Kit

Karma: 1,382

Kit Mar 10, 2019, 1:26 PM
45 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Getting People Excited About More EA Careers: A New Community Building Challenge
I think IASPCs handle these things well, and think there’s some misinterpretation going on. What makes a strong plan change under this metric is determined by whatever 80,000 Hours thinks is most important, and currently this includes academic, industry, EA org and government roles. These priorities also change in response to new information and needs. The problem Sebastian is worried about seems more of a big deal: maybe some orgs / local groups are defining their metrics mostly in terms of one category, or that it’s easy to naively optimise for one category at the expense of the others.
The part about counting impact from skill-building and direct work differently simply seems like correct accounting: EA orgs should credit themselves with substantially more impact for a plan change which has led to impact as one which might do so in the future, most obviously because the latter has a <100% probability of turning into the former.
I also think the metric works fine with Sebastian’s point that quant trading can be competitive with other priority paths. You seem to imply that the use of IASPCs contradicts his advice, but you point to a non-priority rating for ‘earn to give in a medium income career’, which is not quant trading!† 80,000 Hours explicitly list quant trading as a priority path (as Seb pointed out in the post), so if an org uses IASPCs as one of their metrics they should be excited to see people with those particular skills go down that route. (If any readers land quant jobs in London, please do say hi :) )
I agree that misapplication of this or similar metrics is dangerous, and that if e.g. some local groups are just optimising for EA-branded orgs instead of at least the full swathe of priority paths, there’s a big opportunity to improve. All the normal caveats about using metrics sensibly continue to apply.
All views my own.
†As a former trader, I felt the need to put an exclamation mark somewhere in this paragraph.

Kit Mar 2, 2019, 5:23 PM
12 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Effective Impact Investing
I’d like to highlight the distinction between ‘impact investing funds would outperform funds purely optimized for profit’ and ‘SRI doesn’t undermine the bottom line’. In markets as efficient as I think publicly traded stocks are, the former is highly improbable and the latter is highly probable.
The blog post appears to make both claims. Habryka’s complaint may seem more defensible to you if it is entirely about the former claim.
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Two technical notes on this distinction:
- Given the existence of some low-quality evidence for the strong (outperformance) claim, you might argue that that too is not so naive.
- Of course, SRI typically reduces diversification, with an effect somewhere between negligible and substantial depending on the strategy, making the weak (doesn’t undermine) claim misleading in some situations, even with efficient markets.

Kit Feb 28, 2019, 9:18 AM
14 points
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on: Effective Impact Investing
Thanks for giving examples of advocacy efforts you might see as a good use of investor time and capital! Getting to the concrete outcomes of impact investing seems pretty key for figuring out in what situations it’s a good use of time and capital to engage in.
When you say, ‘shareholder advocacy, which is the primary mechanism for impact in public equity investing’, I find this very much plausible in the sense that it’s the part which seems to have the highest potential. Interestingly, though, when I last looked into this, the vast majority of the SRI industry by capital seemed to be not engaging in shareholder advocacy.*
I would expect shareholder advocacy to be worth the time of effectiveness-minded altruists only in very specific situations (perhaps including some of the ones you named), but given that good shareholder advocacy seems so rare even in SRI, I wonder if there is room for getting the entire SRI industry to actually do the part of SRI which seems promising? Is it true that most SRI capital isn’t being used for shareholder advocacy? Is it tractable to improve the industry in this way? (Is that already your main aim?)
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*I’m not counting screening/divestment campaigns which don’t involve talking to specific companies, because this generally seems not to provide clear incentives for any particular company to do anything in particular. Best-in-class screening might be an exception, but the incentives still seemed super weak to me when I last thought about this. Overall, it looks like there’s ${tens of trillions} of assets considered to be SRI and a small number (on the order of 1,000 per year?) of good shareholder advocacy campaigns, which suggests a massive difference between the potential of SRI and SRI in practice today.

Kit Jan 18, 2019, 6:24 PM
2 points
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in reply to: DavidRooke’s comment on: Is Superintelligence Here Already?
Context: the report is 190 pages long and was published this month. Those who are reading it seem unlikely to reply with detailed analysis on this particular Forum post.
Object-level response: becoming excellent at chess, go, and shogi is interesting, since it is more general than being excellent at any one alone. My impression is that the AI safety community recognises the importance of milestones like this. It is simply the case that superintelligence typically means something far more general still, such as
an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills
which will not include an AI which can play a specific set of games.
Since we have now discovered that the disagreement is merely a matter of definitions, hostilities can be ceased :)

Kit Jan 15, 2019, 9:47 AM
7 points
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on: Talking about EA at an investors’ summit
Immediate, not hugely informed thoughts: (I’ve talked to ~250 finance people about EA but only attended one finance conference, and it was fintech rather than investment.)

