Scriptwriter for RationalAnimations! Interested in lots of EA topics, but especially ideas for new institutions like prediction markets, charter cities, georgism, etc. Also a big fan of EA / rationalist fiction!
Jackson Wagner
Karma: 3,483
New Cause Area: Low-Hanging Fruit
Thanks for this detailed overview; I’ve been interested to learn about AI for materials science (after hearing about stuff like Alphafold in biology), and this is the most detailed exploration I’ve yet seen.
Hello!
I’m glad you found my comment useful! I’m sorry if it came across as scolding; I interpreted Tristan’s original post to be aimed at advising giant mega-donors like Open Philanthropy, moreso than individual donors. In my book, anybody donating to effective global health charities is doing a very admirable thing—especially in these dark days when the US government seems to be trying to dismantle much of its foreign aid infrastructure.
As for my own two cents on how to navigate this situation (especially now that artificial intelligence feels much more real and pressing to me than it did a few years ago), here are a bunch of scattered thoughts (FYI these bullets have kind of a vibe of “sorry, i didn’t have enough time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one”):
My scold-y comment on Tristan’s post might suggest a pretty sharp dichotomy, where your choice is to either donate to proven global health interventions, or else to fully convert to longtermism and donate everything to some weird AI safety org doing hard-to-evaluate-from-the-outside technical work.
That’s a frustrating choice for a lot of reasons—it implies totally pivoting your giving to a new field, where it might no longer feel like you have a special advantage in picking the best opportunities within the space. It also means going all-in on a very specific and uncertain theory of impact (cue the whole neartermist-vs-longtermist debate about the importance of RCTs, feedback loops, and tangible impact, versus ideas like “moral uncertainty” that m.
You could try to split your giving 50⁄50, which seems a little better (in a kind of hedging-your-bets way), but still pretty frustrating for various reasons...
I might rather seek to construct a kind of “spectrum” of giving opportunities, where Givewell-style global health interventions and longtermist AI existential-risk mitigation define the two ends of the spectrum. This might be a dumb idea—what kinds of things could possibly be in the middle of such a bizarre spectrum? And even if we did find some things to put in the middle, what are the chances that any of them would pass muster as a highly-effective, EA-style opportunity? But I think possibly there could actually be some worthwhile ideas here. I will come back to this thought in a moment.
Meanwhile, I agree with Tristan’s comment here that it seems like eventually money will probably cease to be useful—maybe we go extinct, maybe we build some kind of coherent-extrapolated-volition utopia, maybe some other similarly-weird scenario happens.
(In a big-picture philosophical sense, this seems true even without AGI? Since humanity would likely eventually get around to building a utopia and/or going extinct via other means. But AGI means that the transition might happen within our own lifetimes.)
However, unless we very soon get a nightmare-scenario “fast takeoff” where AI recursively self-improves and seizes control of the future over the course of hours-to-weeks, it seems like there will probably be a transition period, where approximately human-level AI is rapidly transforming the economy and society, but where ordinary people like us can still substantially influence the future. There are a couple ways we could hope to influence the long-term future:
We could simply try to avoid going extinct at the hands of misaligned ASI (most technical AI safety work is focused on this)
If you are a MIRI-style doomer who believes that there is a 99%+ chance that AI development leads to egregious misalignment and therefore human extinction, then indeed it kinda seems like your charitable options are “donate to technical alignment research”, “donate to attempts to implement a global moratorium on AI development”, and “accept death and donate to near-term global welfare charities (which now look pretty good, since the purported benefits of longtermism are an illusion if there is effectively a 100% chance that civilization ends in just a few years/decades)”. But if you are more optimistic than MIRI, then IMO there are some other promising cause areas that open up...
There are other AI catastrophic risks aside from misalignment—gradual disempowerment is a good example, as are various categories of “misuse” (including things like “countries get into a nuclear war as they fight over who gets to deploy ASI”)
Interventions focused on minimizing the risk of these kinds of catastrophes will look different—finding ways to ease international tensions and cooperate around AI to avoid war? Advocating for georgism and UBI and designing new democratic mechanisms to avoid gradual disempowerment? Some of these things might also have tangible present-day benefits even aside from AI (like reducing the risks of ordinary wars, or reducing inequality, or making democracy work better), which might help them exist midway on the spectrum I mentioned earlier, from tangible givewell-style interventions to speculative and hard-to-evaluate direct AI safety work.
Even among scenarios that don’t involve catastrophes or human extinction, I feel like there is a HUGE variance betwen the best possible worlds, and the median outcome. So there is still tons of value in pushing for a marginally better future—CalebMaresca’s answer mentions the idea that it’s not clear whether animals would be invited along for the ride in any future utopia. This indeed seems like an important thing to fight for. I think there are lots of things like this—there are just so many different possible futures.
(For example, if we get aligned ASI, this doesn’t answer the question of whether ordinary people will have any kind of say in crafting the future direction of civilization; maybe people like Sam Altman would ideally like to have all the power for themselves, benevolently orchestrating a nice transhumanist future wherein ordinary people get to enjoy plenty of technological advancements, but have no real influence over the direction of which kind of utopia we create. This seems worse to me than having a wider process of debate & deliberation about what kind of far future we want.)
CalebMaresca’s answer seems to imply that we should be saving all our money now, to spend during a post-AGI era that they assume will look kind of neo-feudal. This strikes me as unwise, since a neo-feudal AGI semi-utopia is a pretty specific and maybe not especially likely vision of the future! Per Tristan’s comment that money will eventually cease to be useful, it seems like it probably makes the most sense to deploy cash earlier, when the future is still very malleable:
In the post-ASI far future, we might be dead and/or money might no longer have much meaning and/or the future might already be effectively locked in / out of our control.
In the AGI transition period, the future will still be very malleable, we will probably have more money than we do now (although so will everyone else), and it’ll be clearer what the most important / neglected / tractable things are to focus on. The downside is that by this point, everyone else will have realized that AGI is a big deal, lots of crazy stuff will be happening, and it might be harder to have an impact because things are less neglected.
Today, lots of AI-related stuff is neglected, but it’s also harder to tell what’s important / tractable.
