I lead Effective Altruism Lund in southern Sweden, while wrapping up my M.Sc. in Engineering Physics specializing in machine learning. Iām a social team player who likes high ceilings and big picture work. Scared of AI, intrigued by biorisk, hopeful about animal welfare.
My interests outside of EA, in hieroglyphs: šøš§š¼āāļøššŖš¼ššš¾š®āš¼š¹
EAās goal is impact, not growth for its own sake. Because cost-effectiveness can vary by 100x or more, shifting one personās career from a typical path to a highly impactful one is equivalent to adding a hundred contributors. I agree with the EA stance that the former is often more feasible.
This doesnāt fully address why we maintain a soft tone outwardly, but it does imply we could afford to be a bit less soft inwardly. I predict that SMA will surpass EA in numbers, while EA will be ahead of SMA in terms of impact.
Do you expect to be more of a mentor or a mentee?
Ready to share my community building insights and experiences, but there to hash out some professional cruxes
I have a post about this sitting in my drafts. I think Iāll just delete it and tell people to read this quick take instead. Strong upvote.
As a community builder, Iāve started donating directly to my local EA groupāand I encourage you to consider doing the same.
Managing budgets and navigating inflexible grant applications consume valuable time and energy that could otherwise be spent directly fostering impactful community engagement. As someone deeply involved, I possess unique insights into what our group specifically needs, how to effectively meet those needs, and what actions are most conducive to achieving genuine impact.
Of course, seeking funding from organizations like OpenPhil remains highly valuableātheyāve dedicated extensive thought to effective community building. Yet, donāt underestimate the power and efficiency of utilizing your intimate knowledge of your groupās immediate requirements.
Your direct donations can streamline processes, empower quick responses to pressing needs, and ultimately enhance the impact of your local EA community.
Iām sad to hear that youād feel manipulated by my reply to the QALY-doubting response, but Iām very happy and thankful to get the feedback! We do want to show that EA has some useful tools and conclusions, while also being honest and open about whatās still being worked on. Iāll take this to heart.
I feel the need to clarify that none of these responses are meant to be āsales-yā or to trick people into joining a movement that doesnāt align with their values. My reply was more based on the ideas that we need more skeptics. If they have epistemic (as opposed to ethical) objections, I think itās particularly important to signal that theyāre invited. My condolences for having gotten such awful advice from whatever organization it was, but thatās not how we do things at EA Lund.
For a more realistic example, I talked to one person who said that theyād focus significantly on homelessness in their own city as well as homelessness in Rwanda, because itās unfair to not divide the resources. Theyāre not doing the most good, because they find it more ethical to divide their resources.
So I think your professorās description is good, but Iām not sure it helps discuss egalitarianism/āprioritarianism with laymen in their terms. When I say Iād give everything to Rwanda, Iām answering āwhat does the most good?ā and not āwhatās the most fair/ājust?ā Nonetheless Iāll consider raising this response next time the objection comes up.
Thatās a mistake, thanks for pointing it out! That final sentence wasnāt meant to stay in. That is, I think institutional trust is part of the trunk and not the branches.
I agree with your side point that there are some ideas & tools within EA that many would find useful even while rejecting all of the EA institutions.
Iām sorry if the title was misleading, that was not my intention. I think you and I have different views on the average forum userās population ethics. If I believed that more people reading this had a totalist (or similar) view, I would have been much more up front about my take not being valid for them. Believing the opposite, I put the conclusion youād get from non-person-affecting views as a caveat instead.
That aside, Iād be happy to see the general discourse spell out more that population ethics is a crux for x-risks. Iāve only gottenāand probably at some points givenāthe impression that x-risks are similarly important to other cause areas under all population ethics. This runs the risk of baiting people into working on things they logically shouldnāt believe to be the most pressing problem.
On a personal note, I concede that extinction is much worse than 10 billion humans dying. This is however for non-quantitative reasons. Tegmark has said something along the lines of a universe without sapience being terribly boring, and that weighs quite heavily into my judgement of the disutility of extinction.
Thanks for such an in depth reply! I have two takes on your points but before that I want to give the disclaimer that Iām a mathematician, not a philosopher by training.
First, weāre not saying that the lightcone solution implies we should always save Jones. Indeed, there could still be a large enough number of viewers. What we are saying is this: previously, you could say that for any suffering S Jones is experiencing, there is some number of viewers X whose mild annoyance A would in aggregate be greater than S. Whatās new here is the upper bound to X, so A*X > S could still be true (and we let Jones suffer), but it canāt necessarily be made true for any Y by picking a sufficiently large X.
