Rick

Karma: 65

Rick 20 Sep 2017 2:31 UTC
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Demographics II
Oh thank goodness, I am glad it is nothing worrying. Thank you for clarifying!

Rick 19 Sep 2017 18:56 UTC
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in reply to: Rick’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Demographics II
Sorry to fixate on this, but I’ve just never seen non response rates this high before − 10% is high in most cases of surveys, 40% is absurd. Like, yes you always have groups who feel like the answers don’t accurately capture their reality, but given that you did allow for multiracial answers (and given the homogeneity of EA from a race stand point), this usually would be only a very small fraction of respondents. There’s also the population that, for lack of a better term, “don’t believe in race” and never answer this question, but given how small this population is in general, unless an absurdly high number of them are EAs then this should also only be a very small fraction.

I really, really hope this isn’t the explanation, but I could see at least some of these answers coming from the perspective of “I don’t think race is a problem in EA, and people should stop asking about it, so I’ll just not answer at all as a protest or something.” As someone who sees data collection as sacred, I would be appalled by this—so please, someone, for the sake of my sanity explain what could possibly drive a 40% non response rate that is not this.

Rick 19 Sep 2017 18:17 UTC
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on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Demographics II
Are there any theories about what is driving the really high non response rate for race? Or any cross tabs about what groups or locations are more likely to have a non response for race? Racial demographics in EA is an important topic, and it’s a shame that we can’t get better data on it.

Rick 10 Dec 2016 14:59 UTC
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in reply to: xccf’s comment on: A Different Take on President Trump
Thanks Xccf, it’s definitely good to explore these questions. I just personally worry that this specific anti-immigration part of the right has 1) become particularly dangerous in their rhetoric, and 2) has become too good at co-opting language used by EAs. For 1, I’d probably defer to everyone else’s points on this. I won’t put out an argument, but just to give some background for where I am coming from—I grew up with Muslim and Immigrant friends, and after the rhetoric after 9/11 started getting heated my parents made sure that I listened to Bush’s (as well as everyone else’s) calls for tolerance, including by forcing me to read the wonderful book “Who speaks for Islam”. I just have never bought the ‘clash of civilizations’-type arguments as a result, and can find no evidence that behooves me to change my view. I now directly work for an organization that (among other things) pushes for refugee (including Syrian) rights. If I had any doubt that this work was dangerous, I’d quit. For 2, it’s a little fuzzier, and a little less developed—so you’ll have to bear with me (I wish I had a good source writing this up—perhaps when I have time I’ll make one). I see a lot of cases of young white men (like myself, mind you) pushing pseudo-scientific screeds against various forms of equality (Milo Yiannopoulos is the king of this). Many people in this cohort portray themselves online (note: portrayal is everything in this case!) as the ‘logical’ ones, and say ‘I’ll change my mind if you can prove me wrong with facts in a reasonable argument’, and then complain that the real problem is ‘political correctness’, which is stifling their ‘freedom of speech’. On the surface, this looks like a sane line of argument, and seems like one that we should support (who doesn’t like freedom of speech, amiright?). And so this becomes a situation where they force the rest of us who believe in freedom of speech and intellectual diversity to either A) yell at them, thus making them look like the ones with the high ground, or B) try to reason with them, which accidentally normalizes their speech, and puts it into the mainstream. God forbid you actually manage to kick the legs out from under their argument, like I’ve managed to do on forums a few times, because then their buddies tend to try to cyberbully you, or worse if god forbid they dox you and people get your real address.

I really don’t want to make this come off as ad hominen or a judgement on your character, so please forgive me if I’m coming on a little too strong (and without enough evidence! which I do apologize for as well). I do not believe that you are one of these people that I mentioned—I’ve seen your posts, and you are very reasonable, but I strongly worry that Henry is one of these people based on the way he writes and the thoughts being pushed. Once again, I can’t prove this, but I just want to flag it just in case.