For a couple of examples of interventions that could exist midway along a spectrum from givewell-style interventions to AI safety research, which are also focused on influencing the transitional period of AGI, consider Dario Amodei’s vision of what an aspirational AGI transition period might look like, and what it would take to bring it about:
Dario talks about how AI-enhanced biological research could lead to amazing medical breakthroughs. To allow this to happen more quickly, it might make sense to lobby to reform the FDA or the clinical trial system. It also seems like a good idea to lobby for the most impactful breakthroughs to be quickly rolled out, even to people in poor countries who might not be able to afford them on their own. Getting AI-driven medical advances to more people, more quickly would of course benefit the people for whom the treatments arrive just in time. But it might also have important path-dependent effects on the long-run future, by setting precedents and infuencing culture and etc.
In the section on “neuroscience and mind”, Dario talks about the potential for an “AI coach who always helps you to be the best version of yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be more effective”. Maybe there is some way to support / accelerate the development of such tools?
Dario is thinking of psychology and mental health here. (Imagine a kind of supercharged, AI-powered version of Happier-Lives-Institute-style wellbeing interventions like StrongMinds?) But there could be similarly wide potential for disseminating AI technology for promoting economic growth in the third world (even today’s LLMs can probably offer useful medical advice, engineering skills, entrepeneurial business tips, agricultural productivity best practices, etc).
Maybe there’s no angle for philanthropy in promoting the adoption of “AI coach” tools, since people are properly incentivized to use such tools and the market will presumably race to provide them (just as charitable initiatives like OneLaptopPerChild ended up much less impactful than ordinary capitalism manufacturing bajillions of incredibly cheap smartphones). But who knows; maybe there’s a clever angle somewhere.
He mentions a similar idea that “AI finance ministers and central bankers” could offer good economic advice, helping entire countries develop more quickly. It’s not exactly clear to me why he expects nations to listen to AI finance ministers more than ordinary finance ministers. (Maybe the AIs will be more credibly neutral, or eventually have a better track record of success?) But the general theme of trying to find ways to improve policy and thereby boost economic growth in LMIC (as described by OpenPhil here) is obviously an important goal for both the tangible benefits, and potentially for its path-dependent effects on the long-run future. So, trying to find some way of making poor countries more open to taking pro-growth economic advice, or encouraging governments to adopt efficiency-boosting AI tools, or convincing them to be more willing to roll out new AI advancements, seem like they could be promising directions.
Finally he talks about the importance of maintaining some form of egalitarian / democratic control over humanity’s future, and the idea of potentially figuring out ways to improve democracy and make it work better than it does today. I mentioned these things earlier; both seem like promising cause areas.
“However, the likely mass extinction of K-strategists and the concomitant increase in r-selection might last for millions of years.”
I like learning about ecology and evolution, so personally I enjoy these kinds of thought experiments. But in the real world, isn’t it pretty unlikely that natural ecosystems will just keep humming along for another million years? I would guess that within just the next few hundred years, human civilization will have grown in power to the point where it can do what it likes with natural ecosystems:
perhaps we bulldoze the earth’s surface in order to cover it with solar panels, fusion power plants, and computronium?
perhaps we rip apart the entire earth for raw material to be used for the construction of a Dyson swarm?
more prosaically, maybe human civilization doesn’t expand to the stars, but still expands enough (and in a chaotic, unsustainable way) such that most natural habitats are destroyed
perhaps there will have been a nuclear war (or some other similarly devastating event, like the creation of mirror life that devastates the biosphere)
perhaps we create unaligned superintelligent AI which turns the universe into paperclips
perhaps humanity grows in power but also becomes more responsible and sustainable, and we reverse global warming using abundant clean energy powering technologies like carbon air capture, assorted geoengineering techniques, etc
perhaps humanity attains a semi-utopian civilization, and we decide to extensively intervene in the natural world for the benefit of nonhuman animals
etc
Some of those scenarios might be dismissable as the kind of “silly sci-fi speculation” mentioned by the longtermist-style meme below. But others seem pretty mundane, indeed “to be expected” even by the most conservative visions of the future. To me, the million-year impact of things like climate change only seems relevant in scenarios where human civilization collapses pretty soon, but in a way that leaves Earth’s biosphere largely intact (maybe if humans all died to a pandemic?).
Infohazards are indeed a pretty big worry of lots of the EAs working on biosecurity: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTtZWBAKgrrnZj73n/biosecurity-culture-computer-security-culture
IMO, one helpful side effect (albeit certainly not a main consideration) of making this work public, is that it seems very useful to have at least one worst-case biorisk that can be publicly discussed in a reasonable amount of detail. Previously, the whole field / cause area of biosecurity could feel cloaked in secrecy, backed up only by experts with arcane biological knowledge. This situation, although unfortunate, is probably justified by the nature of the risks! But still, it makes it hard for anyone on the outside to tell how serious the risks are, or understand the problems in detail, or feel sufficiently motivated about the urgency of creating solutions.
By disclosing the risks of mirror bacteria, there is finally a concrete example to discuss, which could be helpful even for people who are actually even more worried about, say, infohazardous-bioengineering-technique-#5, than they are about mirror life. Just being able to use mirror life as an example seems like it’s much healthier than having zero concrete examples and everything shrouded in secrecy.Some of the cross-cutting things I am thinking about:
scientific norms about whether to fund / publish risky research
attempts to coordinate (on a national or international level) moratoriums against certain kinds of research
the desirability of things like metagenomic sequencing, DNA synthesis screening for harmful sequences, etc
research into broad-spectrum countermeasures like UVC light, super-PPE, pipelines for very quick vaccine development, etc
just emphasising the basic overall point that global catastrophic biorisk seems quite real and we should take it very seriously
and probably lots of other stuff!
So, I think it might be a kind of epistemic boon for all of biosecurity to have this public example, which will help clarify debates / advocacy / etc about the need for various proposed policies or investments.
Thinking about my point #3 some more (how do you launch a satellite after a nuclear war). I realized that if you put me in charge of making a plan to DIYing this (instead of lobbying the US military to do it for me, which would be my first choice), and if SpaceX also wasn’t answering my calls to see if I could buy any surplus starlinks...
You could do worse than partnering with Rocketlab, a satellite and rocket company based in New Zealand, developing the emergency satellite based on their “Photon” platform (design has flown before, small enough to still be kinda cheap, big enough to generate much more power than a cubesat). Then Rocketlab can launch their Electron rocket from New Zealand in the event of a nuclear war, and (in a real crisis like that), the whole company would help make sure the mission happened—the idea of partnering with someone rather than just buying a satellite is key, IMO, because then it’s mostly THEIR end of the world plan and in a crisis would benefit from their expertise / workforce.
I’d try to talk to the CEO, get him on board. Seems like the kind of flashy, Elon-esque, altruistic-in-a-sexy-way mission that could help with making RocketLab seem “cool” and recruiting eager mission-driven employees. (RocketLab’s CEO currently has ambitions to do some similar flashy missions, like sending their own probe to Venus.)
