sbehmer

Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

Share­holder activism

Is Ne­glect­ed­ness a Strong Pre­dic­tor of Marginal Im­pact?

• sbehmer 5 May 2020 15:29 UTC

  15 points

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  on: Re­duc­ing long-term risks from malev­olent actors

  Thanks, it’s a very nice article on an important topic. If you’re interested, there’s a small literature in political economy called “political selection” (here’s an older survey article) . As far as I know they don’t focus specifically on the extreme lower tail of bad leaders, but they do discuss how different institutional features can lead to different types of people gaining power.

• sbehmer 30 Mar 2020 19:58 UTC

  15 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  I agree with your intuition that with what a “cooperative” cause prioritization might look like. Although I do think a lot more work would need to be done to formalize this. I also think it may not make sense to use cooperative cause prioritization: if everyone else always acts non-cooperatively, you should too.

  I’m actually pretty skeptical of the idea that EA tends to fund causes which are widely valued by people as a whole. It could be true, but it seems like it would be a very convenient coincidence. EA seems to be made up of people with pretty unique value systems (this, I’d expect, is partly what leads EAs to view some causes as being orders of magnitude more important than the causes that other people choose to fund). It would be surprising if optimizing independently for the average EA value system leads to the same funding choices as would optimizing for some combination of the value systems in the general population. While I agree that global poverty work seems to be pretty broadly valued (many governments and international organizations are devoted to it), I’m unsure about things like x-risk reduction. Have you seen any evidence that that is broadly popular? Does the UN have an initiative on x-risk?

  I would imagine that work which improves institutions is one cause area which would look significantly more important in the cooperative framework. As I mention in the post, governments are one of the main ways that groups of people solve collective action problems, so improving their functioning would probably benefit most value systems. This would involve improving both formal institutions (constitutions), or informal institutions (civic social norms). In the cooperative equilibrium, we could all be made better off because people of all different value systems would put a significant amount of resources towards building and maintaining strong institutions.

  A (tentative) response to your second to last paragraph: the preferences of animals and future generations would probably not be directly considered when constructing the cooperative world portfolio. Gains from cooperation come from people who have control over resources working together so that they’re better off than in the case where they independently spend their resources. Animals do not control any resources, so there are no gains from cooperating with them. Just like in the non-cooperative case, the preferences of animals will only be reflected indirectly due to people who care about animals (just to be clear: I do think that we should care about animals and future people). I expect this is mostly true of future generations as well, but maybe there is some room for inter-temporal cooperation.

• sbehmer 6 Dec 2020 3:12 UTC

  14 points

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  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: Ask Us Any­thing!

  What is the LTFF’s position on whether we’re currently at an extremely influential time for direct work? I saw that there was a recent grant on research into patient philanthropy, but most of the grants seem to be made from the perspective of someone who thinks that we are at “the hinge of history”. Is that true?

• sbehmer 31 Mar 2020 17:25 UTC

  12 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  I’d be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?

  The more general model captured the idea that there are almost always gains from cooperation between those looking to do good. It doesn’t show, however, that those gains are necessarily large relative to the costs of building cooperation (including opportunity costs). I’m not sure what the answer is to that.

  Here’s one line of reasoning which makes me think the net gains from cooperation may be large. Setting aside the possibility that everyone has near identical valuations of causes, I think we’re left with two likely scenarios:

  1. There’s enough overlap in valuations of direct-work to create significant gains from compromise on direct-work (maybe on the order of doubling each persons impact). This is like example A in the post.

  2. Valuations of direct work are so far apart (everyone thinks that their cause area is 100x more valuable than others) that we’re nearly in the situation from example D, and there will be relatively small gains from building cooperation on direct work. However, this creates opportunities for huge externalities due to advocacy, which means that the actual setting is closer to example B. Intuition: If you think x-risk mitigation is orders of magnitude more important than global poverty, then an intervention which persuades someone to switch from working on global poverty to x-risk will also have massive gains (and have massively negative impact from the perspective of the person who strongly prefers global poverty). I don’t think this is a minor concern. It seems like a lot of resources get wasted in politics due to people with nearly perpendicular value systems fighting each other through persuasion and other means.