Rick 10 Dec 2016 14:26 UTC
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: A Different Take on President Trump
Thank you, to be frankly honest I’m not too sure how sold I am on my argument either—naive utilitarianism is definitely a fun way to explore new models, but I definitely agree that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously! For intellectual diversity, I don’t have a concrete plan as of yet, but in general one of my main hang-up is my perception that EAs don’t give enough credence to the thoughts of practicioners who have been trying to improve the effectiveness of NGO and Government work for decades. I work in a large NGO, and my job focuses on improving the uptake of impact research evidence, and I originally approached my job from a very naive perspective, believing that EA-style thinking (even though I didn’t know about EA at the time) would easily improve the effectiveness of the organization. A lot of people were pushing back against the initiative, which I originally thought was just a matter of them ‘not getting it’, or ‘supporting the status quo’ - until I started talking to them, and realized that I was being the ridiculous one. That being said, I still had some things to add—which is why overall I think that similar engagements between EAs and non-EAs who are working on the effectiveness of a given topic should talk more (and the EAs should listen as much as they talk!). Learning more about how programs and aid and NGOs and such actually ‘work’ in reality and talking to experts on these topics may nuance a lot of people’s positions—it did for me at least. I think engaging more with ‘traditional social movements’, like feminism, Black Lives Matters, labor unions, etc. could lead to similar benefits as well, especially as EAs consider how to grow and increase the power of the EA ‘movement’ - although, I understand that this is a touchier topic, so I don’t really push for it often.

Rick 9 Dec 2016 17:12 UTC
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in reply to: Rick’s comment on: A Different Take on President Trump
Also, it’s worth noting that what I just suggested is a fairly dangerous idea for a variety of reasons. So, by my logic, if the general consensus among everyone is that what I suggested will clearly lead to more harm than good, then I would very strongly suggest down-voting my comment into oblivion and never talking about it again ;)

Rick 9 Dec 2016 17:00 UTC
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on: A Different Take on President Trump
So, this may be an unpopular opinion, but I for one am quite glad that these discussions are being down-voted.

When we consider entertaining these discussions, we can take a consequentialist viewpoint and run a simple cost/benefit analysis to determine if entertaining the discussions is a good idea, such as the following: Benefits = (tractability: chance entertaining discussion will lead to changes in EA thinking) (impact: amount of marginal good that will occur if change in EA thinking occurs) (maybe an uncertainty discount, depending on your preference) + (improved reach: benefits of bringing in new EAs who are amicable to these arguments) + (value externalities: benefits that arise from fomenting a culture of openness to new ideas among EAs) Costs = (decreased reach: harms of causing EAs not amicable to these arguments to become disenchanted with EA) + (reputational risk: harms that would arise if people started saying “EAs seem to be amenable to alt-right discussions”, which in turn would further scuttle our already struggling efforts to diversity the EA movement and repaint ourselves in a better light)

People pushing the above arguments clearly think that the potential impacts of integrating these thoughts into EA are very very high (e.g., a lot more conservative people could join EA, we’d avert WWIII or something, etc.), even if they admit that the tractabillity is quite low, hence why they are pushing so strongly.

However, I, and many other EAs, believe very strongly that the costs (reputation risk + harming our ability to reach more potential EAs) are higher than the potential benefits. I’d also say that, for many of us, the estimated sign on “amount of marginal good that will occur if change in EA thinking occurs” associated with the above arguments is actually negative, for a variety of reasons.

Now, the people arguing for these arguments will most likely say “but what about intellectual diversity and freedom of speech!” To which I retort A) freedom of speech and the ideals of liberty do not mean that I have to spend my time entertaining your thoughts or that I need to write 10 pages explaining why, exactly, I think you are mistaken, and B) as a consequentialist, I am a fan of pushing and supporting equal intellectual diversity as a vehicle for good, and in this case I very strongly think that entertaining this particular form of intellectual diversity will cause much more harm than good. I do think that we need to push for more intellectual diversity in the EA movement, but there are much better ways to do this than entertain this sort of discussion.

Rick 17 Nov 2016 23:27 UTC
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in reply to: debra56’s comment on: Charity Science Health receives GiveWell Experimental grant and other updates
Ah, but have you done a RCT with a cost effectiveness analysis on this? I am dubious that hacked ATM cards are a more cost efficient intervention than, say, funding free bed bet distribution!

