the numerator in the “beneficiaries/EA-resources spent” equation is going to be pretty low. I don’t mean all the resources you gain leverage—you can make your own calculations of what the counterfactual impact price tag of those are, and depending on who you leverage maybe you could even make a case for that being zero. I mean specifically the EA-money. A person using EA money for this cause would have to operate on a shoestring budget to beat the counterfactual cost. If you agree with my earlier statement that per individual, a year of clean water is, let’s say, 10x as good as reaping the unrealistically-best-case scenario of psychedelics research a decade earlier than otherwise (which seems really lowballing it to me), you’d have to honestly believe that every EA-derived $50k (ignoring further leverage) you spend pushes the timeline forward by a year just to “break even”. I admit I don’t fully understand this issue or the plan but that seems really optimistic when I compare that to the aforementioned $19m figure required to push un-stigmatized drugs through FDA approval.

Anyway, if someone were to do those calculations, it would be a good use of time, because developing methods to evaluate the impact of research/advocacy on policy change in general is something we need. (stay tuned! I may be posting more on that later).

In fact it’s worth just assuming psychedelics are as useful as any drug currently in use when doing your calculations, because even if psychedelics aren’t it, there would be many other items in this general class and we can try to estimate expected values of adding funds to promising research in general to refer to them all. If you were to demonstrate that psychedelic research/advocacy might have that level of impact by these metrics, it would be a pretty big deal even if this particular class of under-researched psychoactive compounds ended up being a flop, because there are a lot of other things that would potentially also become high impact by the same arguments.
In these discussions of impact, I think it’s worth pointing out that unlike, say, x-risk, something like psychedelics research/advocacy is sufficiently concrete that we can reasonably attempt to quantify the impact of our activities, at least to within one or two orders of magnitude, and compare numbers...at least next to research/advocacy for other policy interventions (which happening in low-income countries which have more people and are cheaper to lobby in)
This hopefully goes without saying, but I don’t mean to claim that psychedelics is irrelevant and EAs should not pay any attention to this at all: If you or anyone else has done the research and feel that this is a low hanging fruit, even if the aforementioned impact evaluation doesn’t come back as highly efficient, I would encourage that person to find a way to pluck it...and if some of the under-utilized EA-talent was leveraged towards the problem, it could be a good thing. I just wouldn’t support redirecting global poverty or x-risk focused funding to this (unless some very surprising and convincing impact evaluations along the lines of what I described came out and changed my mind).
(Oh also, I think my use of the world “legalizing” in the previous comment might have been misleading, I just meant the general situation where our interventions allow psychedelics to be used in more and more contexts, without breaking the law. Not legalizing recreational use specifically )

ishaan 17 May 2019 21:53 UTC
5 points
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on: Overview of Capitalism and Socialism for Effective Altruism
For skimmers, page 10 of Candidate Scoring System 5 has a diagram outlining the overall methodology of this analysis nicely. My overall impression of the document is that it’s not dissimilar in basic outlook from a mainstream political candidate evaluation or voter’s guide, leaning towards more quantitatively driven methods, and keeping an eye towards issues favored by Effective Altruists.
Things I like: This provides one of the few analyses of politicians on EA specific issues like X-risk, animal welfare, and global poverty. I think that’s potentially important, as (to my knowledge) there are not currently enough political evaluations of candidates based on that sort of thing. I support this and other volunteer projects attempting this sort of thing.
Things I’m ambivalent about: When it comes to areas which are non-neglected in non-EA political discourse, which you might find in a mainstream voter’s guide, I don’t currently feel more inclined to trust it over non-EA evaluations. That is to say, I don’t see any reason to consider it unusually trustworthy with respect to things like which candidates are best for specific cause areas such as climate change, education, abortion, etc let alone broad ideological evaluations of “capitalism vs. socialism” as general philosophies. This is not meant to be discouraging—creating voting guides is a crowded field, being the “most trustworthy” isn’t necessarily easy, though I do wonder if it might be better going forward to place a greater focus on evaluating the less crowded areas.
Some critique of the scope: I think an EA framework evaluating mainstream politics should include interventions (e.g. plans of organizing, activism), not just cause areas, and an analysis of “counterfactual” / “marginal” impact of those interventions, and a sense of the “tractability” when possible...not just the gross impact and importance of the policies themselves.
Whether or not some ideology, framework, -ism, policy recommendation, transfer of power, deep systemic change, etc can be rigorously shown to be superior to some alternative in terms of practical impact is politically interesting, and might change my vote or my ideological loyalty, but that doesn’t help in terms of altruistic activity if the problem is intractable. For me to consider it effective as a form of altruism, I’d want a description of the various methods (beyond just personally voting) to influence political outcomes, and the resources / price tag of shifting the probabilities of an election outcome …in addition to estimates of the impact of doing so. (Positive side effect—this would help keep focus on political issues in proportion to their estimated practical importance)
I don’t think that’s a crowded area, either—I’ve encountered some (but not a lot) of mainstream work on the cost effectiveness of political activity.
(Maybe that’s not the intention/scope of this project, though, and that’s okay—my main intent is to say that it would be really good if in general politically based interventions started focusing more on that part of the analysis)
Edit: Maybe this is the wrong thread, as I now realize there are other posts about the document as a whole, but I’ll leave this up unless someone thinks I should move it.