But this would definitely be more like a $30M project, than a $300K project.
Kind of a funny selection effect going on here here where if you pick sufficiently promising / legible / successful orgs (like Against Malaria Foundation), isn’t that just funging against OpenPhil funding? This leads me to want to upweight new and not-yet-proven orgs (like the several new AIM-incubated charities), plus things like PauseAI and Wild Animal Initiative that OpenPhil feels they can’t fund for political reasons. (Same argument would apply for invertebrate welfare, but I personally don’t really believe in invertebrate welfare. Sorry!)
I’m also somewhat saddened by the inevitable popularity-contest nature of the vote; I feel like people are picking orgs they’ve heard of and picking orgs that match their personal cause-prioritization “team” (global health vs x-risk vs animals). I like the idea that EA should be experimental and exploratory, so (although I am a longtermist myself), I tried to further upweight some really interesting new cause areas that I just learned about while reading these various posts:
- Accion Transformadora’s crime-reduction stuff seems like a promising new space to explore for potential effective interventions in medium-income countries.
- One Acre Fund is potentially neat, I’m into the idea of economic-growth-boosting interventions and this might be a good one.
- It’s neat that Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos is doing a bunch of cool x-risk-related projects throughout latin america; their nuclear-winter-resilience-planning stuff in Argentina and Brazil seems like a particularly well-placed bit of local lobbying/activism.
But alas, there can only be three top-three winners, so I ultimately spent my top votes on Team Popular Longtermist Stuff (Nucleic Acid Observatory, PauseAI, MATS) in the hopes that one of them, probably PauseAI, would become a winner.
(longtermist stuff)
1. Nucleic Acid Observatory
2. Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos
3. PauseAI
4. MATS
(interesting stuff in more niche cause areas, which i sadly doubt can actually win)
5. Accion Transformadora
6. One Acre Fund
7. Unjournal
(if longtermism loses across the board, I prefer wild animal welfare to invertebrate welfare)
8. Wild Animal Inititative
9. Faunalytics
I don’t know anything about One Acre Fund in particular, but it seems plausible to me that a well-run intervention of this sort could potentially beat cash transfers (just as many Givewell-recommended charities do).
Increasing African agricultural productivity has been a big cause area for groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a long time. Hanna Ritchie, of OurWorldInData, explains here why this cause seems so important—it just seems kinda mathematically inevitable that if labor productivity doesn’t improve, these regions will be trapped in poverty forever. (But improving productivity seems really easy—just use fertilizer, use better crop varieties, use better farming methods, etc.) So this seems potentially similar to cash transfers, insofar as if we did cash transfers instead, we’d hope to see people spending a lot of the money on better agricultural inputs!
Notably, people who are into habitat / biodiversity preservation and fighting climate change, really like the positive environmental externalities of improving agricultrual productivity. (The more productive the world’s farmland gets, the less pressure there is to chop into jungle and farm more land.) So if you are really into the environment, maybe those positive eco externalities make a focused intervention like this much more appealing than cash transfers, which are more about the benefits to the direct recipients and local economy.
One could look at this as a kind of less-libertarian, more top-down alternative to cash transfers, which makes it look bad. (Basically—give people the cash, and wouldn’t they end up making these agricultural improvements themselves eventually? Wouldn’t cash outperform, since central planning underperforms?) But you could also look at it as a very pro-libertarian, economic-growth-oriented intervention designed to provide public goods and create stronger markets, which makes it look good. (Hence all the emphasis about educating farmers to store crops and sell when prices are high, or preemptively transporting agricultural inputs around to local villages where they can then be sold. Through this lens I feel like “they’re solving coordination problems and providing important information to farmers. Of course a sufficiently well-run version of this charity has the potential to outperform cash!”) This is basically me rephrasing your second bullet point.
Just a feeling, but I think your first bullet point (loans are more efficient because the money is paid back) wouldn’t obviously make this more efficient than cash transfers? (Maybe you are alluding to this with your use of “you believe”.) Yes, making loans is “cheaper than it first seems” because the money is paid back. But giving cash transfers is also “better than it first seems” because the money (basically stimulus) has a multiplier effect as it percolates throughout the local economy. Whether it’s better for people to buy farming tools with cash they’ve been loaned (and then you get the money back and make more loans to more people who want to buy tools), versus cash they’ve been given (and then the cash percolates around the local economy and again other people make purchases), seems like a complicated macroeconomics question that might vary based on the local unemployment & inflation rate or etc. It’s not clear to me that one strategy is obviously better.
But these are all just thoughts, of course—I too would be curious if One Acre Fund has some real data they can share.
Hi! Jackson Wagner here, former aerospace engineer—I worked as a systems engineer at Xona Space Systems (which is trying to develop next-gen GPS technology, and is recently getting involved in a military program to create a kind of backup for GPS). I am also a big fan of the ALLFED concept.
Here are some thoughts on the emergency satellite concept mentioned—basically I think this is a bad idea! I am sorry that this is a harsh and overly-negative rant that just harps on one small detail of the post; I think the other ideas you mention are pretty good!:
1. No way will you be able to build and launch a satellite for $300K?? Sure, if you are SpaceX, with all the worlds’ most genius engineers, and you can amortize your satellite design costs over tens of thousands of identical Starlink copies, then maybe you can eventually get marginal satellite construction cost down to around $300K. But for the rest of us mere mortals, designing and building individual satellites, that is around the price of building and launching a tiny cubesat (like the pair I helped build at my earlier job at a tiny Virginia company called SpaceQuest).
2. I’m pretty skeptical that a tiny cubesat would be able to talk directly to cellphones? I thought direct-to-cell satellites were especially huge due to the need for large antenas. Although I guess Lynk Global’s satellites don’t seem so big, and probably you can save on power when you’re just transmitting the same data to everybody instead of trying to send and recieve individual messages. Still, I feel very skeptical that a minimum-viable cubesat will have enough power to do much of use. (Many cubesats can barely fit enough batteries to stay charged through eclipse!)
