I’m currently working as a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute. I’ve previously co-created the application Guesstimate. Opinions are typically my own.
Ozzie Gooen(Ozzie Gooen)
Karma: 2,794
Announcing the Forecasting Innovation Prize
To clarify;
My read of this article was that this could have been interpreted as meaning “for a form of consequentialism that doesn’t give extra favor to oneself, it’s often optimal to maximize a decent amount for oneself.”
I’m totally fine optimizing for oneself when under the understanding that their philosophical framework favors favoring oneself, it just wasn’t clear to me that that was what was happening in this article.
If the lesson there is, “I’m going to make myself happy because the utility function I’m optimizing for favors myself heavily”, that’s fine, it’s just a very different argument then “actually, optimizing for my own happiness heavily is the optimal way of achieving a more universally good outcome.” My original read is that the article was saying the latter, I could have been mistaken. Even if I were mistaken, I’m happy to discuss the alternative view; not the one Nicole meant, but the one I thought she meant. I’m sure other readers may have had the same impression I did.
All that said, I would note that often being personally well off is a great way to be productive. I know a lot of altruistic people who would probably get more done if they could focus more on themselves.
I enjoyed reading this, thank you.
One small point:
“that I am a person whose life has value outside of my potential impact.”
I’m happy to hear that this insight is worked for you, but want to flag that I don’t think it’s essential. Personally have been trying to think of my life only as a means to an end. Will my life technically might have value, I am fairly sure it is rather minuscule compared to the potential impact can make. I think it’s’ possible, though probably difficult, to intuit this and still feel fine / not guilty, about things. It makes me fear death less, for one.
I’m a bit wary on this topic that people might be a bit biased to select beliefs based on what is satisfying or which ones feel good. This is the type of phrase that I would assume would be well accepted in common views of morality, but in utilitarianism it is suspect.
To be clear, of course within utilitarianism one’s wellbeing does have “some” “intrinsic/comparative” value, I suspect it’s less than what many people would assume when reading that sentence.
Definitely agreed. That said, I think some of this should probably be looked through the lens of “Should EA as a whole help people with personal/career development rather than specific organizations, as the benefits will accrue to the larger community (especially if people only stay at orgs for a few years).
I’m personally in favor of expensive resources being granted to help people early in their careers. You can also see some of this in what OpenPhil/FHI funds; there’s a big focus on helping people get useful PhDs. (though this helps a small minority of the entire EA movement)
I think people have been taking up the model of open sourcing books (well, making them free). This has been done for [The Life You can Save](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_You_Can_Save) and [Moral Uncertainty](https://www.williammacaskill.com/info-moral-uncertainty).
I think this could cost $50,000 to $300,000 or so depending on when this is done and how popular it is expected to be, but I expect it to be often worth it.
Many kudos for doing this, I’ve been impressed seeing this work progress.
I think it could well be the case that EAs have a decent comparative advantage in prioritization itself. I could imagine a world where the community does help prioritize a large range of globally important issues. This could work especially well if these people could influence the spending and talent of other people. Things that are poorly neglected present opportunity for significant leverage through prioritization and leadership.
On politics, my impression is that the community is going to get more involved on many different fronts. It seems like the kind of thing that can go very poorly if done wrong, but the potential benefits are too big to ignore.
As Carl Shulman previously said, one interesting aspect about politics is the potential to absorb a deep amount of money and talent. so I imagine one of the most valuable things about doing this can work is producing information value to inform us if and how to scale it later.
From a few conversations with him, I think he semi-identifies as an EA. He’s definitely known about EA for a while, there is evidence for that (just search his name in the EA Forum search).
I think he would admit that he doesn’t fully agree with EAs on many issues. I think that most EAs I know wouldn’t exactly classify him as an EA if they were to know him, but as EA-adjacent.
He definitely knows far more about it than most politicians.
I would trust that he would use “evidence-based reasoning”. I’m sure he has for DXE. However, “evidence-based reasoning” by itself is a pretty basic claim at this point. It’s almost meaningless at this stage, I think all politicians can claim this.
I think it’s possible to use good leadership practices and bad leadership practices. I think the success of DxE has shown that he can do some things quite well.
I’ve met Wayne before. I get the impression is he quite intelligent and has definitely been familiar with EA for some time. At the same time, DXE has used much more intense / controversial practices in general than many EA orgs, many practices others would be very uncomfortable with. Very arguably this contributed to their successes and failures.