ishaan 21 May 2019 6:30 UTC
7 points
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on: How to improve your productivity: a systematic approach to sustainably increasing work output
If you’re taking suggestions for things to test, personally my (unquantified) single most successful productivity intervention yet has been putting a treadmill under my desk, and then stacking a box on the table to raise my laptop to elbow height.

My productivity per hour and general willpower to work is unchanged, but I’m now able to be on the computer for much longer hours at a stretch because I don’t have to deal with the postural pain of sitting too long, and I no longer have to fight off my natural tendency to fidget and avoid being still. (I just switch from walking or standing to sitting or lying down as I get tired, with no interruption in work flow).

Perhaps more notable is the I think not unreasonable expectation that the additional 1.5-3.5 hours of walking per day it will ultimately increase my total number of productive years and decrease my sick days. That’s not so easy to test on myself, but the benefits of walking are pretty well established. (Though of course the primary motivator there is not productivity, really)

I’ve also noticed improvements in baseline mood immediately after a long “walk”, improving general physical stamina over time (e.g. I can walk farther without discomfort, I don’t get as easily tired if I take on a task which requires being on my feet all day) and better lower body mobility and flexibility at the gym (e.g. lower and better form with squats).

Conflict of interest: it may end up being convenient for me if the CE office ends up getting a treadmill desk :P

ishaan 22 May 2019 3:08 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: “EA” doesn’t have a talent gap. Different causes have different gaps.
In 2015 you (Benjamin) wrote a post which, if I’m reading it right, aspires to answer the same question, but is in very direct contradiction with the conclusions of your (Katherine’s) post regarding which causes are relatively talent constrained. I would be interested in hearing about the sources of this disagreement from both of you (Assuming it is a disagreement, and not just the fact that time has passed and things have changed, or an issue of metrics or semantics)
here is the relevant excerpt
https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/
...Most of the causes the effective altruism community supports are more talent constrained than funding constrained. For example (in all of the following, I’ve already taken account of replaceability): 1) International development… 2) Building the effective altruism community and priorities research… 3) AI safety research...
...The main exception to this – a cause supported by the community that seems more funding constrained than talent constrained – is ending factory farming. Jon Bockman of Animal Charity Evaluators, told me that vegan advocacy charities have lots of enthusiastic volunteers but not enough funds to hire them, meaning that funding is the greater bottleneck (unless you have the potential to be a leader and innovator in the movement). So, the more weight you put on this cause, the more funding constrained you’ll see the community. But the situation could reverse if you think developing meat substitutes is the best approach, because that could be pursued by for-profit companies or within academia.
It sounds like both of you (Katherine and Benjamin) agree that AI is “talent constrained”. Pretty straightforward, it’s hard to find sufficiently talented people with the specialized skills necessary.
It sounds like the two of you diverge on global poverty, for reasons that make sense to me.
Katherine’s analysis, as I understand it, is straightforwardly looking at what Givewell says the current global poverty funding gap is...which means that impact via talent basically relies on doing more good with the existing money, performing better than what is currently out there. (And how was your talent gap estimated? Is it just a counting up of the number of currently hiring open positions on the EA job board?)
Benjamin’s analysis, as I understand it, is that EA’s growing financial influence means that more money is going to come in pretty soon, and also that effective altruists are pretty good at redirecting outside funds to their causes (so, if you build good talent infrastructure and rigorously demonstrate impact and a funding gap, funding will come)
Is this a correct summary of your respective arguments? I understand how two people might come to different conclusions here, given the differing methods of estimating and depending on what they thought about EA’s ability to increase funding over time and close well demonstrated funding gaps.
(As an aside, Benjamin’s post and accompanying documents made some predictions about the next few years—can anyone link me to a retrospective regarding how those predictions have born out?)
It sounds like you diverge on animal rights, for reasons I would like to understand
Benjamin, it sounds like you / Joe Bockman are saying that ending factory farming is exceptional among popular EA causes in having more talent than they can hire and being in sore need of funding.
Whereas Katherine, it sounds like you’re saying that animal rights is particularly in need of talent relative to all the other cause areas you’ve mentioned here.
These seem like pretty diametrically opposed claims. Is this a real disagreement or have I misread? I’m not actually sure what the source of this disagreement is, other than Katherine and Joe having different intuitions, or bird’s eye views of different parts of the landscape? Has Joe written more on this topic? If it’s just a matter of two people’s intuitions, it doesn’t leave much room for evaluating either claim. (I get the sense that Katherine’s claim isn’t based on intuition, but the fact that EA animal organizations are currently expanding, which increases the estimated number of open job postings available in the near future. Is that correct?)
(Motivation: I’m reading this post now as part of the CE incubation program’s reading list, and felt surprised because the conclusions conflicted with my intuitions, some of which I think were originally formed by reading Benjamin’s posts a few years ago. As the program aims to set me on a path which will potentially help me cause redirection of funding, redirection of talent, create room for more talent, and/or create room for more funding within global poverty or animal issues, the answers to these questions may be of practical value to me.)
I’d be happy if either of you could weigh in on this / explain the nature and sources of disagreement (if there is in fact a disagreement) a bit more!
(PS—can I tag two people to be notified by a comment? Or are people notified about everything that occurs within their threads?)