  So, in either case, it seems like the gains from cooperation are large.

• sbehmer 19 Nov 2018 0:10 UTC

  11 points

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  in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Is Ne­glect­ed­ness a Strong Pre­dic­tor of Marginal Im­pact?

  Thanks for this comment! The links were helpful. I have a few comments on your points:

  ″ Empirically, we do see systematic diminishing returns to R&D inputs across fields of scientific and technological innovation ”

  After reading the introduction of that article you linked, I’m not sure that it has found evidence of diminishing returns to research, or at least that it has found the kind of diminishing returns that we would care about. They find that the number of researchers required to double GDP (or any other measure of output) has increased over time, but that doesn’t mean that the number of researchers required to increase GDP by a fixed amount has increased. In fact, if you take their Moore’s law example, we find that the number of transistors added to a computer chip per researcher per year is 58000 larger than it was in the early 70s (it takes 18 times more researchers to double the number of transistors, but that number of transistors is about a million times larger than it was in the 70s). When it comes to research on how to do the most good, I think we would care about research output in levels, rather than in percentage terms (so, I only care how many lives a health intervention would save at time t, rather than how many lives it will save as a percentage of the total amount of lives at time t).

  ″ In politics and public policy the literatures on lobbying and campaign finance suggest diminishing returns ”

  I’m struggling to see how those articles you linked are finding diminishing returns. Is there something I’m missing? The lobbying article says that the effectiveness of lobbying is larger when an issue does not receive much public attention, but that doesn’t mean that, for the same issue, the effectiveness of lobbying spending will drop with each dollar spent. Similarly, the campaign finance article mentions studies that find no causal connection between ad-spending and winning an election for general elections and others which show a causal connection for primary and local elections. I don’t see how this means that my second dollar donated to a campaign will have less expected value than my first dollar.

  As antonin_broi mentioned in another comment, political causes seem to have increasing returns built in to them. You need a majority to get a law passed or to get someone elected, so under complete certainty there would be zero (marginal) value to convincing people to vote your way until you reach the median voter. After that there will once again be zero marginal value to buying additional votes.

  ″ In growing new movements, there is an element of compounding returns, as new participants carry forward work (including further growth), and so influencing; this topic has been the subject of a fair amount of EA attention ”

  I agree that this is important for growing new movements, and I have seen EA articles discuss a sort of “multiplier effect” (if you convince one person to join a group they will then convince other people). But none of the articles I have seen, including the one that you linked, have mentioned the possibility of increasing returns to scale. Increasing returns would arise if the cost of convincing an additional person to join decreases with the number of people that are already involved. This could arise because of changing social norms or due to increased name recognition.

  ″ historically the greatest successes of philanthropy, reductions in poverty, and increased prosperity have stemmed from innovation, and many EA priorities involve research and development ”

  This brings up one potentially important point: in addition to scaling effects that you mentioned, another common source of increasing returns is high research and development requirements. High R&D requirements mean that the first units of output are very expensive (because in addition to the costs of production you also have to learn how to produce them) compared with following units. To apply this to an EA topic, if Givewell didn’t exist, then to do a unit of good in global health we would either have to fund less cost-effective charities (because we wouldn’t know which one was best) or pay money to create Givewell before donating to its highest recommended charities. In the second scenario, the cost of producing a unit of good within global health is very high for the first unit and significantly lower for the second. The fact that innovation seems to be one of the more effective forms of philanthropy increases the possibility that we are in a world where increasing returns to scale are relevant to doing good. However, I’m not completely sure on my reasoning here. I may be missing something.

  ″ Experience with successes using neglectedness (which in prioritization practice does involve looking at the reasons for neglect) thus far, at least on dimensions for which feedback has yet arrived ”

  I think this would be a very important piece of evidence. Can you give me some detail about the successes so far?

