Seconding Guy Raveh on transparency, thank you!
I’m curious how many people are accepted for general admission but are then unable to attend because there isn’t enough travel funding, and to what extent the amount other attendees paying for tickets affects this?
There’s some evidence humans are also likely to fabricate post-hoc reasons for doing something. For example:
Split brain patients have behaved in a way consistent with input to their right eye, but give verbal explanations based on input to their left eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain.
Giving people a small incentive to lie about enjoying a task has resulted in them report liking it more later than giving them a larger incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_compliance_theory
Korsakoff syndrome is a syndrome where patients have severe memory deficits, and often confabulate–eg. answering questions they can’t know the answer to with a made up answer
Some experiments have shown people asked to choose between two identical items will come up with a reason for their choice; other experiments have shown that people asked to choose between two options will come up with a coherent reason for their “choice” even if they’re presented with the option they didn’t choose. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/confabulation-why-telling-ourselves-stories-makes-us-feel-ok/ ; https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-choice-blindness-2795019
I don’t view cause prioritisation as the primary choice here.
To illustrate, consider only ‘farmed animal welfare’ charities: Shrimp welfare project, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Arthropoda Foundation, the Humane League, Hive, Legal Impact for Chickens, Animetrics, Veganuary, Sentient, Fish Welfare Institute. Here are the most relevant questions that would influence which organisation I would prioritise.
What is the track record of each organisation, or the people in the organisation, or other organisations which seem similar to each organisation?
How effective do I think interventions in: community building, policy advocacy, the law, public advocacy, vegan advocacy, research, data improvements, etc. are, relative to one another?
How much do I think success or failure in each of those classes of interventions is predictive of future success or failure?
What will each organisation fund on the margin?
What factors do I think play into the “moral weight” of different groups of animals, and how do different animals score on these factors?
How much can each charity do about the above factors?
Of these, I would consider only question (5), maybe (6), to be “cause prioritisation” questions. In this election, information relating to questions (1) and (4) is more easily available to me than usual, and I’m forced to consider the range of interventions discussed in (2) and (3) if I want to produce a full ranking, where in most circumstances I would just go with the intervention I think is most effective and not think about how the rest are ordered.
Can people who are downvoting this say why? I feel like roboton has provided useful information about why they have voted a certain way, even if its not very detailed information
Can you say more about why you’re opposed to most animal rights / what you mean more specifically by “animal rights”? At risk of sounding facetious, I assume you aren’t eg. a proponent of torturing animals for no reason?
Can you explain why you think its completely implausible that PauseAI “feeds capabilities” but plausible that The Midas Project does? I can think of many similar ways PauseAI and The Midas Project can both backfire (mostly gaining public attention in an undesirable way), and have a hard time imagining either of them directly contributing to capabilities improvements.
I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.
I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.
I’m kind of confused why I don’t think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don’t...
I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don’t know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:
When a friend donates to charity, I show appreciation, not ask him how sure he is that it was the best possible use of his money
When my relative gets a good grade, I congratulate her—I don’t start questioning if she really prioritised studying for the right subject
When a server is nice to me, I thank them—I don’t ask them why they’re talking to me instead of serving someone else
I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that’s a public good—it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me.
Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we’re perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don’t think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent.
I’d love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!
Would you be up for making your “deaths of effective altruism” article available in a way that isn’t paywalled?
In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.
I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I’m just much less sure what they are.
Thanks for your work here! I can see that the data here is limited, and I think that makes projects like this much harder but still very valuable.
A couple of questions/suggestions:
I’m unable to find any .csv’s to download on that page. Could you point out where they are?
It looks to me like all the data you have is at the country level – is this correct?
I’m generally a big fan of geospatial work, but I’m not sure its helping in your case. It becomes quickly confusing if I turn on more than one layer at once, and I can’t see any of the correlations you discuss.
You say: “layer overlapping, statistical variable calculations using GeoDa software, and interpolation were used to search for relevant indicators for spatial analysis” – can you specify what you did here?
At the risk of sounding naive: I’d like to point out you can go work for a frontier AI company and give lots of money to AI safety (or indeed any other cause area you believe in).
