Views expressed here do not represent the views of any organizations I am affiliated with, unless mentioned otherwise.
Prabhat Soni
This looks exciting! Since there’s a limited time that someone may want to listen to us, it’s important to prioritize concepts. Perhaps, we could use a {neglectedness—importance—ease of explaining} [or similar] framework to rank EA concepts?
Some similar ideas are discussed by Will MacASkill in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCpFsvYI-7Y [30:40]
Hey, the hyperlinks of the ‘homepage’ and ‘GitHub’ URLs are wrong
Oh sorry, I must’ve misread! So the issue seems to be with the number 0.095%. The chance of a true existential event in B) would be 0.01% * 95% = 0.0095% (and not 0.095%). And, this leads us to 0.7/0.0095 =~ 73.68
I’ve also heard that countries like India and Russia also have a large amount of potential; they may get their own posts.
I think an interesting question is : how does the importance of China, Russia, India (and few other countries) compare with each other? If we could get a quantitative answer to this question, it would help to guide how we spend our resources in these high-profile, emerging-EA locations.
We may need to invest more to tackle future problems
Which types of “investments” are you talking about? Are they specifically financial investments, or a broader range of investments?
In case you mean a broader range of investments, such investments could include: building the EA movement, making good moral values a social norm, developing better technologies that could help us tackle unforseen problems in the future, improving the biological intelligence level of humans. This definition could get problematic since many of these investments are seperate cause areas themselves.
Thanks for the clarification, Brendon!
Why couldn’t a manual of organizational best practices from non-EA organisations (I’m guessing there are probably many such manuals or other ways of communicating best practices) suffice? Which areas would it be unable to cover when applied directly to EA organisations? Are these areas particularly important to cover?
Changing behaviour of people to make them more longtermist
Can we use standard behavioral economics techniques like loss aversion (e.g. humanity will be lost forever), scarcity bias, framing bias and nudging to influence people to make longtermist decisions instead of neartermist ones? Is this even ethical, given moral uncertainty?
It would be awesome if you could direct me to any existing research on this!
Hi Ramiro, thanks for your comment. Based off this post, we can think of 2 techniques to promote longtermism. The first is what I mentioned—which is exploiting biases to get people inclined to longtermism. And the second is what you [might have] mentioned—a more rationality-driven approach where people are made aware of their biases with respect to longtermism. I think your idea is better since it is a more permanent-ish solution (there is security against future events that may attempt to bias an individual towards neartermism), has spillover effects into other aspects of rationality, and has lower risk with respect to moral uncertainity (correct me if I’m wrong).
I agree with the several biases/decision-making flaws that you mentioned! Perhaps, sufficient levels of rationality is a pre-requisite to one’s acceptance of longtermism. Maybe a promising EA cause area could be promoting rationality (such a cause area probably exists I guess).
I may have misunderstood your question, so there’s a chance that this is a tangential answer.
I think one mistake humans make is overconfidence in specific long-term predictions. Specific would mean like predicting when a particular technology will arrive, when we will hit 3 degrees of warming, when we will hit 11 billion population, etc.
I think the capacity of even smart humans to reasonably (e.g. >50% accuracy) predict when a specific event would occur is somewhat low; I would estimate around 20-40 years from when they are living.
You ask: “if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today” what would you do? I would acknowledge that I cannot (with reasonable accuracy) predict the thing that will “the largest possible impact in 2020″ (which is a very specific thing to predict) and go with broad-based interventions (which is a more sure-shot answer) like improving international relations, promoting moral values, promoting education, promoting democracy, promoting economic growth, etc (these are sub-optimal answers; but they’re probably the best I could do).
It seems like the hyperlink of the arxiv webpage is invalid (i.e. when you click on the arxiv link).
Thoughts on modifications/improvements to The Windfall Clause?
This was a very enjoyable post! You frequently analysed yourself from a 3rd person viewpoint, and very skeptical of your claims—which is very healthy :)
Related to poverty eradication / systematic change
1. How exactly do you think we should measure the poverty line? Relative poverty? Absolute poverty? Enough money to buy x bottles of water a day? Enough money to produce x units of happiness?
2. Neo-colonialism has expanded beyond Europe and the US. Apparently, China is also doing this. China gives loans to poorer countries for development of ports, and when those countries default on their debt, China siezes control of the ports. And, what are your opinions on neo-colonialism between different parts of the same country?