Broadly I’d recommend looking at generic sales advice, including some conference-specific stuff. A big thing is making clear quickly why you’re relevant to someone. What can you offer them? Why will they care? What is the one point you want them to remember? They’ll have little time, probably being very focused on finding potential business partners, e.g. funds looking for investors, if this is the kind of investor conference I’m thinking of. You might have to be even more prepared to demonstrate relevance than others at the conference because you are not obviously part of the main theme or expected to be there.

Also, how familiar are you with how these kinds of people think? Can you frame EA in industry terms, for example? Seeking to maximise (social) return on investment seems uncontroversial and used as a concept in impact investing. I’ve also tried talking directly about comparing charities (comparables, alpha) though that seemed to not translate as well. (Anecdotal.)

The handbook here may also be of tangential relevance: http://eaworkplaceactivism.org

Another tip is to expect an extremely low hit rate. Figure out who seems interested in thinking about their giving and focus on them. Think about whether you want to follow up with the most promising people to point them to key resources or connect them to other interested people. Figure out if asking for contact details is normal or weird in this context.

Good luck. There don’t seem to be major downsides, so even with a low hit rate, seems worth a shot.

Kit Jan 10, 2019, 1:29 PM
3 points
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in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: What Is Effective Altruism?
Yes, I’d be excited to always include something about epistemics, such as scientific mindset. One can then argue about evidence instead of whether something qualifies as secular, which seems only relevant insofar as it is a weak predictor of well-evidenced-ness. In particular, while I don’t assign it high credence, I would not be hasty to rule out maximising ‘enlightenment’ as one of my end goals. Terminal goals are weird.
Notably, without an epistemic/scientific part to the definition, it is unclear how to distinguish many current EA approaches from e.g. Playpumps, which is a secular project which was hyped for its extraordinary outcomes in helping people far away. Looking forward, I also think that strong epistemics are how long-term-focused EA efforts can continue to be more useful than regular futurism.

Kit Jan 9, 2019, 9:03 AM
3 points
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on: [Link] The option value of civilization
I think the author has confused one type of payoff diagram (the probability density function of a variable) with another (the payoff of an option plotted against the value of the underlying variable). This results in a number of the claims in the piece being reversed. There seems to be confusion between other parameters too.
In finance, an option is the right to do something (typically some variant of ‘buy asset A for price P’). The most surprising thing is that the piece doesn’t establish where the optionality comes from. I think it just draws an analogy between the distribution of future outcomes and the payoff of an option, then treats the value of the future like an option. As above, I think this is incorrect.
One way the conclusions would carry is if one asserts that the future is net positive in expectation largely independently of size, and thus one should make the future bigger (a particular version of more variance). This argument is coherent but does not involve options.
A plausible source of optionality is that future generations might have some control over whether the world continues.* (Finance jargon would call this a put option on the future of the world with a low strike.)
Under this interpretation:
- Standard options pricing theory applies when you can trade the thing you have an option on. Here that isn’t the case: one cannot buy and sell the future to hedge the option delta.
- One should instead use more straightforward expected utility calculations taking into account the expected actions of future actors. e.g. a crude simplification: P(world good)×(how good)×P( future actors let world continue | good) - P(world bad)×(how bad)×P(future actors let world continue | bad). Standard financial options pricing would give a very different formula.
- The volatility point does hold, but for the above reasons, not the analogy drawn in the piece. One should simply be willing to trade extra potential upside (before future generations intervene) for extra potential downside (before intervention) in proportion to how much future generations have the power to stop bad outcomes closer to the time.
- The claim that we are long a call and short a put seems false—I think this is just drawing an incorrect analogy as noted in the first paragraph. I think the situation is more like owning an X% put on the future, where X% is the chance that future altruists have control over whether the long-term future exists. (You could alternatively see the overall situation as long X calls and long (1-X) futures.) This weakens but does not nullify the amount that a balanced upside and downside leads to focusing more on the present.
*Seems unclear but worth considering.
In conclusion, I got some interesting thinking out of reading this piece, but disagree with most of it.

