I have heard some people wanted to have a ‘high impact career’ but instead they became a ‘stay at home mom or dad’. They had to raise 1 or more children—who then went on to become noble prize winners. That to me is an ‘interaction effect’.
ishi
Very good comment. I am in favor of some of universal or conditional basic income, because the issue of ‘relative deprivation’ is very real.
the most extreme example is someone who gets rich by winning a lottery (in my area alot of people play the lottery, because they want to get rich quick and also tend to have low paying and unpleasant jobs—they spend alot of their low incomes on the lottery—which spposedly is used by the govt to pay for public education).
If someone wins the lottery, supposedly everyone is better off, because the winners will buy more stuff in the area (multiplier effect) and so on—and will be much happier themselves because don’t have to worry about money. They can even quit an unpleasant job and pay for their kids’ private school or college tuition. .
But then everyone they know will show up and ask for some money , and they are quickly miserable, and sometimes go broke—some spend most of their money on luxuries which they think will make them happier.
Also often the ‘multiplier effect’ doesn’t really benefit or help much the people who also get money indirectly from the lottery. They just get a bit more than their own neighbors , who proceed to ask them for money. Cash transfers have to take into account the whole community.
I just skimmed this but it raises important issues (which of course have been discussed many times—often economic and philosophy papers).
(I partly skimmed it because i skimmed your ‘preprint’ paper linked to in another thread. I basically didn’t figure out what it said, except I noted it cited Robert May’s ‘complexity and stability’ book which is a classic, so I figured it said something—just not in my dialect.)
What really caught my attention (besides the author’s name) was mention of ‘vacation travel’ as non-altruistic, but part of personal responsibility. The same issue applies less obviously to ‘taking care of your kids’. In biology, having kids can be seen as either ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’—perhaps some child grows up to a great altruist. Aldo taking a vacation may be indirectly altruistic. If you don’t get some ‘personal time’, its possible you will not be able to take care of personal and family responsibilities, nor even be ‘altruistic’ (ie donate to various charities). You may help some others more if you take care of yourself enough to also help them.
The question is ‘how much is enough’?
I personally donate the little I do to local and small groups dealing with environmental and poverty issues, as well at times to individuals (who can’t make their bills—in a way this is taking care of myself—it keeps me on ok terms with people in my area, some of whom otherwise can get desperate and turn to criminal behavior.
In a sense i am paying a ‘tax’ for personal safety; which is why I support a some forms of ‘social safety or welfare nets’, and Universal or Conditional Basic Income . Also to an extent i am being ‘altruistic’ to people who are irresponsible—my donations ‘keep the peace’ around here, and while they provide some safety for me, they also provide safety for people who spend all their money on themselves (probably because they feel its a personal responsibility-and even altruistic in their own way. If they have some very expensive car , clothes, and house, their neighbors often like them—makes the nieghborhood aesthetic and a joy to live in. They would have less joy if they spent less on those, and relieved the ‘suffering’ among people who live a few blocks away who can’t afford heat, water, food or electricity by giving it to them. Often they also do not support government services such as ‘welfare’ or ‘rent subsidies’, except perhaps police protection --because that means they have to pay more taxes.
Also many go to church, so if they do give to charity, its their church. A few churches do ‘help the needy’ using donations, though often the help they give is a small fraction of the donations they get—which often goes for good salaries spent on nice clothes and cars and so on for the church staff. Of course the people who make those cars and clothes benefit as well—provides them a job, especially if they like the job. If its not a ‘3rd world sweatshop’ maybe they feel relativiely happy.
Ii
It may not be especially useful if you want to get a job or even a math degree The applications of that field are few and far between , only other way you can get a job in that is if you have a degree at PhD level. Or if you can write software you can be slightly involved in that field.
Many if not most or all modern fields of science use some variant of that formalism.
I’m biased towards some versions of graph / network theory , dynamical systems and multiobjective optimization theory. Since you are into neural nets and multivariable calculus it sounds like you are already doing a version of these. (I was in an interdisplinary field and took a fair amount of applied math and physics, many of the details of which i never used or really remember—i can look them up—my applied interests were in between very technical and ‘fermi’ (back of the envelope) problems and i usually tried to phrase them both ways—one solvable. and the other intractable.
