Kit

• Kit 15 Aug 2016 19:26 UTC

  25 points

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  on: Ideas for Fu­ture Effec­tive Altru­ism Con­fer­ences: Open Thread

  Honesty, because community norms

  The conference itself was incredible, specifically the best weekend I can remember. Dishonest elements in the marketing beforehand seemed destructive to long-term coordination. Less important short-term effects included

  • I switched from ‘trust everyone at CEA except...’ to ‘distrust everyone at CEA except...’, which is a wasteful position to have to take

  • dodgy emails convinced approximately −1 of the 12 people I nominated to attend, and now some of my friends who were interested in EA associate it with deception

  I believe we should be truly honest when feasible, but at the very least we should not lie outside of extreme circumstances.

  [Clarification: I still think it’s correct to assign higher default credence to the claims of CEA staff than those of most people, just not the extremely high credence I would like to use. I used the term ‘distrust’ in an idiosyncratic fashion, which was dumb, and I apologise for not picking this up earlier. ‘Be sceptical’ would have been more appropriate.]

  What links here?

  • Red Team­ing CEA’s Com­mu­nity Build­ing Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount (1 Sep 2022 14:42 UTC; 296 points)
  • Gregory Lewis's comment on Build­ing Co­op­er­a­tive Episte­mol­ogy (Re­sponse to “EA has a Ly­ing Prob­lem”, among other things) by Raemon (14 Jan 2017 16:18 UTC; 14 points)
  • AGB's comment on Ad­vi­sory panel at CEA by Julia_Wise (9 Mar 2017 20:11 UTC; 2 points)

• Kit 17 Aug 2016 23:28 UTC

  24 points

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  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ideas for Fu­ture Effec­tive Altru­ism Con­fer­ences: Open Thread

  Hi Benito, Howie—sure, some highlights I’d recommend all EAs avoid in the future:

  • Sending emails ‘from’ other people. Friends I recommended received emails with ‘from’ name ‘Kit Surname via EAG’. Given that I did not create the content of these emails, this seemed somewhat creepy, and harmed outreach.

  • Untruths, e.g. fake deadlines, ‘we trust Kit’s judgement’, ‘I was looking through our attendee database’, etc. (My vanity fooled me for a solid few seconds, by the way!)

  I can believe that whoever designed the strategy believed this the right thing to do, because the second bullet point are standard marketing tricks. However, the willingness to say things which are not true is evidence for… a willingness to say things which are not true. That’s annoying for anyone who wants to collaborate.

  One counter-consideration: perhaps many donors and collaborators have a much better feel for the lines which people will or won’t cross, hence would still assume complete trustworthiness on bigger issues. Conversely, people less familiar than myself might assume this behavour pervades EA.

  What links here?

  • Red Team­ing CEA’s Com­mu­nity Build­ing Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount (1 Sep 2022 14:42 UTC; 296 points)

• Kit 18 Aug 2016 21:20 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: Ideas for Fu­ture Effec­tive Altru­ism Con­fer­ences: Open Thread

  Hi Michael – please see my reply to Benito’s question for easier-to-explain suggestions. I don’t have informed views on automated flattery in general.

• Kit 22 Aug 2016 23:19 UTC

  11 points

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  in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: Ideas for Fu­ture Effec­tive Altru­ism Con­fer­ences: Open Thread

  Hi Kerry! Congratulations again for the exceptional conference, and thanks for adding detail.

  Updates I’ve made:

  • while in my tiny sample of 13 the emails with ‘from’ names like ‘Kit Surname via EAG’ worked out badly, it looks like you produced the most reasonable emails of that form possible without the benefit of hindsight. In answer to your question, I call this dishonest primarily because it gives the appearance of endorsement of content which I do not endorse. I would still not do this.

  • the deadlines at first appeared to be mainly to generate haste, but some or all had operational function. My blanket terming ‘fake deadlines’ was therefore wrong.

  • aside from ‘we trust Kit’s judgement’, I see that most/​all other statements made in the campaign were true in a technical sense. However, I maintain that this is insufficient. ‘I was looking through our attendee database’ is a great example, precisely because the whole message implies specificity to the recipient, while it appears that the looking could have been replaced by a single filter for people who hadn’t bought tickets. Likewise for ‘ideal participant’. At the very least, I’d bin these along with the “you’re a cool person, come to EA” emails Michael mentioned.

  Additional arguments against my position:

  • if CEA has standards substantially above average for its reference class, people might still not trust EAs to the extent I would like

  • maybe we don’t particularly need highly involved EAs to trust each other more, and this kind of marketing won’t materially affect what less involved people think.

  I had also suspected that my concerns put me in a niche group which holds a small proportion of total relevance. I have updated away from this suspicion because the ratio of people who at the present time register a desire for greater honesty (17-27, probably nearer 17) to those who register no concern (3-5) is much higher than I had anticipated, and I suspect that forum participants are a highly relevant class for cooperation considerations.

  To the other 16+ of those 17+ people: if my views are not representative of yours, it could be valuable for you to say so.

• Kit 28 Aug 2016 14:05 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Ideas for Fu­ture Effec­tive Altru­ism Con­fer­ences: Open Thread

  I think a stronger argument can be made in favour of the chosen marketing methods. It would probably conclude with something like ‘the huge value of a small number of extra links formed between otherwise-disjoint groups outweighed the minor weakening of cooperation standards across the community’.

