“To see the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be.”
People may or may not also be interested in my comments on Metaculus and Twitter:
Metaculus: https://pandemic.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/112057/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LinchZhang
I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This seems like an interesting line of reasoning, and I’d maybe be excited to see more strategic thinking around this.
Might eventually turn out to be pointless and/or futile, of course.
Likewise.
I do think I would be somewhat unhappy to see them given just a talk with Q&A, with no natural place to provide pushback and followup discussion, but if someone were to organize an event with Baumeister debating some EA with opinions on scientific methodology, I would love to attend that.
I think that’s roughly my position as well.
I’ve just read the shorter version of your report, and gave some specific comments there. Here are some high-level thoughts:
First of all, great work! I think I had moderately high expectations for this report when you first sent me the proposal to give feedback, and I think this has mostly exceeded them, so congrats!
You might want to make the shorter version of the report a separate EA Forum post. The shorter version is ~4500 words and the current post is >20000 words. My guess is that many people will feel intimidated about commenting on this post before reading the whole post (and perhaps after, if they’re worried they missed an important part), particularly on mobile.
At the high level, how has your opinions on political inclusion/exclusion changed as a result of doing this research? In particular, do you think as a result of looking at the case studies, the primary effect was that your existing opinions have gotten more nuanced, or have you dramatically changed your mind from doing this work?
Any high-level takeaways/hot tips on doing EA-focused historical research, or hot takes on the quality of current EA epistemics?
What do other case studies suggest about the hypotheses in this report, and what other hypotheses do they suggest?
Re the above, do you have thoughts on how much predictive (postdictive?) power your framework has on other randomly generated historical case studies?
Relatedly, do you think it’s likely that you will change your mind a lot if you read five more analogous case studies in a similar level of detail? What probability will you assign to reversing one of the core conclusions were you to do so?
For this and also Robert Wiblin’s comment, I’m interested in whether unrepentant opponents of scientific replication should be considered beyond the pale in EA circles. It’s not a central problem in most people’s minds, but a) it’s uncontroversially bad in our circles and b) EAs have a stronger case for considering denial of truth very bad than other groups.
This is arguably not a hypothetical example (note that I do not have an opinion on the original research).
EDIT: Removed concrete examples since they might be a distraction.
Got it, I must have misunderstood you! I think it’s a little difficult for me to understand how much people were talking about the general principles vs the specific example in Munich, and/or how much they believe the Munich example generalizes.
I think this discussion can benefit from more rigor, though it’s unclear how to advance it in practice.
Yeah I agree. At the risk of derailing the conversation further, I think there are several different things going on here:
1. Whether reported cases or reported deaths are a better proxy for total covid-19 prevalence. (or a different proxy entirely)
2. Whether total (relative) covid-19 prevalence in turn is the right proxy for “how well these regions handled the pandemic.”
3. Whether/which different government are counterfactually more morally responsible in a culpable way.
For #1, I think reported deaths aren’t obviously a better proxy for overall relative prevalence than reported cases, but they are better upon reflection. I empathetically do not think that they are the best metric, as of October 2020, and I think for the narrow question “did Trump-voting states have more or less covid-19 prevalence per capita than non-Trump-voting states” is something that you can probably form an educated opinion of in several hours or so (probably less), but there isn’t an obvious single metric for me to point to immediately.
For #2, I think this is hotly contested. One thing to note is that many US regions are going for a de facto partial herd immunity strategy, so some people will argue that total (true) deaths is a better proxy for “success of handling the pandemic” than total (true) prevalence. For example, “we delayed the pandemic long enough that we now have better medical care and the most vulnerable populations have self-selected out, hence driving our covid-19 deaths down” is a steelmanned conservative narrative that has some truth to it.
I think it’s a bit nuanced because long-term disability matters a lot (as well as long-term economic impacts), so it’s a more complicated question of whether you think true prevalence correlates better with long term consequences than true # of deaths. Again, better proxies are possible.
