Rick

Karma: 65

Rick Sep 16, 2016, 7:02 PM
1 point
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in reply to: James Snowden🔸’s comment on: Is not giving to X-risk or far future orgs for reasons of risk aversion selfish?
I just want to push back against your statement that “economists believe that risk aversion is irrational”. In development economics in particular, risk aversion is often seen as a perfectly rational approach to life, especially in cases where the risk is irreversible.

To explain this, I just want to quickly point out that, from an economic standpoint, there’s no correct formal way of measuring risk aversion among utils. Utility is an ordinal, not cardinal, measure. Risk aversion is something that is applied to real measures, like crop yields, in order to better estimate people’s revealed preferences—in essence, risk aversion is a way of taking utility into account when measuring non-utility values.

So, to put this in context, let’s say you are a subsistence farmer, and have an expected yield of X from growing Sorghum or a tuber, and you know that you’ll always roughly get a yield X (since Sorghum and many tubers are crazily resilient), but now someone offers you an ‘improved Maize’ growth package that will get you an expected yield of 2X, but there’s a 10% chance that you’re crops will fail completely. A rational person at the poverty line should always choose the Sorghum/tuber. This is because that 10% chance of a failed crop is much, much worse than could be revealed by expected yield—you could starve, have to sell productive assets, etc. Risk aversion is a way of formalizing the thought process behind this perfectly rational decision. If we could measure expected utility in a cardinal way, we would just do that, and get the correct answer without using risk aversion—but because we can’t measure it cardinally, we have to use risk aversion to account for things like this.

As a last fun point, risk aversion can also be used to formalize the idea of diminishing marginal utility without using cardinal utility functions, which is one of the many ways that we’re able to ‘prove’ that diminishing marginal utility exists, even if we can’t measure it directly.

Rick Sep 16, 2016, 3:29 PM
2 points
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on: Is not giving to X-risk or far future orgs for reasons of risk aversion selfish?
I agree with a lot of the other folk here that risk aversion should not be seen as a selfish drive (even though, as Gleb mentioned, it can serve that drive in some cases), but rather is an important part of rational thinking. In terms of directly answering your question, though, regarding ‘discounting future life’, I’ve been wondering about this a bit too. So, I think it’s fair to say that there are some risks involved with pursuing X-risks: there’s a decent chance you’ll be wrong, you may divert resources from other causes, your donation now may be insignificant compared to future donations when the risk is more well-known and better understood, and you’ll never really know whether or not you’re making any progress. Many of these risks are accurately represented in EA’s cost/benefit models about X-risks (I’m sure yours involved some version of these, even if just the uncertainty one).

My recent worry is the possibility that, that when a given X-risk becomes associated with the EA community, these risks become magnified, which in turn needs to be considered in our analyses. I think that this can happen for three reasons:

First, the EA community could create an echo chamber for incorrect X-risks, which increases bias in support of those X-risks. In this case, rational people who would have otherwise dismissed the risk as conspiratorial now would be more likely to agree with it. We’d like to think that large support of various X-risks in the EA communities is because EAs have more accurate information about these risks, but that’s not necessarily the case. Being in the EA community changes who you see as ‘experts’ on a topic – there isn’t a vocal majority of experts working on AI globally who see the threat as legitimate, which to a normal rational person may make the risk seem a little overblown. However, the vast majority of experts working on AI who associate with EA do see it as a threat, and are very vocal about it. This is a very dangerous situation to be in.

Second, if an ‘incorrect’ X-risk is grasped by the community, there’s a lot of resource diversion at stake – EA has the power to more a lot of resources in a positive way, and if certain X-risks are way off base then their popularity in EA has an outsized opportunity cost.

Lastly, many X-risks turns a lot of reasonable people away from EA, even when they’re correct—if we believe that EA is a great boon to humanity, then the reputational risk has very real implications for the analysis.

Those are my rough initial thoughts, which I’ve elaborated on a bit here. It’s a tricky question though, so I’d love to hear people’s critiques of this line of thinking—is this magnified risk something we should take into account? How would we account for it in models?

Rick Sep 12, 2016, 2:18 PM
2 points
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Altruistic Organizations Should Consider Counterfactuals When Hiring
Possibly! Outside of a few annoying high-profile groups (who shall not be named), you don’t really hear people working for charitible causes say “I’m in it for the money”. I’m pretty sure this situation is mostly driven by a lack of money mixed with the availability of people who are willing to take a pay cut to work in aid, rather than it being a conscious attempt at screening workers for morality. It may be worth researching the ‘screening for morality’ aspect further—I haven’t really seen much on the implications of it (hence my curiosity about how it would work in practice—it’s a very interesting thought!). Either way, there’s a sweet spot somewhere, it’s just a question of where—how much below market rate do you need to pay charitable workers in order to maximize the costs/benefits between screening for morality, saving money, and minimizing possible side effects like those I mentioned downpost?