3. Would de-growth result in better income equality and also lower total economic growth? If so, could you elaborate on what this tradeoff looks like (preferably in a quantitative sense)?
4. Is the amount of colonialism/neo-colonialism increasing/decreasing/same over the past ~100 years?
5. You mentioned using GPI instead of GDP as a national performance index? What do you think are the chances of GPI gaining widespread acceptance?
Related to personal career plans
1. You expressed a LOT of interest in Economics, and some interest in Law. What are your thoughts on a Master’s in Public Policy?
2. Are entrepreneurial skills a rare asset within EA? How does supply-demand of entrepreneurial skills in EA look like?
3. You mentioned that even big tech companies aren’t able to achieve large amounts of change. I would a little skeptical of this. One counter-example is that American English is slowly replacing British English, even in countries that used to historically speak British English. I think one of the biggest reasons for this is popular softwares like MS Word, Google docs and Google search having American English as their default language. However, I have a feeling that large changes like this generally happen when a company is REALLY succesful/popular (I’m not sure though).
Should More EAs Focus on Entrepreneurship?
My argument for this is:
1. EAs want to solve problems in area that are neglected/unpopular.
=> 2. Less jobs, etc in those fields and lot of competition for jobs among existing EA orgs (e.g. GPI, FHI, OpenPhil, Deepmind, OpenAI, MIRI, 80K). I’m not sure, but I think there’s an unnecessarily high amount of competition at the moment—i.e. rejecting sufficiently qualified candidates.
=> 3. It is immensely beneficial to create new EA orgs that can absorb people.
Other questions:
Should we instead make existing orgs larger? Does quality of orgs go down when you create a lot of orgs?
What about oligopoly over market when there are very few orgs (e.g. due to whatever reason if GPI starts messing up consistently it is very bad for EA since they are on of the very few orgs doing global priorities research)
I think this is a very relevant point. I think (correct me if I’m wrong) the effectiveness of the best intervention in the world >>> the effectiveness of the best intervention in a random country X. So, it would be more beneficial to have 100 donors for effective global issues compared to 500 donors for effective national issues.
A caveat, however is value promotion. This is difficult to measure or quantify. There is a chance of large spillover effects due more people having an “effective giving” mindset. These people may further spread the idea of effective giving, or may become globally-aligned in the future. Off the top of my head, I think the spillover effects would be rather modest, but we’d probably need more “hard evidence” for this argument.
I think your question is: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
Let’s go through which countries are good for specific causes:
Artificial General Intelligence: USA, China, UK
Engineered Pandemics: USA, China
Earning-to-give: rich countries like USA, Qatar, Singapore, Norway, UAE, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland
Nuclear Security: Russia, USA, North Korea
Climate Change: Countries developing rapidly like Brazil, India and countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases as of now like USA, UK, etc
Improving Institutional Decision Making: Corrupt countries like Colombia, Brazil, India Mexico, Ghana, Bolivia and influential countries like USA, UK
Malaria Interventions: A lot of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Influencing long-term future: Potential superpowers like Russia, China, India, Brazil
Alternative meats: Brazil, China, USA, Israel, India
Food/Water Fortification: India, West African countries
The countries that are good for specific problems/interventions are good because they exhibit certain “structural” properties. For example, countries good for earning to give are rich; countries good for factory farming have high consumption of meat; countries good for institutional decision making are corrupt or influential; countries good for influencing long-term future are potential superpowers; and so on.
These “structural” properties are present in multiple (on average around 5) countries, and thus there are around 5 countries that are high-impact for a specific cause area/intervention. Also, these countries are generall geographically and culturally dispersed—often belonging to different continents.
Coming back to the original question: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
If what I have argued above is correct, the premise that “a problem/intervention is specific to my country” is generally false. Going by the trend that the top ~10 problems/interventions today are not region-specific, I see no reason why a very promising problem/intervention would be found that is region-specific. And, so I argue that region-level cause prioritization research is not particularly valuable.
EDIT: I’m proposing that a majority of the promising problems are not restricted to a particular region. Ofcourse, there are some exceptions to this like war, US immigration, (maybe) health development in Sub-saharan Africa, etc.
Yes, I completely agree. In fact, most wars would probably require local-level knowledge and need to be prioritized by local altruists.
How do you create tables?
Thanks!
I believe this should be ~70 times more.