Kit Jan 4, 2019, 8:40 PM
1 point
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in reply to: atlasunshrugged’s comment on: Request For Feedback: EA Venture Fund
Wow, I’m no expert on VC, but it sounds like you could have the expertise to pull something like this off.
Counterfactuals: mostly I’m saying that most impact investing just replaces other investment. At the ludicrous end of the spectrum (which is unfortunately most of the spectrum), a lot of ‘socially responsible investing’ involves buying shares on a public market, simply transferring ownership without changing incentivises (since the impact on capital raising ability appears minimal and most investors don’t do PR stunts, influence management or other potentially useful byproducts of owning shares). As one goes into private markets—as you are --, I’m a bit more optimistic since there are situations like seed funding where an investor really can make the difference between existing or not, or growing or not, and can perhaps have useful early influence. e.g. I’d guess that investing in Wave now would just be displacing another investor, while maybe an impact investor helped them get off the ground and they wouldn’t have been funded by regular investors. (I don’t know if that’s true.) The more you can identify opportunities which you could fund which wouldn’t otherwise get funded, the less confident I would be in my pessimism :) Overall, I mostly defer to the Founders Pledge report. Reading every mention of ‘counterfactual’ will likely cover everything I would say and much more.
You mention a few potential outcomes from this kind of work (e.g. getting impactful things capital, a platform for EA advocacy, influencing companies’ behaviour*). When I have done impact analysis recently, the first step was to consider what the most important outcomes could be. Sometimes a quick estimate suggests that one of the outcomes is much more important than the others, allowing you to focus on studying that factor.
Re comparing to 80k’s priority paths, I’d be surprised if doing something part-time would be optimal, just on generic advice. If that generalises to VC, I’d start by comparing running a VC full-time vs deploying the same staff in other roles. Interesting idea for this as a sub-fund of a larger group. Whatever you decide, great to hear about what you’re doing.
*See commentary from the Good Technology Project on their related experiences here. The ‘Advise entrepreneurs directly’ section seems particularly relevant, but it all might be of interest.

Kit Jan 3, 2019, 8:26 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Request For Feedback: EA Venture Fund
Hi atlasunshrugged,
My first thought (as per a comment on another investment project) is that investment firms typically need to be managed by experienced investors. It works a bit differently for VC than algorithmic trading but the basic point applies: you’d need to convince someone with relevant experience to run it (or maybe that’s you).
That’s my first hurdle, but there’s a broader question: how valuable are various kinds of impact investing? Founders Pledge covered a lot of ground in their impact investing report. I can’t remember if they mentioned the value of having influence over important startups, but based on a summary I heard, it seemed to basically hit all the points I was aware of from my experience in finance, and more. A key point, which you might be aware of, is that the counterfactuals tend to be quite bad in impact investing. That is, impactful companies typically don’t require your capital in order to exist, because there are other investors. Happily, you are at least considering working with seed funding, which seems like a key place where impact investing might be worthwhile. (It’s sadly a tiny share of the commercial ‘socially responsible investing’ market.)
Overall, I think it’s pretty likely that any of 80,000 Hours’ priority paths would beat founding a small impact investing firm, even a sensibly targeted one. However, the Founders Pledge report mentions a bunch of ways to do impact investing well, so that seems worth looking into if you are a professional investor or end up working with one.
Happy exploring!
P.S. there are some particular details which seem like they might need changing if this goes ahead someday, e.g. requiring all investees to commit a large percentage of their profits to charity seems likely to limit your scope.

Kit Dec 27, 2018, 1:54 PM
2 points
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in reply to: toonalfrink’s comment on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 1: the story
Thanks! That’s a very helpful summary.

Kit Dec 27, 2018, 12:39 PM
8 points
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on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 1: the story
Are the ‘abstracted case studies’ each an anonymised description of a single current/past resident?
(I wondered if they might be hypothetical or blended after reading the possibility to ‘interview some actual residents’ mentioned later.)