If nothing else, if you give at least the salary difference between a frontier job and a lower-pay non-frontier AI safety job, this prevents you from lying to yourself: thinking you are working at a frontier company because you believe its good, while actually doing it because of the benefits to you.
This is great! I think its extremely important and underrated (dare I say ‘neglected’?) work to identify and shift resources towards more effective charities in smaller contexts, even if those charities are unlikely to be the most globally effective.
Are you able to share more of your analysis or data? I’m curious about the proportion of charities in the categories you identify above, and what, if any numerical/categorical values you assigned.
Upvoted because −50 karma strikes me as excessive for a joke (even if in poor taste)
Presentations from any of the individuals who work on evaluation, getting “into the weeds” of how decisions are made, and recent work
Presentations from Givewell grantees on what they’re currently working on
Bill / Melinda Gates, or otherwise someone from the Gates foundation
Elon Musk, or people from Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX
People from pharmaceutical companies
Board members of EVF
Sal Khan
A talk from successful edutainment/social media people who discuss EA-adjacent ideas like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, etc. (who did not necessarily start out EA-funded)
Podcast interviewers who discuss EA-relevant content, eg. Ezra Klein (as already mentioned), Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan.
People running non-cause area EA interest groups, eg. SEADS, High Impact [Engineers, Law, Professionals, Medicine, etc], Religious EA groups, on what they’re working on/how EA is different in their communities
I suspect you would get a much wider applicant pool for EAGxSingapore if it were a week later.
The time requirements (<10 hours/week for most roles for most of the process, then full-time the week of the conference) is not really viable for most working professionals, and more suited to students who would be on winter break—but it looks like NUS (Singapore), Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University (Phillipines), and Fulbright University (Vietnam), ie. the (I think) majority of the EA university groups in South East Asia, have school terms going up to the week of the conference.
:)
If we are correct about the risk of AI, history will look kindly upon us (assuming we survive).
Perhaps not. It could be more like Y2K, where some believe problems were averted only by a great deal of effort and others believe there would have been minimal problems anyway.
I sometimes downvote comments and posts mostly because I think they have “too much” karma—comments and posts I might upvote or not vote on if they had less karma. As I look at the comment now it has 2 karma with 11 votes—maybe at some point it had more and people voted it back to 2?
I would have downvoted this comment if it had more karma because I think Deborah’s comment can be read as antagonistic: “utterly blind”, “dire state”, “for heaven’s sake!”, calling people ignorant. In this context I didn’t read it this way, but I often vote based on “what would the forum be like if all comments were more like this” rather than “what intentions do I think this person has”.
Hi Deborah, I also disagree with this comment (and have disagree voted but not downvoted it). Here are some of my reasons:
Without getting too much into it, I think the concerns with the population growth/technological change trend are somewhat distinct from problems relating to the current population size of the earth. One can be concerned that the population replacement rate is dropping too fast while also thinking that the current global population is too large.
I think that, while the summarised breakdown you have under the overpopulation project link you have can be understood as broadly true (the specific link is broken), its imprecise, and the real picture is much more complicated. My understanding is that many estimate the carrying capacity of the earth to be 10 billion. If this estimate is true, then “large population, ecological sustainability and high human development” is possible if we define “large population” to be “8-10 billion people” and the other two factors in the same way that those who made the estimates defined them. I also think this picture does not consider the micro effects of aging populations, and papers over the important fact that the welfare of people in the least developed areas is not bottlenecked by planetary boundaries but the distribution of resources. Many effective altruists (myself included) also take a longtermist view which looks to expand sentient life beyond the earth.
You present biodiversity and “balance” as ultimate goals, while I primarily think of the former as an instrumental goal and the latter as often ill-defined.
I’m concerned about the long-run effects of the people most concerned with these issues collectively choosing to not have children. See discussion here.
It’s not clear that human incursion into animal habitats is net-negative for wild animal welfare. See discussion here.
I also think it is unfair to call the post ‘utterly blind to the dire state of the biosphere and the existential risks we are creating for our species by pushing beyond the planetary boundaries’. Rather I think these concerns are outside the scope of this post.
Adding ALLFED for their cost effectiveness analysis. I’d thought of this when writing the original post but couldn’t find the discussion around transparency I remember it from, but I’ve now found it here.