In humanitarian work, for example, I think we’ve gone too far (as one writer put it, “it’s unrealistic to expect us to live like monks”. On a related note, it may be worth looking into the large debate on the professionalization of the humanitarian aid sector. Basically, for a very long time the humanitarian aid sector under-invested in the professional development, mental health, safety, and general wellbeing of its workers, because the kind of people who work in frontline aid work tend to be willing to do it anyway even if they are getting paid next to nothing, are in serious danger all the time, and are under-invested in by their organization. Unsurprisingly, burn-out and untreated PTSD are common. As an aside, professionalization also seems to be slowly increasing the effectiveness of humanitarian aid, which is great.

Rick Sep 11, 2016, 11:09 PM
1 point
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Altruistic Organizations Should Consider Counterfactuals When Hiring
The rationale is mostly borne of experience, from what I can tell (e.g. managers experiencing consistent success with this set up), but formally it is that 1) you should hire based on who will do the most good in the position, and 2) asking about experience and skills is the best way of figuring out if they’ll do the most good. Outside of corruption, which is a whole other discussion, the difference between very moral person A and mediocre-ly moral person B is that person B may dedicate more time to thinking about and working on the cause, which in turn becomes results. If person A is not as smart as person B, but works harder and gets better results as a result, you should hire person A. As a converse, if person B really doesn’t care that much, slacks off a lot, but is a genius who consistently gets better results than person A, you should hire person B. In both cases, asking about their morality isn’t going to tell you who will be most effective—it’s an easy thing to lie about, and when it does play a large role it will show up in your skills and experience anyway (past success is an indicator of future success).

Rick Sep 11, 2016, 10:46 PM
2 points
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in reply to: kierangreig🔸’s comment on: Altruistic Organizations Should Consider Counterfactuals When Hiring
Encouraging altruistic workers to self-subsidize altruistic work is a dangerous path to go down, in my opinion. On a large scale, it can (and does!) put downward pressure on sector-wide wages, which in turn can push qualified people away from the sector (thus hurting the talent pool), disproportionately may exclude people of humble backgrounds from getting jobs in altruistic work (which in turn helps ensure that people of privilege are over represented in those jobs, which is not good—e.g. this post), and may also, according to some sociological theories, possibly lead to a societal devaluation of such work (e.g. what is seen with care work, which also is bad). I’d much rather let such people seek normal wages, and then donate the excess—you get the same benefits, but avoid all of the associated problems.

Rick Sep 11, 2016, 9:50 PM
1 point
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on: Altruistic Organizations Should Consider Counterfactuals When Hiring
Can someone elaborate on what assessing candidates’ value-alignment/morality and making decisions about that looks like in practice? I work in the ‘traditional’ charitable sector (for lack of a better word), and the number one piece of advice that I’ve always heard given to hiring managers is “ask people about their skills, never about their morality or commitment to the cause” (and, as a addendum, dock people who spend too much time in the interview talking about those things). Obviously there are special cases to avoiding considering someone’s value-alignment—e.g. cases where people avoid hiring candidates with associations with organizations that seem a little ‘questionable’ vis-a-vis the cause—but overall I’ve not really heard a lot about assessing or taking into account people’s value-alignment/morality during hiring decisions. So, with that in mind—do some EA-aligned organizations screen candidates based on morality/commitment/value-alignment? If so, how do they go about doing that—what sort of interview questions can get that information out of people accurately?
What links here?
- John_Maxwell's comment on Is the community short of software engineers after all? by Benjamin_Todd (Oct 4, 2016, 5:16 AM; 1 point)

Rick Sep 2, 2016, 3:37 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Should donors make commitments about future donations?
I think that Karnofsky’s post, as well as the above discussions, miss another important set of considerations for effectiveness (which only really apply to people giving over $100,000, but still):

1) Lowering fundraising and transaction costs for the charity: When a large donor agrees to stay with an organization for a long time, that organization can focus more on their programs and less on fundraising—when donors are constantly shifting from organization to organization, organizations are constantly being forced to spend valuable resources replacing them. In addition to fundraising costs, it’s also important to remember various transaction costs, such as reporting requirements (which you can work to streamline over a long-term engagement with a trusted organization).

2) Uncertainty for the capacity building: Keep in mind that helping build an organization’s capacity can have long-term impacts beyond just ‘# of bednets distributed’. When it comes to long-term donor relationships, it’s not just about revenue planning (which was mentioned above), but also about strategic planning. Lets say that your current largest donor is really interested in, say, monitoring and evaluation. If you know that that donor will stay around for a while, you can invest in your M&E capacity knowing that it will continue to be funded, but if that donor is going to switch to another organization in a year, how can you be sure that the next donor will fund you in a similar way? You might need to prepare to cut your M&E the instant you find a new donor.

3) Giving to learn isn’t just about building a network and learning about a cause, it’s also important to have deep relationships with an implementer: Shallow relationships only go so far, building a strong, ongoing relationship with an organization you trust can help you prioritize growth areas within that organization, and set both you and the organization up for successful experimentation and problem solving.

Caroline Fiennes of Giving Evidence (https://giving-evidence.com/) has a few other good reasons for focusing on building a long-term relationship with a small number of charities, but unfortunately I cannot find a consolidated blog post or article on this specific topic. Still, if you dig into her work, she does have a lot of interesting work on how the way in which people give (e.g. long vs. short term) has implications for the long-term effectiveness of charities. I would definitely recommend looking in to her work.