SammyDMartin

Karma: 520

SammyDMartin Oct 28, 2021, 3:30 PM
41 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Good news on climate change

Firstly, on the assumption that the direct or indirect global catastrophic risk (defined as killing >10% of the global population or doing equivalent damage) of climate change depends on warming of more than 6 degrees, the global catastrophic risk from climate change is at least an order of magnitude lower than previously thought. If you think 4 degrees of warming would be a global catastrophic risk, then that risk is also considerably lower than previously thought: where once it was the most likely outcome, the chance is now arguably lower than 5%.

I think that the crux between climate pessimists and optimists is, at the moment, mostly about how much damage the effects of 2-4 degrees of warming would cause. This has been a recent development—I feel like I saw a lot more arguments that 6+ degrees of warming would make earth uninhabitable in the past when that seemed more likely, and now I see more arguments that 2-4 degrees of warming could cause way more damage than we think. Mark Lynas in a recent 80k podcast puts it this way when asked about civilisational collapse:

Mark Lynas: Oh, I think… You want to put me on the spot. I would say it has a 30 to 40% chance of happening at three degrees, and a 60% chance of happening at four degrees, and 90% at five degrees, and 97% at six degrees.

Arden Koehler: Okay. Okay. No, I appreciate you being willing to put numbers on this because I feel that’s always really hard, but it’s really helpful.

Mark Lynas: Maybe 10% at two degrees.

These new environmentalist arguments for climate posing a GCR aren’t that we expect to get a lot of warming, but that even really modest amounts of warming, like 2-4 degrees, could be enough to cause terrible famines by reducing global food output suddenly or else knock out key industries in a way that cascades to cause mass deaths and civilisational collapse.

They don’t dispute the basic physical effects of 2-4 degrees of warming, but they think that human civilisation is way more fragile than it appears, such that a modest loss of agricultural productivity and/or a couple of key industries being badly damaged by extreme weather could knock out other industries and so on leading to massive economic damage.

Now, I’ve always been very sceptical of these arguments because they seem to rely on nothing but intuition and go against historical precendent, but also because I thought we had reliable evidence against them—the IPCCs economic models of climate change say that 2 degrees of warming, for example, represents only a few percent in lost economic output.

E.g. this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/the-economic-geography-of-global-warming.html So the damage is bounded and not that high.

However, I found out recently that these models are so oversimplified as to be close to useless—at least according to Noah Smith:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-has-climate-economics-failed

For example, in 2011, Michael Greenstone and Olivier Deschenes published a paper about climate change and mortality (I studied an earlier version of this paper in a grad school class). Their approach is to measure the effect of temperature on mortality rates in normal times, and use that estimate to predict how a warmer world would affect mortality.

The authors make the obvious and grievous mistake of assuming that climate change affects human mortality only through the direct effects of air temperature — heatstroke, heart attack, freezing, and so on. The word “storm” does not appear in the paper. The word “fire” does not appear in the paper. The word “flood” does not appear in the paper. The authors do mention that climate change might increase disease vectors, but wave this away. Near the end of the paper they write that “it is possible that the incidence of extreme events would increase, and these could affect human health…This study is not equipped to shed light on these issues.”

You don’t say.

The big conceptual mistake here is to assume that whatever economists can easily measure is the sum total of what’s important for the world — that events for which a reliable cost or benefit cannot be easily guessed should simply be ignored in cost-benefit calculations. That is bad science and bad policy advice.

His source for a lot of these criticisms appears to be this (admittedly very clearly biased) paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856 by Steve Keen, who seems to be some sort of fringe economist. But I see them repeated by environmentalists a lot. The claim is that the economic models are really wrong and therefore we should expect lots more damage from relatively minor amounts of global warming.

So, if we accept these criticisms of the IPCCs climate economic forecasts (and please let me know if there are good responses to them), then where does that leave us epistemically? It means that the total economic damage caused by e.g. 3 degrees of warming doesn’t have a clear, low, upper bound and that the ‘extreme fragility’ argument doesn’t have strong evidence against it.

However there still isn’t any positive evidence for it either! And it still strikes me as implausible, and against historical precedent for how famines work (plus resource shorages are the sort of problem markets are good at solving).

As far as I can tell, this really is the epistemic situation we’re in with regard to the economic side of climate change forecasting—in the podcast episode with Rob Wiblin and Mark Lynas, they discuss this extreme fragility idea and neither cite climate forecasts to try and assess if modest losses to agricultural productivity would cause massive famines or not—it’s just intuition Vs intuiton

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/?startTime=2614&btp=476595d6

Mark Lynas: So that’s, for me, the main question. And one of the most important studies I think that’s ever been performed on this was a study in the PNAS Journal, which looked at what they called synchronous collapse in breadbaskets around the world. So at the moment, the world still produces enough food every single year very reliably. We’ve never had a major food shortage which has been as a result of harvest failure.

Mark Lynas: So I mean, if the U.S. Corn Belt was knocked out one year, that would have a huge impact on food prices, and have a huge impact on food security, in fact, as a direct result of that. But imagine if it really wasn’t just the U.S. Corn Belt. It was Australia, it was Brazil, and Argentina, it was breadbaskets of Eastern Europe, and the former USSR, all of that added together, then you enter a situation which humanity has never experienced before, and which looks very much like famine.

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/

Robert Wiblin: So when I envisage a situation where there’s a huge food shortfall like that, firstly, I think we’ll probably have some heads up that this is coming ahead of time. You start to notice the warning signs earlier, like food prices going up, and food futures going up. And then I imagine that people would start… Because it’ll be a global emergency much worse than the coronavirus, say. You just start seeing everyone starts paying attention to how the hell can we get more calories produced? And fortunately, unlike 500 years ago, we are in the fortunate situation where most people today aren’t already producing food, and most capital today isn’t already allocated towards producing more food. So there’s potentially a bunch of elasticity there where, if food prices go up tenfold, that a lot more people can go out and try to grow food one way or another. And a lot more capital can be reallocated towards agriculture in order to try to ameliorate the effects.