• sbehmer 7 Mar 2024 16:17 UTC

  10 points

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  in reply to: LewisBollard’s comment on: This is why we can’t have nice laws

  My sense is that most historic social reforms also followed path A), e.g. women’s suffrage, child labor, civil rights. In the UK, cross-party support was also critical to abolishing slavery, while in the US, where abolition was more politicized, it took a Civil War.

  As a non-expert, this is surprising to me. And I’m not sure that this applies to the US context. I think it’s useful to distinguish between party polarization (democrats vs republicans) and ideological polarization (liberals vs conservatives). Almost any reform passed in the 1950s-1970s probably had bipartisan support, since the two parties were hardly ideologically polarized at that time. But many of these reforms were absolutely politicized on ideological grounds (liberals typically were in favor of civil rights and environmental reforms. Conservatives were not). I think the anti-slavery movement fits this description as well. Until the last few years before the civil war, the two major political parties (democrats and whigs) both contained large groups of pro-slavery and anti-slavery politicians. So opposition to slavery was bipartisan even though it was clearly polarized on ideological and geographical grounds. Only in the few years before the civil war did the major parties become polarized on the slavery issue.
  In recent decades, since the two major parties have become more ideologically polarized, it seems like major reforms were politicized on both party and ideological lines (LGBTQ rights and climate change come to mind).
  
  So, my guess is that most major social reforms in US history were highly politicized on ideological lines, but not necessarily on party lines. I could be wrong though. This is mostly based on reading wikipedia pages.

• sbehmer 22 Oct 2020 22:35 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing LEEP: Lead Ex­po­sure Elimi­na­tion Project

  This looks great and thanks for posting! One question: how come those other organizations working in this space, who as you note have a track record of success in other countries, haven’t expanded to countries like Malawi? In other words, why is lead exposure reduction in Malawi neglected by other actors?

• sbehmer 30 Jun 2020 20:50 UTC

  9 points

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  in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: John Halstead: Is im­pact in­vest­ing im­pact­ful?

  Thanks for the reply.

  You’re right that the paper I posted doesn’t present direct evidence. I just thought it was important that in their literature review they claim that prior studies show that demand curves are not perfectly elastic (at least in theory. They aren’t citing empirical papers).

  On the empirical side, I’m surprised to hear you say that there seems to be agreement that long-run demand curves are perfectly elastic. On page 18 of the founder’s pledge report, you seem to say that there is expert disagreement on this, and you cite multiple recent studies on both sides of the issue. Has more evidence come out since the report was published?

• sbehmer 30 Jun 2020 15:22 UTC

  9 points

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  on: John Halstead: Is im­pact in­vest­ing im­pact­ful?

  It seems like you are fairly confident from your research that impact investing will tend to have little impact in publicly traded markets. I briefly looked into the theoretical literature on this, and I’m not seeing why we should be so confident in that idea. For example, this paper from 2019 claims:

  “In general, systematic screening of assets based on investors’ preferences leads to a return premium on the screened assets, in equilibrium, and such return differences cannot be arbitraged away by ‘neutral’ investors”.

  They then cite four theoretical papers in support of that claim (note: I haven’t actually read through these papers. I just glanced at the introductions and the setups of their models. It could be that these are bad papers).

  Were you aware of this literature when writing your report? Why should we be so confident in the arbitrage argument?

• sbehmer 30 Mar 2020 14:51 UTC

  8 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  Thanks for the clarification. I apologize for making it sound as if 80k specifically endorsed not cooperating.

• sbehmer 9 Feb 2020 18:46 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Differ­en­tial progress /​ in­tel­lec­tual progress /​ tech­nolog­i­cal development

  Thanks for the post!

  For people especially interested in this topic, it might be useful to know that there’s a literature within academic economics that’s very similar called “Directed Technical Change”. See Acemoglu (2002) for a well-cited reference.

  Although that literature has mostly focused on how different technological developments will impact wage inequality, the models used can be applied (I think) to a lot of the topics mentioned in your post.

