slicedonions

Karma: 71

slicedonions 3 Sep 2022 16:37 UTC
3 points
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on: Ideological tensions between Effective Altruism and The UK Civil Service
Thanks for writing this up! I’m also a civil servant with a similar length of tenure. To add my two cents for other readers considering a career in the civil service, I’ve not found particular issues with the democracy and comprehensivity values you raise so far.

On the democracy value—I see a simplified three-staged process for policy work and in my experience if you’re working on an impactful policy area it often leaves lots of space for satisfying EA action:
1. Provide the most thoughtful and careful advice you can given any institutional constraints you face—this is typically quite aligned with an EA worldview.
2. Let Ministers make the decision (sometimes this will go against your view of where the evidence leads) - this can be frustrating, but lots in this world is frustrating and outside our control, I think that part of the joy (and pain) of EA is optimising around constraints and this is just another one.
3. Implement the decision in the most pro-social way within the constraints of the steer you’ve been given—most ministerial steers don’t fill in all the detail meaning it’s a requirement for the civil servant to fill in the blanks, this is also quite aligned with an EA worldview.
On the comprehensivity value—I think the best move for an individual EA civil servant is to spend a bit of time early on in their career gathering some general civil service career capital and rotating around often to get it. Then to seek to specialise in a high-impact policy area and stick around for the long haul trying to become highly skilled at making good policy in that area. The fact that lots of others rotate regularly doesn’t mean we have to. There are also so few EA-aligned civil servants that it doesn’t feel like we’re close to having unhelpful competition for important roles.
I think we agree on a bunch but do push back :)

slicedonions 6 Jul 2022 17:57 UTC
3 points
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on: Working in the industrial meat industry?
I’m an EA working on improving animal welfare who interacts quite a lot (in non adversarial contexts) with various big meat companies as part of my job. I think it’s a real oversight that we aren’t encouraging more people (especially those with more consequentialist ethics outlooks) to go and work within industry and help it improve from the inside (this also applies to joining buying teams in supermarkets). Whilst there are real constraints, I think bright people could get promoted quickly and then push for incremental improvements which could improve the welfare of large numbers of farm animals.

Happy to chat more to anyone interested!

slicedonions 12 Dec 2021 14:04 UTC
11 points
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on: Takeaways on US Policy Careers (Part 1): Paths to Impact and Personal Fit
This is excellent and is amongst the most thoughtful reflections on impact via policy that I’ve read, so thanks for writing it up.

I lead a policy team in the UK Civil Service working on a classic EA cause area and lots of the content here about routes to impact chimes with my experience, though obviously the institutional set-up in the UK is different.
From my experience, the points under the heading: ‘Big impact wins require taking the time to look for non-obvious opportunities’ are incredibly important. There are often super exciting opportunities for impact that sit outside of what your boss directly expects you to be doing and these can be reasonably easy to achieve if you cultivate the discipline of lifting your head above the grind to reflect on available opportunities and also then protecting enough time to pursue them alongside your more standard obligations.

slicedonions 4 Dec 2021 21:39 UTC
1 point
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on: What is the maximum number of days of pig confinement that you would exchange in order to save one piglet from being crushed?
Hmmmmmm, around 10 days is my best current guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it should be more like 100 days, I assume crushing involves extreme pain which crating doesn’t and so it wouldn’t be outrageous to me if it ended up being more like that.

slicedonions 3 Apr 2021 7:39 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JeremyR’s comment on: EA for Jews—Proposal and Request for Comment
I’d be happy to chat about it if helpful, I helped found EA for Christians and have spent a bunch of time thinking about different word choices for our name, though you may already be in contact with members of our team.

Our Facebook group is called ‘Christians and Effective Altruism’ I think this wording allows Christians who don’t yet feel comfortable with fully aligning with EA to join and participate which has been useful for us in terms of outreach.

Then in terms of the name for our actual org, I see three options (i) ‘EA for Christians’, (ii) ‘Christians in EA’ and (iii) some wording like our Facebook group name using ‘and’.