Rick 28 Oct 2016 16:39 UTC
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
Yeah, I can see how that could be an issue, and honestly I do lean towards the “the external optics problem is the patriarchy’s fault, not ours—telling us that we are ‘not nice enough’ is just a form of silencing, and you wouldn’t listen to us anyway if we were ‘nicer’” viewpoint, but I can see how that can make this discussion difficult. I’m just mostly hoping that the discussions on ‘calling-in’ within feminism move forward—even a quick google search shows that it’s popping up on a lot of the feminist sights targeted to younger audiences—it may be on oncoming change, and hopefully it’ll pick up steam.

Congratulations on your engagement by the way!

Rick 28 Oct 2016 16:21 UTC
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in reply to: AGB’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
Ah, I see the issue now—you are assuming that I’m saying that feminism has a model that we should directly emulate, whereas I am just saying that they are dealing with similar issues, and we have things to learn from them. In short, there are leaders in feminism who have been working on this issue, with some limited success and yes, a lot of failures. However, even if they were completely 100% failing, then there is still a very important thing that we can learn from them: what have they tried that didn’t work? It is just as important to figure out pitfalls and failed projects as it is to try and find successful case studies.

The key is getting that conversation started, and comparing notes. Your perception of feminism and the problems therein may change in the process, but most importantly we all may learn some important lessons that can be applied in EA (even if they do consist primarily of “hey this one solution really doesn’t work, if you do anything, do something else”).

If you are truly 100% not convinced that we can learn this from feminism, then that’s OK: you can talk to leaders of any other social movement instead, since many of them have dealt with and thought about similar problems. Your local union reps may be a good place to start!

Rick 28 Oct 2016 16:01 UTC
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in reply to: Michael_Wulfsohn’s comment on: Taking Systemic Change Seriously
I agree that systematic change should be given more thought in EA, but there’s a very specific problem that I think we need to tackle before we can do this seriously: a lot of the tools and mindsets in EA are inadequate for dealing with systematic change.

To explain what I mean, I want to quickly make reference to a chart that Caroline Fiennes uses in her book. Essentially, you can think of work on social issues as a sort of ‘pyramid’. At the top of the pyramid you have very direct work (deworming, bed nets, cash transfers, etc.). This work is comparably very certain to work, and you can fairly easily attribute changes in outcomes to these programs. However, the returns are small—you only help those who you directly work with. As you go down the pyramid, you start to consider programs that focus on communities… then those that focus on changing larger policy and practice … then changing attitudes and norms (or some types of systematic change) … and eventually you get to things like existential risks. As you go down the pyramid, you get greater returns to scope (can impact a lot more people), but it becomes a lot more uncertain that you will have an impact, and it also becomes very hard to attribute change in any outcome to an program.

My worry is that the tools that the EA movement relies on were created with the top of the pyramid in mind—the main forms of causal research, cost effectiveness analysis, and so on that we rely on were not built with the bottom or even middle of the pyramid. Yes, members of EA have gotten very good at trying to apply these tools to the bottom and middle, but it can get a bit screwy very quickly (as someone with an econ background, I shudder whenever someone uses econ tools to try and forecast the cost effectiveness of X-risk reduction activities—it’s like trying to peel a potato while blindfolded using a pencil: it’s not what the pencil was made for, and even though it is technically possible I’ll be damned if the blindfolded person actually has a clue if it’s working or not).

We should definitely keep our commitment to these tools, but if we want to be rigorous about exploring systematic risks, we should probably start by figuring out how to expand our toolbox in order to address these issues as rigorously as possible (and, importantly, to figure out when exactly our current tools are insufficient! We already have these for a lot of our tools—basically assumptions that, when broken, break the tool—but I haven’t seen people rigorously consulting them!). I’m sure that a lot of us have in mind some very clear ideas of how we can/should rigorously prioritize and evaluate various systematic risks—but I’m pretty sure we have as many opinions as we have people. We need to get on the same page first, which is why I’d suggest that we work on figuring out some basic standards and tools for moving forward, then going from there. Expanding our toolkit is key, though—perhaps someone should look into other disciplines that could help out? I’d do it, but I’m lazy and tired and probably would make a hash of it anyway.

