MichaelA

Karma: 9,516

I’m Michael Aird, a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and guest fund manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. Opinions expressed are my own. You can give me anonymous feedback at this link.

With Rethink, I’m mostly focused on helping lead our AI Governance & Strategy team. I also do some nuclear risk research, give input on our Generalist Longtermism team’s work, and do random other stuff.

Previously, I did a range of longtermism-y and research-y things as a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute, a Summer Research Fellow at the Center on Long-Term Risk, and a Researcher/Writer for Convergence Analysis. More on my background here.

I also post to LessWrong sometimes.

If you think you or I could benefit from us talking, feel free to message me or schedule a call. For people interested in doing EA-related research/writing, testing their fit for that, “getting up to speed” on EA/longtermist topics, or writing for the Forum, I also recommend this post.

MichaelA 28 Jan 2022 15:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jh’s comment on: Why and how to be excited about megaprojects
I agree with your final three paragraphs, but:
1. You seem to be implying that Scalability was one of the terms in ITN/SSN, which I think it never was.
  1. The Ss have been Scale and Solvability, which aren’t the same as Scalability
  2. iirc, Charity Entrepreneurship does account for scalability in their own weighted factor models or frameworks, but that’s separate from ITN
2. I don’t think the ITN/SSN frameworks made the points in my post or in your final three paragraphs clear.
  1. Those are primarilyframeworks for prioritizing among problems, not projects.
  2. “if we doubled the resources dedicated to solving this problem, what fraction of the problem would we expect to solve?” doesn’t tell me how scalable a given project is. “resources dedicated to solving this problem” would mean things like total resources dedicated to solving wild animal suffering or extreme climate change risks, not resources dedicated toward a given project.
    You could have cases where a given project could grow to 100 times its current size without losing much cost-effectiveness per dollar and yet the cost-effectiveness was fairly low to begin with or the problem area it’s related to isn’t very tractable.
    You could also have cases where a project is very cost-effective and is in a very tractable area but isn’t very scalable.
  3. Scale, Tractability, and Neglectedness are also often used to evaluate intervention or project ideas, but in that case Scale is used to mean things like “How big would the impacts be if the project were successful?” or “How big a problem is this aiming to tackle?”, rather than things like “How large can this project grow to while remaining somewhat cost-effective?”

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 22:41 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ShayBenMoshe’s comment on: Why and how to be excited about megaprojects
Doubling the cost effectiveness while maintaining cost absorbed, and doubling cost absorbed while maintaining cost effectiveness, would both take work (scaling without dilution/breaking is also hard). Probably one tends to be harder, but that’d vary a lot between cases. But if we could achieve either for free by magic, or alternatively if we assume an equal hardness for either, then doubling cost effectiveness would very likely be better, for the reason stated above. (And that’s sufficient for “literally the same” to have been an inaccurate claim.)

I think that’s just fairly obvious. Like if you really imagine you could press a button to have either effect on 80k for free or for the same cost either way, I think you really should want to press the “more cost effective” button, otherwise you’re basically spending extra talent for no reason. (With the caveat given above. Also a caveat that absorbing talent also helps build their career capital—should’ve mentioned that earlier. But still that’s probably less good than them doing some other option and 80k getting the extra impact without extra labour.)

As noted above, we’re still fairly constrained on some resources, esp. certain types of talent. We don’t have left overs of all types of resources. (E.g. I could very easily swap from my current job into any of several other high impact jobs, but won’t because there’s only 1 me and I think my current job is the best use of current me, and I know several other people in this position. With respect to such people, there are left over positions/project ideas, not left over resources-in-the-form-of-people.)

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 21:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ShayBenMoshe’s comment on: Why and how to be excited about megaprojects

A 2-fold increase in one, while keeping the other fixed, is literally the same as having the roles reversed.

But doubling the cost also doubles the cost (in addition to impact), while doubling the cost-effectiveness doubles only the impact. That’s a pretty big difference!

Like if we could either make 80k twice as big in terms of quality-adjusted employees while keeping impact per quality-adjusted employee constant, or do the inverse, we should very likely prefer the inverse, since that leaves more talent available for other projects. (I say “very likely” because, as noted in the post, it can be valuable to practice running big things so we’re more able to run other big things.)

So I disagree that your simple summary of what’s going on is a sufficient and clear picture (though your equation itself is obviously correct).

Separately, I agree with your second paragraph with respect to money, but mildly disagree with the final sentence specifically with respect to talent, or at least “vetted and trained” talent—that’s less scarce than it used to be, but still scarce enough that it’s not simply like there’s a surplus relative to projects that can absorb it. (Though more project ideas or early stage projects would still help us more productively absorb certain specific people, and I’d also say there’s kind of a surplus of less vetted and trained talent.)