Whilst (ii) feels the cleanest, as noted above it reads as an affinity group without the outreach edge which is a core part of our org. (iii) is also inoffensive but sounds like it lacks a mission which I think can also be unattractive when doing outreach. I like the fact that in (i) Christianity is spotlighted, which works with the way Christians are encouraged to think about their Christian identity being the most central to them. The downside is that it risks sounding like it’s EA being used in support of Christians, which obviously isn’t our goal, rather the use of for is meant to imply that EA provides an invaluable toolkit to aid Christians in their God-given mission to serve others.

slicedonions 28 Mar 2021 12:17 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: FAQ: UK Civil Service Job Applications
I’m also a current UK Civil Servant and agree with Kirsten. I don’t think doing a Masters in public policy is going to do much to help your application. Obviously, there can be lots of good reasons to do one, but I wouldn’t treat as a major factor it helping you get into the UK Civil Service.

slicedonions 6 Mar 2021 20:21 UTC
1 point
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on: Subjectivism and moral authority
Thanks for another excellent post. I continue to get a lot out of your writing, so please keep it coming!

I’ve always found the idea of ‘bindingness’ as the most intuitive term I can grasp towards to get at what it’s like to be under the purview of a normative ought. You can choose to ignore the ought, or fail to realise that it’s there, but regardless it’ll be there binding you until you comply, and whilst you don’t comply your hypothetical normative life score is jettisoning points and you’re slipping down the league table. (Note I’m coming from a normative realist perspective)
Ultimately I think my view is that what one ought to do is just that which there is all-things-considered most reason to do, and I’ve always had the intuition that what it means to have a reason to do something is primitive and not amenable to deeper analysis. Interested in whether you think that having a normative reason is a primitive concept / any useful reading on the topic you might know on the topic?

slicedonions 17 Jan 2021 22:19 UTC
3 points
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on: Alienation and meta-ethics (or: is it possible you should maximize helium?)
This was one of my favourite EA Forum posts in a long time, thanks for sharing it!

Externalist realism is my preferred theory. Though I think we’d probably need something like God to exist in order for humans to have epistemic access to any normative facts. I’ve spent a bit of time reflecting on the “they understand everything there is to understand; they have seen through to the core of reality, and reality, it turns out, is really into helium. But they, unfortunately, aren’t.” style case. Of course it’d be really painful, but I think the appropriate response would be to understand the issue as one of human motivational brokenness. Something has gone wrong in my wiring which means my motivations are not properly functioning as they are out of kilter with what there is all-things-considered most reason to do, namely promote helium. That doesn’t mean that I’m to blame for this mismatch. But I’d hope that I’d then push this acknowledgement of my motivational brokenness into a course of actions to see if I can get my motivations to fall in line with the normative truth.
On the hell case (which feels personally relevant as an active Christian) I think I’d take a lot of solace during my internment that this is just what there is all-things-considered most reason to happen. If my dispositions/motivations fail to fall in line, then as above they are failing to properly function and I think/hope that acknowledging this would take some of the edge off the dissonance of not being able to understand why this is a just punishment.

slicedonions 17 Jan 2021 19:16 UTC
3 points
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on: [Podcast] Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
As a data point, I found this super useful and would love to see these happen for each episode. Two particular ways I’d benefit: (i) typically there are a few particularly interesting bits in each episode which I found particularly novel/helpful and reading over a post later which re-states those will help them sink in more, (ii) sometimes I skip an episode based on the title but would read over something like this to glean any quick useful things and then maybe listen to the whole thing if it looked particularly useful.

I haven’t ever (and doubt I will) read over a full transcript, so posting those wouldn’t do the same thing. Also, putting the particularly interesting insights as comments allows upvoting to triage the insights that are most useful for the community.

slicedonions 30 Nov 2020 23:27 UTC
8 points
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on: What are you grateful for?
Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed by just how vast the terrain of doing good is, how many niche questions there are to explore and interventions to test, and how little time/bandwidth I have to figure things out. Then I remember that I’m part of this incredible community of thousands of thoughtful and motivated people who are each beavering away on a small patch of the terrain, turning over the stones, and incrementally building a better view of the territory and therefore what our best bets are. It fills me with real hope and joy that in some important sense the graft that other people are putting in psychologically frees me up to double down on my small patch of activity with even more vigour knowing that other people will find gold veins in other parts of the terrain that I miss.

