Mau

Many Un­der­grads Should Take Light Courseloads

What Helped the Voice­less? His­tor­i­cal Case Studies

AI Gover­nance Needs Tech­ni­cal Work

Take­aways on US Policy Ca­reers (Part 1): Paths to Im­pact and Per­sonal Fit

AI Gover­nance Course—Cur­ricu­lum and Application

Take­aways on US Policy Ca­reers (Part 2): Ca­reer Advice

• Mau 11 May 2022 6:14 UTC

  79 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: _pk’s comment on: Why Helping the Flynn Cam­paign is es­pe­cially use­ful right now

  Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Without commenting on the candidacy or election overall, a response (lightly edited for clarity) to your point about pandemics:

  You emphasize pandemic expertise, but pandemic prevention priorities are arguably more relevant to who will make a difference. It might not take much expertise to think that now is a bad time for Congress to slash pandemic prevention funding, which happened despite some lobbying against it. And for harder decisions, a non-expert member of Congress can hire or consult with expert advisors, as is common practice. Instead of expertise being most important in this case, a perspective I’ve heard from people very familiar with Congress is that Congress members’ priorities are often more important, since members face tough negotiations and tradeoffs. So maybe what’s lacking in Congress isn’t pandemic-related expertise or lobbying, but willingness to make it a priority to keep something like covid from happening again.

• Mau 6 Apr 2022 8:13 UTC

  76 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Vul­tures Are Circling

  So what to do? I’d like to note that some of the knee jerk reactions when hearing of the problem are examples of things not to do.

  This seems overly quick to rule out a large class of potential responses. Assuming there are (or will be) more “vultures,” it’s not clear to me that the arguments against these “things not to do” are solid. I have these hesitations (among others) [edited for clarity and to add the last two]:

  • “The rationale for giving out high risk grants stands and hasn’t changed.”

    • Sure, but the average level of risk has increased. So accepting the same level of risk means being more selective.

  • “decreasing the riskiness of the grants just means we backslide into becoming like any other risk averse institution.”

    • Even if we put aside the previous point, riskiness can go down without becoming as low as that of typical risk-averse institutions.

  • “Increasing purity tests. [...] As a community that values good epidemics, having a purity test on whether or not this person agrees with the EA consensus on [insert topic here] is a death blow to the current very good MO.”

    • There are other costly signals the community could use.

  • “So not funding young people means this type of talent and potential is wasted. Let’s not do that.”

    • Just because something has downsides doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it; maybe it’s worth it to waste some talent to avoid many vultures. (I’m not saying that’s the case, just that more consideration would be helpful.)

• Mau 18 Jan 2023 1:39 UTC

  53 points

  25 ∶ 7

  in reply to: GideonF’s comment on: Do­ing EA Better

  why they would want to suggest to these bunch of concerned EAs how to go about trying to push for the ideas that Buck disagrees with better

  My guess was that Buck was hopeful that, if the post authors focus their criticisms on the cruxes of disagreement, that would help reveal flaws in his and others’ thinking (“inasmuch as I’m wrong it would be great if you proved me wrong”). In other words, I’d guess he was like, “I think you’re probably mistaken, but in case you’re right, it’d be in both of our interests for you to convince me of that, and you’ll only be able to do that if you take a different approach.”

  [Edit: This is less clear to me now—see Gideon’s reply pointing out a more recent comment.]

[Short Ver­sion] What Helped the Voice­less? His­tor­i­cal Case Studies

• Mau 18 Jan 2023 1:16 UTC

  50 points

  28 ∶ 15

  in reply to: GideonF’s comment on: Do­ing EA Better

  I interpreted Buck’s comment differently. His comment reads to me, not so much like “playing the man,” and more like “telling the man that he might be better off playing a different game.” If someone doesn’t have the time to write out an in-depth response to a post that takes 84 minutes to read, but they take the time to (I’d guess largely correctly) suggest to the authors how they might better succeed at accomplishing their own goals, that seems to me like a helpful form of engagement.

