Kit

Karma: 1,382

Kit Nov 16, 2019, 1:31 PM
7 points
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on: Assumptions about the far future and cause priority
Thanks!
In my understanding, [a confident focus on extinction risk] relies crucially on the assumption that the utility of the future cannot have exponential growth in the long term
I wanted to say thanks for spelling that out. It seems that this implicitly underlies some important disagreements. By contrast, I think this addition is somewhat counterproductive:
and will instead essentially reach a plateau.
The idea of a plateau brings to mind images of sub-linear growth, but all that is required is sub-exponential growth, a much weaker claim. I think this will cause confusion.
I also appreciated that the piece is consistently accurate. As I wrote this comment, there were several times where I was considering writing some response, then saw that the piece has a caveat for exactly the problem I was going to point out, or a footnote which explained what I was confused about.
A particular kind of accuracy is representing the views of others well. I don’t think the piece is always as charitable as it could be, but details like footnote 15 make it much easier to understand what exactly other people’s views are. Also, the simple absence of gross mischaracterisations of other people’s views made this piece much more useful to me than many critiques.
Here are a few thoughts on how the model or framing could be more useful:
‘Growth rate’
The concept of a ‘growth rate’ seems useful in many contexts. However, applying the concept to a long-run process locks the model of the process into the framework of an exponential curve, because only exponential curves have a meaningful long-run growth rate (as defined in this piece). The position that utility will grow like an exponential is just one of many possibilities. As such, it seems preferable to simply talk directly in terms of the shape of long-run utility.
Model decomposition
When discussing the shape of long-run utility, it might be easier to decompose total utility into population size and utility per capita. In particular, the ‘utility = log(GDP)’ model is actually ‘in a perfectly equal world, utility per capita = log(GDP per capita)’. i.e. in a perfectly equal world, utility = population size x log(GDP per capita).[1]
For example, this resolves the objection that
if we duplicate our world and create an identical copy of it, I would find it bizarre if our utility function only increases by a constant amount, and find it more reasonable if it is multiplied by some factor.
The proposed duplication doubles population size while keeping utility per capita fixed, so it is a doubling[2] of utility in a model of this form, as expected.
More broadly, I suspect that the feasibility of ways to gain at-least-exponentially greater resources over time (analogous to population size, e.g. baby-universes, reversible computation[3]) and ways to use those resources at-least-exponentially better (analogous to utility per capita, no known proposals?) might be debated quite separately.
How things relate to utility
Where I disagreed or thought the piece was less clear, it was usually because something seemed at risk of being confused for utility. For example, explosive growth in ‘the space of possible patterns of matter we can potentially explore’ is used as an argument for possible greater-than-exponential growth in utility, but the connection between these two things seems tenuous. Sharpening the argument there could make it more convincing.
More broadly, I can imagine any concrete proposal for how utility per capita might be able to rise exponentially over very long timescales being much more compelling for taking the idea seriously. For example, if the Christiano reversible computation piece Max Daniel links to turns out to be accurate, that naively seems more compelling.
Switching costs
My take is that these parts don’t get at the heart of any disagreements.
It already seems fairly common that, when faced with two approaches which look optimal under different answers to intractable questions, Effective Altruism-related teams and communities take both approaches simultaneously. For example, this is ongoing at the level of cause prioritisation and in how the AI alignment community works on multiple agendas simultaneously. It seems that the true disagreements are mostly around whether or not growth interventions are sufficiently plausible to add to the portfolio, rather than whether diversification can be valuable.
The piece also ties in some concerns about community health to switching costs. I particularly agree that we would not want to lose informed critics. However, similarly to the above, I don’t think this is a real point of disagreement. Discussed simultaneously are risk from being ‘surrounded by people who think that what I intend to do is of negligible importance’ and risks from people ‘being reminded that their work is of negligible importance’. I think this conflates what people believe with whether they treat those around them with respect, which I think are largely independent problems. It seems fairly clear that we should attempt to form accurate beliefs about what is best, and simultaneously be kind and supportive to other people trying to help others using evidence and reason.
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[1] The standard log model is surely wrong but the point stands with any decomposition into population size multiplied by a function of GDP per capita.
[2] I think the part about creating identical copies is not the main point of the thought experiment and would be better separated out (by stipulating that a very similar but not identical population is created). However, I guess that in the case that we are actually creating identical people we can handle how much extra moral relevance we think this creates through the population factor.
[3] I guess it might be worth making super clear that these are hypothetical examples rather than things for which I have views on whether they are real.