Robert Wiblin: And you can also imagine, just as everyone in March was trying to figure out how the hell do we solve this COVID problem, everyone’s going to be thinking “How can I store food? How can I avoid consuming food? How can we avoid wasting food? Because every calorie looks precious”. And maybe that sense of our adaptability, or our ability to set our mind to something when there’s a huge disaster and just throw everything at it, perhaps makes me more optimistic that we’ll be able to muddle through, perhaps more than you’re envisaging. Do you have a reaction to that?

Mark Lynas: My reaction is: imagine if Donald Trump is in charge of the response. It’s all very well to have optimistic notions of technological progress and adaptive capacity and things. And yeah, if smart people were running the show, that would no doubt be the most likely outcome. But smart people don’t run the show most of the time, in most places, and people are amenable to hate and fear, and denial and conspiracies, and all of those kinds of things as you’ve seen, even in the very short term challenges of COVID.

My point is that, unlike temperature forecasts, there aren’t any concrete models to support either Rob or Mark’s position. And elsewhere in the article Mark claims this scenario is 10% likely with 2 degrees of warming. If he’s right, butterfly effects of 2 degrees of warming causing civilisational collapse is twice as likely as the 5% chance of 4 degrees of warming cited in this post, and it’s therefore where the majority of the subjective risk comes from.

Regardless, as the physics side of climate change modelling has started to rule out enough warming to directly end civilisation by clear obvious mechanisms, this ‘other climate tail risk’ (i.e. what if the fragility argument is right) seems worth investigating if only to exclude the possibility. I still place a very low weight on these arguments being right, but it’s probably higher than the chance we get 6+ degrees of warming.

Again, this isn’t my area so please let me know if this has all been heavily debunked by climate economists. But currently it seems to me that the main arguments of climate pessimists aren’t addressed by ruling out extreme warming scenarios.
What links here?
- The most important climate change uncertainty by cwa (Jul 26, 2022, 3:15 PM; 144 points)

SammyDMartin Oct 21, 2021, 12:32 PM
22 points
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on: The Phil Torres essay in Aeon attacking Longtermism might be good
One substantive point that I do think is worth making is that Torres isn’t coming from the perspective of common-sense morality Vs longtermism, but rather a different, opposing, non-mainstream morality that (like longtermism) is much more common among elites and academics.
Yet this Baconian, capitalist view is one of the most fundamental root causes of the unprecedented environmental crisis that now threatens to destroy large regions of the biosphere, Indigenous communities around the world, and perhaps even Western technological civilisation itself.
When he says that this Baconian idea is going to damage civilisation, presumably he thinks that we should do something about this, so he’s implicitly arguing for very radical things that most people today, especially in the Global South, wouldn’t endorse at all. If we take this claim at face value, it would probably involve degrowth and therefore massive economic and political change.
I’m not saying that longtermism is in agreement with the moral priorities of most people or that Torres’s (progressive? degrowth?) worldview is overall similarly counterintuitive to longtermism. His perspective is more counterintuitive to me, but on the other hand a lot more people share his worldview, and it’s currently much more influential in politics.
But I think it’s still important to point out that Torres’s world-view goes against common-sense morality as well, and that like longtermists he thinks it’s okay to second guess the deeply held moral views of most people under the right circumstances.
Practically what that means is that, for the reasons you’ve given, many of the criticisms that don’t rely on CSM, but rather on his morality, won’t land with everyone reading the article. So I agree that this probably doesn’t make longtermism look as bad as he thinks.
FWIW, my guess is that if you asked a man in the street whether weak longtermist policies or degrowth environmentalist policies were crazier, he’d probably choose the latter.
What links here?
- SammyDMartin's comment on How should Effective Altruists think about Leftist Ethics? by AppliedDivinityStudies (Nov 27, 2021, 3:30 PM; 5 points)

SammyDMartin Oct 4, 2021, 10:57 AM
16 points
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in reply to: asclepius’s comment on: Robin Hanson on the Long Reflection
I don’t think Hanson would disagree with this claim (that the future is more likely to be better by current values, given the long reflection, compared to e.g. Age of Em). I think it’s a fundamental values difference.
Robin Hanson is an interesting and original thinker, but not only is he not an effective altruist, he explicitly doesn’t want to make the future go well according to anything like present human values.
The Age of Em, which Hanson clearly doesn’t think is an undesirable future, would contain very little of what we value. Hanson says this, but it’s a feature, not a bug. Scott Alexander:
Hanson deserves credit for positing a future whose values are likely to upset even the sort of people who say they don’t get upset over future value drift. I’m not sure whether or not he deserves credit for not being upset by it. Yes, it’s got low-crime, ample food for everybody, and full employment. But so does Brave New World. The whole point of dystopian fiction is pointing out that we have complicated values beyond material security. Hanson is absolutely right that our traditionalist ancestors would view our own era with as much horror as some of us would view an em era. He’s even right that on utilitarian grounds, it’s hard to argue with an em era where everyone is really happy working eighteen hours a day for their entire lives because we selected for people who feel that way. But at some point, can we make the Lovecraftian argument of “I know my values are provincial and arbitrary, but they’re my provincial arbitrary values and I will make any sacrifice of blood or tears necessary to defend them, even unto the gates of Hell?”
Since Hanson doesn’t have a strong interest in steering the long-term future to be good by current values, it’s obvious why he wouldn’t be a fan of an idea like the long reflection, which has that as its main goal but produces bad side effects in the course of giving us a chance of achieving that goal. It’s just a values difference.