Kit Dec 24, 2018, 6:16 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: How Effective Altruists Can Be Welcoming To Conservatives
Also see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SfMvGMPYswSwpeGDk/pursuing-infinite-positive-utility-at-any-cost

Kit Dec 20, 2018, 2:16 PM
11 points
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in reply to: Brendon_Wong’s comment on: Antigravity Investments: Helping the EA Community Leverage Investing to Increase Funding and Donations
Antigravity Investments does not do trading or money-management in the sense of actively managing portfolios.
My heuristic applies to money-management in the sense of managing money, or, more precisely, having control of others’ investments. I agree that the strength of the heuristic varies by project, but I think it applies pretty broadly.
Relatedly, you may wish to update your website. You currently advertise Long-Term Active Investing as one of three services.
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Thanks for noting why one might override the heuristic I mentioned. Congratulations on setting up a legal entity and registering with the SEC. However, my impression is that the qualifications required to register are pretty basic. e.g. it took me <2 weeks of preparation to pass 3 regulatory exams in the UK when I started working in finance. I already believe you to be smart, and of course Antigravity isn’t fraudulent, so passing the low hurdles the SEC requires doesn’t seem like much of an update. You might want to be careful with using this as evidence: non-finance people might not understand what it means.
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Thanks for clarifying your previous statements. Given the private nature of 2017 discussions, I probably can’t comment on your representation of previous feedback.
Thank you, also, for the offer to spend more time on Antigravity. As mentioned by chat, I’m going to focus on other things. If you believe your comparative advantage to be money-management, my recommendation would be to work at a top firm for a couple of years, focusing first on learning all the best practices and tacit knowledge and second on building respect in the industry, then to consider starting your own firm. As an aside, I would be more excited about this as an earning to give strategy than as an EA-specific company, though I think the advice applies similarly either way.

Kit Dec 19, 2018, 7:26 PM
22 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brendon_Wong’s comment on: Antigravity Investments: Helping the EA Community Leverage Investing to Increase Funding and Donations
Speaking as an individual who follows finance projects with interest, I’m assuming that “no one has reached out to me” refers to something like no-one reaching out after this particular post, rather than no-one having flagged significant bugs with Antigravity Investments in the past?
It is very likely most concerns are “partly or fully out of date” as you mention, likely stemming from when I talked with a lot of EAs in finance about my very first investment related project idea in 2016
I would have expected the majority of perceptions to be shaped by the public launch and marketing of Antigravity in 2017, rather than individual discussions in 2016? It seems possible that the 2017 perceptions are nonetheless out of date. However, the following claim still stood out as very surprising to me:
Within the last year, this project has received positive evaluations from… EAs in finance, and I have not received any negative feedback
Until the end of 2017, I worked as a trader, ran the London EA & finance community, and talked with financial markets people around the world. My understanding is that most traders and money managers think that a money-management project usually needs staff with previous trading experience to be viable. (I agree that this heuristic should carry a lot of weight.) Antigravity, of course, is attempting to substantially shortcut this heuristic, by launching an investment firm without any staff with previous trading experience. I am therefore very surprised by the above claim. The heuristic leads me to expect that EAs in finance will be typically negative on such a project, but the above suggests that they are consistently positive.
What links here?
- Kit's comment on Request For Feedback: EA Venture Fund by atlasunshrugged (Jan 3, 2019, 8:26 PM; 9 points)

Kit Nov 8, 2018, 12:47 PM
7 points
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on: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities: A Problem for Long-Termism?
Thanks for the food for thought. I thought I’d share three related notes on framing which might be relevant to the rest of your series:
1) Tiny probabilities appear to not be fundamental to long-termism. The mugging argument you attribute to long-termists is indeed espoused as the key argument in favour by some, especially on online forums, but many people researching these problems assign non-mugging (e.g. ~1%) probability of their organizations having an overall large effect. For example, Yudkowsky in the interesting piece you linked (thanks for that):
You cannot justifiably trade off tiny probabilities of x-risk improvement against efforts that do not effectuate a happy intergalactic civilization, but there is nonetheless no need to go on tracking tiny probabilities when you’d expect there to be medium-sized probabilities of x-risk reduction.
It would be excellent to see someone write this up, since the divergence in argumentation by different parties interested in long-termism is large.
2) Projects tend not to have binary outcomes, and may have large potential positive and negative effects which have unclear sign on net. This makes robustness considerations (Knightian uncertainty, confidence in the sign, etc.) somewhere between quite important and the central consideration. This is the key reason why I pay little attention to the mugging arguments, which typically assume no negative outcomes without justifying this assumption. Instead, I think that the strongest case for aiming directly at improving the long-run may revolve around the robustness gained from aiming directly at where most of the expected value is (if one considers future generations to be morally relevant). Might be valuable to explore the relative merits of these approaches.
3) Consider explicitly separating the overall promisingness of a project from the marginal effect of additional resources. This is relevant e.g. for case ‘You give $7,000 to the Future of Humanity Institute, and your donation makes the difference between human extinction and long-term flourishing.’ i.e. consider separating out ‘your donation makes the difference’ from ‘the Future of Humanity Institute has a large positive impact’. When looking at marginal contributions, these things can get conflated. For example, there is a low probability that there has been or will be a distribution of bednets which would not have happened had I not donated $3,000 to AMF in 2014, but this uncertainty does not worry me. Uncertainty about whether increasing economic growth is good is a much larger deal. It looks like Eliezer summarised this well:
In this case the average marginal added dollar can only account for a very tiny slice of probability, but this is not Pascal’s Wager. Large efforts with a success-or-failure criterion are rightly, justly, and unavoidably going to end up with small marginally increased probabilities of success per added small unit of effort. It would only be Pascal’s Wager if the whole route-to-an-OK-outcome were assigned a tiny probability, and then a large payoff used to shut down further discussion of whether the next unit of effort should go there or to a different x-risk.
Based on your ‘Summary’ section, I suspect that you are already intending to tackle some of these points in ‘Sheltering in the herd’ or elsewhere. Good luck!