I never had a class in statistics but i studied it a bit on my own (partly because one area i did use a bit was statistical physics, though alot of that does not like what you see in a statistics text thoughn they overlap, and also newer texts sometimes sort of have both fields—neural nets to an extent can be viewed as analogous or closely related to statistical physics (sometimes almost the same formalism). .
since i was into applications (and usually not the ones i was assigned to do which were more in biochemsitry and biotech—fields that don’t really interest me even though formally they can be phrased in analogy to ones i was interested in, i never could really get into the research (felt they were not problems of high priority to solve, or at least were ‘aesthetically’ inintersting—just alot of tecnique. its like music—i’m more into forms of modern pop/underground ‘Fermi’ music, rather than (tecnical) classical, thogh they can overlap. ).
That looks like an interesting attempt to answer a question many others have tried to answer . (These are also being discussed in an AAAS forum where people try to figure out what, can, and should be done—i have seen quite a few analyses and reccomendations of varying technical sophistication, and while they overlap, its overwhelming and beyond my competency to do more than just see which looks best.
Your top 5 causes all look good to me, as well as your larger list in the ‘green box’ in your diagram.
I would probably have 10-15 causes all ranked about same level. Also, I might have causes ‘geographically’ clustered, ie people should work on ones nearby, however defined.
I tend to thijnk transportation may be underranked, as well as clean energy, though I may be wrong. I wonder if transportation includes all the road building, airports, and energy used to make cars, planes,ships, shipping containers etc. --’life cycle analyses. Aslo , transportation has indirect effects—sprawl, lifestyles, etc. Resorts, casinos, convention centers are buldings, but exist partly due to transportation. Alot more could be said.
if you google ‘food loss and waste USFDA ’ they have some numbers and reports that appear to go through the details—they say there is loss every step of the way. I remember my own stores used to throw away what seemed to be immense amount of fruit and vegetables, and things like yogurt and cheese, and bread and pastry. Now i can’t tell because they have locked the dumpsters to keep people from getting free food, there is some organized collection of unused food, and also they do the trash now at times I am not around.
I tend to think alot small things like diet, food loss, and transportation actually could add up and also be ‘easily implemented’ in the short term, while the more difficult ones requiring engineering/technolopgy would be done as they became feasible.
But as anyone familiar with things like addiction , cigaerette use, obesity, diet change to even a low meat diet (i forget the term), views on issues like religion, evolution, sex, politics, economics , etc even ‘easy things to change’ (behavior, or ideas) sometimes is no faster than making technological advances.
I looked at that article because i saw that a ‘self designed course’ was also possible which would also have some supervision --the kind of thing I like, and also to see what the curricula was, where it was, and if it had an online ‘MOOC’ style or distance learning version. I noticed its at Brown, where i went, and see you can even course credit for taking the course—at Brown i did partially self-design a few courses which had supervisors or ‘mentors’, but wish i had done designed my entire major rather than take the ‘easy route’ and just take a predesigned one . I ended up taking alot of courses I would have taken anyway, but as result my credential actually makes it look like I prepared for a field i actually studied relatively little and prepared me for jobs i neither want nor am qualified for. Oh well. I’m somewhat familar with most topics (since they are in the EA literature i’ve read, and discussed elsewhere as well).
MOst likely this isn’t for me even if logicstics existed. I would probably would want a self-designed EA course, and perhaps might ot even call it EA. I’ll add some comments anyway.
My favorite source on EA is the one about ′ prospecting for gold’ by Owen-Barrett ( video) --mentioned above. The Atlantic article by Derek Thompson did not impress me (nor does the Atlantic in general for similar reasons). I’ve seen a few papers mostly in economics which were mathematically interesting , and like alot of EA stuff overlap with discussions by people who don’t identify as EAs—though in their work, donations, or life some would also basically say they try to figure out how to allocate resources to help others the most. Others just do research in math, physics, etc. similar to that done by EAs. (Its possible that is EA, because for some people research is their most useful contribution.)
For others it can art, family, education, even if EAs dont tend to mention those as causes.)
I’m not sure I consider myself an EA because while I agree in part with their methodology—eg Impact/neglectedness/Tractability criteria --and some of their reccomendations (best charities) alot of what I see I am not sure about (and wonder if one can even call it a part of ‘effective altruism’ if it appears that its not a good use of resources (including time) to even discuss these things—it might be an ‘innective use of time’. Some EA people seem to come up with view completely opposite to mine)
Sometimes EA appears to be more like a cult or religion with its own language and theology. Of course often different religions coexist and share similar goals, and permit visitors from outside the faith. Thats what i may be.