• sbehmer 30 Jul 2020 13:05 UTC

  7 points

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  on: Com­mon ground for longtermists

  Thanks for the post. One question on the background: is there any data (from the EA survey or elsewhere) about the percentage of EAs who lean towards suffering-focused ethics?

• sbehmer 2 Jan 2021 22:40 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Im­prov­ing In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing: a new work­ing group

  This seems like a very good initiative. It’s great to see this cause area moving forward.

  Now, like some of the other commenters, I’m having some trouble understanding what kind of work IIDM includes. I agree with the earlier comment which said that the framing of IIDM so far has emphasized improving decision-making a lot more than improving institutions. The original 80k article focused mainly on the possibility of correcting cognitive biases (the kind that people would learn about in cognitive science or psychology classes). There was no mention of the large body of academic work relating to institutional design (this would mainly be learned in political economy or political science courses). Until reading the comments on this post, I was under the impression that IIDM was focused only on “how do we improve decision-making within the current political system” rather than “how can we reform the political system to work better”. So, for example, I thought that EA-funded organizations working on voting reform wouldn’t fall under IIDM.

  If you want IIDM to include institutional reform, then I think that should be made more clear. At least for me, one thing that would have helped is if a different name was used for the overall cause area (like improving institutions) and then within that cause area you have IIDM, which is focused only on improving decision-making within a given institutional structure.

  However, I’m pretty unsure of how much overlap there is between these two cause areas, so I’m not sure that it’s even worth having the institutional reform people in your working group. Does someone working on constitution design have much to contribute to a discussion on how to teach civil servants to better deal with uncertainty? At least in the academic world, these two fields are fairly separate (from what I can tell). Maybe it would better to have these mostly operate as two separate cause areas.

• sbehmer 31 Mar 2020 17:20 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  I’d still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it’s going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation.

  For now, I don’t think any major changes in decisions should be made based on this. We don’t know enough about how difficult it would be to build cooperation and what the gains to cooperation would be. I guess the only concrete recommendation may be to more strongly emphasize the “not being a jerk” part of effective altruism (especially because that can often be in major conflict with the “maximize impact” part). Also I would argue that there’s a chance that cooperation could be very important and so it’s worth researching more.

• sbehmer 8 Aug 2022 19:27 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Share­holder activism

  Good question, and I haven’t been very clear on this partially because I don’t know much about it.

  That said, I do think it’s common for nonprofits to have lots of money invested in the stock market. This is what philanthropic foundations do. Examples include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($38B in assets) or the Ford Foundation ($16B). Universities are other examples of nonprofits with huge investments in the stock market (the Harvard Endowment is $53.2B).

  Within EA, I think the two major foundations are Good Ventures (which funds Open Philanthropy’s recommendations) and FTX Foundation. It looks like Good Ventures had $3.4B in assets in 2020, and it was growing at around $1B a year before then, so it may be significantly higher now (I haven’t been able to find more current data). I also haven’t been able to find data on FTX since it’s so new.

  Based on the information provided in the post, I would guess that Good Ventures’ existing investments are enough to engage in impactful shareholder activism.

  Maybe another commenter with more knowledge about this stuff could chime in and correct any mistakes I’m making.

• sbehmer 29 Aug 2020 16:30 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  Thanks, this is a very good comment. I mostly cited that article for the literature review, which includes a few papers that argue for a causal connection between learning economics and free-riding. However, I looked into it more today, and it seems like the entire body of work is inconclusive on this question. Here’s a more recent literature review on that.

  I’ll edit that part of the post to be more accurate.

• sbehmer 30 Mar 2020 20:25 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: sbehmer’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

  One more example to add here of a cause which may be like a “public good” within the EA community: promoting international cooperation. Many important causes are global public goods (that is, causes which benefit the whole world and thus any one nation has an incentive to free-ride on other nations’ contributions), including global poverty, climate change, x-risk reduction, and animal welfare. I know that FHI already has some research on building international cooperation. I would guess that some EAs who primarily give to global poverty would be willing to shift funding towards building international cooperation if some EAs who normally give to AI safety do the same.