For #3, I think I share the (commonsensical?) view that the US in general, and Republican states in particular, screwed up in many ways, some of which is ex ante foreseeable, and most likely a Clinton presidency would have done better. To the specific question of state actions, I do think my dominant hypothesis is the (again, likely commonsensical?) Republican states somewhat squandered natural advantages like lower population densities and less international travel, and did some dumb things. However, I think we should be very careful about reasoning in a format that looks like
Alice and Bob have a disagreement. We like Alice more.
Naive evidence says X, we blame Bob.
Updated evidence says not X, we now have a more nuanced view that continues to blame Bob.
Hence why (even though I agree in many ways with OP and the folk views on who is more morally culpable for pandemic actions) I want to address this discrepancy in facts/framing carefully.
Of the top 18 states by highest per-capita COVID-19 incidence to date, 17 voted for Trump in 2016.
Minor note, but this is not as much evidence as it first appears. If we use reported deaths, rather than reported cases, we’ll see that ~8 or so of the top 12 states for covid-19 deaths per capita did not vote for Trump, including the top 4. (Visualization here).
This isn’t (much) of a problem if you think that the difference between how the two campaigns use money is in expectation neutral. It is a bigger problem if you think there might be systematic differences in how campaigns use money that correlate with better candidates/policies, especially if the correlation is positive. For example, if you think more competent campaign staff translates to more competent political appointees, or if you think it’s easier to use money to campaign for true/good things than for inaccurate/bad things, or if you think the default state (without additional money in politics) is worse.
At least anecdotally, I’ve heard that the last one is a serious problem: in some countries, opposition activists really like the option of eg, buying Facebook ads where the central information source (eg. state mass media) is regime-controlled. (I don’t know how big a problem this is in the US, or in practice in those countries for that matter).
More broadly, I think we should maybe reflect on the (the wildly unpopular, but nonetheless endorsed by the highest court in the land) idea that “money is speech,” and that limiting speech (including in voluntary ways) has a large host of unintended consequences, some of which may not be positive.
EDIT: I plausibly misunderstood kokotajlod, see his reply.
I think there’s a dangerous rhetorical slip when we construe “do not invite someone to [speak at] events” as “cancel culture.”
Judgments about someone’s character are, unfortunately, extremely tribal. Different political tribes have wildly different standards for what counts as good character and what counts as mere eccentricity. In many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice.
In light of this, I think we should view with suspicion the argument that it’s OK to cancel someone because they have bad character.
I think this is one of the things that sounds really good in the abstract, but in practice not the practical way to think about how to do local group organizing. If I think about people who I was part of decisions of banning/softbanning from our meetups, I definitely don’t think “in many cases one tribe’s virtue is another tribe’s vice” feels like a particularly appealing abstract argument relative to more concrete felt sense of “this person negatively impacts the experience of others at the meetup much more than they plausibly derive value from it.” Though it hasn’t been immediately applicable in the examples I’ve mentioned (since we can point to concrete issues), I’d argue that in many situations “character” makes the situation overdetermined, so we’d arguably have been in the right to exclude people before the concrete problems very obviously surface.
I’m also very much not convinced by meta-level arguments that EA (in this context, local EA meetups) has too much exclusion rather than too little. I think people by default (myself included), especially group organizers, have a very strong egalitarian instinct/distaste for being mean/cliquish, so will by default tolerate much higher levels of social infractions than are plausibly +EV. See EY on well-kept gardens.
(Aside: Being explicitly disinvited; akin to “hi I don’t wanna be friends with you” is very unpleasant. This can be worse if you’ve formed being part of a group as part of your identity. In some cases there’s a risk of harm to others as well. For an organizer, being in the situation of disinviting someone who wants to attend your meetup is in a sense admitting failure. If the meetup structure was designed well to begin with, people who should self-select out of wanting to attend. However, if we say that organizers should have events iff they can guarantee that their meetup will not accidentally have people who will be net negative for the group, this will be a high cost to organizing, maybe implausibly high)
If we reframe “do not invite someone to events” as “do we want to hang out with them,” I feel like the alternative “we must not consider the quality of someone’s character in our friendships, only the quality of their ideas” will be absurd.