I come many times to different conclusions about cause prioritization, and some causes i think are important are basically ignored or ‘neglected’ in my opinion. I also think the INT formalism, while a first start, is ‘underspecified’ and may lead to ‘poorly posed problems’ (and priority rankings) , which is why I often disagree with what i see on EA.
(This is common in sciences of courses—people can use same scientific method and come to different conclusions—sometimes this means one scientific field basically splits into 2 or more. I could see this happening with EA as well, if it hasn’t already.
I’ve never posted anything but comments on EA sites—some of which got many—votes, while others got a few + votes—and I wonder what would happen if i did post my own article. I sometimes wonder if some of these ‘- votes’ are part of a ‘vendetta’. I’m in a science online group which has a few members with ‘extreme’ views (eg are far right’ in politics, ‘global warming denialists’, people who think “einstein was wrong’, etc.---basically ‘cranks’ or ideologues who do not belong in a science group) who will post a negative reply anytime these issues are discussed by people with mainstream scientific views, or are perceived as ‘leftists’.
Other times scientists with somewhat old but mainstream views will sort of try to make anyone discussing less mainstream and newer ideas which they don’t like, look like they don’t know what they are talking about, and the issues are settled. (These are usually ‘arguments from authority’ , and are a form of gatekeeping, and can be effective at maintaining authority—people with less knowledge will tend to believe them.
Most likely if I had or was in a ‘GISP’ it might have as a curricula 1/3rd of what is in the above one (the other 2/3rds would be viewed as supplementary material for people who time and interest), and 2/3rds other things, mostly in math/logic, social science (including semiotics) and complexity theory—though avoiding getting too deep into technical details because its easy to get stuck on an intractable problem, and hence become paralyzed. (I view those as most useful for figuring out what is ‘effective’. ) Ideally it would have arts, political, and applied education aspects (ie ‘each one teach one’—a ‘community service ’ requirement) but in a sense these can be included informally or implicitly. An ideal GISP would have a mix of people with different histories, competencies and interests.
I think I remember reading a book or paper by Noam Chomsky which said that chimpanzees don’t have minds because they beg for food usually directly facing a human, but if that doesn’t work they will use the same strategy and beg behind the human. He says this proves chimpanzees dont know what a human is—they view humans as food dispensers. My interpretation was if you are going to beg, maybe display subserviance—ask from the back, nor face to face. (Chomsky if i recall also said something like this in 2 lectures on linguistics i attended (along with many other things like ‘language did not evolve for communication’—his view was language first evolved to talk to yourself (he has a ‘technical term’ for this called ‘I(nternal) language’, which was then later found to have a slight evolutionary use for communication (‘E-language’) --eg Amazon books found it valuable. ).
Chomsky’s view is not what is found in my limited study of social biology, sociobiology, ethology (R Hinde had a reasonable book on this if i recall), etc. (Chomsky has written a few reasonable things, but also many which seem ‘off the wall’).
While i tend to think animals of all sorts have various forms of cognition, as noted with the ‘ant’ example, these often will be quite different. (Chomsky has also said the only animal language even close to human language is ‘bee language’—none of the other animals like birds or non-human primates have language in his view. I guess this is how you become the most famous public intellectual—Chomksy said it, i beleive it, and that is all there is to it. Chomsky related language to recursion—which as many have noted, he basically did not define until the 2000′s. Animals use recursion all the time in my experience. Squirrels know exactly where their acorns are and can point to them. )
Many if not most studies of animal cognition (and human) are flawed or imperfect—not really well thought out, but there is a bias to publish something. Sometimes they seem to be on the right track, and sometimes not.
My brief take (for what its worth—I can imagine its better not to give a ‘rapid response’ as opposed to a well thought out one): That seems to me to be a ‘tour de force’ even though I mostly skimmed it, and skipped some parts—its the kind of thing I would print out if I had a working printer. I am only slightly familiar with psychological literature and measures (eg ‘Cohen’s d’) though I read (or glance at at some of it), and am often skeptical of the results claimed to be found. (People often do something like a poll, or give some sort of test, without looking at things like context, wording, ordering of questions, etc.--but these lead to alot of publications)
The ‘procedure section’ for me was the first clue that was going to be a well thought out discussion.
