Robert_Wiblin

Karma: 5,436

Robert_Wiblin 12 Nov 2019 12:02 UTC
4 points

in reply to: Jc_Mourrat's comment on: Assumptions about the far future and cause priority
Yes it needs to go in an explanation of how we score scale/importance in the problem framework! It’s on the list. :)

Alternatively I’ve been wondering if we need a standalone article explaining how we can influence the long term, and what are signs that something might be highly leveraged for doing that.

Robert_Wiblin 11 Nov 2019 17:07 UTC
14 points

in reply to: Jc_Mourrat's comment on: Assumptions about the far future and cause priority
As a first pass the rate of improvement should asymptote towards zero so long as there’s a theoretical optimum and declining returns to further research before the heat death of the universe, which seems like pretty mild assumptions.

As an analogy, there’s an impossibly wide range of configurations of matter you could in theory use to create a glass from which we can drink water. But we’ve already gotten most of the way towards the best glass for humans, I would contend. I don’t think we could keep improving glasses in any meaningful way using a galaxy’s resources for a trillion years.

Keep in mind eventually the light cone of each star shrinks so far it can’t benefit from research conducted elsewhere.

Robert_Wiblin 11 Nov 2019 14:43 UTC
15 points

on: Assumptions about the far future and cause priority
Having settled most of the accessible universe we’ll have hundreds of billions or even trillions of years to try to keep improving how we’re using the matter and energy at our disposal.

Doesn’t it seems almost certain that over such a long time period our annual rate if improvement in the value generated by the best configuration would eventually asymptote towards zero? I think that’s all that’s necessary for safety to be substantially more attractive than speed-ups.

(BTW safety is never ‘infinitely’ preferred because even on a strict plateau view the accessible universe is still shrinking by about a billionth a year.)

Robert_Wiblin 7 Nov 2019 12:01 UTC
15 points

in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Effective Altruism and International Trade
“changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society”

I agree these are all benefits, but I class them as instrumental benefits, and imagine most others here do as well.

They are benefits inasmuch as they go on to improve people’s well-being.

“the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake”

The HDI also includes GDP which presumably nobody thinks is valuable for its own sake (i.e. widgets are only useful inasmuch as they make people better off when they’re used not valuable merely for existing). In my opinion education is good to have in the HDI as a proxy for all of the many instrumental benefits it provides people.

Most people here place great weight on a welfarist theory of value: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/ . If you disagree with welfarism then it would pay to set education aside for a minute and go back and discuss more fundamental issues in moral philosophy.

Robert_Wiblin 6 Nov 2019 15:26 UTC
32 points

in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Effective Altruism and International Trade
You quote GiveWell as saying:

“We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores”

But you cut off the quote in a very misleading way indeed:

We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores, although we think that such improvements may have instrumental value.

Unless you think spending time in school is very useful even if it has no other benefits to kids (i.e. they don’t learn anything they use later in life), GiveWell is surely right here that the benefits are mostly instrumental.

It is wrong to quote others in a way that misrepresents their view like this.

You also say:

“Exactly zero dollars went to education … The overall importance given to education is zero.”
1. GiveWell just didn’t think the very best giving opportunities they could support were in education — that doesn’t mean they think it has no value. They also didn’t buy people food, but presumably they don’t think eating is a useless activity and people can safely starve themselves.
2. GiveWell isn’t all of EA. Some EAs probably have a very positive view of the value of education. There’s a wide range of views on most issues.

Robert_Wiblin 5 Nov 2019 13:10 UTC
22 points

in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Effective Altruism and International Trade
“If growth leads to education, then why is South Africa behind Jamaica and India, how about Bangladesh > Pakistan? Sri Lanka > Brazil”

Because it’s not the only factor?

“Its very strange EA says education has no value”

‘EA’ does not say this, and I don’t know anyone involved in EA who holds such a strong view.

Robert_Wiblin 24 Oct 2019 19:21 UTC
2 points

in reply to: bfinn's comment on: Oddly, Britain has never been happier
Hi bfinn, maybe have a listen to this episode of the Freakonomics podcast: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-suicide-paradox/

It’s one of the things that shaped my view that cross-country differences in suicide are best explained by culture rather than underlying happiness.

Robert_Wiblin 24 Oct 2019 11:28 UTC
4 points

in reply to: bfinn's comment on: Oddly, Britain has never been happier
I also don’t trust mental health time series to show whether conditions are becoming more common, because it’s equally or more likely that more people are coming forward as having, e.g. depression, as it becomes very acceptable to talk about it.

But suicide rates are hugely influenced by the social acceptability of suicide specifically, and easy access to suicide methods that allow you to successfully kill yourself on impulse (e.g. guns, which have become less accessible to people over time). So unfortunately I don’t think suicide rates are a reliable way to track mental health problems over time either.