ishaan 22 May 2019 3:44 UTC
3 points
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on: “EA” doesn’t have a talent gap. Different causes have different gaps.
What are your thoughts on this? https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/
In particular
> a cause supported by the community that seems more funding constrained than talent constrained – is ending factory farming. Jon Bockman of Animal Charity Evaluators, told me that vegan advocacy charities have lots of enthusiastic volunteers but not enough funds to hire them, meaning that funding is the greater bottleneck (unless you have the potential to be a leader and innovator in the movement).
Please see also my reply to Benjamin Todd’s comment for a longer version of this question, which I wanted to address to both of you, but I don’t think this forum has user tagging functionality.

ishaan 23 May 2019 4:02 UTC
4 points
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on: EA Survey 2018 Series: Cause Selections
If EA engagement predicts relatively more support for AI relative to climate change and global poverty, I’m sure people have been asking as to whether EA engagement causes this, or if people from some cause areas just engage more for some other reason. Has anyone drawn any conclusions?
Either way: one _might_ conclude that “climate change” and “global poverty” are more “mainstream” priorities, where “mainstream” is defined as the popular opinion of the populations from which EA is drawing. Would this be a valid conclusion?
Do people know of data on what cause prioritization looks like among various non-EA populations who might be defined as more “mainstream” or more “hegemonic” in some fashion? Bearing in mind that “mainstream” / distance from EA is a continuum, and it would be useful to sample multiple points on that continuum. (For example, “College Professors” might be representative of opinions that are both more mainstream and more hegemonic within a certain group)
(I’ll try to come back to this comment and link any relevant data myself if I come across it later)
What links here?
- David_Moss's comment on EA Survey Series 2018 : How do people get involved in EA? by David_Moss (2 Aug 2019 23:10 UTC; 12 points)

ishaan 23 May 2019 6:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ishaan’s comment on: EA Survey 2018 Series: Cause Selections
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MDxaD688pATMnjwmB/to-grow-a-healthy-movement-pick-the-low-hanging-fruit

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ywputy5v0qzu3t/Understanding Effective Givers.pdf?dl=0

This isn’t really what I was looking for, but it’s an”online national sample of Americans” polled on giving to deworming vs make a wish and the local choir. I’m hoping to find something more focused on the diversity of causes within EA, and more well defined and more adjacent populations.