3. How are you going to launch and operate this satellite amid a global crisis?? Consider that even today’s normal cubesat projects, happening in a totally benign geopolitical / economic environment, have something like a 1⁄3 rate of instant, “dead on arrival” mission failure (ie the ground crew is never able to contact the cubesat after deployment). In the aftermath of nuclear war or other worldwide societal collapse, you are going to have infinitely more challenges than the typical university cubesat team. Many ground stations will be offline because they’re located in countries that have collapsed into anarchy, etc! Who will be launching rockets, aside from perhaps the remnants of the world’s militaries? Your satellite’s intended orbit will be much more radioactive, so failure rates of components will be much higher! Basically, space is hard and your satellite is not going to work. At the very least, you’d want to make three satellites—one to launch and test, another to keep in underground storage for a real disaster (maybe buy some rocket, like a RocketLab Electron, to go with it!), and probably a spare.
(If the disaster is local rather than global, then you’d have an easier time launching from eg the USA to help address a faminine Africa. But in this scenario you don’t need a satellite as badly—militaries can airdrop leaflets, neighboring regions can set up radio stations, we can ship food aid around on boats, etc.)
4. Are you going to get special permission from all the world’s governments and cell-network providers, that you can just broadcast texts to anyone on earth at any time? Getting FCC licensed for the right frequencies, making partnerships with all the cell-tower providers (or doing whatever else is necessary so that phones are pre-configured to be able to recieve your signal), etc, seems like a big ask!
5. Superpower militaries are already pretty invested in maintaining some level of communications capability through even a worst-case nuclear war. (Eg, the existing GPS satellites are some of the most radiaiton-hardened satellites ever, in part because they were designed in the 1980s to remain operational through a nuclear war. Modern precision ASAT weapons could take out GPS pretty easily—but hence the linked Space Force proposal for backup “resilient GPS” systems. I know less about military comms systems, but I imagine the situation is similar.) Admittedly, most of these communications systems aren’t aimed at broadcasting information to a broad public. But still, I expect there would be some important communications capability left even during/after an almost inconcievably devastating war, and I would bet that crucial information could be disseminated surpisingly well to places like major cities.
6. Basically instead of building satellites yourselves, somebody should just double-check with DARPA (or Space Force or whoever) that we are already planning on keeping a rocket’s worth of Starlink satellites in reserve in a bunker somewhere. This will have the benefit of already being an important global system (many starlink terminals all around the world), reliable engineering, etc.
Okay, hopefully the above was helpful rather than just seeming mean! If you are interested in learning more about satellites (or correcting me if it turns out I’m totally wrong about the feasibility of direct-to-cellphone from a cubesat, or etc), feel free to message me and we could set up a call! In particular I’ve spent some time thinking about what a collapse of just the GPS system would look like (eg if China or Russia did a first-strike against western global positioning satellites as part of some larger war), which might be interesting for you guys to consider. (Losing GPS would not be totally devastating to the world by itself—at most it would be an economic disruption on the scale of covid-19. But the problem is that if you lose GPS, you are probably also in the middle of a world war, or maybe an unprecedented worst-case solar storm, so you are also about to lose a lot of other important stuff all at once!)
Concluding by repeating that this was a hastily-typed-out, kinda knee-jerk response to a single part of the post, which doesn’t impugn the other stuff you talk about!
Personally, of the other things you mentioned, I’d be most excited about both of the “#1” items you list—continuing research on alternative foods themselves, and lobbying naturally well-placed-to-survive-disaster governments to make better plans for resiliency. Then #4 and #5 seem a little bit like “do a bunch of resliliency-planning research ourselves”, which initially struck me as seeming less good than “lobbying governments to do resiliency planning” (since I figure governments will take their own plans more seriously). But of course it would also be great to be able to hand those governments detailed, thoughtful information for them to start from and use as a template, so that makes #4 and #5 look good again to me. Finally, I would be really hyped to see some kind of small-scale trials of ideas like seaweed farming, papermill-to-sugar-mill conversions, etc.
Cross-posting a lesswrong comment where I argue (in response to another commenter) that not only did NASA’s work on rocketry probably benefitted military missile/ICBM technology, but their work on satellites/spacecraft also likely contributed to military capabilities:
Satellites were also plausibly a very important military technology. Since the 1960s, some applications have panned out, while others haven’t. Some of the things that have worked out:GPS satellites were designed by the air force in the 1980s for guiding precision weapons like JDAMs, and only later incidentally became integral to the world economy. They still do a great job guiding JDAMs, powering the style of “precision warfare” that has given the USA a decisive military advantage since 1991′s first Iraq war.
Spy satellites were very important for gathering information on enemy superpowers, tracking army movements and etc. They were especially good for helping both nations feel more confident that their counterpart was complying with arms agreements about the number of missile silos, etc. The Cuban Missile Crisis was kicked off by U-2 spy-plane flights photographing partially-assembled missiles in Cuba. For a while, planes and satellites were both in contention as the most useful spy-photography tool, but eventually even the U-2′s successor, the incredible SR-71 blackbird, lost out to the greater utility of spy satellites.
Systems for instantly detecting the characteristic gamma-ray flashes of nuclear detonations that go off anywhere in the world (I think such systems are included on GPS satellites), and giving early warning by tracking ballistic missile launches during their boost phase (the Soviet version of this system famously misfired and almost caused a nuclear war in 1983, which was fortunately forestalled by one Lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov).
Some of the stuff that hasn’t:
The air force initially had dreams of sending soldiers into orbit, maybe even operating a military base on the moon, but could never figure out a good use for this. The Soviets even test-fired a machine-gun built into one of their Salyut space stations: “Due to the potential shaking of the station, in-orbit tests of the weapon with cosmonauts in the station were ruled out.The gun was fixed to the station in such a way that the only way to aim would have been to change the orientation of the entire station. Following the last crewed mission to the station, the gun was commanded by the ground to be fired; some sources say it was fired to depletion”.
Despite some effort in the 1980s, were were unable to figure out how to make “Star Wars” missile defence systems work anywhere near well enough to defend us against a full-scale nuclear attack.
Fortunately we’ve never found out if in-orbit nuclear weapons, including fractional orbit bombardment weapons, are any use, because they were banned by the Outer Space Treaty. But nowadays maybe Russia is developing a modern space-based nuclear weapon as a tool to destroy satellites in low-earth orbit.
Overall, lots of NASA activities that developed satellite / spacecraft technology seem like they had a dual-use effect advancing various military capabilities. So it wasn’t just the missiles. Of course, in retrospect, the entire human-spaceflight component of the Apollo program (spacesuits, life support systems, etc) turned out to be pretty useless from a military perspective. But even that wouldn’t have been clear at the time!
Rethink’s weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink’s numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don’t mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to “assume hedonism” or etc. Instead, we’re told these weights are authoritative and scientific because they’re “based on the most elaborate research to date”.
