Yes, I have an intuition that development is good, just like I have an intuition that ice cream is good. That doesn’t mean that the price of the ice-cream should be ignored and assumed to be zero when deciding when to buy it, and nor should the costs of development be ignored and assumed to be zero.
Larks
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It is the commerce clause interpretation that gives the federal government the right to regulate in this fashion. (Though I would point to Wickard v. Filburn as being the key case, rather than Gonzales v. Raich). The federal government doesn’t have the right to do whatever it likes, it has certain enumerated constitutional powers—Wickard v Filburn and a couple of similar cases are where they decided to interpret those enumerated powers very broadly and give themselves the almost unlimited power they have today.
I agree the discussion of Guantanamo is a distraction.
I agree that all else equal it is an argument against development, though I still think development is good overall on net, and I think the extent to which development specifically is the cause of reduced fertility has been overstated.
More generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form “We must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be bad”. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why can’t that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesn’t exist?
Thanks very much for sharing this. I appreciated the explicit section on the lives prevented from existing. Having said that, I’m pretty skeptical of some of your reasoning.
Our understanding from these conversations is that there’s no philosophical consensus on how to value potential lives,24 and this gets especially complex when considering unwanted births where valuing potential lives could conflict with respecting autonomy.25
We currently do not assign any value, positive or negative, to these potential lives.
As an initial framing, I think this should be a bit of a red flag. Typically in the absence of an expert consensus on the value of some parameter (how much to discount potential lives), we would adopt an intermediate value as our prior, perhaps weighted by the rough distribution of experts. Exactly what is the most appropriate prior is up for debate, but it seems clear it should be somewhere within the range. In contrast, assuming a 100% discount for potential lives, as you do, it taking one of the most extreme positions possible.[1]
You offer some specific reasons for this extreme position, but all seem weak to me.
First reason:
Many mentioned respecting reproductive autonomy as a rationale for not placing a value on lives that don’t occur.
Autonomy might be a good, to be weighed against potential lives—but it doesn’t mean you get to just zero-out part of the cost-benefit ledger. Or it might be a side constraint on what we can do—but ‘decline to donate to this specific thing’ is not the sort of action that would typically be considered to violate a side constraint. (If it was, then you would arguably be guilty anyway, for failing to donate to IVF and other fertility treatments for couples who want them).
This is an especially big deal because you do consider autonomy as a positive contributor, with quite large weight:
This could include reduced anxiety about becoming pregnant or improved subjective well-being from greater perceived control over reproductive decisions.
We roughly estimate that each year of modern contraceptive use adds the equivalent of ~0.1 DALYs due to improvements in the woman’s subjective well-being (~0.2 additional units of value). [emphasis added]
The category they are in (admittedly they are not all of this category, but surely a lot of them), accounts for 0.23 ‘units of value’ out of a total of 0.7, or 0.23/0.7 = 33% of the total.
So autonomy is getting double-counted: [at least one aspect of it] both adds to the positive and somehow ‘nullifies’ a negative.
Second reason:
A relatively high number of women and men in LMICs desire to have no more children.28 While this doesn’t mean they assign neutral value to lives that don’t exist as a result of contraception, it does suggest this consideration is not enough to fully override the perceived benefits of avoiding unwanted pregnancies.
This seems like a situation where it is important to read the citation… given the text, I was not expecting the citation to say that actually most women and men want more children! But regardless, this argument seems… beside the point? The fact that (a minority of) people don’t wish to experience the costs of more children doesn’t mean that those children wouldn’t have valuable experiences and worthwhile existences. You are taking into account many of the costs that parents experience from having children (e.g. opportunity cost), and then assuming the benefits are zero. In fact, because parents pay most of the costs of having children, but do not capture all or even most of the benefits, which suggests they should under-value having more children.
Third reason:
Local governments29 and organizations like WHO30 support family planning programs, indicating that decision-makers in these contexts (at least implicitly) don’t see prevented births as a major downside, even if they don’t take an explicit stance on the issue.
The fact that someone does an activity doesn’t mean they evaluate the costs as being zero—it just means they think the costs are smaller than the aggregate benefits. (Or, perhaps more likely, that they have never done a proper cost-benefit analysis).