• Mau 6 Aug 2022 6:01 UTC

  46 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Be­ing the per­son who doesn’t launch nukes: new EA cause?

  I’d consider tweaking (3) to something like, “Make sure you don’t start a nuclear war based on a false alarm.” The current version has imo some serious downsides:

  • Association with planned disloyalty could hurt the efforts of everyone else in this community who’s trying to contribute to policy through dedicated service.

  • A (US) community’s reputation for planned non-retaliation might increase risk of nuclear war, because nuclear peace depends partly on countries’ perceptions that other countries are committed to retaliating against nuclear attack.

• Mau 29 Dec 2021 12:27 UTC

  45 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics

  Thanks for sharing this! Responding to just some parts of the object-level issues raised by the paper (I only read parts closely, so I might not have the full picture)--I find several parts of this pretty confusing or unintuitive:

  • Your first recommendation in your concluding paragraph is: “EA needs to diversify funding sources by breaking up big funding bodies.” But of course “EA” per se can’t do this; the only actors with the legal authority to break up these bodies (other than governments, which I’d guess would be uninterested) are these funding bodies themselves, i.e. mainly OpenPhil. Given the emphasis on democratization and moral uncertainty, it sounds like your first recommendation is a firm assertion that two people with lots of money should give away most of their money to other philanthropists who don’t share their values, i.e. it’s a recommendation that obviously won’t be implemented (after all, who’d want to give influence to others who want to use it for different ends?). So unless I’ve misunderstood, this looks like there might be more interest in emphasizing bold recommendations than in emphasizing recommendations that stand a chance of getting implemented. And that seems at odds with your earlier recognition, which I really appreciate—that this is not a game. Have I missed something?

  • Much of the paper seems to assume that, for moral uncertainty reasons, it’s bad for the existential risk research community to be unrepresentative of the wider world, especially in its ethical views. I’m not sure this is a great response to moral uncertainty. My intuition would be that, under moral uncertainty, each worldview will do best (by its own lights) if it can disproportionately guide the aspects of the world it considers most important. This suggests that all worldviews will do best (by their own lights) if [total utiliarianism + strong longtermism + transhumanism]* retains over-representation in existential risk research (since this view cares about this niche field to an extremely unusual extent), while other ethical views retain their over-representation in the many, many other areas of the world that entirely lack these longtermists. These disproportionate influences just seem like different ethical communities specializing differently, to mutual benefit. (There’s room to debate just how much these ethical views should concentrate their investments, but if the answer is not zero, then it’s not the case that e.g. the field having “non-representative moral visions of the future” is a “daunting problem” for anyone.)

  *I don’t use your term “techno-utopian approach” because “utopian” has derogotary connotations, not to mention misleading/​inaccurate connotations re: these researchers’ typical levels of optimism regarding technology and the future.

• Mau 4 Feb 2022 4:08 UTC

  39 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jaime Sevilla’s comment on: The best $5,800 I’ve ever donated (to pan­demic pre­ven­tion).

  I think on the margin the community is too concerned with reacting to “what people might think” instead of their actual reactions.

  I see where you’re coming from with this general heuristic, but I’m less sure how applicable the heuristic is to this context. In most cases, it seems right to ask, “How will a random person react if they hear X, if they randomly stumble across it?” But given the adversarial nature of politics, the more relevant question here might be, “How will a random person react if they hear X, if it’s presented however an adversary wants to present it?” And my intuition is that the latter question, when it’s very relevant, warrants lots more caution in public communications (while high openness is still great in certain private communications).

  What links here?