Kit Oct 9, 2019, 11:43 AM
6 points
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in reply to: mchr3k’s comment on: Updated Climate Change Problem Profile
I’m curious to know what you think the difference is. Both problems require greenhouse gas emissions to be halted.
I agree that both mainline and extreme scenarios are helped by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there are other things one can do about climate change, and the most effective actions might turn out to be things which are specific to either mainline or extreme risks. To take examples from that link:
- Developing drought-resistant crops could mitigate some of the worst effects of mainline scenarios, but might help little in extreme scenarios.
- Attempting to artificially reverse climate change may be a last resort for extreme scenarios, but may be too risky to be worthwhile for mainline scenarios.
For the avoidance of doubt, I think that my point about mainline and extreme risks appealing to different worldviews is sufficient reason to separate the analyses even if the interventions ended up looking similar.
if you have two problems who require $100 or $200 of total funding to solve completely, if they both have $50 of funding today, they are not equally neglected
Yep, you could use the word ‘neglected’ that way, but I stand by my comment that if you do that without also modifying your definition of ‘scale’ or ‘solvability’, the three factors no longer add up to a cost-effectiveness heuristic. i.e. if you formalise what you mean by neglectedness and insert it into the formula here without changing anything else, the formula will no longer cancel out to ‘good done / extra person or $’.

Kit Oct 8, 2019, 2:13 PM
12 points
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on: Updated Climate Change Problem Profile
Thanks for this. I found it interesting to think about. Here are my main comments.
Mainline and extreme risks
I think it would be better to analyse mainline risks and extreme risks separately.
- Depending on whether or not you put substantial weight on future people, one type of risks may be much more important than the other. The extreme risks appear to pose a much larger existential threat than mainline risks, so if you value future generations the extreme risks may be much more important to focus on. The opposite may be true for people who apply high pure time discounting. (Relatedly, on most worldviews, the ‘scale’ factor will be materially different between the two.)
- The ideal responses to mainline and extreme risks appear to be different. (Relatedly, the ‘solvability’ of those responses may differ, as might the amount of resources that are already committed to the relevant kinds of responses.)
- The methodologies which are useful are different. Efforts to understand and act on mainline risks are amenable to standard economic approaches, while extreme risk analysis requires substantive judgements about empirical and model uncertainty.
Overall, putting the two together seems to make the analysis less clear, not more.
More expensive things are worse
Firstly, this approach will undervalue capital intensive causes where the total required investment is so large that $10 billion/year may still represent underfunding. A better model would be one which examined the total funding required to solve the problem compared to the current level of funding.
The framework 80k uses is designed to add up to a cost-effectiveness heuristic. Adjusting this by giving more expensive things higher neglectedness scores in effect takes the ‘cost’ out of the ‘cost-effectiveness analysis’. Using a completely different framework would be fine, but making this adjustment alone causes one to depart from any notion of good done per effort put in.
If I put more time into this, I would focus on the solvability part
In your initial comments on solvability, you give a concrete set of interventions which you say would cost approximately a certain amount and achieve approximately a certain amount. If someone were to analyse these in detail, this could be the basis for a cost-effectiveness calculation. Of course, I don’t know enough to say whether the Project Drawdown analysis you reference is accurate. Other people looking into this might want to focus on that since it seems crucial to the bottom line.
Qualified ’need’s
When you just say ‘we need to do Y’, this seems to be sort of assuming the conclusion, adding little to my understanding of which actions produce the most impact. For example:
All of these solutions, and more, need to be rolled out as quickly as possible at global scale.
I found it much more helpful when you said ‘if we want to achieve X, we need to do Y’, improving my understanding of what actions lead to what effects. For example:
the latest UN press release (2019-10-23) states that nations need to increase their targets fivefold to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.
This part of my comment might sound like a nitpick, but I think attention to this kind of thing can make for better analysis and better communication.
All personal views only, of course.