IMO it would be cool to be able to swap between Rethink, versus squared neuron count or something, versus everything-is-100%. As is, they do let you edit the numbers yourself, and also give a checkbox that makes everything equal 100%. Which (perhaps unintentionally) is a pretty extreme framing of the discussion!! “Are shrimp 3% as important as a human life (30 shrimp = 1 person)! Or 100%? Or maybe you want to edit the numbers to something in-between?”
I think the foodimpacts calculator is a cool idea, and I don’t begrudge anyone an attempt to make estimates using a bunch of made-up numbers (see the ACX post on this subject) -- indeed, I wish the calculator went more out on a limb by trying to include the human health impacts of various foods (despite the difficulties / uncertainties they mention on the “methods” page). But this is the kind of thing that I was talking about re: the weights.
Animal welfare feeling more activist & less truth-seeking:
This post is specifically about vegan EA activists, and makes much stronger accusations of non-truthseeking-ness than I am making here against the broader animal welfare movement in general: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qF4yhMMuavCFrLqfz/ea-vegan-advocacy-is-not-truthseeking-and-it-s-everyone-s
But I think that post is probably accurate in the specific claims that it makes, and indeed vegan EA activism is part of overall animal welfare EA activism, so perhaps I could rest my case there.
I also think that the broader animal welfare space has a much milder version of a similar ailment. I am pretty “rationalist” and think that rationalist virtues (as expounded in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, or Slate Star Codex blog posts, or Secular Solstice celebrations, or just sites like OurWorldInData) are important. I think that global health places like Givewell do a pretty great job embodying these virtues, that longtermist stuff does a medium-good job (they’re trying! but it’s harder since the whole space is just more speculative), and animal welfare does a worse job (but still better than almost all mainstream institutions, eg way better than either US political party). Mostly I think this is just because a lot of people get into animal EA without ever first reading rationalist blogs (which is fine, not everybody has to be just like me); instead they sometimes find EA via Peter Singer’s more activist-y “Animal Liberation”, or via the yet-more-activist mainstream vegan movement or climate movements. And in stuff like climate protest movements (greta thurnberg, just stop oil, sunrise, etc), being maximally truthseeking and evenhanded just isn’t a top priority like it is in EA! Of course the people that come to EA from those movements are often coming specifically because they recognize that, and they prefer EA’s more rigorous / rationalist vibe. (Kinda like how when Californians move to Texas, they actually make Texas more republican and not more democrat, because California is very blue but Californians-who-choose-to-move-to-Texas are red.) But I still think that (unlike the CA/TX example?) the long-time overlap with those other activist movements makes animal welfare less rationalist and thereby less truthseeking than I like.
(Just to further caveat… Not scoring 100⁄100 on truthseekingness isn’t the end of the world. I love the idea of Charter Cities and support that movement, despite that some charter city advocates are pretty hype-y and use exaggerated rhetoric, and a few, like Balajis, regularly misrepresent things and feel like outright hustlers at times. As I said, I’d support animal welfare over GHD despite truthseeky concerns if that was my only beef; my bigger worries are some philosophical disagreements and concern about the relative lack of long-term / ripple effects.)
David Mathers makes a similar comment, and I respond, here. Seems like there are multiple definitions of the word, and EA folks are using the narrower definition that’s preferred by smart philosophers. Wheras I had just picked up the word based on vibes, and assumed the definition by analogy to racism and sexism, which does indeed seem to be a common real-world usage of the term (eg, supported by top google results in dictionaries, wikipedia, etc). It’s unclear to me whether the original intended meaning of the word was closer to what modern smart philosophers prefer (and everybody else has been misinterpreting it since then), or closer to the definition preferred by activists and dictionaries (and it’s since been somewhat “sanewashed” by philosophers), or if (as I suspect ) it was mushy and unclear from the very start—invented by savvy people who maybe deliberately intended to link the two possible interpretations of the word.
Good to know! I haven’t actually read “Animal Liberation” or etc; I’ve just seen the word a lot and assumed (by the seemingly intentional analogy to racism, sexism, etc) that it meant “thinking humans are superior to animals (which is bad and wrong)”, in the same way that racism is often used to mean “thinking europeans are superior to other groups (which is bad and wrong)”, and sexism about men > women. Thus it always felt to me like a weird, unlikely attempt to shoehorn a niche philosophical position (Are nonhuman animals’ lives of equal worth to humans?) into the same kind of socially-enforced consensus whereby things like racism are near-universally condemend.
I guess your definition of speciesism means that it’s fine to think humans matter more than other animals, but only if there’s a reason for it (like that we have special quality X, or we have Y percent greater capacity for something, therefore we’re Y percent more valuable, or because the strong are destined to rule, or whatever). Versus it would be speciesist to say that humans matter more than other animals “because they’re human, and I’m human, and I’m sticking with my tribe”.
Wikipedia’s page on “speciesism” (first result when I googled the word) is kind of confusing and suggests that people use the word in different ways, with some people using it the way I assumed, and others the way you outlined, or perhaps in yet other ways:
The term has several different definitions.[1] Some specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual’s species membership,[2][3][4] while others define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not.[5][6] Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”.[7] Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals in exploitative ways which is pervasive in the modern society.[8][9][10] Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
The 2nd result on a google search for the word, this Britannica article, sounds to me like it is supporting “my” definition:
Speciesism, in applied ethics and the philosophy of animal rights, the practice of treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species; also, the belief that this practice is justified.
That makes it sound like anybody who thinks a human is more morally important than a shrimp, by definition is speciesist, regardless of their reasons. (Later on the article talks about something called Singer’s “principle of equal consideration of interests”. It’s unclear to me if this thought experiment is supposed to imply humans == shrimps, or if it’s supposed to be saying the IMO much more plausible idea that a given amount of pain-qualia is of equal badness whether it’s in a human or a shrimp. (So you could say something like—humans might have much more capacity for pain, making them morally more important overall, but every individual teaspoon of pain is the same badness, regardless of where it is.)
Third google result: this 2019 philosophy paper debating different definitions of the term—I’m not gonna read the whole thing, but its existence certainly suggests that people disagree. Looks like it ends up preferring to use your definition of speciesism, and uses the term “species-egalitarianists” for the hardline humans == shrimp position.
Fourth: Merriam-Webster, which has no time for all this philosophical BS (lol) -- speciesism is simply “prejudice or discrimination based on species”, and that’s that, apparently!