I mentioned college professors above, but I can think of lots of different populations e.g .”students from specific colleges” or “members of adjacent online forums”, or “startup founders” or ’doctors without borders people” or “teach for america people” or even “Non-EA friends and relatives of EAs” which might be illustrative as points of comparison—some easier to poll than others. Generally I think the most useful data comes from those who are representative of people who are already sort of adjacent to EA, represent key institutions, and whose buy-in would be most practically useful for movement building over decades, which is why I went for “college professors” first.

ishaan 28 May 2019 20:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: KarolinaSarek’s comment on: How to improve your productivity: a systematic approach to sustainably increasing work output
I haven’t tried a mini-stepper! Next time I’m at the gym I’ll check if they have one I can try. Even if it does not work as well, it would certainly be a lot cheaper and more portable.
Untested Speculation: People using steppers/bikes etc. might stop exerting conscious attention to move once they get sufficiently absorbed in their work. A special property of treadmills is that if you stop, you’ll be carried backwards and away from your keyboard—this trains you out of stopping pretty instantly. Steppers/bikes/etc wouldn’t automatically have this property—though perhaps one could mimic the training by adding a “don’t stop!” signalling noise or something. Ultimately I think it’s probably important that the movement not require much conscious attention.

ishaan 29 May 2019 4:09 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Julia_Wise’s comment on: Drowning children are rare
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)

BenHoffman’s central claim is not that people aren’t suffering preventable diseases. It is only that “drowning children” (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.

So they’re questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasn’t all that low hanging fruit of saving “drowning children” been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?

And the answer supposedly can’t be “there’s simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning children” because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, there’s a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the “there’s just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and that’s why the price remains low” is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And that’s why it makes sense to assume that they’re all at the marginal price. The claim is that if you were truly purchasing all the low hanging lives saved, and your budget was that high, the marginal price should have gone up by now because you should have already bought up all the cheap life saving methods.

(I’m just exploring the thought process behind this particular subsection of the analysis, which is not to be taken as being agreement with the overall argument, in whole or in part.)

ishaan 29 May 2019 18:14 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Drowning children are rare
I think examining the number of low hanging fruits is important. I’m not yet sure if this analysis is correct, but I too would like to know exactly how many low hanging fruits there are, and exactly how low hanging they are, and whether this information is consistent with EA org’s actions. If your analysis is true, people should put more energy into expanding cause areas beyond health stuff.
I think it might be nice if someone attempted a per-intervention spreadsheet / graph estimating how much more expensive the “next marginal life saved / qaly / disease prevented / whatever” would get, with each additional dollar spent...while sort of assuming that that currently existing organizations can successfully scale or new organizations can be formed to handle the issue. (So, sort of like “room for more funding”, but focusing instead on the scale of the problem rather than the scale of the organization that deals with the problem). Has someone already done so? I know plenty of people have looked at problem scales in general, but I haven’t seen much on predicting the marginal-cost changes as we progress along the scales.
Okay, that said: this last paragraph was in the original post but not the cross-post
As far as I can see, this pretty much destroys the generic utilitarian imperative to live like a monk and give all your excess money to the global poor or something even more urgent. Insofar as there’s a way to fix these problems as a low-info donor, there’s already enough money. Claims to the contrary are either obvious nonsense, or marketing copy by the same people who brought you the obvious nonsense. Spend money on taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits. And try to fix the underlying systems problems that got you so confused in the first place.
I think there’s potentially a much deeper problem with this statement, which goes beyond any in the impact analysis. Even if one forgets all moral philosophy, disregard all practical analyses, and use nothing but concrete practical personal experience and a gut sense of right and wrong to guide one’s behavior...well, for me at least, that still makes living frugally to conserve scarce resources for others seem like a correct thing to do?
I know people who live in poverty, personally—both in the “below the American poverty line” sense (I guess I’m technically below that line myself in a grad student sort of way, but I know people who are rather more permanently under it), and in the “global poor” sense. Even by blood alone, I’m only two generations removed from people who have temporarily experienced global poverty of the <$2/day magnitude. So for me at least, it remains obvious on a personal face-to-face level that among humans the global poor are the ones who can make best personal use of scarce resources. I imagine there are people whose social circles don’t include people in local or global poverty, but that’s not an immutable fact of life—one can change that, if one thinks social circles are essential ingredients to making impact.
I don’t really agree with the framing of “Spend money on taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits” as something obviously distinct from helping the global poor. I don’t feel like I or my lived ones could never experience global poverty. I feel like I’m part of a community and friendly with people who might directly experience or interact with global poverty. If being a low info donor doesn’t help...are there not things one can do to become a “high info donor” or direct worker for that matter?
I think that if I believed similarly to you—and if I understand correctly, you think: that abstractions are misleading, that face-to-face community building and support of loved ones and people you actually know is the important thing here, that it’s important to build your own models of the world rather than trust more knowledgeable people to do impact evaluations for you, that it’s really hard to overcome deceptive marketing practices by donation seekers......then, rather than claiming that there is no imperative to live frugally and engage with global poverty. If I believed this I think I’d advocate that more EAs set some time aside to get some hands-on, face to face involvement in with the people who generate impact evaluations (or at least, actually read the impact evaluation), that donors spend more time meeting people who do direct work, and that both donors and direct work spend more time interacting with the supposed direct beneficiaries of their work. That seems really different from saying that the “utilitarian imperative” is wrong. (And maybe you do advocate all these other things as well, I don’t mean to imply you don’t...but why advocate for just staying within yourself and your circle?)
If there’s a lot of misinformation and misleading going on, I do think there’s ways to get around that by acting to put oneself in more situations where one has more opportunities for direct experience and building one’s own models of the world. Going straight to the idea that you should just take care of yourself and people you currently know seems …a bit like giving up? And even if you don’t think a global scope is appropriate, is there not enough poverty within your immediate community and social circle that there remains an urgency to be frugal and use resources to help others?
I just don’t see how your analysis, even if totally correct, leads to the conclusion that the imperative to frugality and redistribution is destroyed. I mean, as long as we’re calling it “living like a monk”, at least some of the actual monks did it for exactly that purpose, in the absence of any explicit utilitarianism, with the people they tried to help largely on a face to face basis. it’s not an idea that rests particularly heavily on EA foundations or impact evaluations.
(I don’t want to be construed as defending frugality in particular, just claiming the general sense of the ethos of redirecting resources to people who may need it more, and the personal frugality that is sometimes motivated by that ethos, as being positive… and that the foundations of it do not rely on trusting Givewell, Effective Altruism, and so on)