Sometimes I’m the most scared of the people who are the most capable.
I really don’t know much about Wayne, all things considered. I could imagine a significant amount of investigation concluding that he’d either be really great or fairly bad.
Agreed on preventative measures, where possible. I imagine preventative measures are probably more cost-effective than measures after the fact.
Thanks so much for the feedback.
On the example; I wrote this fairly quickly. I think the example is quite mediocre and the writing of the whole piece was fairly rough. If I were to give myself a grade on writing quality for simplicity or understandability, it would be a C or so. (This is about what I was aiming for given the investment).I’d be interested in seeing further writing that uses more intuitive and true examples.
Very fair question. I’m particularly considering the issue for community discussions around EA. There’s a fair EA Twitter presence now and I think we’re starting to see some negative impacts of this. (Especially around hot issues like social justice.)
I was considering posting here or LessWrong and thought that the community here is typically more engaged with other public online discussion.
That said, if someone has ideas to address the issue on a larger scale, I could imagine that being an interesting area. (Communication as a cause area)
I myself am doing a broad survey of things useful for collective epistemics, so this would also fall within that.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about this.
I think that forecasting can act as really good intellectual training for people. It seems really difficult to BS, and there’s a big learning curve of different skills to get good at (can get into automation).
I’m not sure how well it will scale in terms of paid forecasters for direct value (agreeing with “the impact probably isn’t huge). I have a lot of uncertainty here though.
I think the best analogy is that to hedge funds and banks. I could see things going one of two ways; either it turns out what we really want is a small set of super intelligent people working in close coordination (like a high-salary fund) or that we need a whole lot of “pretty intelligent people” to do scaled labor (like a large bank or trading institution).
That said, if forecasting could help us determine what else would be useful to be doing, then we’re kind of set.
Thanks for letting me know, that’s really valuable.
Open Communication in the Days of Malicious Online Actors
A very simple example might be someone saying, “What’s up?” and the other person saying “The sky.”. “What’s up?” assumes a shared amount context. To be relevant, it would make much more sense for it to be asking how the other person is doing.
There are a bunch of youtube videos around the topic, I recall some go into examples.
First, neat idea, and thanks for suggesting it!
Is there a reason this isn’t being done? Is it just too expensive?
From where I’m sitting, there are a whole bunch of potentially highly useful things that aren’t being done. After several years around the EA community, I’ve gotten a better model of why that is:
1) There’s a very limited set of EAs who are entrepreneurial, trusted by funders, and have the necessary specific skills and interests to do many specific things. (Which respected EAs want to take a 5 to 20 year bet on field anthropology?)
2) It often takes a fair amount of funder buy-in to do new projects. This can take several years to develop, especially for an research area that’s new.
3) Outside of OpenPhil, funding is quite limited. It’s pretty scary and risky to start something new and go for it. You might get funding from EA Funds this year, but who’s to say if you’ll have to fire your staff in 3 years.
On doing anthropology, I personally think there might be lower hanging fruit first engaging with other written moral systems we haven’t engaged with. I’d be curious to get an EA interpretation of parts of Continental Philosophy, Conservative Philosophy, and the philosophies and writings of many of the great international traditions. That said, doing more traditional anthropology could also be pretty interesting.
EA seems to have been doing a pretty great job attracting top talent from the most prestigious universities. While we attract a minority of the total pool, I imagine we get some of the most altruistic+rational+agentic individuals.
If this continues, it could be worth noting that this could have significant repercussions for areas outside of EA; the ones that we may divert them from. We may be diverting a significant fraction of the future “best and brightest” in non-EA fields.
If this seems possible, it’s especially important that we do a really, really good job making sure that we are giving them good advice.
Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform
I think this is one of the principals of GiveDirectly. I imagine that more complicated attempts at this could get pretty hairy (try to get the local population to come up with large coordinated proposals like education reform), but could be interesting.
Thanks! That’s useful to know. I intend to host more prizes in the future but can’t promise things yet.
There’s no harm in writing up a bunch of rough ideas instead of aiming for something that looks super impressive. We’re optimizing more to encourage creativity and inspire good ideas, rather than to produce work that can be highly cited.
You can look through my LessWrong posts for examples of the kinds of things I’m used to. A few were a lot of work, but many just took a few hours or so.