SammyDMartin Oct 1, 2021, 1:53 PM
6 points
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on: Forecasting Compute—Transformative AI and Compute [2/4]
Great post! You might be interested in this related investigation by the MTAIR project I’ve been working on, whch also attempts to build on Ajeya’s TAI timeline model, although in a slightly different way to yours (we focus on incorporating non-DL based paths to TAI as well as trying to improve on the ‘biological anchors’ method already described): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z8YLoa6HennmRWBr3/link-post-paths-to-high-level-machine-intelligence

SammyDMartin Sep 28, 2021, 6:30 PM
22 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Summary of history (empowerment and well-being lens)
One thing that your account might miss is the impact of ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line. E.g. it’s a very common argument that Christan ideas about the golden rule motivated anti-slavery sentiment, so if the Roman empire hadn’t spread Christianity across Europe then we’d have ended up with very different values.

Similarly, even if the content of ancient Greek moral philosophy wasn’t directly useful to improve wellbeing, they inspired the Western philosphical tradition that led to Enlignment ideals that led to the abolition of slavery.

I’ve told two stories about why the Greeks and Romans might have been necessary for future moral progress—are you skeptical of these appeals to historical contingency or are the long run causes of these events just outside the scope of this way of looking at history?
What links here?
- Jamie_Harris's comment on Summary of history (empowerment and well-being lens) by Holden Karnofsky (Dec 4, 2021, 1:04 PM; 8 points)

SammyDMartin Sep 27, 2021, 10:05 PM
2 points
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on: Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning
Very good summary! I’ve been working on a (much drier) series of posts explaining different AI risk scenarios—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KxDgeyyhppRD5qdfZ/link-post-how-plausible-are-ai-takeover-scenarios

But I think I might adopt ‘Sycophant’/‘Schemer’ as better more descriptive names for WFLL1/WFLL2, Outer/Inner alignment failure going forward

I also liked that you emphasised how much the optimist Vs pessimist case depends on hard to articulate intuitions about things like how easily findable deceptive models are and how easy incremental course correction is. I called this the ‘hackability’ of alignment—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zkF9PNSyDKusoyLkP/investigating-ai-takeover-scenarios#Alignment__Hackability_

SammyDMartin Aug 20, 2021, 3:03 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Jason Brennan’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
Thanks for this reply. Would you say then that Covid has strengthened the case for some sorts of democracy reduction, but not others? So we should be more confident in enlightened preference voting but less confident in Garett Jones’ argument (from 10% less democracy) in favour of more independent agencies?

SammyDMartin Aug 18, 2021, 5:09 PM
18 points
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on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
Do you think that the West’s disastrous experience with Coronavirus (things like underinvesting in vaccines, not adopting challenge trials, not suppressing the virus, mixed messaging on masks early on, the FDA’s errors on testing, and others as enumerated in this thread- or in books like The Premonition) has strengthened, weakened or not changed much the credibility of your thesis in ‘Against Democracy’, that we should expect better outcomes if we give the knowledgeable more freedom to choose policy?
For reasons it might weaken ‘Against Democracy’, it seems like a lot of expert bureaucracies did an unusually bad job because they couldn’t take correction, see this summary post for examples:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dYiJLvcRJ4nk4xm3X#Vax
For reasons it might strengthen the argument, it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/the-premonition.html
Or this summary

SammyDMartin Jul 3, 2021, 5:05 PM
29 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Does Moral Philosophy Drive Moral Progress?
I don’t think the view that moral philosophers had a positive influence on moral developments in history is a simple model of ‘everyone makes a mistake, moral philosopher points out the mistake and convinces people, everyone changes their minds’. I think that what Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill were getting at is that these people gave history a shove at the right moment.
At the very least, it doesn’t seem that discovering the correct moral view is sufficient for achieving moral progress in actuality.
I have no doubt that they’d agree with you about this. But if we all accept this claim, there are two further models we could look at.
One is a model where changing economic circumstances influence what moral views it is feasible to act on, but progress in moral knowledge still affects what we choose to do, given the constraints of our economic circumstances.
The other is a model where economics determines everything and the moral views we hold are an epiphenomenon blown about by these conditions (note this is very similar to some Marxist views of history). Your view is that ‘the two are totally decoupled’, but at most your examples just show that the two are decoupled somewhat, not that moral reasoning has no effect. And there are plenty of examples that show explicit moral reasoning having at least some effect on events—see Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill’s original list.
The strawman view that moral advances determine everything is not what’s being proposed by Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill, it’s the mixed view that ideas influence things within the realm of what’s possible.