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 17:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: SamClarke’s comment on: CSER is hiring for a senior research associate on longterm AI risk and governance
Cool, I’ll shoot you an email!

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 17:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: IanDavidMoss’s comment on: Why and how to be excited about megaprojects
Yeah, I agree with that.
Though I also think your comment could be read as implying that you think megaprojects won’t themselves be cost-effective / labour-effective / in other senses efficient, relative to some bar like 80k or FHI or GiveWell’s recommended charities or ACE’s recommended charities. (Were you indeed thinking that?)
I think I disagree with that. That is, I’d guess that at least a few megaprojects that would be worth doing if we had the right founders will also clear the relevant efficiency bar. (I also think that at least a few won’t clear the relevant efficiency bar. And, of course, most megaprojects that aren’t worth doing will also not clear the relevant efficiency bar.)
I haven’t attempted any relevant Fermi estimates or even really properly qualitatively thought about this before. My tentative disagreement is just based on the following fuzzy thoughts:
- The set “megaprojects that would be worth doing if we had the right founders” is probably fairly large, so it wouldn’t be that hard for at least a few to clear those bars?
- It seems plausible there are multiple ambitious ideas that could make like >1000x as large a dent in the world’s problems as other things we’re excited about do, while absorbing >1000x as many resources, such that overall they’re similarly efficient?
- Megaprojects can benefit from economies of scale
(But now that I’ve started to draft this reply, I realise that this might be an important question, that its answer isn’t immediately obvious, and that I’ve hardly thought about it at all and I don’t feel confident about my fuzzy thoughts on it. Also, in any case, this wouldn’t mean I overall disagree with your comment and wouldn’t change my views on what I said in the post itself.)

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 13:53 UTC
4 points
on: CSER is hiring for a senior research associate on longterm AI risk and governance
Exciting!
Would people giving you a list of plausibly good candidates be useful, so you can contact them? (Specifically, I know of lots of people who are probably too junior but still might be worth the low cost of an email asking them to apply since they seem promising and interested in this kind of thing. And I guess even if they are too junior, maybe they’ll impress CSER enough that you give them a more junior version of the role.)

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 13:43 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: MichaelA’s Shortform
Thanks—I think those are both really good points! I’ve now made a top-level post version of this shortform, with the main modifications being adjustments in light of your points (plus, unrelatedly, adding a colourful diagram because colourful diagrams are fun).

Why and how to be excited about megaprojects

MichaelA24 Jan 2022 13:34 UTC

62 points

13 comments3 min readEA link

MichaelA 24 Jan 2022 11:08 UTC
14 points
in reply to: alexrjl’s comment on: Advice I’ve Found Helpful as I Apply to EA Jobs
Likewise—I listened to this via the Nonlinear Library but decided to open the Forum version just to leave a comment endorsing this post’s advice.
Both this and Six Takeaways from EA Global and EA Retreats contain a lot of things that I already believed were useful advice that not enough people are aware of and that I wasn’t aware of a good concise clear writeup on, so I appreciate you (Akash) producing these posts :)

