Right, I’m asking how useful or dangerous your (1) could be if it didn’t have very good models of human psychology—and therefore didn’t understand things like “humans don’t want to be killed”.
JesseClifton
Karma: 560
Great piece, thank you.
Regarding “learning to reason from humans”, to what extent do you think having good models of human preferences is a prerequisite for powerful (and dangerous) general intelligence?
Of course, the motivation to act on human preferences is another matter—but I wonder if at least the capability comes by default?
Have animal advocacy organizations expressed interest in using SI’s findings to inform strategic decisions? To what extent will your choices of research questions be guided by the questions animal advocacy orgs say they’re interested in?
Strong agreement. Considerations from cognitive science might also help us to get a handle on how difficult the problem of general intelligence is, and the limits of certain techniques (e.g. reinforcement learning). This could help clarify our thinking on AI timelines as well as the constraints which any AGI must satisfy. Misc. topics that jump to mind are the mental modularity debate, the frame problem, and insight problem solving.
This is a good article on AI from a cog sci perspective: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf
Yes, I think you’re right, at least when prices are comparable.
More quick Bayes: Suppose we have a Beta(0.01, 0.32) prior on the proportion of people who will pledge. I choose this prior because it gives a point-estimate of a ~3% chance of pledging, and a probability of ~95% that the chance of pledging is less than 10%, which seems prima facie reasonable.
Updating on your data using a binomial model yields a Beta(0.01, 0.32 + 14) distribution, which gives a point estimate of < 0.1% and a ~99.9% probability that the true chance of pledging is less than 10%.
Thanks for writing this up.
The estimated differences due to treatment are almost certainly overestimates due to the statistical significance filter (http://andrewgelman.com/2011/09/10/the-statistical-significance-filter/) and social desirability bias.
For this reason and the other caveats you gave, it seems like it would be better to frame these as loose upper bounds on the expected effect, rather than point estimates. I get the feeling people often forget the caveats and circulate conclusions like “This study shows that $1 donations to newspaper ads save 3.1 chickens on average”.
I continue to question whether these studies are worthwhile. Even if it did not find significant differences between the treatments and control, it’s not as if we’re going to stop spreading pro-animal messages. And it was not powered to detect the treatment differences in which you are interested. So it seems it was unlikely to be action-guiding from the start. And of course there’s no way to know how much of the effect is explained by social desirability bias.
...as such it reads “There are many important things being neglected. This is an important thing. Therefore it is the most important thing to do.”
I never meant to say that spreading anti-speciesism is the most important thing, just that it’s still very important and it’s not obvious that its relative value has changed with the election.
Trump may represent an increased threat to democratic norms and x-risk, but that doesn’t mean the marginal value of working in those areas has changed. Perhaps it has. We’d need to see concrete examples of how EAs who previously had a comparative advantage in helping animals now can do better by working on these other things.
my personal position on animal advocacy is that the long-term future of animals on Earth is determined almost entirely by how much humans have their shit together in the long run
This may be true of massive systemic changes for animals like the abolition of factory farming or large-scale humanitarian intervention in nature. But the past few years have shown that we can reduce a lot of suffering through corporate reform. Animal product alternatives are also very promising.
Also, “having our shit together in the long run” surely includes anti-speciesism (or at least much higher moral consideration for animals). Since EAs are some of the only people strategically working to spread anti-speciesism, it seems that this remains highly valuable on the margin.
Edited to add: It’s possible that helping animals has become more valuable on the margin, as many people (EA and otherwise) may think similarly to you and divert resources to politics. Many animal advocates still think humans come first. Just a speculation.
Agreed that large updates about things like the prevalence of regressive attitudes and the fragility of democracy should have been made before the election. But Trump’s election itself has changed many EA-relevant parameters—international cooperation, x-risk, probability of animal welfare legislation, environmental policy, etc. So there may be room for substantial updates on the fact that Trump and a Republican Congress will be governing.
That said, it’s not immediately obvious to me how the marginal value of any EA effort has changed, and I worry about major updates being made out of a kneejerk reaction to the horribleness of someone like Trump being elected.
I’d be interested to hear a case for moving from animal advocacy to politics. If your comparative advantage was in animal advocacy before the election, it’s not immediately obvious to me that switching makes sense.
In the short term, animal welfare concerns dominate human concerns, and your marginal contribution to animal welfare via politics is unclear: welfare reform in the US is happening mostly through corporate reform, and it’s dubious that progressive politics is even good for wild animals due to the possible harms of environmentalism.
Looking farther into the future, it’s not clear that engaging in politics is has become more effective on the margin than spreading anti-speciesism.