SammyDMartin Jul 1, 2021, 3:09 PM
33 points
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on: COVID: How did we do? How can we know?
Is there any public organisation which can be proud of last year?
This is an important question, because we want to find out what was done right organizationally in a situation where most failed, so we can do more of it. Especially if this is a test-run for X-risks.
There are two examples that come to mind of government agencies that did a moderately good job at a task which was new and difficult. One is the UK’s vaccine taskforce, which was set up by Dominic Cummings and the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance and responsible for the relatively fast procurement and rollout. You might say similar for the Operation Warp Speed team, but the UK vaccine taskforce overordered to a larger extent than Warp Speed and was also responsible for other sane things like the simple oldest-first vaccine prioritization and the first doses first decision, which prevented a genuine catastrophe due to the B117 variant. (Also credit to the MHRA (the UK’s regulator) for mostly staying out of the way.)
See this from Cummings’ blog, which also outlines many of the worst early expert failures on covid, and my discussion of it here:
This is why there was no serious vaccine plan — i.e spending billions on concurrent (rather than the normal sequential) creation/manufacturing/distribution etc — until after the switch to Plan B. I spoke to Vallance on 15 March about a ‘Manhattan Project’ for vaccines out of Hancock’s grip but it was delayed by the chaotic shift from Plan A to lockdown then the PM’s near-death. In April Vallance, the Cabinet Secretary and I told the PM to create the Vaccine Taskforce, sideline Hancock, and shift commercial support from DHSC to BEIS. He agreed, this happened, the Chancellor supplied the cash. On 10 May I told officials that the VTF needed a) a much bigger budget, b) a completely different approach to DHSC’s, which had been mired in the usual processes, so it could develop concurrent plans, and c) that Bingham needed the authority to make financial decisions herself without clearance from Hancock.
This plan later went on to succeed and significantly outperform expectations for rollout speed, with early approval for the AZ and Pfizer vaccines and an early decision to delay second doses by 12 weeks. I see the success of the UK vaccine taskforce and its ability to have a somewhat appropriate sense of the costs and benefits involved and the enormous value of vaccinations, to be a good example of how it’s institution design that is the key issue which most needs fixing. Have an efficient, streamlined taskforce, and you can still get things done in government.
The other example of success often discussed is the central banks, especially in the US, which responded quickly to the COVID-19 dip and prevented a much worse economic catastrophe. Alex Tabarrok:
So what lessons should we take from this? Lewis doesn’t say but my colleague Garett Jones argues for more independent agencies in his excellent book 10% Less Democracy. The problem with the CDC was that after 1976 it was too responsive to political pressures, i.e. too democratic. What are the alternatives?
The Federal Reserve is governed by a seven-member board each of whom is appointed to a single 14- year term, making it rare for a President to be able to appoint a majority of the board. Moreover, since members cannot be reappointed there is less incentive to curry political favor. The Chairperson is appointed by the President to a four-year term and must also be approved by the Senate. These checks and balances make the Federal Reserve a relatively independent agency with the power to reject democratic pressures for inflationary stimulus. Although independent central banks can be a thorn in the side of politicians who want their aid in juicing the economy as elections approach, the evidence is that independent central banks reduce inflation without reducing economic growth. A multi-member governing board with long and overlapping appointments could also make the CDC more independent from democratic politics which is what you want when a once in 100 year pandemic hits and the organization needs to make unpopular decisions before most people see the danger.
I really would like to be able to agree with Tabarrok here and say that, yes, choosing the right experts and protecting them from democratic feedback is the right answer and all we would need, and the expert failures we saw were due to democratic pressure in one form another, but the problem is that we can just look at SAGE in the UK early in the Pandemic or Anders Tegnell in Sweden, who were close to unfireable and much more independent, but underperformed badly. Or China, which is entirely protected from democratic interference and still didn’t do challenge trials.
Just saying the words ‘have the right experts and prevent them from being biased by outside interference’ doesn’t make it so. But, at the same time, it is possible to have fast-responding teams of experts that make the right decisions, if they’re the right experts—the Vaccine Taskforce proves that. I think the advice from the book 10% less democracy still stands, but we have to approach implementing it with far more caution than I would have thought pre-covid.
It seems like following the 10% less democracy policy can give you either a really great outcome like the one you’ve described, and like we saw a small sliver of in the UK’s vaccine procurement, or a colossal disaster like your impossible to fire expert epidemiologists torpedoing your economy and public health and then changing their mind a year late.
Suppose the UK had created a ‘pandemic taskforce’ with similar composition to the vaccine taskforce, in February instead of April, and with a wider remit over things like testing and running the trials. I think many of your happy timeline steps could have taken place.
One of the more positive signs that I’ve seen in recent times, is that well-informed elite opinion (going by, for example, the Economist editorials) has started to shift towards scepticism of these institutions and a recognition of how badly they’ve failed. We even saw an NYT article about the CDC and whether reform is possible.
Among the people who matter for policymaking, the scale of the failure has not been swept under the rug. See here:
We believe that Mr Biden is wrong. A waiver may signal that his administration cares about the world, but it is at best an empty gesture and at worst a cynical one.
...
Economists’ central estimate for the direct value of a course is $2,900—if you include factors like long covid and the effect of impaired education, the total is much bigger.
This strikes me as the sort of remark I’d expect to see in one of these threads, which has to be a good sign.
What links here?
- SammyDMartin's comment on AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA by Jason Brennan (Aug 18, 2021, 5:09 PM; 18 points)
- Sammy Martin's comment on Omicron Variant Post #1: We’re F***ed, It’s Never Over by Zvi (LessWrong; Nov 27, 2021, 3:16 PM; 9 points)

SammyDMartin May 16, 2021, 11:25 PM
6 points
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on: Why should we *not* put effort into AI safety research?
Alignment by default: if we have very strong reasons to expect that the methods that are best suited for ensuring that AI is aligned are the same as the methods that are best suited for ensuring that we have AI that is capable enough to understand what we want and act on it, in the first place.

To the extent that alignment by default is likely we don’t need a special effort to be put into AI safety because we can assume that the economic incentives will be such that we will put as much effort into AI safety as is needed, and if we don’t put the sufficient effort into AI safety, we won’t have capable AI or transformative AI anyway

Stuart Russell talks about this as a real possibility but see also, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nwgdq6kHke5LY692J/alignment-by-default

SammyDMartin May 14, 2021, 11:58 AM
2 points
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on: Vitalik Buterin just donated $54M (in ETH) to GiveWell
We know he’s been active on lesswrong in the past. Is it possible he’s been reading the posts here?

SammyDMartin May 6, 2021, 12:25 AM
7 points
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in reply to: Tejas Subramaniam’s comment on: Three charitable recommendations for COVID-19 in India
Thanks for getting back to me—I took Jeff’s calculations and did some guesstimating to try and figure out what demand might look like over the next few weeks. The only covid forecast I was able to find for India (let me know if you’ve seen another!) is this by IHME. Their ‘hospital resource use’ forecast shows that they expect a demand of 2 million beds, roughly what was the case in the week before Jeff produced his estimate of the value of oxygen-based interventions (last week of April), to be exceeded until the start of June, which is 30 days from when the estimate was produced. I’m assuming that his estimate was based on what the demand looked like over the previous week.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in this figure, but around 3-8 weeks is a reasonable range for how many weeks demand for oxygen will be at or above what it was in the last week of April, given that the IHME forecast is 4 weeks.
Taking the mean of the estimates, excluding ventilators (since they’re an outlier), gives us 31 days of use to equal givewell’s top charities, i.e. 4 weeks, and we can expect 3-8 weeks of demand being that high. So depending on how the epidemic pans out, it seems like, very roughly, three quarters to twice as good as Givewell’s top charities is a reasonable range of uncertainty.
EDIT: what I said should be taken as a lower limit, as it assumes that the value of oxygen is exactly what Jeff calculated when demand is greater than or equal to 2 Million, and zero below then, when in reality the value is real but smaller if demand is under 2M. I tried to account for this by skewing my guess, so 0.75 to 2x as good, where IHMEs demand numbers would suggest 1x as good.
What links here?
- Three charitable recommendations for COVID-19 in India by Tejas Subramaniam (May 5, 2021, 8:23 AM; 71 points)
- Sammy Martin's comment on Covid 5/13: Moving On by Zvi (LessWrong; May 14, 2021, 1:22 PM; 24 points)