Fifth: this animal-ethics.org website—long page, and maybe it’s written in a sneaky way that actually permits multiple definitions? But at least based on skimming it, it seems to endorse the hardline position that not giving equal consideration to animals is like sexism or racism: “How can we oppose racism and sexism but accept speciesism?”—“A common form of speciesism that often goes unnoticed is the discrimination against very small animals.”—“But if intelligence cannot be a reason to justify treating some humans worse than others, it cannot be a reason to justify treating nonhuman animals worse than humans either.”
Sixth google result is PETA, who says “Speciesism is the human-held belief that all other animal species are inferior… It’s a bias rooted in denying others their own agency, interests, and self-worth, often for personal gain.” I actually expected PETA to be the most zealously hard-line here, but this page definitely seems to be written in a sneaky way that makes it sound like they are endorsing the humans == shrimp position, while actually being compatible with your more philosophically well-grounded definition. Eg, the website quickly backs off from the topic of humans-vs-animals moral worth, moving on to make IMO much more sympathetic points, like that it’s ridiculous to think farmed animals like pigs are less deserving of moral concern than pet animals like dogs. And they talk about how animals aren’t ours to simply do absolutely whatever we please with zero moral consideration of their interests (which is compatible with thinking that animals deserve some-but-not-equal consideration).Anyways. Overall it seems like philosophers and other careful thinkers (such as the editors of the the EA Forum wiki) would like a minimal definition, wheras perhaps the more common real-world usage is the ill-considered maximal definition that I initially assumed it had. It’s unclear to me what the intention was behind the original meaning of the term—were early users of the word speciesism trying to imply that humans == shrimp and you’re a bad person if you disagree? Or were they making a more careful philosophical distinction, and then, presumably for activist purposes, just deliberately chose a word that was destined to lead to this confusion?
No offense meant to you, or to any of these (non-EA) animal activist sources that I just googled, but something about this messy situation is not giving me the best “truthseeking” vibes...
Excerpting from and expanding on a bit of point 1 of my reply to akash above. Here are four philosophical areas where I feel like total hedonic utilitarianism (as reflected in common animal-welfare calculations) might be missing the mark:
Something akin to “experience size” (very well-described by that recent blog post!)
The importance of sapience—if an experience of suffering is happening “all on its own”, floating adrift in the universe with nobody to think “I am suffering”, “I hope this will end soon”, etc, does this make the suffering experience worse-than, or not-as-bad-as, human suffering where the experience is tied together with a rich tapestry of other conscious experiences? Maybe it’s incoherent to ask questions like this, or I am thinking about this in totally the wrong way? But it seems like an important question to me. The similiarities between layers of “neurons” in image-classifying AIs, and the actual layouts of literal neurons in the human retina + optical cortex (both humans and AIs have a layer for initial inputs, then for edge-detection, then for corners and curves, then simple shapes and textures, then eventually for higher concepts and whole objects) makes me think that possibly image-classifiers are having a genuine “experience of vision” (ie qualia), but an experience that is disconnected (of course) from any sense of self or sense of wellbeing-vs-suffering or wider understanding of its situation. I think many animals might have experiences that are intermediate in various ways between humans and this hypothetical isolated-experience-of-vision that might be happening in an AI image classifier.
How good of an approximation is it to linearly “add up” positive experiences when the experiences are near-identical? ie, there are two identical computer simulations of a suffering emulated mind, any worse than one simulation? what about a single simulation on a computer with double-thick wires? what about a simulation identical in every respect except one? I haven’t thought super hard about this, but I feel like these questions might have important real-world consequences for simple creatures like blackflies or shrimp, whose experiences might not add linearly across billions/trillions of creatures, because at some point the experiences become pretty similar to each other and you’d be “double-counting”.
Something about “higher pleasures”, or Neitzcheanism, or the complexity of value, that maybe there’s more to life than just adding up positive and negative valence?? Personally, if I got to decide right now what happens to the future of human civilization, I would definitely want to try and end suffering (insomuch as this is feasible), but I wouldn’t want to try and max out happiness, and certainly not via any kind of rats-on-heroin style approach. I would rather take the opposite tack, and construct a smaller number of god-like superhuman minds, who might not even be very “happy” in any of the usual senses (ie, perhaps they are meditating on the nature of existence with great equanimity), but who in some sense are able to like… maximize the potential of the universe to know itself and explore the possibilities of consciousness. Or something...
Yeah, I wish they had clarified how many years the $100m is spread out over. See my point 3 in reply to akash above.
Yup, agreed that the arguments for animal welfare should be judged by their best proponents, and that probably the top EA animal-welfare organizations have much better views than the median random person I’ve talked to about this stuff. However:
I don’t have a great sense of the space, though (for better or worse, I most enjoy learning about weird stuff like stable totalitarianism, charter cities, prediction markets, etc, which doesn’t overlap much with animal welfare), so to some extent I am forced to just go off the vibes of what I’ve run into personally.
In my complaint about truthseekingness, I was kinda confusedly mashing together two distinct complaints—one is “animal-welfare EA sometimes seems too ‘activist’ in a non-truthseeking way”, and another is more like “I disagree with these folks about philosophical questions”. That sounds really dumb since those are two very different complaints, but from the outside they can kinda shade into each other… who’s tossing around wacky (IMO) welfare-range numbers because they just want an argument-as-soldier to use in favor of veganism, versus who’s doing it because they disagree with me about something akin to “experience size”, or the importance of sapience, or how good of an approximation it is to linearly “add up” positive experiences when the experiences are near-identical[1]. Among those who disagree with me about those philosophical questions, who is really being a True Philosopher and following their reason wherever it leads (and just ended up in a different place than me), versus whose philosophical reasoning is a little biased by their activist commitments? (Of course one could also accuse me of being subconsciously biased in the opposite direction! Philosophy is hard...)
All that is to say, that I would probably consider the top EA animal-welfare orgs to be pretty truthseeking (although it’s hard for me to tell for sure from the outside), but I would probably still have important philosophical disagreements with them.
Maybe I am making a slightly different point as from most commenters—I wasn’t primarily thinking “man, this animal-welfare stuff is gonna tank EA’s reputation”, but rather “hey, an important side effect of global-health funding is that it buys us a lot of goodwill and mainstream legibility; it would be a shame to lose that if we converted all the global-health money to animal-welfare, or even if the EA movement just became primarily known for nothing but ‘weird’ causes like AI safety and chicken wellbeing.”
I get that the question is only asking about $100m, which seems like it wouldn’t shift the overall balance much. But see section 3 below.