  • Should the fo­rum have posts (or com­ments) only vie­w­able by logged-in fo­rum members by Jeremy (4 Apr 2022 17:40 UTC; 21 points)

• Mau 16 Nov 2022 3:33 UTC

  38 points

  11 ∶ 1

  on: I think EA will make it through stronger

  Thanks for writing this! I want to push back a bit. There’s a big middle ground between (i) naive, unconstrained welfare maximization and (ii) putting little to no emphasis on how much good one does. I think “do good, using reasoning” is somewhat too quick to jump to (ii) while passing over intermediate options, like:

  • “Do lots of good, using reasoning” (roughly as in this post)

  • “be a good citizen, while ambitiously working towards a better world” (as in this post)

  • “maximize good under constraints or with constraints incorporated into the notion of goodness”

  There are lots of people out there (e.g. many researchers, policy professionals, entrepreneurs) who do good using reasoning; this community’s concern for scope seems rare, important, and totally compatible with integrity. Given the large amounts of good you’ve done, I’d guess you’re sympathetic to considering scope. Still, it seems important enough to include in the tagline.

  Also, a nitpick:

  now it’s obvious that the idea of maximizing goodness doesn’t work in practice—we have a really clear example of where trying to do that fails (SBF if you attribute pure motives to him); as well as a lot of recent quotes from EA luminaries saying that you shouldn’t do that

  This feels a bit fast; the fact that this example had to include a (dubious) “if” clause means it’s not a really clear example, and maximizing goodness is compatible with constraints if we incorporate constraints into our notion of goodness (just by the fact that any behavior can be thought of as maximizing some notion of goodness).

  (Made minor edits.)

• Mau 5 Sep 2022 20:56 UTC

  37 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Base Rate of Longter­mism Is Bad

  Thanks for writing this. I think there are actually some pretty compelling examples of people/​movements being quite successful at helping future generations (while partly trying to do so):

  • Some sources suggest that Lincoln had long-term motivations for permanently abolishing slavery, saying, “The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come—a measure of such importance that these two votes must be procured.” Looking back now, abolition still looks like a great move for future generations.

    • I don’t know how accurate those sources are, but at least a U.S. constitutional amendment is structured to have very long-lasting impacts, given the extreme difficulty of undoing it.

  • The U.S. constitution appears to have been partly aiming to create a long-lasting democracy, citing “our posterity” in its preamble. It seems to have largely worked.

  • Proponents of measures to avoid nuclear war and reduce nuclear weapons testing often cited future generations as one motivation. (For example, in a famous speech he gave before launching U.S.-Soviet cooperation on limiting nuclear testing and nonproliferation, Kennedy appealed to the importance of “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time” and to “the right of future generations to a healthy existence.”) These efforts have been quite successful; we’ve had about 77 years with no wartime use of nuclear weapons, nuclear testing has plummeted, and far few states than once feared now have nuclear weapons.

  [Edited to add] All this looks to me like a mixed (and maybe fairly good overall) track record, not a terrible one. (Though a deeper problem is that we can’t justifiably draw almost any conclusions about base rates from these or the post’s examples, since we’ve made no serious efforts to find a representative sample of historical longtermist efforts.)

• Mau 18 Feb 2022 3:56 UTC

  37 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mau’s comment on: Why your EA group should pro­mote effec­tive giv­ing (and how)

  [Part 2 of my original comment]

  Second, tactical downsides of promoting giving seem to be overlooked.

  I was a little surprised to see no acknowledgement of downsides, although maybe I missed it. I think there are several likely and significant downsides:

  • Opportunity costs:

    • Time and attention (of potential group members, active group members, and organizers) are scarce.

      • Running or attending a giving game often replaces running or attending a career planning workshop.

      • Many people lack the time or attention to develop a nuanced understanding of what groups do, and there’s anecdotally already a meme of “EA is all about effective giving.” So a group that tries to emphasize both effective giving and effective careers will often be rounded off as just being about the former.

    • Social capital (of group organizers) is scarce.

    • Many people’s altruism is probably scarce? (Maybe it can grow, but if that takes time, it suggests not emphasizing many asks from the beginning.)