Politics is still a crowded space and it’s looking like many other progressives have been galvanized by this result.
Thank you for opening this discussion.
It’s not clear to me that animal advocacy in general gets downweighted:
-For the short term, wild and farmed animal welfare dominates human concerns. I’d be interested to hear a case that animals are better served by some EAs switching to progressive politics more generally. I’m doubtful that EA contributions to politics would indirectly benefit welfare reform and wild animal suffering efforts. Welfare reform in the United States is taking place largely through corporate reform. The impact of progressive vs conservative (or Trumpian) policy on WAS is unclear, and it’s not implausible that the latter will be net helpful to wild animals due to anti-environmentalist policies. And plenty of progressives will be galvanized to work on (human-centered) progressive politics; so it’s not clear to me that the marginal value of the EA community getting involved is high.
Animal liberation, however, looks (on the face of it) worse as a cause. The election makes any kind of legal status for animals, factory farming ban, etc. in the next few decades seem even less likely.
-Looking at the farther future…I am personally skeptical about the value of any efforts to affect the long-term development of human civilization, political or otherwise. But even conditional on one thinking that trying to influence the far-future is a good idea, it’s not obvious to me that marginal anti-speciesism efforts are less valuable than marginal progressive political efforts, esp. since the latter is fairly crowded.
That said, I imagine there are many variables I haven’t considered and I think this is a great time to deepen the conversation about the extent to which progress for animals depends on the broader political circumstances.
Finally, I am wary of major belief revisions being made due to System 1 reactions. Right now I want to join the Rebel Alliance as much as the next guy, but we have to keep in mind that the consequences of Trump’s election for all sentient beings are highly complex and uncertain.
What do you mean by “too speculative”? You mean the effects of agriculture on wildlife populations are speculative? The net value of wild animal experience is unclear? Why not quantify this uncertainty and include it in the model? And is this consideration that much more speculative than the many estimates re: the far future on which your model depends?
Also, “I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind” is a strange reason for not accounting for this consideration in the model. Don’t we build models in the first place because we don’t trust such intuitions?
Thanks for writing this up! Have you taken into account the effects of reductions in animal agriculture on wildlife populations? I didn’t see terms for such effects in your cause prioritization app.
It’s possible that preventing human extinction is net negative. A classical utilitarian discusses whether the preventing human extinction would be net negative or positive here: http://mdickens.me/2015/08/15/is_preventing_human_extinction_good/. Negative-leaning utilitarians and other suffering-focused people think the value of the far-future is negative.
This article contains an argument for time-discounted utilitarianism: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/d6/problems_and_solutions_in_infinite_ethics/. I’m sure there’s a lot more literature on this, that’s about all I’ve looked into it.
You could also reject maximizing expected utility as the proper method of practical reasoning. Weird things happen with subjective expected utility theory, after all—St. Petersburg paradox, Pascal’s Mugging, anything with infinity, dependence on possibly meaningless subjective probabilities, etc. Of course, giving to poverty charities might still be suboptimal under your preferred decision theory.
FWIW, strict utilitarianism isn’t concerned with “selfishness” or “moral narcisissm”, just maximizing utility.
Examining the foundations of the practical reasoning used (and seemingly taken for granted) by many EAs seems highly relevant. Wish we saw more of this kind of thing.
Have you seen Brian Tomasik’s work on 1) the potential harms of environmentalism for wild animals, and 2) the effects of climate change on wild animal suffering?
e.g. http://reducing-suffering.org/climate-change-and-wild-animals/ http://reducing-suffering.org/applied-welfare-biology-wild-animal-advocates-focus-spreading-nature/
You don’t think directing thousands of dollars to effective animal charities has made any difference? Or spreading effectiveness-based thinking in the animal rights community (e.g. the importance of focusing on farm animals rather than, say, shelter animals)? Or promoting cellular agriculture and plant-based meats?
As for wild animal suffering: there are a few more than 5-10 people who care (the Reducing WAS FB group has 1813 members), but yes, the community is tiny. Why does that mean thinking about how to reduce WAS accomplishes nothing? Don’t you think it’s worth at least trying to see if there are tractable ways to help wild animals—if only through interventions like lawn-paving and humane insecticides?
May I ask which efforts to reduce suffering you do think are worthwhile?
What do you think of the effort to end factory farming? Or Tomasik et al’s work on wild animal suffering? Do you think these increase rather than decrease suffering?
Lazy solutions to problems of motivating, punishing, and experimenting on digital sentiences could also involve astronomical suffering.