slicedonions 13 Nov 2020 21:45 UTC
17 points
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on: Please Take the 2020 EA Survey
Thanks for organising, always enjoy filling it in each year! Did questions on religious belief/practice get dropped this year? Or perhaps I just autopiloted through them without noticing. Aware that there are lots of pressures to keep the question count low, but to flag as part of EA for Christians we always found it helpful for understanding that side of the EA community.

slicedonions 18 Nov 2018 19:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Pursuing infinite positive utility at any cost
Human utility functions seem clearly inconsistent with infinite utility.
If you’re not 100% sure that they are inconsistent then presumably my argument is still going to go through, because you’ll have a non-zero credence that actions can elicit infinite utilities and so are infinite in expectation?
I don’t identify 100% with future versions of myself, and I’m somewhat selfish, so I discount experiences that will happen in the distant future. I don’t expect any set of possible experiences to add up to something I’d evaluate as infinite utility.
So maybe from the self interest perspective you discount future experiences. However from a moral perspective that doesn’t seem too relevant, these are experiences and they count the same so if there are an infinite number of positive experiences then they would sum to an infinite utility. Also note that even if your argument counted in the moral realm too then unless you’re 100% sure it does then my reply to your other point will work here too?

slicedonions 18 Nov 2018 19:11 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Even non-theists should act as if theism is true
I’ve found the conversation productive, thanks for taking the time to discuss.
My intuitive response is that that is an incomplete definition and we would also need to say what impartial reasons are, otherwise I don’t know how to identify the impartial reasons.
Impartial reasons would be reasons that would ‘count’ even if we were some sort of floating consciousness observing the universe without any specific personal interests.
I probably don’t have any more intuitive explanations of impartial reasons than that, so sorry if it doesn’t convey my meaning!

slicedonions 13 Nov 2018 23:54 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Even non-theists should act as if theism is true
My main claim is that properties 1 and 2 need not be correlated, whereas you seem to have the intuition that they are, and I’m pushing on that.
I do think they are correlated, because according to my intuitions both are true of moral reasons. However I wouldn’t want to argue that (2) is true because (1) is true. I’m not sure why (2) is true of moral reasons. I just have a strong intuition that it is and haven’t come across any defeaters for that intuition.
A secondary claim is that if it does not satisfy property 3, then you can never infer it and so you might as well ignore it, but “irreducibly normative” sounds to me like it does not satisfy property 3.
This seems false to me. It’s typically thought that an omniscient being (by definition) could know these non-natural irreducibly normative facts. All we’d need is some mechanism that connects humans with them. One mechanism as I discuss in my post is that God puts them in the brains of humans. We might wonder how God could know the non-natural facts, one explanation might be that God is the truthmaker for them, if he is then it seems plausible he would know them.
On your three options (a) seems closest to what I believe. Note my preferred definitions would be:
‘What I have most prudential reason to do is what benefits me most (benefits in an objective rather than subjective sense).’
‘What I have most moral reason to do is what there is most reason to do impartially considered (i.e. from the point of view of the universe).’
To be clear it’s very plausible to me that what ‘benefits you most’ is not necessarily what you desire most as seen by Parfit’s discussion of future Tuesday indifference mentioned above. That’s why I use the objective caveat.