SammyDMartin May 5, 2021, 11:59 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Three charitable recommendations for COVID-19 in India
Thanks for getting this done so quickly! Do you have any internal estimates (even order of magnitude ones) of the margin by which this exceeds Givewell’s top recommended charities? I’m intending to donate, but my decision would be significantly different if, for example, you thought GiveIndia Oxygen fundraiser was currently ~1-1.5 times better than Givewell’s top recommended charities, versus ~20 times better.
What links here?
- Sammy Martin's comment on Covid 5/13: Moving On by Zvi (LessWrong; May 14, 2021, 1:22 PM; 24 points)
- Sammy Martin's comment on Covid 6/3: No News is Good News by Zvi (LessWrong; Jun 4, 2021, 2:16 PM; 10 points)

SammyDMartin Aug 27, 2020, 5:11 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Moral Anti-Realism Sequence #3: Against Irreducible Normativity
I kind of feel this way, except that I think the target criteria can differ between people, and are often underdetermined. (As you point out in some comment, things also depend on which parts of one’s psychology one identifies with.)
I think that you were referring to this?
Normative realism implies identification with system 2
...
I find this very interesting because locating personal identity in system 1 feels conceptually impossible or deeply confusing. No matter how much rationalization goes on, it never seems intuitive to identify myself with system 1. How can you identify with the part of yourself that isn’t doing the explicit thinking, including the decision about which part of yourself to identify with? It reminds me of Nagel’s The Last Word.
My point here was that if you are a realist about normativity of any kind, you have to identify with system 2 as that is what makes the (potentially correct) judgements about what you ought to do.
But that’s not to say that if you are antirealist, you have to identify with system 1. If you are an antirealist, then in some sense (the realist sense) you don’t have to identify with anything, but how easy and natural it is to identify with system 2 depends on how much importance you place on coherence among your values, which in turn depends on how coherent and universalizable your values actually are—you can be an antirealist but accept that some fairly strong degree of convergence does occur in practice, for whatever reason. This:
target criteria can differ between people, and are often underdetermined
seems to imply that you don’t think there will be much convergence practically, or that we should feel a strong pressure to reach high-level agreement on moral questions because such a project is never going to succeed.
I think this is part of the motivation for your ‘case for suffering focussed ethics’ - even though any asymmetry between preventing suffering and producing happiness falls victim to the absurd conclusion and paralysis argument, I’m assuming that this wouldn’t bother you much.
I talk about why, regardless of whether realism is true, I think this is an unstable position in that post.