Rick 28 Oct 2016 13:19 UTC
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in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
I am sorry to hear that your encounters with feminism have primarily been divisive. My experience has been a bit different, and it may help for me to go into some quick details (OK, actually this post became quite long, which I apologize for—it’s probably approaching blog length) and draw parallels with EA.

It took me a year to actually start engaging with EA. I love cost effectiveness, marginal thinking, and rigorously thinking about how to do the most good. My friends and colleagues do as well, but they do not engage with EA. To me, EA appeared, from the outside, to be a group that lays claim to something that is not unique to them, and then looks down on others—a very insular community with members that actively trash and condescend people who ‘are not EA enough’. Other critics have expressed this view as well, and my initial forays into EA did not help this perception—some of my views are not standard EA views, and I had multiple people without economics backgrounds jump on me to explain that I was wrong while condescendingly explaining basic economics to me. This would be fine, if they were actually correct to do so—most of the times the loudest critiques were the most rudimentary and off the mark (for reference, I got my masters in economics and work directly in integrating economic thinking into aid programs, so I have a decent idea of what bad economic thinking looks like). Needless to say, these experiences and others left a sour taste in my mouth, and so I stopped engaging for a while.

This is similar to some people’s experiences with feminism—when initially trying to break in, it can seem like a very insular community driven entirely by yelling at people who are not ‘feminist enough’. I liked feminist ideals in undergrad, similar to how I enjoyed EA ideals, but avoided it because my perception was that I would not get anything from engaging in feminism because I would be expunged for ‘not being feminist enough’ (similar to why I avoided EA). I also didn’t see a clear reason for engaging, since many of my friends already had feminist ideals without being a direct part of the feminist movement (similar to my friends and colleagues who hold EA ideas without engaging with EA).

The moment that really changed everything was in the first year of my masters, where I was hitting a economic problem that the tools I was using just could not solve—I went to my adviser, complaining that no one seemed to have thought about this problem before, to which he retorted “you know that the feminist economists have been working on this for decades, right? Talk to Professor XYZ and they’ll help you”. And I did, and next thing I knew I was getting a specialty in gender analysis of economics—because as I started to get more involved, I realized that behind that initial barrier was a rich world of diverse thinking on a variety of topics. I truly believe now that the most advanced and innovative thinking in economics today comes from feminist economists.

And it wasn’t just academic feminists—once I got past that initial barrier, I started looking more into the very groups I originally avoided, and I soon realized that a lot of feminist activists were actively fighting to break down the barrier that I encountered, by advocating for ‘calling in’ rather than ‘calling out’ (among other things). Once you’re inside, it is a very supportive and tolerant community, and it has helped me (and many others) grow as a person and as a thinker more than anything else in my life has.

Going back to EA, as I mentioned before there is a very similar barrier, in which to an outside person a lot of the people ‘representing EA’ online can be quite nasty to outsiders and divergent views. Once I got past this initial barrier, I realized that the majority of people identifying with EA are actually quite nice, and I realized that there are many in the EA movement who are actively trying to make people’s first experience of EA more amicable and to make the movement as a whole more tolerant and respective of divergent views. It’s essentially the EA movement’s equivalent of the ‘calling-in’ problem, and the point that these discussions are happening make me very hopeful for the future.

None of this really helps answer the ‘what about a formal mechanism’ question directly, I just want to try and express my belief that better engagement with social movements like feminism (all of whom have dealt with similar problems to the EA movement!) is important. Offhand saying that ‘feminism failed on this point, so we can’t learn from them’ without really engaging with members of the feminist movement is not a strong way forward.

