Michael_S

Karma: 228

Michael_S Mar 17, 2018, 3:30 PM
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
1) I’d like to know what your definition of “subject-of-experience” is.

2) For this to be true, I believe you would need to posit something about “conscious experience” that is entirely different than everything else in the universe. If say factory A produces 15 widgets, factory B produces 20 widgets, and Factory C produces 15 widgets, I believe we’d agree that the number of widgets in A+C is greater than the number of widgets produced by B, no matter how independent the factories are. Do you disagree with this?

Similarly, I’d say if 15 neural impulses occur in brain A, 20 in brain B, and 15 in brain C, the # of neural impulses is greater than A+C than in B. Do you disagree with this?

Conscious experiences are a product of such neural chemical reactions. Do you disagree with this?

Given this, It seems odd to then postulate that even though all ingredients are the same and are additive between individuals, the conscious product is not. It seems arbitrary and unnecessary to explain anything, and there is no reason to believe it is true.

Michael_S Mar 17, 2018, 2:21 AM
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
I’d say I’m making two arguments:

1) There is no distinct personal identity; rather it’s a continuum. The you today is different than the you yesterday. The you today is also different from the me today. These differences are matters of degree. I don’t think there is clearly a “subject of experience” that exists across time. There are too many cases (eg. brain injuries that change personality) that the single consciousness theory can’t account for.

2) Even if I agreed that there was a distinct difference in kind that represented a consistent person, I don’t think it’s relevant to the moral accounting of experiences. Ie. I don’t see why it matters whether experiences are “independent” or not. They’re real experiences of pain

Michael_S Mar 15, 2018, 4:17 AM
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
It’s the same 5 headaches. It doesn’t matter if you’re imagining one person going through it on five days or imagine five different people going through it on one day. You can still imagine 5 headaches. You can imagine what it would be like to say live the lives of 5 different people for one day with and without a minor headache. Just as you can imagine living the life of one person for 5 days with and without a headache. The connection to an individual is arbitrary and unnecessary.

Now this goes into the meaningless of personhood as a concept, but what would even count as the individual in your view? For simplicity, let’s say 2 modest headaches in one person are worse than one major headache. What if between the two headaches, the person gets a major brain injury and their personality is completely altered (as has happened in real life). Let’s say they also have no memory of their former self. Are they no longer the same person? Under your view, is it no longer possible to say that the two modest headaches are worse than the major headache? If it still is, why is it possible after this radical change in personality with no memory continuity but impossible between two different people?

Michael_S Mar 14, 2018, 1:31 PM
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
I think this is confusing means of estimation with actual utils. You can estimate that 5 headaches are worse than one by asking someone to compare five headaches vs. one. You could also produce an estimate by just asking someone who has received one small headache and one large headache whether they would rather receive 5 more small headaches or one more large headache. But there’s no reason you can’t apply these estimates more broadly. There’s real pain behind the estimates that can be added up.

Michael_S Mar 14, 2018, 1:55 AM
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
If a small headache is worth 2 points of disutility and a large headache is worth 5, the total amount of pain is worse because 2*5>5. It’s a pretty straightforward total utilitarian interpretation.I find it irrelevant whether there’s one person who’s worse off; the total amount of pain is larger.

I’ll also note that I find the concept of personhood to be incoherent in itself, so it really shouldn’t matter at all whether it’s the same “person”. But while I think an incoherent personhood concept is sufficient for saying there’s no difference if it’s spread out over 5 people, I don’t think it’s necessary. Simple total utilitarianism gets you there.

Michael_S Mar 13, 2018, 3:30 AM
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on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?

Choice situation 3: We can either save Al, and four others each from a minor headache or Emma from one major headache. Here, I assume you would say that we should save Emma from the major headache

I think you’re making a mistaken assumption here about your readers. Conditional on agreeing 5 minor headaches in one person is worse than 1 major headache in one person, I would feel exactly the same if it were spread out over 5 people. I expect the majority of EAs would as well.

Michael_S Feb 21, 2018, 1:35 AM
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on: Why I prioritize moral circle expansion over artificial intelligence alignment

On this topic, I similarly do still believe there’s a higher likelihood of creating hedonium; I just have more skepticism about it than I think is often assumed by EAs.

This is the main reason I think the far future is high EV. I think we should be focusing on p(Hedonium) and p(Delorium) more than anything else. I’m skeptical that, from a hedonistic utilitarian perspective, byproducts of civilization could come close to matching the expected value from deliberately tiling the universe (potentially multiverse) with consciousness optimized for pleasure or pain. If p(H)>p(D), the future of humanity is very likely positive EV.

Michael_S Jan 22, 2018, 6:00 PM
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on: Could I have some more systemic change, please, sir?
In most cases, I expect interventions to impact policy to also have diminishing marginal returns. Eg An experiment on legislative contacts found little increased effect with more calls (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-014-9277-1) .

Michael_S Jan 22, 2018, 1:22 AM
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on: 69 things that might be pretty effective to fund
(Global catastrophic risks: Fund CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.) looks interesting. It looks like they have a goal of raising 1B dollars (http://www.sabin.org/updates/blog/cepi-new-approach-epidemic-preparedness). My impression is that they are likely to meet this, but I may be mistaken. Would additional funding to CEPI likely be counterfactual?

Michael_S Oct 31, 2017, 6:14 PM
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in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Should we be spending no less on alternate foods than AI now?
Sure, this material is most important for EAs. However, it could be used to raise funding from EAs that would then be used to secure even more funding from the public sector in a way that’s more difficult for AI safety.