SammyDMartin Aug 27, 2020, 5:03 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Moral Anti-Realism Sequence #3: Against Irreducible Normativity
This discussion continues to feel like the most productive discussion I’ve had with a moral realist! :)
Glad to be of help! I feel like I’m learning a lot.
What would you reply if the AI uses the same structure of arguments against other types of normative realism as it uses against moral realism? This would amount to the following trilemma for proponents of irreducible normativity (using section headings from my text)
...
(3) Is there a speaker-independent normative reality?
Focussing on epistemic facts, the AI could not make that argument. I assumed that you had the AI lack the concept of epistemic reasons because you agreed with me that there is no possible argument out of using this concept, if you start out with the concept, not because you just felt that it would have been too much of a detour to have the AI explain why it finds the concept incoherent.
I think I agree with all of this, but I’m not sure, because we seem to draw different conclusions. In any case, I’m now convinced I should have written the AI’s dialogue a bit differently. You’re right that the AI shouldn’t just state that it has no concept of irreducible normative facts. It should provide an argument as well!
How would this analogous argument go? I’ll take the AI’s key point and reword it to be speaking about epistemic facts instead of moral facts
AI: To motivate the use of irreducibly normative concepts, philosophers often point to instances of universal agreement on epistemic propositions. Sammy Martin uses the example “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4.” Your intuition suggests that all epistemic propositions work the same way. Therefore, you might conclude that even for propositions philosophers disagree over, there exists a solution that’s “just as right” as “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4” is right. However, you haven’t established that all epistemic statements work the same way—that was just an intuition. “we always have a reason to believe that 2+2=4” describes something that people are automatically disposed to believe. It expresses something that normally-disposed people come to endorse by their own lights. That makes it a true fact of some kind, but it’s not necessarily an “objective” or “speaker-independent” fact. If you want to show beyond doubt that there are epistemic facts that don’t depend on the attitudes held by the speakers—i.e., epistemic facts beyond what people themselves will judge to be what you should believe —you’d need to deliver a stronger example. But then you run into the following dilemma: If you pick a self-evident epistemic proposition, you face the critique that the “epistemic facts” that you claim exist are merely examples of a subjectivist epistemology. By contrast, if you pick an example proposition that philosophers can reasonably disagree over, you face the critique that you haven’t established what it could mean for one party to be right. If one person claims we have reason to believe that alien life exists, and another person denies this, how would we tell who’s right? What is the question that these two parties disagree on? Thus far, I have no coherent account of what it could mean for an epistemic theory to be right in the elusive, objectivist sense that Martin and other normative realists hold in mind.
Bob: I think I followed that. You mentioned the example of uncontroversial epistemic propositions, and you seemed somewhat dismissive about their relevance? I always thought those were pretty interesting. Couldn’t I hold the view that true epistemic statements are always self-evident? Maybe not because self-evidence is what makes them true, but because, as rational beings, we are predisposed to appreciate epistemic facts?
AI: Such an account would render epistemology very narrow. Incredibly few epistemic propositions appear self-evident to all humans. The same goes for whatever subset of “well-informed” or “philosophically sophisticated” humans you may want to construct.
It doesn’t work, does it? The reason it doesn’t work is that the scenario in which the AI is written where it ‘concluded’ that ‘incredibly few epistemic propositions appear self-evident to all humans’ is unimaginable. What would it mean for this to be true, what would the world have to be like?
I think the points in (3) apply to all domains of normativity, and they show that unless we come up with some other way to make normative concepts work that I haven’t yet thought of, we are forced to accept that normative concepts, in order to be action-guiding and meaningful, have to be linked to claims about convergence in human expert reasoners.
I do not believe it is logically impossible that expert reasoners could diverge on all epistemic facts, but I do think that it is in some fairly deep sense impossible. For there to be such a divergence, reality itself would have to be unknowable.
The ‘speaker-independent normative reality’ that epistemic facts refer to is just actual objective reality—of all the potential epistemic facts out there, the one that actually corresponds to reality is the one that ‘sticks out’ in exactly the way that a speaker-independent normative reality should.
This means that there is no possible world where anyone with the concept of epistemic facts gets convinced, probabilistically, because they fail to see any epistemic convergence, that there are no epistemic facts. There would never be such a lack of convergence.
So my initial point,
The AI is in the latter camp, but not because of evidence, the way that it’s a moral anti-realist (...However, you haven’t established that all normative statements work the same way—that was just an intuition...), but just because it’s constructed in such a way that it lacks the concept of an epistemic reason.
So, if this AI is constructed such that irreducibly normative facts about how to reason aren’t comprehensible to it, it only has access to argument 1), which doesn’t work. It can’t imagine 2).
still stands—that the AI is a normative anti-realist because it doesn’t have the concept of a normative reason, not because it has the concept and has decided that it probably doesn’t apply (and there was no alternative way for you to write the AI reaching that conclusion).
The trilemma applies here as well. Saying that it must apply still leaves you with the task of making up your mind on how normative concepts even work. I don’t see alternatives to my suggestions (1), (2) and (3).
So I take option (3), where the ‘extremely strong convergence’ on claims about epistemic facts about what we should believe implies with virtual certainty that there is a speaker-independent normative reality, because the reality-corresponding collection of epistemic claims, in fact, stick out compared to all the other possible epistemic facts.
So, maybe the ‘normativity argument’ as I called it is really just another convergence argument, but just a convergence argument that is of infinite or near-infinite strength, because the convergence among our beliefs about what is epistemically justified is so strong that it’s effectively unimaginable that they couldn’t converge.

If you wish to deny that epistemic facts are needed to explain the convergence, I think that you end up in quite a strong form of pragmatism about truth, and give up on the notion of knowing anything about mind-independent objective reality, Kant-style, for reasons that I discuss here. That’s quite a bullet to bite. You don’t expect much convergence on epistemic facts, so maybe you are already a pragmatist about truth?
“Since we probably agree that there is a lot of convergence among expert reasoners on epistemic facts, we shouldn’t be too surprised if morality works similarly.”
And I kind of agree with that, but I don’t know how much convergence I would expect in epistemology. (I think it’s plausible that it would be higher than for morality, and I do agree that this is an argument to at least look really closely for ways of bringing about convergence on moral questions.)
Lastly,
My confidence that convergence won’t work is based on not only observing disagreements in fundamental intuitions, but also on seeing why people disagree, and seeing that these disagreements are sometimes “legitimate” because ethical discussions always get stuck in the same places (differences in life goals, which is intertwined with axiology).
I’ll have to wait for your more specific arguments on this topic! I did give some preliminary discussion here of why, for example, I think that you’re dragged towards a total-utilitarian view whether you like it or not. It’s also important to note that the convergence arguments aren’t (principally) about people, but about possible normative theories—people might refuse to accept the implications of their own beliefs.
What links here?
- MichaelStJules's comment on SDM’s Shortform by Sammy Martin (LessWrong; Aug 28, 2020, 4:30 AM; 2 points)

SammyDMartin Aug 14, 2020, 10:48 AM
1 point
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on: Center for Global Development: The UK as an Effective Altruist
I thought that this post would make a bigger deal of the UK’s coronavirus response—currently top in the world for both vaccine development and large-scale clinical trials, and one of the leading funders of international vaccine development research.