MichaelA 23 Jan 2022 8:57 UTC
13 points
on: MichaelA’s Shortform
EDIT: This is now superseded by a top-level post so you should read that instead.
tl;dr: Value large impacts rather than large inputs, but be excited about megaprojects anyway because they’re a new & useful tool we’ve unlocked
A lot of people are excited about megaprojects, and I agree that they should be. But we should remember that megaprojects are basically defined by the size of their inputs (e.g., “productively” using >$100 million per year), and that we don’t intrinsically value the capacity to absorb those inputs. What we really care about is huge positive impact, and megaprojects are just one means to that end, and actually (ceteris paribus) we should be even more excited about achieving the same impacts using less inputs & smaller projects. How can we reconcile these thoughts, and why should we still be excited about megaprojects?
I suggest we think about this as follows:
1. Imagine a Venn diagram with a circle for megaprojects and another circle for projects with great expected value (EV)
2. Projects with great EV are really the focus and always have been
3. Projects like 80,000 Hours, FHI, and Superintelligence were each far smaller than megaprojects, but in my view probably had and still have great EV, and an EV high enough to potentially justify megaproject-level spending. That’s great (even better than megaprojects!), and we’d still love more projects that can punch so far above their weight.
4. But there’s also a large area of overlap between the two circles of the Venn diagram—a large overlap between megaprojects and projects with great EV—since it will usually take a lot of inputs to achieve a lot of good outcomes.
5. And we haven’t yet explored that area of overlap much—haven’t found and executed on the obvious and best ideas. This is partly because it obviously generally makes sense to start with the smaller, cheaper, easier options, and partly because EA’s stock of financial resources and relevant human capital has grown fairly rapidly so just a few years ago we had far less ability to execute on megaprojects. It’s probably also partly because a lot of people aren’t naturally sufficiently ambitious or lack sufficient self-confidence.
6. Now that those stocks of financial and human capital resources have grown so much, we’ve sort-of “unlocked” that additional area of high-EV project options. And we’re likely continuing to unlock it more each year.
7. So we should now be explicitly focusing attention on that area of options; if we don’t want make an explicit effort to do that, we’ll continue neglecting it via inertia. This doesn’t make smaller projects that also have great EV any less valuable, but we don’t want to be only focusing on those.
8. But we should remember that really we should first and foremost be extremely ambitious in terms of impacts, and just willing to also—as a means to that end—be extremely ambitious in terms of inputs absorbed.
9. One caveat: We should also to some extent value doing larger projects for the sake of doing larger projects—like sometimes choose that over doing smaller projects with similar/great impact—since that upgrades the career capital of the project’s leaders/employees and also provides community-level lessons learned, helping further unlock the option of future megaprojects. But this still isn’t a matter of valuing the size of projects as an end in itself.
Caveats: I wrote this fairly quickly and didn’t run it by people to check that it clearly conveys my full views here. I imagine some people could take this as “be less excited about megaprojects”, which is definitely not a message I want to convey to EA in general.
My thanks to Linch Zhang for conversations that informed my thinking here, though that doesn’t imply his endorsement of my thinking or of this shortform.
What links here?
- Why and how to be excited about megaprojects by MichaelA (24 Jan 2022 13:34 UTC; 62 points)

MichaelA 20 Jan 2022 18:35 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Research idea: Evaluate the IGM economic experts panel
I don’t have a particularly informed/informative stance on how useful it’d be, unfortunately. (I guess I can at least say it’d be nice if someone spent a few hours thinking further about it, but that’s true of many things.)

MichaelA 20 Jan 2022 12:21 UTC
4 points
on: Research idea: Evaluate the IGM economic experts panel
Thanks for this post.
Here’s a copy of some quick notes I wrote earlier (and don’t plan to take any next steps on), in case this is useful to anyone:
- “I see results from the IGM economics expert panels cited somewhat often, and it seems like that’s probably a really useful thing to have.
- Idea 1: Does anyone know if there are similar things for other disciplines?
  - E.g., historians, psychologists, international relations scholars?
  - And if there isn’t, might it be highly valuable per unit effort to set that up?
  - Obviously lots of individual experts comment on individual things, and there’ll sometimes be surveys or the like. But it seems like it could make sense for this sort of thing to be institutionalised in the way the IGM panels are, rather than being ad hoc.
- Idea 2: Does anyone know if it’s possible to submit questions to the IGM panel or other panels (if they exist), or to in some other way get them to respond to questions on topics of particular interest to EAs?
- (If people think this sort of thing doesn’t exist yet but might be worth thinking more about, I might write a quick EA Forum post/question post/shortform on this.)”
Replies from colleagues of mine included:
- “In the US, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine does expert opinion in a more formal way for relevant issues e.g., https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25665/heritable-human-genome-editing”
- “You hear a lot in the US from the US Army Corps of Engineers.”
- “PhilPapers seems like a natural place to expand polls of philosophers.”
- “I don’t know about historians, but wouldn’t it be cool if macrohistory/predictive history were more of a thing and they took surveys of their members?”

MichaelA 18 Jan 2022 19:48 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JJ Hepburn’s comment on: List of EA funding opportunities
Thanks again for doing that!
Just in case other commenters were wondering: JJ usefully started this, and then we all mutually agreed to have Effective Thesis take over maintenance of the Airtable, so I’ve now added to the top of the post an update linking to the latest version of the Airtable.

MichaelA 12 Jan 2022 7:38 UTC
5 points
on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
These projects have reasonably good feedback loops (at least compared to most longtermist interventions), making this area a promising proving ground for meta-EA interventions, especially around entrepreneurship. [emphasis added]
Do you mean that these projects would be a promising proving ground for people (esp. entrepreneurial types) who might want to later also do interventions seeking to build/strengthen the EA movement? If so, why?
I would’ve thought that (a) the biosecurity projects would provide similarly good or better feedback loops for other “object-level” entrepreneurial longtermist projects, and (b) entrepreneurial community building projects themselves would have good feedback loops so might be better proving grounds for further work of the same type?
Or maybe the idea is that meta-EA interventions aimed at getting more skilled longtermist aligned entrepreneurs could focus on funnelling them into doing the sorts of projects you propose in this post, and then how well that goes could be used to evaluated those meta-EA interventions?