Kit Sep 30, 2019, 10:22 AM
14 points
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on: Summary of my academic paper “Effective Altruism and Systemic Change”
Regarding increasing marginal returns (IMR), which seems to be the primary contribution of this paper and not obviously addressed by replies to other types of systemic change objections:
Perhaps rather than ‘Are IMR commonly found in cause areas?‘, I would ask ‘where are IMR found?’ and, for the purposes of testing the critique, ‘in which cases are relevant actors not already aware of those IMR?’ This is because I expect the prevalence of IMR to vary substantially between areas. (I see that you also call for concrete examples in your paper.) Some examples, sorted from strategic to individual decision-making:
- DMR at a high level within causes: you may have seen this list of reasons to expect DMR when looking at a cause area at a sufficiently high level. I would argue that since
  - the methodology you point to is largely about high-level cause prioritisation, and
  - the neglectedness criterion works if there are roughly† logarithmic diminishing marginal returns within causes,
- the IMR objection does not apply to them.
- IMR when starting new projects: in their 2011 post on why they are not using donation matching, GiveWell discusses ‘coordination matching’, where the project only goes ahead if sufficient funds are committed (like Kickstarter), as a legitimate form of donation matching. [Minor: this may be IMR only with respect to money ultimately committed. A large donor making a partial, initial commitment may in fact have outsized impact relative to later funders due to the earlier donor causing later donors to act.]
- IMR when coordinating individual careers: this section of William MacAskill’s 2017 EAGx Berlin talk encourages more attention to coordinated action. This includes things closely analogous to the coordination games you discuss in the paper, in which one person switching to their comparative advantage is a cost, but two people switching is a gain. I would guess that you would also like 80,000 Hours’ writing on comparative advantage and other coordination concepts.
Of course, my examples of IMR are drawn from people who helped create the effective altruism community, so they help with ‘where are IMR found?’ but not with identifying points where IMR are underappreciated by the community. It certainly seems possible that there are issues I am unaware of. I see that in your paper you mention ‘the problem of competition between NGOs and states’ as a problem for which the solution which might have IMR. To rehash an old counterargument, I would guess that this is not really a conflict, in that substantially reducing disease prevalence (the relevant comparable on the scale of the funding required for other mass empowerment efforts) is hugely empowering. However, this is an off-the-cuff comment. I also know little about the example of whether corporate campaigns accelerate or decelerate abolition, but I believe that this was and probably still is an active debate among effectiveness-focused animal advocates.
† In fact, I am a little worried that the logarithmic assumption is sufficiently wrong to cause problems, while I am confident that there is DMR in general at this level.

Kit Sep 22, 2019, 5:21 PM
1 point
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in reply to: JanB’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Punting strategies, in contrast, affect future generations primarly via their effect on the people alive in the most influential centuries.
That seems like a sufficiently precise definition. Whether there are any interventions in that category seems like an open question. (Maybe it is a lot more narrow than Will’s intention.)

Kit Sep 15, 2019, 2:05 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Not appropriated: lost to value drift. (Hence, yes, the historical cases I draw on are the same as in my comment 3 up in this thread.) I’m thinking of this quantity as something like the proportion of resources which will in expectation be dedicated 100 years later to the original mission as envisaged by the founders, annualised.