I’m not sure why we should be deferring to these groups here. To the extent that other groups have specific arguments for their position, we should consider them. But the mere fact that some other funder is supporting a program… should surely update us against the program, because it reduces neglectedness, not in favour of it.
Finally, I don’t think you would make this argument in other contexts. You call out the government of Ghana specifically as a positive example worthy of deference to their moral views—would you also exhibit significant deference to them on the issue of LGBT rights, where they recently unanimously passed a bill imposing prison sentences for same-sex intercourse or promoting LGBT? (The bill seems to have not gone into effect for procedural reasons, but might be re-introduced). I suspect not—I think you would assign this basically zero moral weight when considering an AIDS charity—which suggests to me that your moral view came first, and then you looked for congenial authorities to defer to.
And the question of moral weight on potential lives turns out to matter a great deal! I think you deserve a lot of credit for making this explicit:
However, we’re uncertain about this, and this decision has significant implications for our assessment of family planning programs. Valuing lives that don’t occur as a result of contraception as 20% as valuable as existing lives would make family planning programs net negative in our model.
I encourage you to take this seriously. If you are uncertain, probably you shouldn’t set the parameter at one of the most extreme values possible!
- ^
Yes, technically you could assign values less than 0% or more than 100%, but I don’t think this is very credible, especially as we generally consider young children to have positive lives in expectation.
- ^
This is a ten year old article, but it was discussed at the time—see e.g. here.
Absent an agreement with enough backing it to stick, slowdown by the US tightens the international gap in AI and means less slack (and less ability to pause when it counts) and more risk of catastrophe in the transition to AGI and ASI.
I agree this mechanism seems possible, but it seems far from certain to me. Three scenarios where it would be false:
One country pauses, which gives the other country a commanding lead with even more slack than anyone had before.
One country pauses, and the other country, facing reduced incentives for haste, also pauses.
One country pauses, which significantly slows down the other country also, because they were acting as a fast-follower, copying the models and smuggling the chips from the leader.
A intuition-pump I like here is to think about how good it would be if China credibly unilaterally paused, and then see how many of these would also apply to the US.
I’d like to hear why you chose to label radical feminism as an ‘extremist group’. This has a lot of negative connotations carried, vs using a term like ‘radical’.
Yes, that is important, because when considering ‘uniting’ with another group, you will acquire their negative connotations.
I suggest being curious about and open to learning from radical feminism. This allows you to discard ideas that you would like to discard, and take in ideas that you would not.
This seems like a motte and bailey argument to me. After the The Meiji Restoration, Japan was curious about and open to learning from the west, but Japan did not ‘unite’ with any Western nation. The word ‘unite’, sharing a latin root with ‘unity’, implies a merging and coming together as one, not mere communication.
To make it painfully clear: I suspect you would agree that we should be open to learning from all sources if they have good and relevant ideas. We should be open to learning from industrial agriculture, because they have a lot of relevant information about animals. But this does not imply we should ‘unite’ with factory farms, and I think few people would propose this. Likewise, we should be open to learning from the Republican and Democrat parties. But we shouldn’t ‘unite’ with either of them, let alone both. Because ‘uniting’ is not about curiosity, it is about forming a close alliance, setting aside differences and focusing on common foes.
Your final comment indicates that perhaps you are not that familiar with radical feminism, and perhaps such a strongly weighted opinion would be best kept until after a little more research?
While I periodically read feminist pieces online and have discussions with feminists, you’re right that it has been over ten years now since I formally studied feminist political philosophy. Fortunately I still have my old notes, which I reviewed. The notes are a summarized version of the original source material I read, but they confirm my recollection: almost every line was about women, or sexism, or maternity, or patriarchy, or sex in some way. This article is I think the first ‘feminist’ article I have ever read that didn’t mention a single one of these concepts.
I agree with the other commenters that it’s not clear why ‘uniting’ with this particular extremist group is particularly desirable. Doing so seems like it would require us to make epistemic sacrifices and potentially alienate more mainstream and influential groups. But actually the main thing I took away from this was… radical feminism seems a lot more like just socialism, and a lot less about women than I expected?
