Paul_Christiano

Replaceability

Why might the fu­ture be good?

Risk aver­sion and in­vest­ment (for al­tru­ists)

Giv­ing now vs. later

The best rea­son to give later

Three Im­pacts of Ma­chine Intelligence

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 4:43 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  As Carl points out here, if big donors have better opportunities than small donors, the small donors can just purchase lotteries. In fact I think that you can get more than a 50% chance of doubling your money using typical risky investments, though this gets into a more complicated discussion about risk. $200,000 is small enough that you probably have access to the typical EA opportunities, so I suspect you shouldn’t do anything differently than smaller EA donors.

  That said, I suspect that smaller EA donors should behave quite differently than they currently do, and thinking about what you might do with more money can serve to make this more clear.

  edited to add: I also think it’s plausible that at the $100k level a donor should still be saving /​ trying to pool their money /​ being risk-loving /​ just giving it to existing EA orgs, because the amounts of time required to make a good decision even at the meta level—unless you’ve already found someone you trust who you can just hand the money to.

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 4:51 UTC

  14 points

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  on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  I suspect that funders in general, but especially altruists, and double-especially effective altruists, should be investing in prizes more on the margin. Briefly, some arguments in favor:

  • It is much easier to evaluate interventions after the fact. In fact, that is what most EA donors are already doing, but in a way that forces an intervention to be very similar to something else that has already happened if it wants to be funded.

  • The incentives created by prize funding tend to be much better.

  • Standard mechanisms can overcome many of the costs of prizes (esp. the inability of prospective grantees /​ prize-recipients to fund their projects if they don’t win a prize), and the development of such institutions would be a huge public good.

  • The evaluation process for prizes tends to substantially reinforce EA values, as compared to the more typical grant-making process.

  There are a number of ways in which an economically sound EA prize would differ from usual philanthropic prizes (which are typically engineered with the PR impact in mind, rather than as a sustainable funding source). I hope to write a post about this eventually (both w.r.t. the economic arguments, and particularly promising opportunities at the moment). But I’m always interested in thoughts.

  What links here?

  • Ideas for new ex­per­i­men­tal EA pro­jects you could fund! by Robert_Wiblin (2 Dec 2014 2:47 UTC; 9 points)

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 4:55 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  I basically believe the efficient market hypothesis, but the inference/​implication here doesn’t seem right to me.

  The risk from investing in individual stocks rather than broad indices is pretty minor (and for philanthropic capital I think it is completely negligible), and if you accept the EMH the returns are the same. There are a number of other considerations (tax issues, small amounts of domain expertise or insight, hedging) that might lead one to purchase individual stocks instead. The amounts of money involved don’t have to be too large before it starts to look worthwhile to be thinking about these issues.

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 14:25 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: toron’s comment on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  If the returns were worse, the price would drop.

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 14:26 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: TopherHallquist’s comment on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  It could be worse, mostly by correlating your investment returns with the general success of the tech sector (with which your ordinary income is tightly linked, and moreover which drives much effective altruist philanthropy).

• Paul_Christiano 29 Sep 2014 14:46 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: toron’s comment on: Brain­storm­ing thread: ideas for large EA funders

  What would that look like? Ex post the returns of different stocks are very different. Ex ante, if you think some stock is going to have low returns, sell it short.

• Paul_Christiano 1 Oct 2014 22:59 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Ca­reer choice: Eval­u­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties, not just fields

  The main impact of early choices in a career may be determining what skills you develop, who you know, what you are respected for, and so forth. The value of these resources depends on how useful they will be down the line, i.e. on what opportunities you will have in 10 years. This seems to be an important consideration in favor of thinking about what area to be in.

• Paul_Christiano 9 Oct 2014 5:42 UTC

  7 points

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  on: How a lazy eater went vegan

  (I apologize in advance for a downer of a comment, especially for the parts that are poorly argued.)

  In general, I think the risk of important but unknown nutrient deficiencies from cutting out a whole class of foods is probably much more important than the animal welfare benefits if you are spending much of your life working on good projects. This is a concern with vegetarianism, but it seems much more severe for veganism.

  I haven’t looked into the literature in creatine in any depth (largely because my diet is long on creatine), but the evidence for material cognitive effects looks weighty enough that I would want to be careful before considering returning to a low-creatine vegetarian diet. It seems like this should probably get more weight, unless everyone else knows something I don’t.

  Based on rough estimates it seems like being a vegan is not going to be worth it on consequentialist grounds, at least for those who would e.g. be willing to pay an additional factor of 2 premium to eat meat periodically. For such people the question is: if raising an animal generates $X of economic value, can you generate a welfare offset for a small multiple of $X? It would be quite surprising to me if this weren’t possible (e.g. just subsidizing the creation of a small number of more humanely raised substitutes should work, which I would guess is orders of magnitude less effective than realistic approaches). I haven’t thought about this at too much length, largely because I think that the effects on animal welfare today are not too important either on contractarian grounds nor on utilitarian grounds (since they seem to have a minimal long-term impact, and the direct impacts are small compared to long-term considerations). But I do think that given the basic economic logic the burden of argument rests with the vegetarian advocate.

  If it’s a bad idea on consequentialist grounds, I’m not convinced it’s a useful signaling exercise. Alternatives like “cut out the worst offenders,” “reduce consumption by 90%,” and “buy humanely produced products” seem much better both on consequentialist grounds and (consequently) also signaling grounds.