  Owen’s comment shows that the numbers can be big on the other side too, but valuing brands is a notoriously hard problem. In the hope that people refer back to this discussion when considering future strategies, here is an explicit estimate of one component of the value of avoiding minor harm to trust, for this specific case. It works by assuming that anyone put off from CEA simply shifts collaboration from one organisation to another, causing efficiency loss from wasting comparative advantages, not total loss. It also recognises that I made an unusually large update, and the average will be much smaller. Bracketed items are multiplied together to give an italicised item in the next line.

  (present value of a GWWC pledge, $73,292 x number of pledges next year, 856) x size of CEA compared to GWWC proxied by headcount, 2.45 x (my unusually large update to engagement with CEA, 30% x perceived relative strength of other affected people’s reactions, 17.5%) x relative advantage of CEA over competition, 17% x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%

  = (value realised by GWWC next year, $62,737,952 x size of CEA compared to GWWC proxied by headcount, 2.45) x (average affected person’s shift from CEA to elsewhere, 5.25% x relative advantage of CEA over competition, 17%) x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%

  = value realised by CEA next year, $153,707,982 x (inefficiency from one affected person’s shift, 0.88% x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%)

  = (value realised by CEA next year, $153,707,982 x proportion of CEA value lost 0.42%)

  = value of one year of CEA minor reputation preservation, $638,849

  This model does not incorporate the effects EAG marketing can have on other EA organisations’ reputations (I suspect large), the value of not putting people off the movement entirely (unsure), or the effort required to clean up one’s reputation in the unlikely case that lasting harm is incurred (low in expectation?) To handle overoptimisation, I have tried to keep inputs conservative rather than discounting explicitly.

  My guess after public and private discussion is that the approach which captures the most total value would be something like aggressive marketing (including pushing known EAs hard to tell their friends, slightly-more-than-comfortable numbers of chaser emails to applicants, and focussing almost entirely on the positives of attending) while avoiding anyone feeling deliberately misled. Obviously CEA is better placed to make this call, and I hope the broad discussion will help guide future decisions.

• Kit 4 Dec 2016 21:27 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  Does anyone have specific proposals for what kind of public pledge you would prefer to make, or ask people to make? Including guesses as to who would take or not take such a pledge would be helpful for assessing whether a change would be net positive.

  I don’t expect CEA to implement changes to the Giving What We Can Pledge any time soon due to the substantial momentum cost but think we should focus on actionable statements to best understand what’s going on here.

• Kit 4 Dec 2016 21:27 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  Are there specific people who shouldn’t take the pledge as-is other than the small minority MichaelDickens highlighted, plus the politicians proposed above?

• Kit 4 Dec 2016 22:47 UTC

  7 points

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  in reply to: AlyssaVance’s comment on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  Strongly movement-affiliated EAs are not dominant in the pledge reference class.

  Evidence:

  • 2,294 people have taken the pledge already. (See current here.)

  • GWWC donations appear dominated by a handful of multi-millionaires who were drawn to the community by a meaningful pledge rather than first getting involved in the movement.

• Kit 5 Dec 2016 9:05 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Paul_Crowley’s comment on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  Haven’t you just chosen precisely the most extreme counterfactual? Now you have to defend the view that Giving What We Can, run by very smart people who test what they’re doing, is causing net harm in expectation.

• Kit 5 Dec 2016 9:32 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: AlyssaVance’s comment on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  GWWC is not firebombing anything, happily. War crimes are obviously bad and need no counterfactual spelled out. The principle you outline does not apply to the pledge because many people (citation) don’t think the pledge is obviously bad. To engage these people in productive discourse you need to suggest at least one strategy which could be better.

• Kit 5 Dec 2016 22:24 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Con­tra the Giv­ing What We Can pledge

  Indeed. Knowing what the proposal is would help here.

• Kit 18 Feb 2018 22:58 UTC

  3 points

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  on: A gen­er­al­ized strat­egy of ‘mis­sion hedg­ing’: in­vest­ing in ‘evil’ to do more good

  The point I would most like to emphasise is that it’s often unclear what will happen to an asset when cost-effectiveness goes up. If you’re confident it’ll go up at that time, you buy/​overweight it. If you’re confident it’ll go down at that time, you sell/​underweight it. If it could go either way, this approach is weaker. Most discussion I have seen on this topic assumes that the ‘evil’ asset can be expected to move in the same direction as cost-effectiveness. Finding something with reliable covariance in either direction seems like it might be most of the challenge.

  For more detail on that, here are some notes on the most valuable insights and most significant errors of the original Federal Reserve paper.

  My guess is that the best suggestions from this post appear in ‘Applications outside of investment’. These do not fall prey to the abovementioned issues since the mechanisms are different to the investment case, directly exploiting the extra power one gains from being on the inside of an organisation rather than correlation/​covariance.

  (I might as well note that this comment represents my views on the matter, and no-one else’s, while the main post represents the views of others, and not necessarily mine.)

• Kit 22 Jul 2018 18:13 UTC

  6 points

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  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.

• Kit 7 Nov 2018 12:23 UTC

  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 8 Nov 2018 9:11 UTC

  1 point

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  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 8 Nov 2018 12:14 UTC

  1 point

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  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  1) Tiny probabilities (e.g. $10^-40$) appear to not be fundamental to long-termism. The

• Kit 8 Nov 2018 12:26 UTC

  1 point

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  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  1) Tiny probabilities (e.g. ${10}^{-40}$) appear to not be fundamental to long-termism. The

• Kit 8 Nov 2018 12:47 UTC

  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 19 Dec 2018 19:26 UTC

  22 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

  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 (3 Jan 2019 20:26 UTC; 9 points)

• Kit 20 Dec 2018 14:16 UTC

  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.

  -----

  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.

  -----

  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.