Labour migrants in aggregate contribute positively, but you are focused on non-western migration specifically, which the paper suggests has significantly worse effects than the average labour migrant. They find the average 30year old non-western migrant has a net impact of -EUR125k, or -EUR772k if he brings his family, and that the average 30year old labour migrant has a net impact of ~ +EUR175k (eyeballing the chart). They don’t show the intersection, but given that people often do bring their families, and 30 year old is basically the most-favourable-age possible, it seems very likely to me that the combination of non-western background and labour motive is negative.
The destination country fills critical labor gaps.
How confident are you that the destination country benefits? The most detailed recent study I have seen on this, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, found significantly negative effects on public finances from non-western migration. Unfortunately they didn’t do the cross-tabs to show non-western labour-motivated migrants, but based on my eyeballing I think the impact would be negative.
Thanks for the reply. I’m not sure why we should consider self-identified EAs to be the constituency of EA. Unlike a state, whose objective (some people argue) is to promote the welfare of its citizens, the objective of EA is not to promote the welfare of EAs. And unlike a state, EA does not claim a monopoly on violence over EAs, nor the right to imprison and execute them. If you are contributing, it makes sense to have influence (though where you donate, or where you work, etc.), but it’s not clear to me why mere existence should warrant influence.
I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:
If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.
By my understanding, there are two main purposes to democracy when it comes to states:
Allowing the masses to select representatives protects against the mechanisms of state being used to loot or oppress them excessively.
By aligning legitimacy with latent capability for violence, the need for violent transitions of power can be reduced.
Neither seem very relevant to EA.
Surely the environmental externalizes are dramatically lower with AI than with humans. There’s a reason people bringing up this argument never do the actual apples-to-apples comparison: because once AI is capable of doing something, it can do it very cheaply.
Why does it make sense to bundle buying chips, operating a datacenter etc. with doing due diligence on grant applicants? Why should grant applicants prefer to receive compute credits from your captive neocloud than USD they can spend on any cloud they want—or on non-compute, if the need there is greater?
I see it primarily as a social phenomenon because I think the evidence we have today that AGI will arrive by 2030 is less compelling than the evidence we had in 2015 that AGI would arrive by 2030.
The evidence we have today that there will be AGI by 2030 is clearly dramatically stronger than the evidence we had in 2015 that there would be AGI by 2020, and that is surely the relevant comparison. This is not EA specific—we have been ahead of the curve in thinking AI would be a big deal, but the whole world has updated in this direction, and it would be strange if we hadn’t as well.
I agree that what you describe could have been a decent new post. However, I disagree it characterizes what was actually shared here. Consider for the first example (I have editted the formatting):
The reception was… rough. According to her:
It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written. We lost sleep, time, friends, collaborators, and mentors because we disagreed on: whether this work should be published, whether potential EA funders would decide against funding us and the institutions we’re affiliated with, and whether the authors whose work we critique would be upset.
While many in the community responded constructively, others reportedly sought to suppress the paper — not on academic grounds, but out of fear that it might alienate funders. The clear implication here is that critique is encouraged, as long as it doesn’t threaten the financial or ideological foundations of the movement.
Somehow the omitted is the idea that… maybe the feedback was negative because the paper wasn’t very good. Which would explain everything else… bad work typically shouldn’t be published, bad work is evidence that future work will also be low quality which is an argument against funding in the future, and it is reasonable for people subject to low-quality criticism to be annoyed. Yet Bob’s post here doesn’t even mention this explanation, despite the 161 upvotes, and simply presents hostility and anti-democraticness as the only explanation.
and there are a significant number of new people each year
Eternal September is meant to be descriptive, not a normative ideal!
I don’t think it’s reasonable to repeatedly post the same content, even after it got hundreds of comments, many of which engaged with various ideas at quite some length. There are reasons why rejected ideas were rejected—you should proactively address them, or otherwise introduce new content if you want to achieve something.
I think ‘biodiversity’ generally implies a commitment to maintaining a very large number of species, over and above the identifiable value each one provides. It’s not about protecting specifically identified valuable species.
Thanks for comissioning this work and sharing it.
I found your comments about the methodology a bit confusing. Are these estimates for what the impact would have been, if PEPFAR hadn’t been largely restored, or what it actually will be?