  I second the recommendations for powersmoothies elsewhere (though I drink mine with milk, which I find more delicious and seems probably better health-wise).

• Paul_Christiano 9 Oct 2014 15:25 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Greg_Colbourn’s comment on: How a lazy eater went vegan

  I agree that creatine is easy to get, but given that I object to a description of how to be a vegetarian that says “if it’s too much trouble don’t bother.”

  Animals and non-animals are quite different nutritionally, and it seems quite likely that there are some things you need to supplement as a vegan, or at least that you need to be quite careful about.

  The question of whether you can get by without meat at all then seems quite similar to the question of whether you can get by without any fruits or vegetables if you take all of the relevant nutrients via supplementation, for which the consensus appears to be “maybe, but don’t count on it given our limited understanding of nutrition.” Do you see a relevant disanalogy (other than scope, which may be somewhat larger for veggies than meat)?

On Progress and Prosperity

• Paul_Christiano 16 Oct 2014 5:25 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: AGB’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity

  My estimates for [1] and [2] together are less than 0.01% per year (for [1], they are very much lower!) So the quantitative effect of speeding up progress, via these channels, is quite small. You would have to be very pessimistic about the plausible trajectory-changing impacts of available interventions before such a small effect was relevant.

  I can believe that most of the problems faced by people today are external, and indeed this is related to why I find this disagreement such a painful one. But why do you think that the long-term constraints are external? I’ve never seen a really plausible quantitative argument for this. Resource limitations are the closest, though (1) I’m quite skeptical as a very long-term factor, but this comes down mostly to views on the likely rate of technological progress over the next centuries, and (2) describing those as “external” rather than “a consequence of progress” is already pushing it.

  I think that the “man-made” troubles have already easily surpassed the natural worries, via the risk of nuclear annihilation and anthropogenic climate change. Do you disagree with this? What natural problems do you think might be competitive? The unknown unknown?

• Paul_Christiano 16 Oct 2014 15:58 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: AGB’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity

  In the worst case, you personally saving money and spending it later (in the worst case, to hasten progress at a time when the annual risk of doom has increased!) seems very likely to beat 0.01%, unless you have pretty confident views about the future.

  I think research on improving institutional quality, human cognition, and human decision-making, also quite easily cross this bar, have had successes in the past, and have opportunities for more work on the margin. I’ve written about why I think these things would constitute positive changes. But it’s also worth pointing out that if you think there is a 0.01% /​ year chance of doom now, then improvements in decision-making can probably be justified just by short-term impacts on probability of handling a catastrophe soon

  How long progress goes on for before stopping seems irrelevant to its value, according to the model you described. The value of an extra year of progress is always the per annum doom risk. Suppose that after some number of years T the per annum doom probability drops to 0. Then speeding up progress by 1 year reduces that number to T-1, reducing the cumulative probability of doom by the per annum doom probability. And this conclusion is unchanged if the doom probability continuously decreases rather than dropping to 0 all at once, or if there are many different kinds of doom, or whatever. It seems to be an extremely robust conclusion. Another way of seeing this is that speeding up progress by 1 year is equivalent to just pausing the natural doom-generating processes for a year, so naturally the goodness of a year of progress is equal to the badness of the doom-generating processes.

  If you believe a 0.01% /​ year chance of doom by natural catastrophes, addressing response capabilities to those catastrophes in particular generally seems like it is going to easily dominate faster progress. On your model reducing our probability of doom from natural disasters by 1% over the next year is going to be comparable to increasing the overall rate of progress by 1% over the next year, and given the relative spending on those problems it would be surprising if the latter was cost-effective. I can imagine such a surprising outcome for some issues like encountering aliens (where it’s really not clear what we would do), but not for more plausible problems like asteroids or volcanos (since those act by climate disruptions, and there are general interventions to improve society’s robustness to massive climate disruptions).

  Whether we’ve missed the boat on climate change or not, it would undermine your claim that historically the main problems have been nature-made and not man-made (which I find implausible), which you were invoking to justify the prediction that the same will hold true in the future. I’m also willing to believe the risk of extremely severe outcomes is not very large, but you don’t have to be very large to beat 0.01% /​ year.

  One reason I’m happy ignoring aliens is that the timing would have to work out very precisely for aliens to first visit us during any particular 10k year period given the overall timescales involved of at least hundreds of millions of years and probably billions. There are further reasons I discount this scenario, but the timing thing alone seems sufficient (modulo simulation-like hypotheses where the aliens periodically check up on Earth to see if it has advanced life which they should exterminate, or some other weird thing).

• Paul_Christiano 18 Oct 2014 16:02 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: AlexRichard’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity

  I discussed some quantitative estimates of this here, with a general argument for why it would be small in light of model uncertainty. Overall it seems at least a few orders of magnitude smaller than other issues that favor faster progress.

• Paul_Christiano 18 Oct 2014 16:08 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Helen’s comment on: On Progress and Prosperity

  I think that most good things people do push on differential progress in one way or another, it’s just a different standard for evaluation. Those do stand out as things that contribute particularly to differential progress.

  I would guess that on average progress in the social sciences is a net benefit in terms of differential progress, while progress in the hard sciences is a net cost in terms of differential progress. I think the bulk of improvement in institutions comes from people working within organizations trying to help them run better (with the positive developments then propagated through society), and then economists and the social sciences in a distant second.