  • Giving-focused groups have lower appeal than careers-focused groups, in a university context:

    • (University groups are a very significant special case of these groups, since they’re a large fraction of EA groups and are arguably unusually high-leveraged.)

    • Anecdotally, students seem much more excited about careers-focused pitches than about other kinds of pitches. (Presumably this is because many of them are very confused about what to do with their careers and are desperate for high-quality support.)

    • Many students have low, zero, or negative incomes, so they often don’t see giving as all that accessible.

    • In many universities, students’ political or political-adjacent views (e.g., about billionaires having too much influence, or about the importance of systemic change, or about white saviors, etc.) make some students highly skeptical of charity. So a group that very strongly emphasizes giving will be less appealing to these people (and, by social influence, to their friends) than a group with a different emphasis.

    • In the survey mentioned earlier, 80,000 Hours came out as the top listed contributor to people getting involved.

  • Group norms costs: given that career choice is (arguably) typically much more consequential than donations choices, very strongly emphasizing the latter may undermine the group norm of prioritizing what matters most.

• Mau 14 Feb 2022 7:20 UTC

  37 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some thoughts on veg­e­tar­i­anism and veganism

  Psychological/​epistemic consequences seem like another potentially big part of this choice that isn’t discussed often (e.g., I haven’t checked it, but this Wikipedia article summarizes experiments which seem to suggest that eating meat changes people’s ethical and empirical beliefs about animals).

• Mau 14 Feb 2022 7:13 UTC

  37 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Some thoughts on veg­e­tar­i­anism and veganism

  This does seem like a downside. Is it also a significant downside on the margin? I imagine (and have a little experience suggesting that) most of the logistical costs are in finding any good veg*n options for the event (rather than in scaling an order). That seems to suggest that, even if (say) 70% of veg*ns in the community started eating meat, that would only cut a minority of these costs. So this marginal cost of veg*nism may be smaller than it initially appears.

• Mau 18 Feb 2022 3:53 UTC

  36 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why your EA group should pro­mote effec­tive giv­ing (and how)

  Thanks for writing this! I definitely agree on not wanting the community to make big tactics shifts without carefully thinking things through. In that spirit, I want to gently push back on some points, focusing on the claim that “Giving is great scaffolding to bring people further into EA” (since this claim is emphasized as “possibly the best argument for integrating giving and pledging into your group”). My current sense is that this claim is true to some extent, but significantly overstated:

  First, much of the post’s argument for the tactical upsides of promoting giving seems shaky.

  The post argues:

  Giving is an important factor in deepening people’s connection to EA. When asked which factors were important for EA survey respondents getting [more] involved, 35% cited GiveWell, 21% cited Giving What We Can, 12% cited The Life You Can Save and 6% cited ACE, all organisations that are primarily concerned with giving.

  It’s not clear to me from the survey that giving is actually an important factor in deepening people’s connection to the community. As far as I can tell, the survey didn’t ask people what was important for them “getting [more] involved”; it just asked them what was important for “getting involved.” So another hypothesis that seems compatible with the survey evidence would be: giving-focused orgs often make people initially aware of the community, and then other factors deepen their involvement.

  (We might think that benefit is a good enough alternative reason to emphasize giving, but for now let’s keep looking at the originally claimed benefit.)

  It is a concrete commitment that involves self-sacrifice, which can in turn make you more committed to the community and its ideas. This aligns with the theory that ‘costly signals’ increase your commitment to a group or cause.

  Does this theory have strong support? The opposite seems at least as plausible to me: maybe costly signals are annoying to give and therefore decrease commitment to a group or cause.

  [Giving] (mostly) has short feedback loops, where you can see the results of your actions much more quickly than in, for example, choosing a new career

  Is this true? I’ve yet to see the results of any of my donations.

  The remaining reasons given in support of this claim don’t apply uniquely to giving, as far as I can tell.

  (This comment was getting painfully long, so I’ll continue in a sub-comment.)