SammyDMartin Jul 29, 2020, 10:25 AM
6 points
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on: Moral Anti-Realism Sequence #3: Against Irreducible Normativity
How to make anti-realism existentially satisfying
Instead of “utilitarianism as the One True Theory,” we consider it as “utilitarianism as a personal, morally-inspired life goal...
”While this concession is undoubtedly frustrating, proclaiming others to be objectively wrong rarely accomplished anything anyway. It’s not as though moral disagreements—or disagreements in people’s life choices—would go away if we adopted moral realism.
If your goal here is to convince those inclined towards moral realism to see anti-realism as existentially satisfying, I would recommend a different framing of it. I think that framing morality as a ‘personal life goal’ makes it seem as though it is much more a matter of choice or debate than it in fact is, and will probably ring alarm bells in the mind of a realist and make them think of moral relativism.
Speaking as someone inclined towards moral realism, the most inspiring presentations I’ve ever seen of anti-realism are those given by Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle and Eliezer Yudkowsky in his metaethics sequence. Probably not by coincidence—both of these people are inclined to be realists. Eliezer said as much, and Singer later became a realist after reading Parfit. Eliezer Yudkowsky on ‘The Meaning of Right’:
The apparent objectivity of morality has just been explained—and not explained away. For indeed, if someone slipped me a pill that made me want to kill people, nonetheless, it would not be right to kill people. Perhaps I would actually kill people, in that situation—but that is because something other than morality would be controlling my actions.
Morality is not just subjunctively objective, but subjectively objective. I experience it as something I cannot change. Even after I know that it’s myself who computes this 1-place function, and not a rock somewhere—even after I know that I will not find any star or mountain that computes this function, that only upon me is it written—even so, I find that I wish to save lives, and that even if I could change this by an act of will, I would not choose to do so. I do not wish to reject joy, or beauty, or freedom. What else would I do instead? I do not wish to reject the Gift that natural selection accidentally barfed into me.
And Singer in the Expanding Circle:
“Whether particular people with the capacity to take an objective point of view actually do take this objective viewpoint into account when they act will depend on the strength of their desire to avoid inconsistency between the way they reason publicly and the way they act.”
These are both anti-realist claims. They define ‘right’ descriptively and procedurally as arising from what we would want to do under some ideal circumstances, and rigidifies on the output of that idealization, not on what we want. To a realist, this is far more appealing than a mere “personal, morally-inspired life goal”, and has the character of ‘external moral constraint’, even if it’s not really ultimately external, but just the result of immovable or basic facts about how your mind will, in fact work, including facts about how your mind finds inconsistencies in its own beliefs. This is a feature, not a bug:
According to utilitarianism, what people ought to spend their time on depends not on what they care about but also on how they can use their abilities to do the most good. What people most want to do only factors into the equation in the form of motivational constraints, constraints about which self-concepts or ambitious career paths would be long-term sustainable. Williams argues that this utilitarian thought process alienates people from their actions since it makes it no longer the case that actions flow from the projects and attitudes with which these people most strongly identify...
The exact thing that Williams calls ‘alienating’ is the thing that Singer, Yudkowsky, Parfit and many other realists and anti-realists consider to be the most valuable thing about morality! But you can keep this ‘alienation’ if you reframe morality as being the result of the basic, deterministic operations of your moral reasoning, the same way you’d reframe epistemic or practical reasoning on the anti-realist view. Then it seems more ‘external’ and less relativistic.
One thing this framing makes clearer, which you don’t deny but don’t mention, is that anti-realism does not imply relativism.
In that case, normative discussions can remain fruitful. Unfortunately, this won’t work in all instances. There will be cases where no matter how outrageous we find someone’s choices, we cannot say that they are committing an error of reasoning.
What we can say, on anti-realism as characterised by Singer and Yudkowsky, is that they are making an error of morality. We are not obligated (how could we be?) towards relativism, permissiveness or accepting values incompatible with our own on anti-realism. Ultimately, you can just say that ‘I am right and you are wrong’.
That’s one of the major upsides of anti-realism to the realist—you still get to make universal, prescriptive claims and follow them through, and follow them through because they are morally right, and if people disagree with you then they are morally wrong and you aren’t obligated to listen to their arguments if they arise from fundamentally incompatible values. Put that way, anti-realism is much more appealing to someone with realist inclinations.