Kit Nov 8, 2018, 12:26 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
1) Tiny probabilities (e.g. $10^{- 40}$ ) appear to not be fundamental to long-termism. The

Kit Nov 8, 2018, 12:14 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
1) Tiny probabilities (e.g. $10^-40$) appear to not be fundamental to long-termism. The

Kit Nov 8, 2018, 9:11 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: trammell’s comment on: RPTP Is a Strong Reason to Consider Giving Later
If you have any confident thoughts, I’d be interested to hear which funding opportunities in the space seem most promising to you. (i.e. my question above was not rhetorical.) In particular, it is not obvious to me where the funding gaps are, and you seem likely to be better placed to know.
Also, I think there are some considerations which are 1-3 orders of magnitude more important than RTPT. Your post prompted me to write up a simple quantitative comparison of factors. Would you be interested in discussing/commenting at some point?

Kit Nov 7, 2018, 12:23 PM
2 points
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on: RPTP Is a Strong Reason to Consider Giving Later
Regarding learning value being dominant (which seems plausible), you make one concrete recommendation:
In the meantime, there is nothing to do but invest and wait.
Do you think we could instead spend money on prioritization research? Some actors relevant to this space include
- The Open Philanthropy Project
- The Global Priorities Institute
- The Future of Humanity Institute
- Rethink Priorities
- The Foundational Research Institute
- The China Center for Global Priorities
- Some think tanks
- Independent researchers working on forecasting, cause prioritization, exploring specific domains that might turn out to be promising, etc.
Some of these groups are clearly very well-funded. However, some have raised funds recently, suggesting that they believe that marginal funds will accelerate prioritization work. Reasonable people can disagree about this, and it seems like a key point which would need to be resolved for the recommendation to carry.

Kit Jul 22, 2018, 6:13 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Impact Investing—A Viable Option for EAs?
Among the most significant confusions in investing is this: when you buy a stock for $10, you give up $10 now in exchange for some variable return in the future. Importantly, the seller gets back $10 and gives up the same variable return in the future. Both parties are happy with this trade (due to different preferences or beliefs about the world).

This symmetry applies to the social impact too. The buyer gets a stock producing social impact. The seller gives up a stock producing social impact. It is unclear whether this transaction has affected the total social impact in the world at all. My understanding is that the section A Rational Take on Investing does not take this into account.

The above paragraph is the typical second-order reasoning in this space, and is a more explicit version of a point kbog made.
- First-order: I claim credit for whatever good/bad things I’m associated with, thus impact investing counts for a lot.
- Second-order: taking counterfactuals into account, impact investing appears to have approximately zero impact.
- The interesting stuff: controlling or launching important startups, and shareholder activism in general, seems like it might do something, and can sometimes be targeted at the most promising cause areas. Plant-based meat alternative companies are the companies that I’m aware of that seem likely to be worth EA investors’ attention for this reason. Maybe holding tobacco company shares in order to be able to more easily lobby them might be attractive for EAs focused on global health. Note that these activist approaches are entirely distinct from what most of the impact investing industry is doing.