In terms of examples off the top of my head of how feminist actors have tried to mitigate the ‘bad actor’ problem, my first thought is the issue of problematic ‘allies’. The response has to write guidance (less formal version here) on how to be a good ally, and to generally set forth ‘community norms’ that show up in various places (blogs, posters, listservs, whatever). When someone does not adhere to these norms, in the best of cases you can help them understand why going against the norm is bad and help them be a better ally, and in the worst of situations the movement as a whole at least has some plausible deniability (“don’t tell us that person is representative of us, they’re clearly breaking all of the norms that we’ve clearly detailed all of these places!”).

Rick 28 Oct 2016 1:29 UTC
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
A nice balance is probably best overall, good point. Although, I do think it may be worth looking into replicating the intellectual diversity that feminism developed over time (while avoiding the pitfalls, inshallah) - it might be something that could benefit the movement going forward.

Rick 27 Oct 2016 23:42 UTC
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Setting Community Norms and Values: A response to the InIn Open Letter
I would strongly advise against using the Freeman article, which is very out of date and doesn’t represent the almost 50 years of progress in feminist thought that have come after it. In particular, intersectional feminism, which has now become one of the leading types of feminism, directly challenges the thoughts that Freeman put down, noting that the structures in feminism actually consistently were used to silence voices within the movement that did not fit within the mainstream. Crenshaw wrote one of the seminal articles on this, but there are many other modern authors who also share this view.

Silencing of voices within a movement is a really important issue: many women in the civil rights movement were silenced in the name of ‘black unity’ (Audre Lorde is a good source on this); even today bisexual people have trouble finding a place in the LGBTQ movement (example); genderqueer women, transsexual women, non-hetero women, and women of color consistently are sidelined in women’s rights movements (Lorde again, she’s amazing); and national identities can be used to silence dissenters of any type. In the best of cases, these cases consisted of silencing the concerns of multiple members of the movement, in the worst of cases the ensuing dehumanization (“you are a danger to the cause!”) led to violence.

I’ve heard of people who don’t fit the ‘traditional EA mold’ feel that this is happening in EA as well (quick example here). Even if it’s not direct sanction, feeling that you are “not EA enough” can still create a problem.

Long story short, structure is bad, long live structurelessness.

Rick 27 Oct 2016 18:58 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Concerns with Intentional Insights
Good question—not really sure, I just meant to directly answer that one question. That being said, Social movements have, to varying degrees of success, managed to distance evenhanded from fringe subsets and problematic actors. How, exactly, one goes about doing this is unknown to me, but I’m sure that it’s something that we could (and should) learn from leaders of other movements. Of the top of my head, the example that is most similar to our situation is the expulsion of Ralph Nader from the various movements and groups he was a part of after the Bush election.

Rick 27 Oct 2016 18:44 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Concerns with Intentional Insights
In the US, and elsewhere, they use incentives to keep people in line, such as withholding endorsements or party funds, which can lead to people losing their seat, this effectively kicking them out of the party. See whips) for what this looks like in practice. Also, in parliamentary systems, often times you can also kick people out of the party directly, or at the very least take away their power and position.

Rick 30 Sep 2016 19:30 UTC
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in reply to: capybaralet’s comment on: Two Strange Things About AI Safety Policy
It probably wouldn’t hurt if AI inclined EAs focused more on getting experts on board. It’s a very bad situation to be in if the vast majority of experts on a given topic think that a given issue you are interested in is overblown, because 1) tractabilty goes down the tubes, since most experts actively contradict you, 2) your ability to collaborate with other experts is greatly hampered, since most experts won’t work with you, and 3) it becomes really easy for people to assume that you’re a crackpot. I’m also not sure if it’s even ‘rational’ for non experts to get involved in this until a majority of experts in the field is on board. I mean, if person A has no experience with a topic, and the majority of experts say one thing, but person A gets convinced that the opposite is true by an expert in the minority, am I wrong in thinking that that’s not a great precedent to set?