ishaan 30 May 2019 23:21 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: There’s Lots More To Do
Well, firstly, how much credence should we assign the actual analysis in that post?
Before we begin talking about how we should behave “even if” the cost per life saved is much higher than 5k—is there some consensus as to whether the actual facts and analysis of that post are actually true or even somewhat credible? (separate from the conclusions, which, I agree, seem clearly wrong for all the reasons you said).
As in, if they had instead titled the post “Givewell’s Cost-Per-Life-Saved Estimates are Impossibly Low” and concluded “if the cost per life saved estimate was truly that low, we could have already gone ahead and saved all the cheap lives, and the cost would be higher—so there’s something deeply wrong here”… would people be agreeing with it?
(Because if so, shouldn’t the relevant lower bound for cpls on the impact evaluations be updated if they’re wrong, and shouldn’t that probably be the central point of discussion?
And if not...we should probably add a note clarifying for any reader joining the discussion late, that we’re not actually sure whether the post is correct or not, before going into the implications of the conclusions. We certainly wouldn’t want to start thinking that there aren’t lives that can be saved at low cost if there actually are)

ishaan 31 May 2019 1:10 UTC
7 points
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on: Which scientific discovery was most ahead of its time?
I think part of the “continuity” comes from the fact that things that were “ahead of their time” tended not to be useful yet and get lost. Or worse, perhaps several people had to independently come up with, and support, and learn about an idea enough to use it for it to be actually adopted, or it just ends up sitting in some tinkerer’s basement or a dusty old tome.
So, you can flip this question: Which discoveries and inventions seem to have occurred after their time (e.g. they were technologically possible, the prerequisite ideas were pretty well known, and they would have been immensely useful practically in that time and place) and why didn’t civilization get at them before?