The various tables on different studies I couldn’t really understand but from the discussion I felt I got the drift.
When the ‘drift-diffusion equation’ and ‘biased random walk’ appeared, I felt like I was walking on firm ground again (even if it was what is called in biology or complexity theory a ‘rugged fitness landscape’—its firm ground, not a swamp, just rugged and complex, like climbing a mountain.)
The discussion of culture and socioeconomic status, personality, genes, and social embededness seemed ‘spot on’—especially because the work of Boyd and Richerson was cited (although I cannot claim to be an expert, I view their books and papers to be basically the current theory of evolution—they are to Darwin what Einstein was to Newton, though B&R’s gene-culture evolution theory might be more analogous to Einstein’s special relativity—a slight modification of Newtonian dynamics—than to General Relativity which has a much more intricate math apparatus and wide applicability. B&R were preceded by qualitative discussions by several people, and a mathematical one by E O Wilson and C J Lumden (‘genes , mind and culture’) which used nonlinear diffusion equations—but EOW and CJL seemed to later agree that while the math in the book was correct (which came from statistical physics) their interpretation was not—B&R I think is the standard or (closer to) correct one (though in what i read they used discrete dynamical systems and evolutionary game theory rather than de’s).
I am familiar with some of the references (Tooby and Cosmides, Plomin, Heinrich , and more).
Also some of the literature on ‘universal moral grammar’ (papers by John Mikhail, Marc Hauser, etc.) and Chomskyian linguistics and ‘poverty of the stimulus’. (I agree with the connectionists that while Chomsky and people like S Pinker are correct that humans are not ‘blank slates’, both of them (along with evolutionary psychologists like Cosmides and Tooby, and J Fodor) go too far from proposing there is a ‘language organ’ , or ‘instinct’, or ‘module’ , nor are there ones for morality. Babies are not smartphones which have ‘apps’ such as a dictionary, calculator, political platform, religious text , 10 commandments, ’12 rules for living’, or even ‘universal grammar ’ genetically coded in them as part of their ‘god given’ hardware. Boyd and Richerson i think have a better take on what people are born with. (And some more recent work sort of adds some of what C Geertz (anthropology) called ‘thick detail’ about ‘social embededness’-ie people aren’t born with video games in their heads.
There are many papers critiquing Chomsky’s ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0212024 None of these however contradict the conclusions in the above paper about the unreliability of moral judgements. You don’t need a plane built with inherint design flaws to crash—planes with no such flaws can crash anyway due to human error, maintenance problems, or the weather.
I looked at the entire Vox article. I sort of dreaded what it was going to say, given that so many wealthy people have contributed to making alot of what I and others have benefited from, in varying extents. The Sackler gallery for example, and the Sackler’s also fund a scientific conference (PNAS). They are also being sued for their role in the creation of the ‘opiate epidemic’ which has made death from drug overdoses more common than from car crashes and guns combined. The Rockefellers created Rockefeller U, Carnegies and Mellons created CMU, Bloomberg funds JHU medical school (where Ben Carson—of Trump admin) worked; and Rockefellers also own a whole lot of land they keep mostly in ‘wilderness’ state. (One of the Rockefellers also was governer of WV for many years, and I think he was relatively progressive for that state, and knowing WV, its likely his wealth helped him stay in power.)
But JHU med school uses to an extent the poverty stricken population of drug addicts in Baltimore as paid ‘guinea pigs’ for clinical trials, so its not all ‘bread and roses’. Ben Carson may not be the best choice for heading HHS (or whatever its called)---there is also some dispute over whether he was a genius neurosurgeon, or just a very competent one. Universities also tend to produce results with mixed values—only some people can go to the best ones, and then they (like Gates) can walk off with tax funded research and use it to make billions$. (The Gates Foundation wok on African agriculture has been criticized for its emphasis on GM crops, and though they changed their policy, their earlier work on malaria if i recall also was criticized as being misprioritized (they spent most of it on research at U Wash theoretically on vaccine development, but labs often work on more than one thing).
Henry Ford brought us the Ford , and some argue that all these cars and related highways and suburban sprawl lead to issues like ‘climate crisis’, air pollution (said to be bad for your IQ), biodiversity loss, etc. ---a mixed blessing.