Michael_S Oct 30, 2017, 2:02 PM
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on: Should we be spending no less on alternate foods than AI now?
Really exciting work! This seems like an intervention that could potentially be funded with public resources more easily than AI safety research could, which opens up another avenue to funding.

I see how this could be very useful in the event of a nuclear war, but I do have some skepticism about how useful these alternative foods wold be for a less severe shortage. With a 10% reduction in agricultural productivity, why do you think alternative foods that don’t need sunlight could be cheaper than simply expanding how much of useable land we devote to agriculture/using land to grow products that are cheaper per calorie?

Michael_S Oct 8, 2017, 5:35 PM
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on: An Effective Altruist Message Test
As a quick update, I also tried something similar on the EA survey to see whether making certain EA considerations salient would impact people’s donation plans. The end result was essentially no effect. Obligation, Opportunity, and emphasizing cost benefit studies on happiness all had slightly negative treatment effects compared to the control group. The dependent variable was how much EA survey takers reported planning to donate in the future.

Michael_S Oct 1, 2017, 9:36 PM
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on: An intervention to shape policy dialogue, communication, and AI research norms for AI safety
It might make a lot of sense to test the risk vs. accidents framing on the next survey of AI researchers.

Michael_S Sep 20, 2017, 1:38 PM
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in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
I disagree. I believe good ballot measure polling should more accurately reflect the actual language that would appear on the ballot. There’s a known bias towards voters being more likely to support simpler language.

Unless this is an extremely expensive measure (which is probably won’t be), I don’t think that assumption is correct. Most voters will probably never hear about the initiative before they see it on the ballot/will have seen a cursory ad that they barely paid attention to.

Michael_S Sep 15, 2017, 2:48 AM
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in reply to: Milan Griffes’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Cool; had missed that row. Yeah, if it polls, 70% the chance of passage might be close to 80%. Conditional upon that level of support, your estimate seems reasonable to me (assuming the ballot summary language would not be far more complex than the polled language).

Yeah, I agree that it being an effective treatment is a necessary precursor to it being a good ballot law to pass by ballot initiative and part of the EV calculation for spending money on the ballot measure itself.

Michael_S Sep 14, 2017, 11:52 PM
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
That seems similar to Milan_Griffes’ approach. However, when we’re comparing ballot measures to other opportunities, I think the relevant cost to EA would be the cost to launch the campaign. That’s what EAs would actually be spending money on and what could be spent on other interventions.

We don’t have to assume away the additional costs of getting the medicine, but that can be factored into the benefit (ie. the net benefit is the gains they would get from the medicine—the gains they lose from giving up the funds to purchase the drugs)

Michael_S Sep 14, 2017, 10:52 PM
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on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Hey; I made some comments on this on the doc, but I thought it was worth bringing them to the main thread and expanding.

First of all, I’m really happy to sea other EAs looking at ballot measures. They’re a potentially very high EV method of passing policy/raising funding. They’re particularly high value per dollar when spending on advertising is limited/nothing since the increased probability of passage from getting a relatively popular measure on the ballot is far more than the increased probability from spending the same amount advertising for it.

Also, am I correct in interpreting that you assume 100% chance of passage in your model conditional on good polling? Polling can help, but ballot measure polling does have a lot of error (in both directions). So even a popular measure in polling is hardly guarantee of passage (http://themonkeycage.org/2011/10/when-can-you-trust-polling-about-ballot-measures/).

Finally, in your EV estimates, you seem to be focus on the individual treatment cost of the intervention, which overwhelms the cost of the ballot measure. I don’t think this is getting at the right question when it comes to running a ballot measure. I believe the gains from the ballot measure should be the estimated sum of the utility gains from people being able to purchase the drugs multiplied by the probability of passage; the costs should be how much it would cost to run the campaign. On the doc, you made the point that Givewell doesn’t include leverage on other funding in their estimates, but when it comes to ballot measures, leverage is exactly what you’re trying to produce, so I think an estimate is important.

Michael_S Apr 2, 2017, 12:31 AM
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: An Effective Altruist Message Test
Thanks!

I adapted that framing from Will MacAskill (example of this starting 12:45 in the podcast with Sam Harris here: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-good). MacAskill refers to the framing as “Excited Altruism” It might come across as better when he tells it than in a web survey. But I think it’s pretty similar. I grouped this in with “opportunity”, which I’ve also seen called “exciting opportunity” in the ea community (http://lukemuehlhauser.com/effective-altruism-as-opportunity-or-obligation/).

But, regardless of what it’s called, I agree with you on the takeaway.

Michael_S Apr 1, 2017, 10:37 PM
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in reply to: nikvetr’s comment on: An Effective Altruist Message Test
Sounds interesting. Would love to take a look when you get a chance to provide the links.

Michael_S Apr 1, 2017, 10:07 PM
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in reply to: nikvetr’s comment on: An Effective Altruist Message Test
Yeah, the survey was a lot longer. Typically general public surveys will cost over 10 dollars a complete, so getting 1200 cases for a survey like this can cost thousands of dollars.

I agree that model specification can be tricky, which is a reason I felt it well worth it to use the proprietary software I had access to that has been thoroughly vetted and code reviewed and is used frequently to run similar analyses rather than trying to construct my own.

I did not make sure people read the paragraph. I discussed the issue a bit in my discussion section, but one way a web survey might understate the effect is if people would pay closer attention and respond better to a friend delivering the message. OTOH, surveys do have some potentual vulnerability to the hawthorne effect, though that didn’t seem to express itself in the donations question.