ishaan 1 Jun 2019 21:41 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Considering people’s hidden motives in EA outreach
You’ve laid out your opinions clearly. It is well cited, and has interesting and informative accompanying sources. It’s a good post. However, I disagree with some portions of the underlying attitudes, (even while not particularly objecting to some of the recommended methods)
In an ideal world where all people are rational, the ideas mentioned in this forum post would be completely useless.
The thing is, this is a purely inside view. It sort of presupposes effective altruist ideas are correct, and that the only barrier to widespread adoption is irrationality, rather than any sensible sort of skepticism.
While humans can be irrational in distributing status, there is such a thing as legitimately earned status. If we put on our idealist hats for just a moment and forget all the extremely silly things humans accord status to, status can represent the “outside view”—if institutions we respect seem to respect EA, that should increase our confidence in EA ideas. Not because we’re status climbing apes, but because “capable of convincing me” shouldn’t be a person’s only bar for trusting an argument. One should sensibly understands the limited scope of ones own judgement regarding big topics.
Now, taking our idealist hats off, obviously we can’t just trust what most people think, or consider all “high status” institutions as equally legitimate. We have to be discerning. But there are institutions (such as academia, in my opinion) whose approval matters because it functions as legitimate external validation. It’s not just social currency, it’s a well earned social currency. Not only that, it’s an opportunity to send our good ideas elsewhere to develop and mutate, as well as an opportunity to allow our bad ideas to be culled.
Unfortunately, people often are much less rational than we’d like to admit. Acknowledging this might be a pragmatic way for EA to improve outreach effectiveness.
The other issue is that when one is forming a broad, high level strategy for engaging in the world, it should feel good. The words one uses should make one feel warm inside, not exasperated at the irrationality of the world and the necessity of stooping to slimy feeling methods to win. Lest anyone irrationally (/s) dismiss this as a “warm fuzzy altruism”, in Bosch’s linked taxonomy, let me pragmatically (/s) employ an appeal to authority: Yudkowsky has made the same point. If it feels cynical and a touch Machiavellian, it usually will not ultimately produce morally wholesome results. Personally, I think if you want to really convince people, you shouldn’t use methods that would make them feel like you tricked them if they knew what you were doing.
Not to mention...it’s just sort of impractical for EA to attempt “we know you are irrational and we’re not above pushing your irrationality buttons” strategies. EA organizations are generally scrupulous about transparency so that we can hold each other accountable. This means that any cynical outreach attempts will be transparent as well. In general my sense is that idealist institutions can’t effectively wield some of these more cynical methods.
Also as a sort of aside, I don’t think there’s anything irrational about appealing to emotions. The key is to appeal to emotions in a way that we bring out behavior which is a true expression of people’s values. Often, when someone has a “bad” ideology, it is emotions of compassion that bring them out of it. Learning to better engage people on an emotional level is not in any way opposed to presenting logical and rational cases for things.
How can EA help people increase their status?
...in a non-cynical way?
By acquiring well-earned legitimacy! Make real positive impacts in areas other people care about. That means you can also help individual effective altruists make real measurable impacts that they can put on their resume and thereby increase their career capital. Create arguments that other intellectuals agree with and cite. Mentor other people and give them skills. Create mechanisms for people to be public about their donations and personal sacrifices they might make to further a cause in a socially graceful way (it inspires others to do the same). These are all things that the Effective Altruist community is currently doing, and it’s been working regardless of whether or not people are wearing suits.
What all these methods have in common is that they work with people’s rationality (and true altruistic motives), rather than work around their irrationality (and hidden selfish motives)- these are methods that encourage involvement with EA because people are convinced that them personally being involved with EA involvement will help further their (altruistic, but also otherwise) goals. The status raising effects in these methods are secondary to real accomplishment, they put forth honest signals of competence and skill, which the larger society recognizes because it is actually valuable. The appeals to emotion work via being connected to the reality of actually accomplishing the tasks that those emotions are oriented towards.
So, I would generally agree with your call for EAs to think about more ways to gain legitimacy. I just want to strongly prioritized well-earned legitimacy...whereas this post comes off as though it’s largely about gaining less legitimate forms of status. (Perhaps due to an implicit feeling that all status is illegitimate?)

ishaan 19 Jul 2019 20:58 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Ways Frugality Increases Productivity

I super agree with the title, but I think the text actually really undersells it! Runway not only increases your flexibility to not earn, but also reduces your stress and removes all sorts of psychologically difficult power dynamics that come with having a boss or otherwise being beholden to external factors for your well being (Yes, you may still have a boss or external factors, but now you won’t need their continued approval or success to pay bills, and that makes all the difference). Also, frugality enables you to really splurge without worrying when it really counts. Additionally, If you do not have any large and expensive possessions, tend to live in low cost apartments, and don’t have any dependents, you can move to whatever location it is most productive for you to be in with little to no overhead—whether that be across town or across the globe. Frugality in an urban context also forces close living situations (housemates) which can dramatically increase your social network. Further, you end up building scrappy skills and habits (e.g. negotiating apartments, meal planning, knowledge of public services, biking) which can really come in handy even when you’re not being frugal.
If you have the privilege to be in circumstances where you are able to make money without spending most of it, it’s good to take advantage of this if you can. Don’t feel bad about it if you can’t—it’s not always simple or possible for everyone. But if you feel like it would be pretty easy for you to be frugal and you’re choosing not to because you think spending a lot more makes you more productive, I strongly suggest reconsider.
Another point worth considering is that if you are sufficiently frugal, and if “productivity” is truly your goal here, you can “increase your productivity” by taking that money and hiring a second person to work on your project with you. Can all your time saving expenses increase your productivity more than a whole second person? (I’m sure there are some circumstances for which the answer is yes, but I imagine that is rare.)