U’s are now bringing us AI , and we already have FB and WWW, which again may be mixed blessings—alot of people now say limit your time using these (especially children ). (I now my ‘quality of life’ (as low as it was) sort of wnet into free fall once i started using WWW—i thought it would be a useful tool because it was for others, but not for me. (Its more like a ‘hamster wheel’—better than nothing but not like being outside and free to wander like a wild mouse. I likely just dont know how to use it—and instead waste time writing stuff like this. My previous quality of life was actually reasonably high, though it was ‘materially’ low—i just didn’t have much besides reasonable health and alot of free time ).
My area has tons of art and other museums, and U’s , which have been funded by billionaires (including Arab Sheiks from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) , but there are plenty of people around here who basically don’t have access to them—sometimes because they don’t feel comfortable going to a free museum. For U’s, often they can’t get in because despite going to the local school system, for various reasons they aren’t prepared for the better U’s.
The article starts with Larry Summers—well known for his comments at Harvard on something like ‘there are few women in the sciences because they prefer housekeeping for their husbands’. He also had a ‘beef’ with Cornel West (though on that i was slightly sympathetic because West’s ‘rap album’ was a crime against humanity; West is also a ‘public intellectual’ basically (this class includes Sam Harris, S Pinker now (at one time he did a tiny bit of science, 50% of which is now known to somewhat incorrect but that’s science) , J Peterson, etc.). Public intellectuals are a step above journalists, and 2 steps above gossip columnists, talk show and podcast hosts. (The step above them actually leads to 2 stairways—one is called ‘science and scholarly research’; the other is called ‘fake science and scholarship’. They are almost indistinguishable to most people—its like asking a dog or a baby to decide whether a holy text is ‘the truth’, or a book on quantum theory is.)
Summers, though related in various ways to some good economists—eg P Samuelson (flawed but amongst the best) --doesn’t seem to be a chip off the same block in economics. He did ‘normal’ or ‘generic ’ economics, nothing special. His policies (i think he may have been in involved in NAFTA) have been criticized for not being ‘well thought out’ . (The author of the OP has an interview with an expert on AI , who says the risk with that is that if it works it can be like a very efficient factory which produces good products but in the process kills everyone who works there as part of the algorithm. Alot of applied economic theory of the kind Summers used—‘IS-LM’ etc.-- is like that. They get a result, just not a desirable one. This is partly why there is a ‘drug epidemic’ and ‘immigration crisis’ in USA (and even Europe—world bank and imf likely helped that along) , and Mexico has 20-40,000 homicides a year. )
I sort of think Summer’s reasoning could be taken to its asymptotic limits. For example, as anarcho-capitalists argue (eg Caplan at GMU, and Heumer at U Colo) things like taxes—all of them, not just wealth taxes—are inerintly distortionary, and a form of theft of private property , and should be abolished (except perhaps the taxes used to fund those people salaries at public U’s). Public education should similarily be abolished except maybe trade schools. Smarter people will be able to buy private education to develop robots, better babies, and AI.
Also considered what might have happenned if in 1776 or before USA or its precolonial form decided to ban slavery—which i view as a form of a wealth tax. Taking people’s private property—Jefferson might not have been able to help write the constitution , etc. We might not even have Dave Chappelle, Jay-Z, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, etc. We wouldn’t have best selling books about the civil war, or films like ‘incident at owl creek bridge’ (my favorite civil war short film).
The basic idea of the OP in Vox i agree with—a wealth tax needs to be ‘well considered’ (though that is difficult because its a political, not only logical problem—the logic i think is easy, but that is only in the ideal world without humans—if you try to include the logic of humans in your model, its more difficult, and almost intractable. ) A small wealth tax i think might just be like having a small ‘gas guzzler (or carbon) tax’ or ‘sin taxes’ (eg on cigarettes), or even a ‘meat tax’, ‘McMansion tax’, ‘commuting tax’—you have to pay for big roads and environmental devastation , etc.
The problems with FDR’s ‘new deal’ (SSI, etc.) and LBJ’s ‘great society’ and civil rights legislation (eg recent suit by Asian americans against Harvard for discrimination) shows how difficult it is to figure out what is the best policy. (In economics, one also has the issue of tarrifs, energy and climate change, and so on.)