slicedonions 12 Nov 2018 22:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Even non-theists should act as if theism is true
There seems to be something that makes you think that moral reasons should trump prudential reasons.
The reason I have is in my original post. Namely I have a strong intuition that it would be very odd to say that someone who had done what there was most moral reason to do had failed to do what there was most ‘all things considered’ reason for them to do.
If my intuition here is right then moral reasons must always trump prudential reasons. Note I don’t have anything more to offer than this intuition, sorry if I made it seem like I did!
On your list of bullets:
1. 95%
2. 99%
3. 99% (Supposing for simplicity’s sake that I had a credence one in utilitarianism—which I don’t)
4. I don’t think I understand the set up of this question—it doesn’t seem to make a coherent sentence to replace X with a number in the way you have written it.
This makes me mildly worried that you aren’t able to imagine the worldview where prudential reasons exist.
I think I do have an intuitive understanding of what a prudential reason for action would be. Derek Parfit discusses the case of ‘future Tuesday indifference’ in On What Matters. Where prior to Tuesday a person is happy to sign up for any amount of pain on Tuesdays for the tiniest benefit before, even though it is really horrible when they get to Tuesdays. My view is that *if* prudential reasons exist, then avoiding future Tuesday indifference would be the most plausible sort of candidate for a prudential reason we might have.
Though I have to admit I’m confused why under this view there are any normative reasons for action—surely all such reasons depend on descriptive facts? Even with religions, you are basing your normative reasons for action upon descriptive facts about the religion.
So I think my view is similar to Parfit’s on this. If normative truths exist then they are ‘irreducibly normative’ they do not dissolve down to any descriptive statement. If someone has reason to do a descriptive statement X then this just means there is an irreducibly normative fact that makes this the case.

slicedonions 12 Nov 2018 22:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Pursuing infinite positive utility at any cost
Yep that seems right, though you might want more than one believer in each in case one of the assigned people messes it up somehow.

slicedonions 12 Nov 2018 22:11 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: trammell’s comment on: Pursuing infinite positive utility at any cost
Thanks @trammell.
Will read up on stochastic dominance, will presumably bring me back to my mirco days thinking about lotteries...
Note that I think there may be a way of dealing with it whilst staying in the expected utility framework. Where we ignore undefined expected utilities as they are not action guiding. Instead we focus on the part of our probability spaces where they don’t emerge. In this case I suggest we should only focus on worlds in which you can’t have both negative and positive infinities. We’d assume in our analysis that only one of them exists (you’d choose the one which is more plausible to exist on it’s own). Interested to hear whether you think that’s plausible.
On your second point I guess I doubt that sending a couple of thousand people into each religion would have big enough negative indirect effects to make it net negative. Obviously this would be hard to assess but I imagine we’d agree on the methodology?

Pursuing infinite positive utility at any cost

slicedonions11 Nov 2018 21:10 UTC

4 points

8 comments4 min readEA link

slicedonions 11 Nov 2018 19:18 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: Even non-theists should act as if theism is true
Agreed that unguided evolution might give us generally reliable cognitive faculties. However, there is no obvious story we can give for how our cognitive faculties would have access to moral facts (if they exist). Moral facts don’t interact with the world in a way that gives humans the way to ascertain them. They’re not like visual data where reflected/emitted photons can be picked up by our eyes. So it’s not clear how information about them would enter into our cognitive system?
I’d be interested if you have thoughts on a mechanism whereby information about moral facts could enter our cognitive systems?

slicedonions 11 Nov 2018 19:11 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Even non-theists should act as if theism is true
Thanks for the really thoughtful engagement.
I don’t know how to argue against this, you seem to be taking it as axiomatic.
I agree, my view stems from a bedrock of intuition, that just as the descriptive fact that ‘my table has four legs’ won’t create normative reasons for action, neither will the descriptive fact that ‘Harry desires chocolate ice-cream’ create them either. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that the desire fact is much more likely to create normative reasons than the table fact. If we don’t think the table fact would then we shouldn’t think the desire fact would either.
This seems tautological when you define morality as “binding oughtness” and compare against regular oughtness (which presumably applies to prudential reasons).
Apologies for a lack of clarity, my use of ‘binding oughtness’ was meant to apply to both prudential and moral reasons for action, another way of describing the property that normative reasons seem to have is that they create this external rational tug on us to do a particular thing.
So I think both prudential and moral reasons create this sort of rational tug on us, and my further claim is that if both prudential and moral reasons exist and conflict in a given case then the moral reasons will override/outweigh the prudential reasons for the reasons given in your quotation.
Why not go to metamorality, or “binding meta-oughtness” that trumps “binding oughtness”? For example, “when faced with uncertainty over ought statements, choose the one that most aligns with prudential reasons”.
I worry that I’m not understanding the full force of your objection here. I have a very low credence that your proposed meta-normative rule would be true? What arguments are there for it?

slicedonions

Pur­su­ing in­finite pos­i­tive util­ity at any cost

Pursuing infinite positive utility at any cost