ishaan 16 Aug 2019 21:18 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: How do you, personally, experience “EA motivation”?
The way I feel when the concept of a person in the abstract is invoked feels like a fainter version of the love I would feel towards a partner, a parent, a sibling, a child, a close friend, and towards myself. The feeling drives me to act in the direction of making them happy, growing their capabilities, furthering their ambitions, fulfilling their values, and so on. In addition to feeling happy when my loved ones are happy, there is also an element of pride when my loved ones grow or accomplish something, as well as fulfillment when our shared values are achieved. When engaging with the concept of abstract people, I can very easily imagine real people—each with a rich life history, unique ways of thinking, a web of connection, and so on...people who I would love if I were to know them. This motivates me to work hard to provide for their well being and growth, to undergo risks and dangers and sacrifices to protect them from harm, to empower and facilitate them in their undertakings, and to secure a future in which they may flourish—in the same ordinary sense that I imagine many other people do for themselves, their children and families, their tribes and nations, all people, all beings, and so on. I feel a sense of being united with all people as we work together to steer the universe towards our shared purpose.

You’ve italicized “effectively” as part of the question, but I don’t think I feel any real distinction between “wanting to help people” and “wanting to help people effectively”—when I’m doing a task, it seems like doing it effectively is rather straightforwardly better than doing it ineffectively. “Effective altruism” does imply a level of impartiality regarding who benefits which I don’t possess (since I care about myself, my friends, my family, and so on more than strangers), but it is otherwise the same. Even if I were I only to help people who I directly knew and personally loved in a non-abstract sense, I would still seek to do so effectively.

ishaan 19 Aug 2019 3:34 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: ‘Longtermism’
I think it’s worth pointing out that “longtermism” as minimally defined here is not pointing to the same concept that “people interested in x-risk reduction” was probably pointing at. I think the word which most accurately captures what it was pointing at is generally called “futurism” (examples [1],[2]).
This could be a feature or a bug, depending on use case.
- It could be a feature if you want a word to capture a moral underpinning common to many futurist’s intuitions while being, as you said, remaining “compatible with any empirical view about the best way of improving the long-run future”, or to form a coalition among people with diverse views about the best ways to improve the long-run future.
- It could be a bug if people started informally using “longtermism” interchangably with “far futurism”, especially if it created a motte-bailey style of argument in which to an easily defensible minimal definition claim that “future people matter equally” was used to response to skepticism regarding claims that any specific category of efforts aiming to influence the far future is necessarily more impactful.
If you want to retain the feature of being “compatible with any empirical view about the best way of improving the long-run future” you might prefer the no-definition approach, because criteria ii is not philosophical, but an empirical view about what society currently wrongly privileges.
From the perspective of addressing the “bug” aspect however, I think criteria ii and iii are good calls. They make some progress in narrowing who is a “longtermist”, and they specify that it is ultimately a call to a specific action (so e.g someone who thinks influencing the future would be awesome in theory but is intractable in practice can fairly be said to not meet criteria iii). In general, I think that in practice people are going to use “longtermist” and “far futurist” interchangeably regardless of what definition is laid out at this point. I therefore favor the second approach, with a minimal definition, as it gives a nod to the fact that it’s not just a moral stance and but advocates some sort of practical response.