MichaelA 12 Jan 2022 7:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
By “this space”, I meant the longtermist biosecurity/biorisk space. As far as I’m aware, the concern was along the lines of “These new people might not be sufficiently cautious about infohazards, so them thinking more about this area in general could be bad”, rather than it being tailored to specific projects/areas/focuses the new people might have (and in particular, it wasn’t because the people proposed thinking up new biothreats).
(But I acknowledge that this remains vague, and also this is essentially second-hand info, so people probably shouldn’t update strongly in light of it.)

MichaelA 11 Jan 2022 17:49 UTC
2 points
on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
Thanks, this post seems super useful!
This version of a ‘sentinel system’ is going to be neglected by traditional public health authorities and governments because they won’t be searching for engineered threats designed to elude pathogen-specific detection tools
This sounds a bit too fatalistic to me. It does seem basically guaranteed that these authorities and governments will spend less attention and resources on this than longtermists would ideally like. I imagine you’re also right that they’ll very much neglect this, like building something far short of what longtermists would like. But that latter point doesn’t seem ~guaranteed, and it seems like something we might have a real shot at changing? E.g., via getting aligned people in positions of power, via lobbying, via more public advocacy.
But this isn’t my area; I could just be wrong. Also I imagine this is probably just a superficial phrasing thing, not an important disagreement.

MichaelA 11 Jan 2022 17:42 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Bridges’s comment on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
FWIW, I know of a case from just last month where an EA biosecurity person I respect indicated that they or various people they knew had substantial concerns about the possibility of other researchers (who are known to be EA-aligned and are respected by various longtermist stakeholders) entering the space, due to infohazard concerns.
(I’m not saying I think these people should’ve been concerned or shouldn’t have been. I’m also not saying these people would have confidently overall opposed these researchers entering the space. I’m just registering a data point.)

MichaelA 11 Jan 2022 17:39 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Simon_Grimm’s comment on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
FWIW, I don’t actually know what you mean/believe here and whether it’s different to what the post already said, because:
- The post said “fraction of longtermist effort” but you’re saying “share of highly-engaged EAs”. Maybe you’re thinking the increased share should mostly come from highly engaged EAs who aren’t currently focused on longtermist efforts? That could then be consistent with the post.
- You said “feels reasonable”, which doesn’t make it clear whether you think this actually should happen, it probably should happen, it’s 10% likely it should happen, it shouldn’t happen but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for it to happen, etc.

MichaelA 9 Jan 2022 11:23 UTC
2 points
on: A guided cause prioritisation flowchart
I think “Speeding up sustainable progress” is presented here substantially too positively, or more specifically that some very important counterpoints aren’t raised but should be. More discussion can be found at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/speeding-up-development . And I think (from memory) the Greaves & MacAskill paper cited either doesn’t mention or argues against a focus on speeding up development?

MichaelA 9 Jan 2022 10:45 UTC
2 points
on: A guided cause prioritisation flowchart
Thanks for making this! The idea, reasoning, and initial draft all seem promising/reasonable to me.
Some quick thoguhts:
- I’d think of this project as essentially a distillation project, and I think good executions of such work on important topics where not much distillation has occurred yet tend to be very valuable. I think EA-aligned cause prioritization is an important topic, and that a fair bit of distillation has occurred on this topic (e.g., 80k articles) but that a flowchart approach could probably add a bunch of value if done well and then endorsed/promoted by some people with big followings in EA. So I think my biggest uncertainties would be how well it’s executed and how useful the other ways you could use your time are, rather than the basic idea.
  - Somewhat related: Suggestion: EAs should post more summaries and collections
  - I think the non-huge karma levels of your post and my somewhat related posts My personal cruxes for focusing on existential risks / longtermism / anything other than just video games and (less so) Crucial questions for longtermists are weak evidence against this (like weak evidence that this isn’t as useful as I think or that it simply won’t get that much attention even if it would be useful if read widely). But I’d see it as only weak evidence, in part because only your post takes the flowchart approach and a more effortful project here would be higher quality.
    (Btw, you or readers might find those two posts of mine useful in this context.)
- A related idea would be something like a “cause prioritization quiz”.
  - This could just be an additional/alternative way of presenting the same ideas and info (like the quiz could basically walk you through one path along the flowchart, one step at a time, rather than showing you the whole thing).
  - 80k made a “problem quiz” that was like this. It can be found here.
    I’m not sure if they still feel that this is useful
    I know they took down their “career quiz”, but I’m not sure if that was because of the quiz format or just because their views on lots of topics changed since then and they didn’t want to take the time to update the quiz in light of that

MichaelA

Why and how to be ex­cited about megaprojects

Why and how to be excited about megaprojects