To directly answer your question about social perception: I wish we could completely discount broader social perception when allocating funding (and indeed, I’m glad that the EA movement can pull off as much disregarding-of-broader-social-perception as it already manages to do!), but I think in practice this is an important constraint that we should take seriously. Eg, personally I think that funding research into human intelligence augmentation (via iterated embryo selection or germline engineering) seems like it perhaps should a very high-priority cause area… if it weren’t for the pesky problem that it’s massively taboo and would risk doing lots of damage to the rest of the EA movement. I also feel like there are a lot of explicitly political topics that might otherwise be worth some EA funding (for example, advocating Georgist land value taxes), but which would pose similar risk of politicizing the movement or whatever.
I’m not sure whether the public would look positively or negatively on the EA farmed-animal-welfare movement. As you said, veganism seems to be percieved negatively and treating animals well seems to be percieved positively. Some political campaigns (eg for cage-free ballot propositions), admittedly designed to optimize positive perception, have passed with big margins. (But other movements, like for improving the lives of broiler chickens, have been less successful?) My impression is that the public would be pretty hostile to anything in the wild-animal-welfare space (which is a shame because I, a lover of weird niche EA stuff, am a big fan of wild animal welfare). Alternative proteins have become politicized enough that Florida was trying to ban cultured meat? It seems like a mixed bag overall; roughly neutral or maybe slightly negative, but definitely not like intelligence augmentation which is guaranteed-hugely-negative perception. But if you’re trading off against global health, then you’re losing something strongly positive.
“Could you elaborate on why you think if an additional $100 million were allocated to Animal Welfare, it would be at the expense of Global Health & Development (GHD)?”—well, the question was about shifting $100m from animal welfare to GHD, so it does quite literally come at the expense (namely, a $100m expense) of GHD! As for whether this is a big shift or a tiny drop in the bucket, depends on a couple things:
- Does this hypothetical $100m get spent all at once, and then we hold another vote next year? Or do we spend like $5m per year over the next 20 years?
- Is this the one-and-only final vote on redistributing the EA portfolio? Or maybe there is an emerging “pro-animal-welfare, anti-GHD” coalition who will return for next year’s question, “Should we shift $500m from GHD to animal welfare?”, and the question the year after that...
I would probably endorse a moderate shift of funding, but not an extreme one that left GHD hollowed out. Based on this chart from 2020 (idk what the situation looks like now in 2024), taking $100m per year from GHD would probably be pretty devastating to GHD, and AW might not even have the capacity to absorb the flood of money. But moving $10m each year over 10 years would be a big boost to AW without changing the overall portfolio hugely, so I’d be more amenable to it.
- ^
(ie, are two identical computer simulations of a suffering emulated mind, any worse than one simulation? what about a single simulation on a computer with double-thick wires? what about a simulation identical in every respect except one? I haven’t thought super hard about this, but I feel like these questions might have important real-world consequences for simple creatures like blackflies or shrimp, whose experiences might not add linearly across billions/trillions of creatures, because at some point the experiences become pretty similar to each other and you’d be “double-counting”.)
The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA. Talk of “speciesim” that implies animals’ and humans’ lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me. People frequently do things like taking Rethink’s moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth.
If I considered only the immediate, direct effects of $100m spent on animal welfare versus global health, I would probably side with animal welfare despite the concerns above. But I’m also worried about the relative lack of ripple / flow-through effects from animal welfare work versus global health interventions—both positive longer-term effects on the future of civilization generally, and more near-term effects on the sustainability of the EA movement and social perceptions of EA. Going all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement.
I’d especially welcome criticism from folks not interested in human longevity. If your priority as a human being isn’t to improve healthcare or to reduce catastrophic/existential risks, what is it? Why?
Personally, I am interested in longevity and I think governments (and other groups, although perhaps not EA grantmakers) should be funding more aging research. Nevertheless, some criticism!
I think there are a lot of reasonable life goals other than improving healthcare or reducing x-risks. These things are indeed big, underrated threats to human life. But the reason why human life is so worthwhile and in need of protection, is because life is full of good experiences. So, trying to create more good experiences (and conversely, minimize suffering / pain / sorrow / boredom etc) is also clearly a good thing to do. “Create good experiences” covers a lot of things, from mundane stuff like running a restaurant that makes tasty food or developing a fun videogame, to political crusades to reduce animal suffering or make things better in developing countries or prevent wars and recessions or etc, to anti-aging-like moonshot tech projects like eliminating suffering using genetic engineering or trying to build Neuralink-style brain-computer interfaces or etc. Basically, I think the Bryan Johnson style “the zeroth rule is don’t-die” messaging where antiaging becomes effectively the only thing worth caring about, is reductive and will probably seem off-putting to many people. (Even though, personally, I totally see where you are coming from and consider longevity/health a key personal priority.)
This post bounces around somewhat confusingly among a few different justifications for / defenses of aging research. I think this post (or future posts) would be more helpful if it had a more explicit structure, acknowledging that there are many reasons one could be skeptical of aging research. Here is an example outline:
Some people don’t understand transhumanist values at all, and think that death is essentially good because “death gives life meaning’ or etc silliness.
Other people will kinda-sorta agree that death is bad, but also feel uncomfortable about the idea of extending lifespans—people are often kinda confused about their own feelings/opinions here simply because they haven’t thought much about it.
Some people totally get that death is bad, insofar as they personally would enjoy living much longer, but they don’t think that solving aging would be good from an overall societal perspective.
Some people think that a world of extended longevity would have various bad qualities that would mean the cure for aging is worse than the disease—overpopulation, or stagnant governments/culture (including perpetually stable dictatorships), or just a bunch of dependent old people putting an unsustainable burden on a small number of young workers, or conversely that if people never got to retire this would literally be a fate worse than death. (I think these ideas are mostly silly, but they are common objections. Also, I do think it would be valuable to try and explore/predict what a world of enhanced longevity would look like in more detail, in terms of the impact on culture / economy / governance / geopolitics / etc. Yes, the common objections are dumb, and minor drawbacks like overpopulation shouldn’t overshadow the immense win of curing aging. But I would still be very curious to know what a world of extended longevity would look like—which problems would indeed get worse, and which would actually get better?)
Most of this category of objections is just vague vibes, but a subcategory here is people actually running the numbers and worrying that an increase in elderly people will bankrupt Medicare, or whatever—this is why, when trying to influence policy and public research funding decisions, I think it’s helpful to address this by pointing out that slowing aging (rather than treating disease) would actually be positive for government budgets and the economy, as you do in the post. (Even though in the grand scheme of things, it’s a little absurd to be worried about whether triuphing over death will have a positive or negative effect on some CBO score, as if that should be the deciding factor of whether to cure aging!!)