ishaan 19 Aug 2019 5:08 UTC
8 points
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on: How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
I think this description generally falls in line with what I’ve experienced and heard secondhand and is broadly true. However, there are some differences between my impression of it and yours. (But it sounds like you’ve collected more accounts, more systematically, and I’ve actually only gone up to the M.A. level in grad school, so I’m leaning towards trusting your aggregate)
Peer review is a disaster
I think we can get at better ways than peer review, but also, don’t forget that people will sort of inevitably have Feelings about getting peer reviewed, especially if the review is unfavorable, and this might bias them to say that it’s unfair or broken. I wouldn’t expect peer review is particularly better or worse than what you’d expect from what is basically a group of people with some knowledge of a topic and some personal investment in the matter having a discussion—it can certainly be a space for pettiness, both by the reviewer and from the reviewed, as well as a space for legitimate discussion.
PIs mostly manage people—all the real work is done by grad students and postdocs
I think this is sometimes true, but I would not consider this a default state of affairs. I think some, but not all, grad students and post docs can conceive of and execute a good project from start to finish (more, in top universities). However, I think most successful PIs are constantly running projects of their own as well. Moreover, a lot of grad students and post docs are running projects that either the PI came up with, or independently created projects that are ultimately a small permutation within a larger framework that the PI came up with. I do think it sometimes happens that some people believe they are doing all the work and sort of forget the degree of training and underestimate how much the PI is behind the scenes.
management and fundraising (and endless administrative responsibilities bestowed on any tenure-track professor) and can 100% focus on doing science and publishing papers, while getting mentoring from your senior PI and while being helped by all the infrastructure established labs
My impression was actually that grant writing, management, and setting up infrastructure is the bulk of Doing Science, properly understood. (Whereas, I get the impression that this write up sort of frames it as some sort of side show to the Real Work of Doing Science). With “fundraising”, the writer of the grant is the one who has to engage in the big picture thinking, make the pitch, and plan the details to a level of rigor sufficient to satisfy an external body. With “infrastructure”, one must set up the lab protocols so that they’re actually measuring what they are meant to. It’s easy to do this wrong, and what’s worse, it’s easy to do this wrong and not even realize you are doing it wrong and have those mistakes make it all the way up to a nonsensical and wrong publication. I think there is a level of fairly deep expertise involved in setting up protocols. And “management” in this context also involves a lot of teaching people skills and concepts, including sometimes a fair bit of hand-holding during the process of publishing papers (students’ first drafts aren’t always great, even if the student is very good).
People outside of biology generally think that doing a PhD means spending 6 years at the bench performing your advisor’s experiments and is only possible with perfect undergrad GPA, not realizing that neither of these are true of you’re truly capable
Very true in one sense—I agree that academia is very forgiving about credentials and gpa relative to other forms of post-graduate education, and people are definitely excited and responsive to being cold contacted by motivated students who will do their own projects. However, keep in mind that if you’re planning to work on whatever you want, rather than your adviser’s experiments, you will have more trouble fully utilizing the adviser’s management/infrastructure/expertise and to a lesser extent grants.
For a unique and individual project, you might have to build some of your infrastructure on your own. This means things may take much longer and are more likely not to work the first few times—all of which is a wonderful learning experience, but this does not always align with the incentive of publishing papers and graduating quickly. I think some fields (especially the ones closer to math) have the sort of “pure researcher” track you have in mind, but it’s rare in social and biological sciences in part because the most needed people are in fact those with scientific expertise who can train and manage a team and build infrastructure/protocol as well s fund raise and set an agenda- i think it would be tough to realistically delegate this to anyone who doesn’t know the science.
(But—again, this is only my impression from doing a masters and from conversations I’ve had with other people. Getting a sense of a whole field isn’t really easy and I imagine different regions and so on are very different.)

ishaan 21 Aug 2019 23:32 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading
brainstorming / regurgitating some random additional ideas -
Goodhart’s law—a charity may from the outset design itself or self-modify itself around Effective Altruist metrics, thereby pandering to the biases of the metrics and succeeding in them despite being less Good than a charity which scored well on the same metrics despite no prior knowledge of them. (Think of the difference between someone who has aced a standardized test due to intentional practice and “teaching to the test” vs. someone who aced it with no prior exposure to standardized tests—the latter person may possess more of the quality that the test is designed to measure). This is related to “influencing charities” issue, but focusing on the potential for defeating of the metric itself, rather than direct effects of the influence.
Counterfactuals of donations (other than the matching thing)- a highly cost effective charity which can only pull from an effective altruist donor pool might have less impact than a slightly less cost effective charity which successfully redirects donations from people who wouldn’t have donated to a cost effective charity (this is more of an issue for the person who controls talent, direction, and other factors, not the person who controls money).
Model inconsistency—Two very different interventions will naturally be evaluated by two very different models, and some models may inherently be harsher or more lenient on the intervention than others. This will be true even if all the models involved are as good and certain as they can realistically be.
Regression to the mean—The expected value of standout candidates will generally regress to the mean of the pool from which they are drawn, since at least some of the factors which caused them to rise to the top will be temporary (including legitimate factors that have nothing to do with mistaken evaluations)