I’m a researcher in psychology and philosophy.
Stefan_Schubert
Karma: 6,520
EA’s CEO says Sam Bankmann-Fried was never an effective altruist
I don’t think the piece says that.
Thanks, this is great. You could consider publishing it as a regular post (either after or without further modification).
I think it’s an important take since many in EA/AI risk circles have expected governments to be less involved:
https://twitter.com/StefanFSchubert/status/1719102746815508796?t=fTtL_f-FvHpiB6XbjUpu4w&s=19
It would be good to see more discussion on this crucial question.
The main thing you could consider adding is more detail; e.g. maybe step-by-step analyses of how governments might get involved. For instance, this is a good question that it would be good to learn more about:
“does it look more like much more regulations or international treaties with civil observers or more like almost-unprecedented nationalization of AI as an industry[?]”
But of course that’s hard.
Thanks, no worries.
I don’t find it hard to imagine how this would happen. I find Linch’s claim interesting and would find an elaboration useful. I don’t thereby imply that the claim is unlikely to be true.
Thanks, I think this is interesting, and I would find an elaboration useful.
In particular, I’d be interested in elaboration of the claim that “If (1, 2, 3), then government actors will eventually take an increasing/dominant role in the development of AGI”.
The reasoning is that knowledgeable people’s beliefs in a certain view is evidence for that view.
This is a type of reasoning people use a lot in many different contexts. I think it’s a valid and important type of reasoning (even though specific instances of it can of course be mistaken).
Some references:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disagreement/#EquaWeigView
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WKPd79PESRGZHQ5GY/in-defence-of-epistemic-modesty
Yes; it could be useful if Stephen briefly explained how his classification relates to other classifications. (And which advantages it has—I guess simplicity is one.)
Thoughtful post.
If you’re perceived as prioritising one EA cause over another, you might get pushback (whether for good reason or not). I think that’s more true for some of these suggestions than for others. E.g. I think having some cause-specific groups might be seen as less controversial than having varying ticket prices for the same event depending on the cause area.
I’m struck by how often two theoretical mistakes manage to (mostly) cancel each other out.
If that’s so, one might wonder why that happens.
In these cases, it seems that there are three questions; e.g.:
1) Is consequentialism correct?
2) Does consequentialism entail Machiavellianism?
3) Ought we to be Machiavellian?
You claim that people get the answer to the two first questions wrong, but the answer to the third question right, since the two mistakes cancel out each other. In effect, two incorrect premises lead to a correct conclusion.
It’s possible that in the cases you discuss, people tend to have the firmest intuitions about question 3) (“the conclusion”). E.g. they are more convinced that we ought not to be Machiavellian than that consequentialism is correct/incorrect or that consequentialism entails/does not entail Machiavellianism.
If that’s the case, then it would be unsurprising that mistakes would cancel each other out. E.g. someone who would start to believe that consequentialism entails Machiavellianism would be inclined to reject consequentialism, since they otherwise would need to accept that we ought to be Machiavellian (which they by hypothesis don’t do).
(Effectively, I’m saying that people reason holistically, reflective equilibrium-style; and not just from premises to conclusions.)A corollary of this is that it’s maybe not as common as one might think that “a little knowledge” is as dangerous as one might believe. Suppose that someone initially believes that consequentialism is wrong (Question 1), that consequentialism entails Machiavellianism (Question 2), and that we ought not to be Machiavellian (Question 3). They then change their view on Question 1, adopting consequentialism. That creates an inconsistency between their three beliefs. But if they have firmer beliefs about Question 3 (the conclusion) than about Question 2 (the other premise), they’ll resolve this inconsistency by rejecting the other incorrect premise, not by endorsing the dangerous conclusion that we ought to be Machiavellian.
My argument is of course schematic and how plausible it is will no doubt vary depending which of the six cases you discuss we consider. I do think that “a little knowledge” is sometimes dangerous in the way you suggest. Nevertheless, I think the mechanism I discuss is worth remembering.
In general, I think a little knowledge is usually beneficial, meaning our prior that it’s harmful in an individual case should be reasonably low. However, priors can of course be overturned by evidence in specific cases.
How much of this is lost by compressing to something like: virtue ethics is an effective consequentialist heuristic?
It doesn’t just say that virtue ethics is an effective consequentialist heuristic (if it says that) but also has a specific theory about the importance of altruism (a virtue) and how to cultivate it.
There’s not been a lot of systematic discussion on which specific virtues consequentialists or effective altruists should cultivate. I’d like to see more of it.
@Lucius Caviola and I have written a paper where we put forward a specific theory of which virtues utilitarians should cultivate. (I gave a talk along similar lines here.) We discuss altruism but also five other virtues.
Another factor is that recruitment to the EA community may be more difficult if it’s perceived as very demanding.
I’m also not convinced by the costly signalling-arguments discussed in the post. (This is from a series of posts on this topic.)
I think this discussion is a bit too abstract. It could be helpful with concrete examples of non-academic EA research that you think should have been published in academic outlets. It would also help if you would give some details of what changes they would need to make to get their research past peer reviewers.
I’m saying that there are many cases where well-placed people do step up/have stepped up.
Assume by default that if something is missing in EA, nobody else is going to step up.
In many cases, it actually seems reasonable to believe that others will step up; e.g. because they are well-placed to do so/because it falls within a domain they have a unique competence in.
One aspect is that we might expect people who believe unusually strongly in an idea to be more likely to publish on it (winner’s curse/unilateralist’s curse).
Yeah the latter is good.
He does, but at the same time I think it matters that he uses that shorthand rather than some other expression (say CNGS), since it makes the EA connection more salient.
Yes, I think the title should be changed.
Some evidence that people tend to underuse social information, suggesting they’re not by default epistemically modest:
Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover ‘egocentric discounting’ phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory’s insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon.There is a discussion on “the producer-scrounger dilemma for information use” of potential interest:
Social information is only useful when others also gather information asocially. Cultural evolutionary models contain a possible explanation of egocentric discounting. Rogers’ influential model [81] showed that social learning may not provide any advantage over individual learning when the environment changes. The advantage of using social learning depends on the frequency of social learners in the population: if those are too numerous, social learning is useless. When there are mostly individual learners, copying is effective, because it saves the costs of individual exploration, and because the probability of copying a correct behaviour is high. However, when there are mostly social learners, the risk of copying an outdated behaviour increases and individual learners are advantaged. This means the advantages of social learning are inversely frequency-dependent: the more other people learn socially, the less efficient it is to learn from them. The same logic is reflected, on a smaller scale, in models of information cascades, where social learning can (with a small probability) become detrimental for an individual when too many other individuals resort to it. More generally, a broad range of models converge upon the view that social information use can be likened, in terms of evolutionary game theory, to a producer–scrounger dynamic [37,77,82]. At equilibrium, these games typically yield a mixed population of producers (individual learners) and scroungers (social learners), where neither type does better than the other [83,84]. Egocentric discounting might emerge from a producer–scrounger dilemma, as a response to the devaluation of social information which may occur when too many other agents rely on social learning.
Note that this seems to assume that people don’t use the “credence by my lights” vs. “credence all things considered”-distinction discussed in the comments.
There’s already a thread on this afaict.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ETwyzQFccHP54ndi4/sam-harris-and-william-macaskill-on-sbf-and-ea