Now I think the bar for not inviting someone to a local meetup has to be somewhat higher (or at least different) than to not be friends with them. For example, having similar musical preferences is a valid preference for friends, but will be absurd as an exclusion criteria for a meetup (unless it’s a music lover’s meetup of a specific genre).
But the bar shouldn’t be infinitely high (and honestly I’m not convinced that it should be very high at all), and I think it’s better for local groups to handle this themselves in their local context.
Now I think the modal example of CC is plausibly pernicious for other important reasons, namely that the appeal isn’t to whether local group A benefits from interacting with person B, but in a (sometimes implausible) appeal to externalities, that A meeting with B somehow substantially negatively impacts the experience of C, where C can be individuals from across the world who had no desire to attend A. To the extent CC is global, the bar then becomes excluding folks from every social group, which ought to be much higher than the bar for excluding them from a single social group.
Reply: Vigilante justice often makes mistakes. Heck, even the best justice systems often make mistakes. Worse, sometimes the mistakes are systemically biased in various ways, or even not even mistakes at all, but rather intentional patterns of oppression. And the way we prevent this sort of thing is by having all sorts of rules for what counts as admissible evidence, for when the investigation into someone’s wrongdoing is supposed to be over and they are supposed to go free, etc. And yeah, sometimes following these rules means that people we are pretty sure are guilty end up going free. And this is bad. But it’s better than the alternative.
Anglo-Saxxon criminal justice (in theory, not in practice) has a fundamental conception of erring on the side of innocence: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” I think the bar ought to be much lower for EA meetups, eg if you prefer >10 cases of sexual harassment, or physical threatening, or yelling at people, or just general unpleasantness, to a single case of a wronged innocent due to false accusations or plausible misunderstanding, I think you’re not going to have a good time.
Epistemic status: likely false
When I talked about this (and other ideas like it) in EA circles, people seem wildly confident that this idea is obviously good; the only difficulty is cost-effectiveness and implementation details. While I broadly share this intuition, I think confidence about far-reaching social changes is often misplaced.
I’d be interested in someone steelmanning a case/set of arguments against the core idea of
matching a pair of opposing campaigns and sending the money to a less-controversial charity instead.
I think the arguments definitely exist; they just haven’t been explicated or criticized in detail.
(Note to Eric et.al: Please don’t let this comment discourage you from being excited about your project and doing valuable work! Execution is hard and naysaying often easy).
What will a company/organization that has a really important secondary mandate to focus on general career development of employees actually look like? How would trainings be structured, what would growth trajectories look like, etc?
When I was at Google, I got the distinct impression that while “career development” and “growth” were common buzzwords, most of the actual programs on offer were more focused on employee satisfaction/retention than growth. (For example, I’ve essentially never gotten any feedback on my selection of training courses or books that I bought with company money, which at the time I thought was awesome flexibility, but in retrospect was not a great sign of caring about growth on the part of the company).
Edit: Upon a reread I should mention that there are other ways for employees to grow within the company, eg by having some degree of autonomy over what projects they want to work on.
I think there are theoretical reasons for employee career growth being underinvested by default. Namely, that the costs of career growth are borne approximately equally between the employer and the employee (obviously this varies from case to case), while the benefits of career growth are mostly accrued by the employee and their future employers.
This view will predict that companies will mostly only invest in general career development/growth of employees if one of a number of conditions are met:
The investment is so valuable that it pays for itself over the expected length of the employee’s tenor
The “investment” has benefits to the company (and hopefully the employee as well) other than via building the employee’s skillsets. Eg, it makes the employee more likely to stay at the company.