I am an amateur and generalist , but this is fascinating—especially the GP-2 system. (I skimmed some of the links in the original post.) My limited background is in theoretical biology, including ‘natural intelligence and language learning’ so I am more familiar with issues in animal behavior and linguistics (eg debates between Chomskyian linguists and connectionists—eg https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0212024 ).
I have actually been working on trying to formulate an analog of what the GP-2 system does but as a ‘fermi problem’ or ‘estimate’—something you can do by hand with a piece of paper, and maybe a calculator. This was partly inspired by some questions raised in an EA affiliated group—EE—effective environmentalism, but these questions occur throughout the sciences—multiobjective optimization, pattern recognition. (My approach could be called ‘deep learning for dummies’).
I don’t really know what ‘factored generation’ and ‘evaluation’ are, but these sound like ‘inverse problems’ (e.g. integer factorization, versus generating an integer from factors like prime numbers). I view these also as ‘matching’ or ‘search’ problems.
I was vaguely aware of how far AI had evolved , but the gp-2 system makes me wonder whether some online discussions i have (mostly on science lists about things like climate change) are actually with ‘bots’ rather than scientists. The OpenAI ethics statement i agree with, but these are not enforcable at present. I sort of wonder what this project is geared towards , and also what this implies for people like me who have few of the skills required to do this kind of research. I’ll just keep trying to do my ‘fermi problem’ approach—until everything is automated there may still be a few places on earth for simple minds.
I’m on an AAAS ( am assn adv scis) forum (AAAS has over 100,000 members but just a small fraction of them participate in the forum) , which has discussions on issues like climate change. I’ve noticed there are many ‘emereti professors’ some with very good credentials (eg worked at CalTech) who comment, and 2/3rds of them think people who worry about climate change ( eg Greta T) are ‘alarmists’. They advocate ‘do nothing’ because its beyond human control—i think they simply do not want to change any aspect of their lifestyle. To the contrary 1/3rd of the people say the issue may be partly within human control and you can change a few things (even eat less meat, don’t drive everywhere by yourself when you can walk or carpool, etc.) . The non-emereti seem divided between ‘don’t care’ and ‘do something’.
Many older people do seem to care about their own children and grandchildren, and financially help them out, but not those who are not their kinfolk. Many also say they support AAAS (ie are members which has a yearly fee with a sliding scale) as a ‘charity’ because its a nonprofit, and they want to support rationality and scientific methodology.
In think in USA, churches are the charities which receive the most donations. (And some or a large part of those donations just go for salaries—sometimes large salaries) or maintaining the church. ) Environmental groups (or charities), and some poverty focused NGOs , also get some support, along with civil liberties groups—human rights watch, ACLU, though those groups also have their critics).
I listen to the radio and one thing i hear are ads for ‘fertility clinics’—alot of people want a baby but can’t get one ‘naturally’. I wonder how that can be calculated as a present value or future value. (Also some people value children while they are young, but if they ‘turn out bad’ they abandon them. )
I only skimmed this and am not familiar much with investing, but the issues seem to me whether people are investing to make money, or investing to make ‘social impact’ (for the greater good) on goals they support. and also whether the investment actually will ‘pay off’ in terms of either making money, having social impact, or both. I think forecasting ‘impact’ is the hardest one. Some venture capital firms succeed , others fail.
My view is if impact predictions are correct then any ‘dilution’ effects on shareholder value will be temporary. In a sense current shareholders are loaning some of their shares to others to invest in the project in the hope its a good investment. (I think in a way what is called MMT—popular in some economics circles—is a version of this idea).
My semi-educated guess is the arguments for either case are both weak at present. Its unknown. I’d say same for ‘designer babies’ and other reproductive technologies (which i hear advertized on the radio all the time—eg infertility clinics—mostly used by affluent people , and often womyn over age 40. In India they have ‘baby farms’—eg people in USA hire some poor womyn in India to be a surrogate mother , so they don’t have to deal with pregnancy—whcih they view as a chore—because they want to keep their career but want a baby).
I come from a background of what could be called liberals (in USA, democrats—but these range from establishment types (eg Hilary Clinton) to ‘anti-establishment’ establishement liberal (Bernie Sanders, Elizabett Warren , and many other democratic presidential candidates) . But my parents also had backgrounds in some of what could be called ‘radical ideological views’ (war resistors, civil rights protests, small farmers who were anti-big business, etc.). Other relatives had some ‘right wing ’ views.