SammyDMartin Jul 28, 2020, 9:12 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Moral Anti-Realism Sequence #3: Against Irreducible Normativity
You’ve given me a lot to think about! I broadly agree with a lot of what you’ve said here.
I think that it is a more damaging mistake to think moral antirealism is true when realism is true than vice versa, but I agree with you that the difference is nowhere near infinite, and doesn’t give you a strong wager.
However, I do think that normative anti-realism is self-defeating, assuming you start out with normative concepts (though not an assumption that those concepts apply to anything). I consider this argument to be step 1 in establishing moral realism, nowhere near the whole argument.
Epistemic anti-realism
Cool, I’m happy that this argument appeals to a moral realist! ….
...I don’t think this argument (“anti-realism is self-defeating”) works well in this context. If anti-realism is just the claim “the rocks or free-floating mountain slopes that we’re seeing don’t connect to form a full mountain,” I don’t see what’s self-defeating about that...
To summarize: There’s no infinitely strong wager for moral realism.
I agree that there is no infinitely strong wager for moral realism. As soon as moral realists start making empirical claims about the consequences of realism (that convergence is likely), you can’t say that moral realism is true necessarily or that there is an infinitely strong prior in favour of it. An AI that knows that your idealised preferences don’t cohere could always show up and prove you wrong, just as you say. If I were Bob in this dialogue, I’d happily concede that moral anti-realism is true.
If (supposing it were the case) there were not much consensus on anything to do with morality (“The rocks don’t connect...”), someone who pointed that out and said ‘from that I infer that moral realism is unlikely’ wouldn’t be saying anything self-defeating. Moral anti-realism is not self-defeating, either on its own terms or on the terms of a ‘mixed view’ like I describe here:
We have two competing ways of understanding how beliefs are justified. One is where we have anti-realist ‘justification’ for our beliefs, in purely descriptive terms, the other in which there are mind-independent facts about which of our beliefs are justified...
However, I do think that there is an infinitely strong wager in favour of normative realism and that normative anti-realism is self-defeating on the terms of a ‘mixed view’ that starts out considering the two alternatives like that given above. This wager is because of the subset of normative facts that are epistemic facts.
The example that I used was about ‘how beliefs are justified’. Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I was referring to beliefs in general, not to beliefs about morality. Epistemic facts, e.g. that you should believe something if there is sufficient amount of evidence, are a kind of normative fact. You noted them on your list here.
So, the infinite wager argument goes like this -
1) On normative anti-realism there are no facts about which beliefs are justified. So there are no facts about whether normative anti-realism is justified. Therefore, normative anti-realism is self-defeating.
Except that doesn’t work! Because on normative anti-realism, the whole idea of external facts about which beliefs are justified is mistaken, and instead we all just have fundamental principles (whether moral or epistemic) that we use but don’t question, which means that holding a belief without (the realist’s notion of) justification is consistent with anti-realism.
So the wager argument for normative realism actually goes like this -
2) We have two competing ways of understanding how beliefs are justified. One is where we have anti-realist ‘justification’ for our beliefs, in purely descriptive terms of what we will probably end up believing given basic facts about how our minds work in some idealised situation. The other is where there are mind-independent facts about which of our beliefs are justified. The latter is more plausible because of 1).
Evidence for epistemic facts?
I find it interesting the imagined scenario you give in #5 essentially skips over argument 2) as something that is impossible to judge:
AI: Only in a sense I don’t endorse as such! We’ve gone full circle. I take it that you believe that just like there might be irreducibly normative facts about how to do good, the same goes for irreducible normative facts about how to reason?
Bob: Indeed, that has always been my view.
AI: Of course, that concept is just as incomprehensible to me.
The AI doesn’t give evidence against there being irreducible normative facts about how to reason, it just states it finds the concept incoherent, unlike the (hypothetical) evidence that the AI piles on against moral realism (for example, that people’s moral preferences don’t cohere).
Either you think some basic epistemic facts have to exist for reasoning to get off the ground and therefore that epistemic anti-realism is self-defeating, or you are an epistemic anti-realist and don’t care about the realist’s sense of ‘self-defeating’. The AI is in the latter camp, but not because of evidence, the way that it’s a moral anti-realist (...However, you haven’t established that all normative statements work the same way—that was just an intuition...), but just because it’s constructed in such a way that it lacks the concept of an epistemic reason.
So, if this AI is constructed such that irreducibly normative facts about how to reason aren’t comprehensible to it, it only has access to argument 1), which doesn’t work. It can’t imagine 2).
However, I think that we humans are in a situation where 2) is open to consideration, where we have the concept of a reason for believing something, but aren’t sure if it applies—and if we are in that situation, I think we are dragged towards thinking that it must apply, because otherwise our beliefs wouldn’t be justified.
However, this doesn’t establish moral realism—as you said earlier, moral anti-realism is not self-defeating.
If anti-realism is just the claim “the rocks or free-floating mountain slopes that we’re seeing don’t connect to form a full mountain,” I don’t see what’s self-defeating about that
Combining convergence arguments and the infinite wager
If you want to argue for moral realism, then you need evidence for moral realism, which comes in the form of convergence arguments. But the above argument is still relevant, because the convergence and ‘infinite wager’ arguments support each other.
The reason 2) would be bolstered by the success of convergence arguments (in epistemology, or ethics, or any other normative domain) is that convergence arguments increase our confidence that normativity is a coherent concept—which is what 2) needs to work. It certainly seems coherent to me, but this cannot be taken as self-evident since various people have claimed that they or others don’t have the concept.
I also think that 2) is some evidence in favour of moral realism, because it undermines some of the strongest antirealist arguments.
By contrast, for versions of normativity that depend on claims about a normative domain’s structure, the partners-in-crime arguments don’t even apply. After all, just because philosophers might—hypothetically, under idealized circumstances—agree on the answers to all (e.g.) decision-theoretic questions doesn’t mean that they would automatically also find agreement on moral questions.[29] On this interpretation of realism, all domains have to be evaluated separately
I don’t think this is right. What I’m giving here is such a ‘partners-in-crime’ argument with a structure, with epistemic facts at the base. Realism about normativity certainly should lower the burden of proof on moral realism to prove total convergence now, because we already have reason to believe normative facts exist. For most anti-realists, the very strongest argument is the ‘queerness argument’ that normative facts are incoherent or too strange to be allowed into our ontology. The ‘partners-in-crime’/‘infinite wager’ undermines this strong argument against moral realism. So some sort of very strong hint of a convergence structure might be good enough—depending on the details.
I agree that it then shifts the arena to convergence arguments. I will discuss them in posts 6 and 7.
So, with all that out of the way, when we start discussing the convergence arguments, the burden of proof on them is not colossal. If we already have reason to suspect that there are normative facts out there, perhaps some of them are moral facts. But if we found a random morass of different considerations under the name ‘morality’ then we’d be stuck concluding that there might be some normative facts, but maybe they are only epistemic facts, with nothing else in the domain of normativity.
I don’t think this is the case, but I will have to wait until your posts on that topic—I look forward to them!
All I’ll say is that I don’t consider strongly conflicting intuitions in e.g. population ethics to be persuasive reasons for thinking that convergence will not occur. As long as the direction of travel is consistent, and we can mention many positive examples of convergence, the preponderance of evidence is that there are elements of our morality that reach high-level agreement. (I say elements because realism is not all-or-nothing—there could be an objective ‘core’ to ethics, maybe axiology, and much ethics could be built on top of such a realist core—that even seems like the most natural reading of the evidence, if the evidence is that there is convergence only on a limited subset of questions.) If Kant could have been a utilitarian and never realised it, then those who are appalled by the repugnant conclusion could certainly converge to accept it after enough ideal reflection!
Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

SammyDMartin Jul 28, 2020, 4:00 PM
14 points
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on: ‘The Precipice’ Book Review
But instilling the urgency to do so may require another type of writing-that of science fiction, of more creative visionaries who are willing to paint in vivid detail a picture of what a flourishing human future could be.
If it’s emotive force you’re after, you may be interested in this—Toby Ord just released a collection of quotations on Existential risk and the future of humanity, everyone from Kepler to Winston Churchill (in fact, a surprisingly large number are from Churchill) to Seneca to Mill to the Aztecs—it’s one of the most inspirational things I have ever read, and makes it clear that there have always been people who cared about humanity as a whole. My all-time favourite is probably this by the philosopher Derek Parfit:
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.

SammyDMartin

How to make anti-realism existentially satisfying

Epistemic anti-realism

Evidence for epistemic facts?

Combining convergence arguments and the infinite wager