Relatedly, the investment only grows (or disproportionately grows) the employee’s skillset in ways that’s relevant to the work of the company, and not that of other workplaces (even close competitors)
There are principal-agent problems within the company, such that managers are not always acting in the company’s best interest when they promote career development for their underlings.
I suppose that in contrast to companies, academia is at least incentivized to focus on general career development (since professors are judged at least somewhat on the quality of their graduate students’ outputs/career trajectories). I don’t know in practice how much better academia is than industry however. (It is at least suggestive that people often take very large pay cuts to do graduate school).
I think the question of how to do employee career development well is particularly interesting/relevant to EA organizations, since there’s a sense in which developing better employees is a net benefit to “team EA” even if your own org doesn’t benefit, or might die in a year or three. A (simplified) formal view of this is that effective altruism captures the value of career development over the expected span of someone continuing to do EA activities.*
*eg, doing EA-relevant research or policy work, donating, working at an EA org, etc.
Relatedly, should we have a strong dispreference for upvoting (especially strong upvoting ) people who work in the same org as us, or whom we otherwise may have a nonacademic interest in promoting*? Deliberately soliciting upvotes on the Forum is clearly verbotten, yet in practice I know that I’m much more likely to read work by somebody else if I had a prior relationship with them**, and since I only upvote posts I’ve read, this means that I’m disproportionately likely to upvote posts by people who I work with, which seems bad.
On the flip side, I guess you can argue that any realistic pattern of non-random upvoting is a mild conflict of interest. For example, I’m more likely to read forecasting posts on the Forum, and I’m much more likely to upvote (and I rarely downvote) posts about forecasting. This in turn has a very small effect of raising awareness/attention/prestige of forecasting within EA, which has a very small but nonzero probability of having material consequences for me later.
So broadly, there are actions along the spectrum of “upvoting things you find interesting may lead to the movement being more interested in things you find interesting, which in turn may have a positive effect on your future material consequences” all the way up to “full astroturfing.”
A possible solution to this is for people to reflect on how they came across the article and chose to read it. If the honest answer is “I’m unlikely to have read this article if not for a prior connection with the author,” then opt against upvoting it***.
It’s also possible I’m overthinking this, and other people don’t think this is a problem in practice.
*(eg funders/fundees, mentors/mentees, members of the same cohort, current project partners, romantic relationships, etc)
**I haven’t surveyed others so I don’t know if this reading pattern is unusual. I will be slightly surprised if it is though.
***or flip a coin, biased towards your counterfactual probability of reading the article without that prior connection.
ImpactMatters was recently acquired by Charity Navigator.
What’s up with that?
I enjoyed this list of philosophy’s successes, but none of them happened in the last 50 years.
I’ll be interested in having someone with a history of philosophy background weigh in on the Gettier question specifically. I thought Gettier problems were really interesting when I first heard about them, but I’ve also heard that “knowledge as justified true belief” wasn’t actually all that dominant a position before Gettier came along.
Thanks a lot for the link, appreciate it!
I’m now pretty confused about whether normative claims can be used as evidence in empirical disputes. I generally believed no, with the caveat that for humans, moral beliefs are built on a scaffolding of facts, and sometimes it’s easier to respond to an absurd empirical claim with the moral claim that has the gestalt sense of empirical beliefs if there isn’t an immediately accessible empirical claim.
I talked to a philosopher who disagreed, and roughly believed that strong normative claims can be used as evidence against more confused/less certain empirical claims, and I got a sense from the conversation that his view is much more common in academic philosophy than mine.
Would like to investigate further.
I’m pretty Atheist, but I find the ‘answer’ to the theism question per LW or similar woefully rudimentary compared to state of the art discussion in the field.
This will be a pertinent critique if the aim of LessWrong is to be a skeptics forum, created to make the most canonical debunkings (serving a societal purpose akin to Snopes). It seems much less relevant if you are trying to understand the world, unless you maybe have a very strong intuition that sophistication is highly correlated with truth.
Oh man your comments are so insightful! Strongly upvoted.
Will carefully consider if I have follow-up questions later.