Robert_Wiblin 11 Oct 2019 17:16 UTC
30 points

on: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than Climate change interventions
Thanks for rewriting and republishing this. All very interesting.

On this new revised version, something that stood out to me was the truly extreme range between the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios you describe.

I think the relative cost-effectiveness range you’ve given spans fully ten orders of magnitude, or a range of 10,000,000,000x. Even by our standards that’s a lot. If we’re really this uncertain it seems we can say almost nothing. But I don’t think we are that uncertain.

By choosing a value out in the tail for 4 different input variables all at once you’ve taken us way out into the extremes of the uncertainty bounds. It looks to me like for these scenarios you’ve chosen the 1st and 99th percentiles for SCC, η, cost of abatement, and gain from doing health, all at once.

If that’s right you’re ending up at more like 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 --> 0.000001th percentile on the cost-effectiveness output on either end (not really, because you can’t actually combine uncertainty distributions like this, but you get my general point). That seems too extreme a value to be useful to me.

Maybe you could put your distributions for the inputs into Guesstimate, which will do simulations drawing from and multiplying the inputs, and then choose the 5th and 95th percentile values for the outputs? That would go a long way towards addressing this issue.

Hope this helps, let me know if I’ve misunderstood anything — Rob

Robert_Wiblin 10 Oct 2019 14:54 UTC
20 points

in reply to: mchr3k's comment on: Updated Climate Change Problem Profile
Hi mchr3k — thanks for writing this. I’m completely slammed with other work at 80,000 Hours just now (I’m recording 7 podcast interviews this month), so I won’t be able to respond right away.

For what it’s worth I agree with just posting this and emailing it to us, rather than letting us hold you up. Many people are going to be interested in what you’re saying here and might have useful comments to add, not just 80,000 Hours. It’s also an area where reasonable people can disagree so it’s useful to have a range of views represented publicly.

Possibly letting us comment on a Google Doc first might have been helpful but I don’t think people should treat it as a necessary step!

Robert_Wiblin 18 Sep 2019 13:50 UTC
2 points

in reply to: John_Maxwell's comment on: How to Make Billions of Dollars Reducing Loneliness
Fair enough I haven’t looked at the YouGov report.

I responding to the thrust of Tyler’s quote at the top.

I doubt pre-2004 data will give us insight into modern loneliness. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist back then, for instance.

That data is especially precious because you need a ‘before’ measurement to see whether social media coincides with any change or loneliness staying the same as before!

But I agree many problems aren’t increasing but are still well worth addressing!

Robert_Wiblin 16 Sep 2019 21:15 UTC
24 points

on: Effective Altruism and Everyday Decisions
The amount of electricity consumed by some appliances these days is astonishingly low.

The LED lightbulb in my room for example uses 9 Watts. If I left it on maximum brightness constantly for a whole year this would come to:

9 Watts * 24 hours per day * 365 days / 1000 = ~79kWh.

That would cost me 79kWh * 14.714p/kWh = £12 in electricity for the year.

If supplied 100% by especially dirty coal this might produce 71kg of CO2.

This is a small amount which could be offset on the EU carbon trading market for about £1.80.

While also not worth fussing much too about, at least heating systems and air conditioners do use a meaningful amount of energy! Get your house insulated and then don’t sweat about the rest.

Robert_Wiblin 16 Sep 2019 19:20 UTC
36 points

on: Does improving animal rights now improve the far future?
Hi Evira — this is an incredibly hard figure to estimate and we haven’t decided to deeply investigate the question, so this should basically be viewed as a guess informed by the views of other people involved in effective altruism.

It is also a pretty low figure (in my view), which reflects that we’re also skeptical of the size of these effects. But here are some pathways to consider:
- Animal organisations do sometimes campaign on the moral patienthood of non-humans, and persuade people of this, especially in countries where this view is less common;
- Getting people to stop eating meat makes it easier for them to concede that the welfare of non-humans is of substantial importance;
- Fixing the problem of discrimination against animals allows us to progress to other moral circle expansions sooner, most notably from a long-termist perspective, recognising the risks of suffering in thinking machines;
- Our values might get locked in this century through technology or totalitarian politics, in which case we need to rush to reach something tolerable as quickly as possible;
- Our values might end up on a bad but self-reinforcing track from which we can’t escape, which is a reason to get to something tolerable quickly, in order to make that less likely;
- Animal advocacy can draw people into relevant moral philosophy, effective altruism and related work on other problems, which arguably increases the value of the long-term future.