I think any ideology can make ‘hits and misses’ regarding promoting well being. (I sort of include religion and science in the class of ideology, though of a different kind.--both of those also seem to have hits and misses—Catholics introduced the transatlantic slave trade to north america—partly because they wanted to stop the oppression of indigneous americans and thought africans wouldn’t suffer so much. The Catholic priest who suggested that later regretted his decision. Scientists invented nerve gas and Xyklon B (for holocaust) Nuclear energy and fossil fuel based economies (eg plastic, climate change ) seem to have some mistakes; as may GMO foods, factory farms, gun rights and weapons industry (eg what is called ‘realism’ in international politics—or mutually assured destruction. ). Time may tell.
I tend to be anti-religion (i call myself agnostic and just object to religious ritual and its common tendency to claim its truth) and pro-science , but i see many religious people who basically are descent and it works for them, and i also object to a fair amount of modern science (and many scientists share my views—although all scientists basically agree with the ‘scientific method’, they often come to different conclusions.Condensed matter physics objected to spending all money on particle physics. )
Perhaps ideologies should be viewed as ‘algorithms’. Many algorithms generate good results for some cases, but perhaps all of them will repeatably make worse decisions than neccesary. This is one reason i see proposals for algorithms that are to a large part essentially random. They ‘typical algiorithm’ is as good as experts at times, and other times as bad as any worst performing algorithm, but on average may be ‘typical’ (be correct 50% of the time—but this is a moving average—humans may make as many mistakes as our evolutionary precursors, but different ones.
I have seen arguments in EA forums that with regarding donating to charities, many of them (large or small) actually may be fairly equally effective though its hard to kow; sometimes you can determine ones which very innefective (ie just squander donations)..
P.S. I just re-skimmed your article and see you dealt in Scenario 6 with ‘tragedy of the commons’ which i view as an n-person variant of the 2 -person prisoner’s dillema.
also your example 2 (Newton and Leibniz ) is an example which is sort of what i was thinking. The theorem i was thinking of would add to the picture and have something like a ‘god’ who would create either Newton, Leibniz, or both of them. Shapley value would be the same in all cases. (unless 2 calculus discoveries are better than 1----in sciences sometimes this is seen as true (‘replication’), or having ‘multiple witnesses’ in law as opposed to just an account by one (who is the victim and may not be believed )).
(its also the case for example that the 3 or 4 or even 5 early versions of quantum mechanics—schrodinger, heisenberg, dirac, feynman, bohm—though some say debroglie anticipated bohm , and feynman acknolwedged that he found his idea in a footnote in a book by Dirac—although redundant in many ways, each have unique perspectives . the golden rule also has many formulations i’ve heard)
(In my scenario, with ‘god’ , i think the counterfactual value of either newton or leibniz would be 1---because without either or both there would be no calculus with shapley value 1. god could have just created nothing---0 rather than 1).
In a way what you seem to be describing is how to avoid the ‘neglectedness’ problem of EA theory. This overlaps with questions in politics—some people vote for people in a major party who may win anyway, rather than vote for a ‘minor party’ they may actually agree with more. This might be called the ‘glow effect’—similarily some people will support some rock or sports star partly just to be in the ‘in crowd’. So they get ‘counterfactual value’ even if the world is no better off-voting for someone who will win any way is no better than voting for one who will lose—or rather they actually get additional Shapley value because they are ‘happier’ being in the ‘in crowd’ rather than being a less favored minority—but this involves a different calculation for the Shapley value, including ‘happiness’ and not just ‘who won’. But, some people are happier being in ‘minorities’, so thats another complication in the calculations.
(eg the song by Beck ‘i’m a loser’ comes to mind. pays to be a loser some times or support an unpopular cause because its actually a neglected one—people just didn’t know its actual or Shapley value. )
As I said I’m skating on thin ice, but the theorem says you can convert any positive or negative sum game into a zero sum game. (its due to von Neumann or nash, but i think i saw it in books on evolutionary game theory . i think there are analogs in physics , and even ecology, etc. ).
Again, i think that may be related to the counterfactual/shapley conversion i ‘see’ or think exists, but can’t prove it----i’d have to look at the definitions again.