Kit Sep 14, 2019, 10:36 PM
9 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Got it. Given the inclusion of (bad) value drift in ‘appropriated (or otherwise lost)’, my previous comment should just be interpreted as providing evidence to counter this claim:
But I shouldn’t think that the chance of my funds being appropriated (or otherwise lost) is as high as 2% per year.
[Recap of my previous comment] It seems that this quote predicts a lower rate than there has ever† been before. Such predictions can be correct! However, a plan for making the prediction come true is needed.
It seems that the plan should be different to what essentially all†† the people with higher rates of (bad) value drift did. These particular suggestions (succession planning and including an institution’s objectives in its charter) seem qualitatively similar to significant minority practices in the past. (e.g. one of my outside views uses the reference class of ‘charities with clear founding values’. For the ‘institutions through the eras’ one, religious groups with explicit creeds and explicit succession planning were prominent examples I had in mind.) The open question then seems to be whether EAs will tend to achieve sufficient improvement in such practices to bring (bad) value drift down by around an order of magnitude relative to what has been achieved historically. This seems unlikely to me, but not implausible. In particular, the idea that it is easier to design a constitution based on classical utilitarianism than for other goals people have had is very interesting.
Aside: investing heavily in these practices seems easier for larger donors. The quote seems very hard to defend for donors too small to attract a highly dedicated successor.
This discussion has made me think that insofar as one does punt to the future, making progress on how to reduce institutional value drift would be a very valuable project, even if I’m doubtful about how much progress is possible.
† It seems appropriate to exclude all groups coordinating for mutual self-interest, such as governments. (This is broader than my initial carving out of for-profits.)
†† However, it seems useful to think about a much wider set of mission-driven organisations than foundations because the sample of 100-year-old foundations is tiny.

Kit Sep 13, 2019, 6:12 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Thanks. I agree that we might endorse some (or many) changes. Hidden away in my first footnote is a link to a pretty broad set of values. To expand: I would be excited to give (and have in the past given) resources to people smarter than me who are outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian, as defined by Will here, even (or especially) if they plan to use them differently to how I would. Similarly, keeping the value ‘do the most good’ stable maybe means something like keeping the outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian values stable.
For clarity, I excluded profit maximisation because incentives to pursue this goal seem powerful in a way that might never apply to effective altruism, however broadly it is construed. (The ‘impartial’ part seems especially hard to keep stable.) In particular, profit maximisation does not even need to be propagated: e.g. if a company does some random other stuff for a while, its stakeholders will still have a moderate incentive to maximise profits, so will typically return to doing this. A similar statement is that ‘maximise profits’ is the default state of things. No matter how broad our conception of ‘do the most good’ can be made, it seems likely to lack this property (except for lock-in scenarios).

Kit Sep 13, 2019, 9:10 AM
29 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
I was very surprised to see that ‘funds being appropriated (or otherwise lost)’ is the main concern with attempting to move resources 100 years into the future. Before seeing this comment, I would have been confident that the primary difficulty is in building an institution which maintains acceptable values† for 100 years.
Some of the very limited data we have on value drift within individual people suggests losses of 11% and 18% per year for two groups over 5 years. I think these numbers are a reasonable estimate for people who have held certain values for 1-6 years, with long-run drop-off for individuals being lower.
A more relevant but less precise outside view is my intuitions about how long charities which have clear founding values tend to stick to those values after their founders leave. I think of this as ballpark a decade on average, though hopefully we could do better if investing time and money in increasing this.
Perhaps yet more relevant and yet less precise is the history of institutions through the eras which have built themselves around some values which they thought of as non-negotiable (in the same way that we might see impartiality as non-negotiable). For example, religious institutions. My vague, non-historian impression is that, even considering institutions founded with concrete values at their core, very few still had those values†† 100 years later, if they existed in the same form at all.
The thing I’d find most convincing in outweighing these outside views is simply an outline for how EAs can get this institutional value drift thing close to zero. I can imagine such a plan seeming obvious to others, but it currently looks like a potentially intractable problem to me.†††
† Possible example of acceptable values.
†† I’m excluding ‘maximise profits’ as a value!
††† This all becomes fairly simple upon the rise of any technology which would enable permanent lock-in. However, it seems that this would be a time to deploy a lot of resources immediately, so ways to move money into the future at that time seem less helpful. This seems like weak evidence for an unfortunate correlation between hingeyness and ability to move resources into the future.
What links here?
- MichaelA🔸's comment on Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations by MichaelA🔸 (Aug 14, 2020, 9:25 AM; 2 points)

Kit Sep 5, 2019, 1:12 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Thanks! I hadn’t seen the Cotton-Barratt piece before.
Extinction risk reduction punts on the question of which future problems are most important to solve, but not how best to tackle the problem of extinction risk specifically. Building capacity for future extinction risk reduction work punts on how best to tackle the problem of extinction risk specifically, but not the question of which future problems are most important to solve. They seem to do more/less punting than one another along different dimensions, so, depending on one’s definition of direct vs punting, each could be more of a punt than the other. I’m not clear on whether this means we should pick a dimension to talk about, or whether there is no meaningful single spectrum of directness vs punting.