Other people seem to think that curing death would be morally neutral from an external top-down perspective—if in 2024 there are 8 billion happy people, and in 2100 there are 8 billion happy people, does it really matter whether it’s the same people or new ones? Maybe the happiness is all that counts. (I have a hard time understanding where people are coming from when they seem to sincerely believe this 100%, but lots of philosophically-minded people feel this way, including many utilitarian EA types.) More plausibly, people won’t be 100% committed to this viewpoint, but they’ll still feel that aging and death is, in some sense, less of an ongoing catastrophe from a top-down civilization-wide perspective than it is for the individuals making up that civilization. (I understand and share this view.)
Some people agree that solving aging would be great for both individuals and society, but they just don’t think that it’s tractable to work on aging. IMO this has been the correct opinion for the vast majority of human history, from 10,000 B.C. up until, idk, 2005 or something? So I don’t blame people for failing to notice that maybe, possibly, we are finally starting to make some progress on aging after all. (Imagine if I wrote a post arguing for human expansion to other star systems, and eventually throughout the galaxy, and made lots of soaring rhetorical points about how this is basically the ultimate purpose of human civilization. In a certain sense this is true, but also we obviously lack the technology to send colony-ships to even the nearest stars, so what’s the point of trying to convince people who think civilization should stay centered on the Earth?)
I really like the idea of ending aging, so I get excited about various bits of supposed progress (rapamycin? senescent cell therapy? idk). Many people don’t even know about these small promising signs (eg the ongoing mouse longevity study).
Some people know about those small promising signs, but still feel uncertain whether these current ideas will pan out into real benefits for healthy human lifespans. Reasonable IMO.
Even supposing that something like rapamycin, or some other random drug, indeed extends lifespan by 15% or something—that would be great, but what does that tell me about the likelihood that humanity will be able to consistently come up with OTHER, bigger longevity wins? It is a small positive update, but IMO there is potentially a lot of space between “we tried 10,000 random drugs and found one that slows the progression of alzheimers!” and “we now understand how alzheimers works and have developed a cure”. Might be the same situation with aging. So, even getting some small wins doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of “curing aging” is tractable, especially if we are operating without much of a theory of how aging works. (Seems plausible to me that humanity might be able to solve, like, 3 of the 5 major causes of aging, and lifespan goes up 25%, but then the other 2 are either impossible to fix for fundamental biological reasons, or we never manage to figure them out.)
A lot of people who appear to be in the “death is good” / “death isn’t a societal problem, just an individual problem” categories above, would actually change their tune pretty quickly if they started believing that making progress on longevity was actually tractable. So I think the tractability objections are actually more important to address than it seems, and the earlier stuff about changing hearts and minds on the philosophical questions is actually less important.
Probably instead of one giant comprehensive mega-post addressing all possible objections, you should tackle each area in its own more bite-sized post—to be fancy, maybe you could explicitly link these together in a structured way, like Holden Karnofsky’s “Most Important Century” blog posts.
I don’t really know anything about medicine or drug development, so I can’t give a very detailed breakdown of potential tractability objections, and indeed I personally don’t know how to feel about the tractability of anti-aging.
Of course, to the extent that your post is just arguing “governments should fund this area more, it seems obviously under-resourced”, then that’s a pretty low bar, and your graph of the NIH’s painfully skewed funding priorities basically makes the entire argument for you. (Although I note that the graph seems incorrect?? Shouldn’t $500M be much larger than one row of pixels?? Compare to the nearby “$7B” figures; the $500M should of course be 1/14th as tall...) For this purpose, it’s fine IMO to argue “aging is objectively very important, it doesn’t even matter how non-tractable it is, SURELY we ought to be spending more than $500m/year on this, at the very least we should be spending more than we do on Alzheimers which we also don’t understand but is an objectively smaller problem.”
But if you are trying to convince venture-capitalists to invest in anti-aging with the expectation of maybe actually turning a profit, or win over philanthropists who have other pressing funding priorities, then going into more detail on tractability is probably necessary.
The idea that random customers would be better at corporate budgeting than the people who work in those companies and think about corporate strategy every day, is a really strong claim, and you should try to offer evidence for this claim if you want people to take your fintech idea seriously.
Suppose I buy a new car from Toyota, and now I get to decide how Toyota invests the $10K of profit they made by selling me the car. There are immediately so many problems:
How on earth am I supposed to make this decision?? Should they spend the money on ramping up production of this exact car model? Or should they spend the money on R&D to make better car engines in the future? Or should they save up money to buy an electric-vehicle battery manufacturing startup? Maybe they should just spend more on advertising? I don’t know anything about running a car company. I don’t even know what their current budget is—maybe advertising was the best use of new funds last year, but this year they’re already spending a ton on advertising, and it would be better to simply return additional profits to shareholders rather than over-expand?
Would it be Toyota’s job to give me tons of material that I could read, to become informed and make the decision properly? But then wouldn’t Toyota just end up making all the decisions anyway, in the form of “recommendations”, that customers would usually agree with?
Wouldn’t a lot of this information be secret / internal data, such that giving it away would unduly help rival companies?
Maybe an idea is popular and sounds good, but is actually a terrible idea for some subtle reason. For example, “Toyota should pivot to making self-driving cars powered by AI” sounds like a good idea to me, but I’m guessing that the reason Toyota isn’t doing it is that it would be pretty difficult for them to become a leader in self-driving technology. If ill-informed customers were making decisions, wouldn’t we expect follies like this to happen all the time?
How is everyone supposed to find the time to be constantly researching different corporations? Last month I bought a car and had to become a Toyota expert, this month I bought a new TV from Samsung, next month I’ll upgrade my Apple iphone, or maybe buy a Nintendo switch. And let’s not forget all the grocery shopping I do, restaurant meals, etc innumerable small purchases.
What happens to all the votes of the people who never bother to engage with this system? What’s the incentive for customers to spend time making corporate decisions?
It seems like you’d need some kind of liquid-democracy-style delegation system for this to work properly, and not take up everyone’s time. Like, maybe you’d delegate most coporate decision-making power to a single expert who we think knows the most about the company (we could call this person a “CEO”), and then have a wider circle of people that oversee the CEO’s behavior and fire them if necessary (this could be a “board of directors”), and then a wider circle of people who are generally interested in that company (these might be called “shareholders”) could determine who’s on the board of directors...