Rick 21 Sep 2016 13:54 UTC
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in reply to: MichaelDello’s comment on: The need for convergence on an ethical theory
Thank you Mike, all very good points. I agree that some frameworks, especially versions of utilitarianism, are quite good at adapting to new situations, but to be a little more formal about my original point, I worry that the resources and skills required to adapt these frameworks in order to make them ‘work’ makes them poor frameworks to rely on for a day-to-day basis. Expecting human beings to apply these frameworks ‘correctly’ is probably giving the forecasting and estimation ability of humans a little too much credit. For a reductive example, ‘do the most good possible’ technically is a ‘correct’ moral framework, but it really doesn’t ‘work’ well for day-to-day decisions unless you apply a lot of diligent thought to it (often forcing you to rely on ‘sub-frameworks’).

Imagine a 10 year old child who suddenly and religiously adopts a classical hedonistic utilitarian framework – I would have to imagine that this would not turn out for the best. Even though their overall framework is probably correct, their understanding of the world hampers their ability to live up to their ideals effectively. They will make decisions that will objectively be against their framework, simply because the information they are acting on is incomplete. 10 year olds with much simpler moral frameworks will most likely be ‘right’ from a utilitarian standpoint much more often than 10 year olds with a hedonistic utilitarian framework, simply because the latter requires a much more nuanced understanding of the world and forecasted effects in order to work.

My worry is that all humans (not just 10 year olds) are bad at forecasting the impacts of their actions, especially when dynamic effects are involved (as they invariably are). With this in mind, let’s pretend that, at most, the average person can semi-accurately estimate the first order effects of your actions (which is honestly a stretch already). A first order effect would be something like “each marginal hour I work creates more utility for the people I donate to than is lost among me and my family”. Under a utilitarian framework, you would go with whatever you estimate to be correct, which in turn (due to your inability to forecast) would be based on only a first order approximation. Other frameworks that aren’t as based on forecasting (e.g. some version of deontology) can see this first order approximation and still suggest another action (which may, in turn, create more ‘good’ in the long-run). Going back to the overtime example, if you look past first-order effects in a utilitarian framework you can still build a reason against the whole ‘work overtime’ thing. A second order effect would be something like “but, if I do this too long, I’ll burn out, thus decreasing my long-term ability to donate”, and a third order effect would be something like “if I portray sacrificing my wellbeing as a virtue by continuing to do this throughout my life, it could change the views of those who see me as a role model in not-necessarily positive ways”, and so on. Luckily, as a movement, people have finally started to normalize an acceptance of some of the problematic second-order effects of the ‘work overtime’ thing, but it took a worryingly long time—and it certainly won’t be the only time that our first order estimations will be overturned by more diligent thinking!

So, yes, if you work really hard to figure out second, third, etc. order effects, then versions of utilitarianism can be great – but relying too heavily on it for day-to-day decisions (at the expense of sub-frameworks that rely less on forecasting ability) may not work out as well as we’d hope, since figuring out those effects is terribly complicated – in many decisions, relying on a sub-framework that relies less on forecasting ability (e.g. some version of deontology) may be the best way forward. Many EAs realize some version of this, but I think it’s something that we should be more explicit about.

To draw it back in to the “is the moral parliament basically the same as Expected Moral Value”, I would say that it’s not. They are similar, but a key difference is the forecasting ability required for each: moral parliament can easily be used as a mental heuristic in cases where forecasting is impossible or misleading by focusing on which framework applies best for given situations, whereas EMV requires quite a bit of forecasting ability and calculation, and most importantly is incredibly biased against moral frameworks that are unable to quantify the expected good to come out of decisions (yes, the discussion of how to deal with ordinal systems does some to mitigate this, but even then there is a need to forecast effects implicit in the decision process). Hopefully that helps clarify my position, I should’ve probably been a bit more formal in my reasoning in my original post, but better late than never I guess!

Rick 20 Sep 2016 17:42 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: The need for convergence on an ethical theory

My suggestion is that we worry less about solving moral philosophy and worry more about solving the actual core issues at stake

Moreover, many of our commonly held moral theories—having been developed in long-past social and historical contexts—don’t actually provide clear guidance on how we should resolve some of these new futuristic debates.

Yes—thank you for posting this! I think it’s really worth exploring the question of whether moral convergence is even necessarily a good thing. Even beyond moral convergence, I think we need to call into question its antecedent of ‘moral purity’ (i.e. defining and sticking to clear-cut moral principles) is even a good thing either.