Kit Sep 5, 2019, 10:08 AM
13 points
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in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
I agree that, among other things, discussion of mechanisms for sending resources to the future would needed to make such a decision. I figured that all these other considerations were deliberately excluded from this post to keep its scope manageable.
However, I do think that one can interpret the post as making claims about a more insightful kind of probability: the odds with which the current century is the one which will have the highest leverage-evaluated-at-the-time (in contrast to an omniscient view / end-of-time evaluation, which is what this thread mostly focuses on). I think that William_MacAskill’s main arguments are broadly compatible with both of these concepts, so one could get more out of the piece by interpreting it as about the more useful concept.
Formally, one could see the thing being analysed as
$P (i = 0$ maximises $E [$ leverage of century $i ∣ F_{i}])$ ,
where $F_{i}$ is the knowledge available at the beginning of century i. If we and all future generations may freely move resources across time, and some things that are maybe omitted from the leverage definition are held constant, this expression tells us with what odds we are correct to do ‘direct work’ today as opposed to transfer resources one century forward. (Confusion about what ‘direct work’ means noted here.)
However, you seem to be right that as soon as you don’t hold other very important factors (such as how well one can send resources to the future) constant, those additional terms go inside the maximisation evaluation, and hence the above expression still isn’t that useful. (In particular, it can’t just be multiplied by an independent factor to get to a useable expression.)
(Also, I feel like I’m mathing from the hip here, so quite possibly I’ve got this quite wrong.)

Kit Sep 4, 2019, 6:46 PM
23 points
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on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
This was very thought-provoking. I expect I’ll come back to it a number of times.
I suspect that how the model works depends a lot on exactly how this definition is interpreted:
a time t $_{i}$ is more influential (from a longtermist perspective) than a time t $_{j}$ iff you would prefer to give an additional unit of resources,[1] that has to be spent doing direct work (rather than investment), to a longtermist altruist living at t $_{i}$ rather than to a longtermist altruist living at t $_{j}$ .
In particular, I think you intend direct work to include extinction risk reduction, and to be opposite to strategies which punt decisions to future generations. However, extinction risk reduction seems like the mother of all punting strategies, so it seems naturally categorised as not direct work for the purpose of considering whether to punt. Due to this, I expect some weirdness around the categorisation, and would guess that a precise definition would be productive.
(Added formatting and bold to the quote for clarity.)
What links here?
- Kit's comment on Are we living at the most influential time in history? by William_MacAskill (Sep 5, 2019, 10:08 AM; 13 points)

Kit Sep 4, 2019, 5:56 PM
20 points
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in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Using a distribution over possible futures seems important. The specific method you propose seems useful for getting a better picture of max $_{i} {P ($ century $i$ most leveraged $)}$ . However, what we want in order to make decisions is something more akin to max $_{i} {E [$ leverage of century $i]}$ . The most obvious difference is that scenarios in which the future is short and there is little one can do about it score highly on expected ranking and low on expected value. I am unclear on whether a flat prior makes sense for expectancy, but it seems more reasonable than for probability.
Of course, even max $_{i} {E [$ leverage of century $i]}$ does not accurately reflect what we are looking for. Similarly to Gregory_Lewis’ comment, the decision-relevant thing (if ‘punting to the future’ is possible at all) is closer still to max $_{i} {E [$ what we will assess the leverage of century i to be at the time $]}$ . i.e. whether we will have higher expected leverage in some future century according to our beliefs at that time. Thinking this through, I also find it plausible that even this does not make sense when using the definitions in the post, and will make a related top-level comment.

Kit Aug 14, 2019, 7:14 AM
1 point
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in reply to: cole_haus’s comment on: Key points from The Dead Hand, David E. Hoffman
I stand corrected. I think those quotes overstate matters a decent amount, but indeed the security of fissile material is a significantly more important barrier to misuse.