As to your point about there being different number of viewers X in different worlds, yep I buy that! I even think itās morally intuitive that if more suffering A*X is caused by saving Jones then we have less reason to do so. This for me isnāt a case of moral rules not holding across worlds because the situations are different, but weāre still making the same comparison (A*X vs Y). Iāll caveat this by saying that Iāve never thought too hard about moral consistency across worlds.
Iām not sure I follow. Are you saying that accepting that there is a finite amount of potential suffering in our future would imply x-risk reduction being problematic?
I buy that. One way of putting it would be to say that if you use a parliamentary method of resolving moral uncertainty, the ānon-totalist population ethics repā and the ānon-longtermist repā should both say that farmed animal welfare as greater in scale than biorisk. Does that seem more useful?
To throw some numbers in here, point no2 would need for a lot of countries to all decide itās not worth it to fill the funding gap even a little. Letās say there are 50 countries that could (Iād estimate half of them to be in Europe), and they decide not to fund with probability .
The probability that they all decide not too fund is then . If p is something like half a percent, thereās a 78% risk of no country filling the funding gap. If all three steps have 78% probability then yeah, we do approach 50% of them all happening.
For the question of whether to āsave to give,ā MacAskillās paper on the topic was very useful for me. One crucial consideration is whether my donations would grow more in someone elseās hands.
E.g. I give $100k to AMF means fewer die from malaria, which means more economic growth. Does this generate more than the ~7%/āyear my stocks might? I find that people often neglect this counterfactual.
In this post, I share some thoughts from this weekend about the scale of farmed animal suffering, compared to the expected lives lost from engineered pandemics. I make the case that animal welfare as a cause has a 100x higher scale than biorisk. Iād happily turn this in to a post if you have more youād like to add either for or against.
Farmed Animal Suffering. I was thinking about the scale of farmed animal suffering, which is on the order of lives per year. These animals endure what might be among the worst conditions on the planet, considering only land animals. My estimate for the moral weight of the average land animal is approximately 1% to 0.1% that of a human. At first glance, this suggests that farmed animal suffering is equivalent to the annual slaughter of between 100 million and 1 billion humans, without considering the quality of their lives before death. I want to make the case that the scale of this could be 100x or a 1000x that of engineered pandemics.
Engineered Pandemics. In The Precipice, Toby Ord lists engineered pandemics as yielding a 1 in 30 extinction risk this century. Since The Precipice was published in 2020, this equates to a 1 in 30 chance over 80 years, or approximately a 1 in 2,360 risk of extinction from engineered pandemics in any given year. If that happens, human lives would be lost, resulting in an expected loss of approximately four million human lives per year.
Tractability & Neglectedness. If engineered pandemic preparedness is two orders of magnitude higher in neglectedness and/āor tractability, that would outweigh the scale and make them tractable. Iād be happy to hear someone more knowledgeable give some comparisons here.
Extinction is Terrible. Human extinction might not equate to just lives lost, due to future lives lost. Further, the The Precipice only discusses extinction level pandemics, but as suggested by Rodriguez here, one in 100k people surviving might only stand a ~50% chance of further survival. I personally donāt ascribe much value to future people not existing as I subscribe more to the Person-affecting View. Under moral uncertainty, thatās relevant even if you mostly donāt agree about that view.
Collapse Facilitating Lock-in. A sufficiently large population loss could mean that in re-building civilization, a system is constructed which can centralize enough for a value lock-in. This could be in the shape of an authoritarian system oppressing everyone, or a lock-in of a system similar to the current one with an equal or greater amount of animals slaughtered annually.
When EA Lund does tabling at student association fairs, one thing thatās gotten a laugh out of some people is having two plates of cookies people can take from. One of them gets a sticky saying āthis cookie saves one (1) lifeā, and the other gets a sticky saying āthis cookie saves 100 lives!ā
The first quote you mention sounds more like a dog whistle to me. I actually think itās great if we can āweaponize capitalist enginesā against the worldās most pressing problems. But if you hate capitalism, it sounds insidious.
The rest I agree is uncharitable. Like, surely you wouldnāt come out the shallow pond feeling moral guily, youād be extatic that you just saved a child! To me, Singerās thought experiment always implied I should feel the same way about donations.