To better understand your view, what are some cases where you think it would be right to either
not invite someone to speak, or
cancel a talk you’ve already started organising,
but only just?
That is, cases where it’s just slightly over the line of being justified.
For whatever reason people who place substantial intrinsic value on themselves seem to be more successful and have a larger social impact in the long term. It appears to be better for mental health, risk-taking, and confidence among other things.
You’re also almost always better placed than anyone else to provide the things you need — e.g. sleep, recreation, fun, friends, healthy behaviours — so it’s each person’s comparative advantage to put extra effort into looking out for themselves. I don’t know why, but doing that is more motivating if it feels like it has intrinsic and not just instrumental value.
Even the most self-effacing among us have a part of their mind that is selfish and cares about their welfare more than the welfare of strangers.
Folks who currently neglect their wellbeing and intrinsic value to a dangerous extent can start by fostering ways of thinking that build up that endorse and build up that selfishness.
Yep that sounds good, non-profits should aim to have fairly stable expenditure over the business cycle.
I think I was thrown off your true motivation by the name ‘Keynesian altruism’. It might be wise to rename it ‘countercyclical’ so it doesn’t carry the implication that you’re looking for an economic multiplier.
The idea that charities should focus on spending money during recessions because of the extra benefit that provides seems wrong to me.
Using standard estimates of the fiscal multiplier during recessions — and ignoring any offsetting effects your actions have on fiscal or monetary policy — if a US charity spends an extra $1 during a recession it might raise US GDP by between $0 and $3.
If you’re a charity spending $1, and just generally raising US GDP by $3 is a significant fraction of your total social impact, you must be a very ineffective organisation. I could not recommend giving to such a project.
I’d think such a gain would be swamped like other issues like investment returns, us learning about better charities in future, or the worst problems getting solved leaving us worse giving opportunities, and so on.
An exception might be if you independently thought something like GiveDirectly was the best option and wasn’t going to be beaten by another option in future. Then giving money for dispersal during a recession in the recipient country might be, say, twice as good as giving it outside of recession.
There’s a bunch of discussion of these issues in my interview with Phil Trammell.
Is there even 1 exclusively about people working at EA organisations?
If someone had taken a different job with the goal of having a big social impact, and we didn’t think what they were doing was horribly misguided, I don’t think we would count them as having ‘dropped out of EA’ in any of the 6 data sets.
“For example 80000 Hours have stopped cause prioritisation work to focus on their priority paths”
Hey Sam — being a small organisation 80,000 Hours has only ever had fairly limited staff time for cause priorities research.
But I wouldn’t say we’re doing less of it than before, and we haven’t decided to cut it. For instance see Arden Koehler’s recent posts about Ideas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths and Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities.
We aim to put ~10% of team time into underlying research, where one topic is trying to figure out which problems and paths go into each priority level. We also have podcast episodes on newer problems from time to time.
All that said, I am sympathetic to the idea that as a community we are underinvesting in cause priorities research.
It seems like lots of active AI safety researchers, even a majority, are aware of Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s views but only agree with parts of what they have to say (e.g. Russell, Amodei, Christiano, the teams at DeepMind, OpenAI, etc).
There may still not be enough intellectual diversity, but having the same perspective as Bostrom or Yudkowsky isn’t a filter to involvement.
As Michael says, common sense would indicate I must have been referring to the initial peak, or the peak in interest/panic/policy response, or the peak in the UK/Europe, or peak where our readers are located, or — this being a brief comment on an unrelated topic — just speaking loosely and not putting much thought into my wording.
FWIW it looks like globally the rate of new cases hasn’t peaked yet. I don’t expect the UK or Europe will return to a situation as bad as the one they went through in late March and early April. Unfortunately the US and Latin America are already doing worse than it was then.
I think you know what I mean — the initial peak in the UK, the country where we are located, in late March/April.
There’s often a few months between recording and release and we’ve had a handful of episodes that took a frustratingly long time to get out the door, but never a year.
The time between the first recording and release for this one was actually 9 months. The main reason was Howie and Ben wanted to go back and re-record a number of parts they didn’t think they got right the first time around, and it took them a while to both be free and in the same place so they could do that.
A few episodes were also pushed back so we could get out COVID-19 interviews during the peak of the epidemic.
Thanks for doing this research, nice work.
Could you make your figure a little larger, it’s hard to read on a desktop. It might also be easier for the reader if each of the five arguments had a one-word name to keep track of the gist of their actual content.
“As you can see, the winner in Phase 2 was Argument 9 by a nose. Argument 9 was also the winner by a nose in Phase 1, and thus the winner overall.”
I don’t think this is quite right. Arguments 5 and 12 are very much within the confidence interval for Argument 9. Eyeballing it I would guess we can only be about 60% confident that argument 9 would do better again if you repeated the experiment.
I would summarise the results as follow:
All five arguments substantially outperformed the control, on average increasing giving by around 45%.
We also had some evidence that Arguments 5, 9 and 12 all outperformed Arguments 3 and 14, perhaps having about 30% more impact.
Hi Tobias — thanks for the ideas!
Invertebrate welfare is wrapped into ‘Wild animal welfare’, and reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors is partially captured under ‘S-risks’. We’ll discuss the other two.
For future reference, next time you need to look up the page number for a citation, Library Genesis can quickly let you access a digital copy of almost any book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
I didn’t mean to imply that the protests would fix the whole problem, obviously they won’t.
As you say you’d need to multiply through by a distribution for ‘likelihood of success’ and ‘how much of the problems solved’.
I think a crux for some protesters will be how much total damage they think bad policing is doing in the USA.
While police killings or murders draw the most attention, much more damage is probably done in other ways, such as through over-incarceration, petty harassment, framing innocent people, bankrupting folks through unnecessary fines, enforcing bad laws such a drug prohibition, assaults, and so on. And that total damage accumulates year after year.
On top of this we could add the burden of crime itself that results from poor policing practices, including a lack of community trust in police due to their oppressive behaviour and lack of accountability.
Regardless of where a consequentialist analysis would come down, it is a tragedy that people feel they need to choose between missing an opportunity to fix a horrible system of state violence, and not spreading a dangerous pandemic.
If I weren’t interested in creating more new beings with positive lives I’d place greater priority on:
Ending the suffering and injustice suffered by animals in factory farming
Ending the suffering of animals in the wilderness
Slowing ageing, or cryonics (so the present generation can enjoy many times more positive value over the course of their lives)
Radical new ways to dramatically raise the welfare of the present generation (e.g. direct brain stimulation as described here)
I haven’t thought much about what would look good from a conservative Christian worldview.
Hi PBS, I understand where you’re coming from and expect many policy folks may well be having a bigger impact than front-line doctors, because in this case prevention is probably better than treatment.
At the same time I can see why we don’t clap for them in that way, because they’re not taking on a particularly high risk of death and injury in the same way the hospital staff are right now. I appreciate both, but on a personal level I’m more impressed by people who continue to accept a high risk of contracting COVID-19 in order to treat patients.
The EA community seems to have a lot of very successful people by normal social standards, pursuing earning to give, research, politics and more. They are often doing better by their own lights as a result of having learned things from other people interested in EA-ish topics. Typically they aren’t yet at the top of their fields but that’s unsurprising as most are 25-35.
The rationality community, inasmuch as it doesn’t overlap with the EA community, also has plenty of people who are successful by their own lights, but their goals tend to be becoming thinkers and writers who offer the world fresh ideas and a unique perspective on things. That does seems to be the comparative advantage of that group. So then it’s not so surprising that we don’t see lots of people e.g. getting rich. They mostly aren’t trying to. ᾓ7♂️