Kit Aug 10, 2019, 8:41 AM
12 points
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in reply to: Eli Rose’s comment on: Key points from The Dead Hand, David E. Hoffman
Thanks! Here are some places you might start. (People who have done deeper dives into nuclear risk might have more informed views on what resources would be useful.)
- Baum et al., 2018, A Model For The Probability Of Nuclear War makes use of a more comprehensive list of (possible) close calls than I’ve seen elsewhere.
- FLI’s timeline of close calls is a more (less?) fun display, which links on to more detailed sources. Note that many of the sources are advocacy groups, and they have a certain spin.
- Picking a few case studies that seemed important and following the citations to the most direct historical accounts to better understand how close a call they really were might be a project which would interest you.
- I thought this interview with Samantha Neakrase of the Nuclear Threat Initiative was helpful for understanding what things people in the nuclear security community worry about today.
Some broader resources
- The probability of nuclear war is only one piece of the puzzle – even a nuclear war would probably not end the world, thankfully. I found the recent Rethink Priorities nuclear risk series (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, especially #4) very helpful for putting more of the pieces together.
- This Q&A with climate scientist Luke Oman gets across some key considerations very efficiently.
I’m also glad that you interpret the discussion of the Petrov incident as ‘some evidence against’. That’s about the level of confidence I intended to convey.

Kit Aug 8, 2019, 7:24 PM
2 points
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in reply to: spanrucker’s comment on: How urgent are extreme climate change risks?
Open Phil (then GiveWell Labs) explored climate change pretty early on in their history, including the nearer-term humanitarian effects. Giving What We Can also compared climate change efforts to health interventions. (Each page is a summary page which links to other pages going into more detail.)

Kit Aug 3, 2019, 12:14 PM
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Cluster Headache Frequency Follows a Long-Tail Distribution
I’m very excited to see people doing empirical work on what things we care about are in fact dominated by their extremes. At least after adjusting for survey issues, statements like
The bottom 90% accounts for 30% of incidents
seem to be a substantial improvement on theoretical arguments about properties of distributions. (Personal views only.)

Kit Aug 3, 2019, 12:13 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Cluster Headache Frequency Follows a Long-Tail Distribution
I’m less optimistic about the use of surveys on whether people think tryptamines will/did work:
- ‘And do they work?’ doesn’t seem like a question that will be accurately answered by asking people whether it worked for them. (Reversion to the mean being my main concern.)
- Non-users are asked whether tryptamines ‘could be effective for treating your cluster headaches’, which could be interpreted as a judgement on whether it works for anyone or whether it will work for them (for which the correct answer seems to be ‘maybe’). Users are asked whether it worked for them specifically. Directly computing the difference between these answers doesn’t seem meaningful.

Kit Jul 16, 2019, 8:40 AM
15 points
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in reply to: Kit’s comment on: Debrief: “cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics”
Huh. The winning response, one of the six early responses, also engages explicitly with the arguments in the main post in its section 1.2 and section 2. This one discussed things mentioned in the post without explicitly referring to the post. This one summarises the long-term-focused arguments in the post and then argues against them.
I worry I’m missing something here. Dismissing these responses as ‘cached arguments’ seemed stretched already, but the factual claim made to back that decision up, that ‘None of these engaged with the pro-psychedelic arguments I made in the main post’, seems straightforwardly incorrect.

Kit Jul 15, 2019, 10:32 PM
19 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Debrief: “cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics”
I also came to note that the request was for ‘the best arguments against psychedelics, not for counter-arguments to your specific arguments in favour’.
However, I also wrote one of the six responses referred to, and I contest the claim that
None of these engaged with the pro-psychedelic arguments I made in the main post
The majority of my response explicitly discusses the weakness of the argumentation in the main post for the asserted effect on the long-term future. To highlight a single sentence which seems to make this clear, I say:
I don’t see the information in 3(a) or 3(b) telling me much about how leveraged any particular intervention is.
I also referred to arguments made by Michael Plant, which in my amateur understanding appeared to be stronger than those in the post. To me, it seems good that others engaged primarily with arguments such as Michael’s, because engaging with stronger arguments tends to lead to more learning. When I drafted my submission, I considered whether it was unhealthy to primarily respond to what I saw as weaker arguments from the post itself. Yet, contra the debrief post, I did in fact do so.