To possibly fall through more holes in the ice , i think the prisoner’s dillema might be the simplest example.
(I’m just not fluent in the definitions since i didn’t learn them when i was studying some game theory; but i looked at many game theory texts where they did occur—mostly for more complex situations than i was dealing with.
Also the term ‘counterfactual’ i only learned from a history book by Niall Ferguson (not a big hero of mine but had what seemed like worthwhile ideas--- he wrote ‘counterfactual history’—eg ‘what would be state of the world if Germany had won WW2?’ )
as noted , i also find examples which use ‘vignettes’ or ‘scenarios’, fractions, whole numbers like ‘7 EA candidates’, ’60 million$ ′ , along with the names of countries (India) and organizations, make it difficult (or time consuming for me) to process. but this is just a stylisitic or personal issue.
I wonder if you think an excercize trying to compare the shapley vs counterfactual value of the 2 cases for WW2 is meaningful—ie would money spent by UK/USA/etc fighting the war have been better spent another way?
i may even put this question to myself to see if its meaningful in your framework. i spend a bit of time on questionable math/logic problems (some of which have solutions, but i try to find different proofs because i dont understand the existing ones, and occasionaly do. Many theorems have many correct proofs which look very different and use different methods, and often have been discovered by many people on different continents at the same time (eg the renormalization group in physics was discovered by Feynman and Nambu (japan) about the same time) . I wish i had a study group who shared my interests in various problems like this one; the few aquaintances i have who work on math/logic basically work on problems that interest them, and don’t find mine interesting or relevant. )
I’m skating on thin ice, but I think
1) the discussion is basically correct
2) similar problems have been discussed in evolutionary game theory, chemical reaction/economic/ ecological networks, cooking, and category theory.
3) I find it difficult to wade through examples (ie stories about AMF and gates foundations, or EA hiring) --these remind me of many ‘self help’ psychology books which explain how to resolve conflicts by going through numerous vignettes involving couples, families, etc—i can’t remember all the ‘actors’ names and roles.
4) i think a classic theorem in game theory (probably by john von neumman, but maybe by john nash) shows you can convert shapley value to counterfactual value very easily. the same issue applies in physics—which can be often thought of as a ‘continuous game’.
5) time ordering invariance is not really a problem (except technically)---you can include a time variable as is done in evolutionary game theory. (mathematically its a much more difficult problem but not conceptually).
Thanks for info. Its possible his village would be eligible for participation in the cash transfer program, but that is really a larger scale and different kind of project.
Though I find alot of EA writing to be basically a different dialect (eg ‘Overton window...’) and difficult to read this article seems fairly well written and complete (though often its easy to miss some important issues for complex topics). Theoretical genetics and evolutionary theory are among my pet interests though I am not employed in the field.
But i basically support the precautionary principal so I would not ‘cause prioritize’ genetic enhancement at present any more than I think going to and colonizing Mars or developing a ‘superintelligence’ is a priority. I view these as causes worth thinking about and perhaps working on—and many people are already doing that—but they do not take priority over other causes in my view. If EA is about ‘doing the greatest good’ I would place many of my bets on other causes. (Also given the intricacies of genetics, its very possible alot of research and money can be wasted on things that basically do not turn out to be effective—they just become big money sinks for people with vested interests in their narrow interests.)
In fact i would say learning and studying (or doing research in) theoretical genetics and evolution , and also getting many more people in the population interested in practicing that to be a greater priority. (This may be partly my bias—I’m not interested in policy work promoting this cause (i don’t like most policy work, unless its more like doing reseach) and I don’t want to work in genetic or other labs.)
I similarily don’t see promoting new advanced weapons developement in Federal agencies as a priority because many of the people who would decide how to use them i don’t have confidence in—their judgement or competency.
Despite my views, I know alot of people will prioritize this cause and already do, and crowd out resourcces for what i think are more cost effective projects.
(The link to the paper blog on how more intelligent people tend to be more tolerant/less discriminitary is interestng though i think issue is also very complex—and I might dispute it because ‘underspecified’ (there are lots of forms of discriminatory attitudes ). However the author of that blog does have another one on another cause ‘Universal Basic income’ --his paper is very interesting , and UBI as a cause I think may rank above genetic enhancement—but is an equally complex issue (i.e. just handing out money could be as disastrous as giving geneticists huge budgets to design the future).