Robert_Wiblin 16 Sep 2019 18:55 UTC
8 points

on: How to Make Billions of Dollars Reducing Loneliness
Loneliness may indeed be rising, but we don’t yet have good evidence that that’s the case:

“It’s easy to find claims that loneliness is rising (for example, here’s a recent Wall Street Journal article on that theme). But last summer the Social Capital Project run by the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress published “All the Lonely Americans?” (August 22, 2018) and found little evidence of such an increase. The report cites a broad array of claims and evidence, which you can check out for yourself. But here’s a quick overview of some main points (with citations omitted for readability):

There are a few different but related questions that tend to get lumped into one general story about whether loneliness is on the rise in America, in part because of a lack of good data, and occasionally because of a failure to distinguish the two often distinct lines of psychological and sociological research. One question is whether Americans are increasingly alone (that is, have fewer social contacts, or have less social interaction). This question, which sociologists tend to study, is about objectively observable social networks or relationship characteristics. It is distinguishable from the second question, regarding the subjective experience of loneliness. This latter question—whether Americans are increasingly experiencing loneliness (`perceived social isolation’)—has typically been the research purview of psychologists.

Correlations are lower than we might expect between the most common measures of loneliness and objective measures of social network characteristics, so these two questions are substantially though not wholly distinct from each other. … However, it is not at all clear that loneliness has increased over the last several decades.

In his 2011 book, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970, sociologist Claude Fischer puts a fine point on this question: `For all the interest in loneliness, there appears to be little national survey data that would permit us to draw trends.′

We looked for the strongest support for the claim that loneliness has risen, and the best we could find comes from polls by FGI. Between 1994 and 2004, the FGI polls indicate that the share of adults saying loneliness was a problem for them rose from roughly 25 percent to 30 percent. It is unclear, however, whether this five-point difference reflects a real shift or arises from chance differences in the people sampled in each year or in survey administration.

The remaining evidence suggests flat trends. … The claim that loneliness has doubled—or even increased—since the 1980s (let alone the late 1960s) is simply unwarranted. … It is entirely possible that loneliness has increased over time, but the available evidence does not appear to support that claim. It is just as possible that loneliness has stayed the same or even declined.”

Robert_Wiblin 13 Sep 2019 18:15 UTC
32 points

on: Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Great discussion here, top quality comments. To make one aspect of this a bit clearer I made this figure of different ‘hingeiness’ trajectories and their implications:

Will adds: “In this post I’m just saying it’s unlikely we’re at A2, rather than at some other point in that curve, or on a different curve, and the evidence we have doesn’t give us strong enough evidence to think we’re at A2.

But then yeah it’s a really good point that even if one thinks hinginess is increasing locally, and feels confident about that, it doesn’t mean we’re atop the last peak.

A related point from the graphs: even if hinginess is locally decreasing faster than the real rate of interest, that’s still not sufficient for spending, if there will be some future time when hinginess starts increasing or staying the same or slowing to less than the real rate of interest (as long as you can save for that long).”

Robert_Wiblin 13 Sep 2019 13:47 UTC
10 points

in reply to: AGB's comment on: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than Climate change interventions
Am I right that what we need to know is whether, when assessing the total global social cost of carbon:

i) they multiplied harms to the world’s poorest people, measured in equivalent dollars of their income, by ~100x;

ii) they divided the harms to the world richest people, measured in equivalent dollars of their income, by ~100x;

iii) or something in between?

HH’s argument only goes through if it’s the second of the three.

Robert_Wiblin 2 Aug 2019 14:23 UTC
8 points

in reply to: Jon_Behar's comment on: ‘Longtermism’

it’s decidedly not a “new term”

While the word long-termism itself isn’t new, it’s a relatively new way of describing the school of thought in moral philosophy being discussed here — if only because that school of thought itself has been quite small until recently.

I think that is what Will meant by it being a ‘new term’.

Robert_Wiblin 1 Aug 2019 14:44 UTC
21 points

in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: ‘Longtermism’
The definitions of many words are fuzzy in practice, but that doesn’t mean it’s ideal for things to be that way. And I seriously doubt it’s ideal in technical research fields like philosophy or engineering.

In those cases shared and precise meanings can speed up research progress, and avoid terrible mistakes, by preventing misunderstandings.

Establishing some consistency in our terminology, like a shared definition of longtermism, strikes me as highly worthwhile.

Robert_Wiblin 31 Jul 2019 13:49 UTC
8 points

in reply to: William_MacAskill's comment on: ‘Longtermism’
“Aron Vallinder and I ran a survey on people’s attitudes on this issue…”

Hey Will — who was this a survey of?

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Robert_Wiblin

1 Jul 2019 14:08 UTC

25 points

2 comments1 min readEA link

Robert_Wiblin

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