I don’t have a philosophy background, so please let me know if this take is way off course, but like kbog mentions many of the commonly cited moral schema don’t apply in every situation – which is why Nick Bostrom, for example, suggests adopting a moral parliament set-up. I worry that pushing for convergence and moral clarity may oversimplify the nuance of reality, and may harm our effectiveness in the long run.

In my own life, I’ve been particularly worried about the limits of moral purity in day-to-day moral decisions – which I’ve written about here. While it’s easy to applaud folk who rigorously keep to a strict moral code, I really wonder whether it’s really the best way forward? For a specific example that probably applies to many of us, utilitarianism sometimes suggests that should you work excessive overtime at the expense of your personal relationships – but is this really a good idea? Even beyond self-care, is there a learning aspect (in terms of personal mental growth, as well as helping you to understand how to work effectively in a messy world filled with people who aren’t in EA) that we could be missing out of?

Rick 19 Sep 2016 21:11 UTC
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in reply to: JamesSnowden’s comment on: Is not giving to X-risk or far future orgs for reasons of risk aversion selfish?
I think that this discussion really comes from the larger discussion about the degree to which we should consider rational choice theory (RCT) to be a normative, as opposed to a positive, theory (for a good overview of the history of this debate, I would highly suggest this article by Wade Hands, especially the example on page 9). As someone with an economics background, I very heavily skew toward seeing it as a positive theory (which is why I pushed back against your statement about economists’ view of risk aversion). In my original reply I wasn’t very specific about what I was saying, so hopefully this will help clarify where I’m coming from!

I just want to say that I agree that rational choice theory (RCT) is dominated by expected utility (EU) theory. However, I disagree with your portrayal of risk aversion. In particular, I agree that risk aversion over expected utility is irrational—but my reasoning for saying this is very different. From an economic standpoint, risk aversion over utils is, by its very definition, irrational. When you define ‘rational’ to mean ‘that which maximizes expected utility’ (as it is defined in EU and RCT models), then of course being risk averse over utils is irrational—under this framework, risk neutrality over utils is a necessary pre-requisite for the model to work at all. This is why, in cases where risk aversion is important (such as the yield example), expected utility calculations take risk aversion into account when calculating the utils associated with each situation—thus making risk aversion over the utils themselves redundant.

Put in a slightly different way, we need to remember that utils do not exist—they are an artifact of our modeling efforts. Risk neutrality over utils is a necessary assumption of RCT in order to develop models that accurately describe decision-making (since RCT was developed as a positive theory). Because of this, the phrase ‘risk aversion over utility’ has not real-world interpretation.

With that in mind, people don’t fail the Allais paradox because of risk aversion over utils, since there is no such thing as being risk averse over utils. Instead, the Allais paradox is a case showing that older RCT models are insufficient for describing the actions of humans—since the empirical results appear to show, in a way, something akin to risk aversion over utils, which in turn breaks the model. This is an important point—put differently, risk neutrality over utils is a necessary assumption of the model, and empirical results that disprove this assumption do not mean that humans are wrong (even though that may be true), it means that the model fails to capture reality. It was because the model broke (in this case, and in others), that economics developed newer positive theories of choice, such as behavioral economics and bounded rationality models, that better describe decision-making.

At most, you can say that the Allais paradox is a case showing that people’s heuristics associated with risk aversion are systematically biased toward decisions that they would not choose if they thought the problem through a bit more. This is definitely a case showing that people are irrational sometimes, and that maybe they should think through these decisions a little more thoroughly, but it does not have anything to do with risk aversion over utility.

Anyways, to bring this back to the main discussion—from this perspective, risk aversion is a completely fine thing to put into models, and it would not be irrational to Alex to factor in risk aversion. This would especially be fine if Alex is worried about the validity of their model itself (which, Alex not being an expert on modeling nor AI risk, should consider to be a real concern). As a last point, I do personally think that we should be more averse to the risks associated with supporting work on far-future stuff and X-risks (which I’ve discussed partially here), but that’s a whole other issue entirely.

Hope that helps clarify my position!