How common is it for such repayments to occur, and what do you think would be the standard for the level of clarity of the commitment, and who does that commitment would have to be to? For example, is there a case that 80k hours should refund payments in light of their pivot to focus on AI? I know there are differences, their funder could support the move etc., but in the spirit of the thing, where is the line here?
Editing to add: One of my interests in this topic is that EA/rationalists seem to have some standards/views that diverge somewhat from what I would characterize as more “mainstream” approaches to these kinds of things. Re-reading the OP, I noticed a detail I initially missed:
Habryka wonders whether payment would have had to be given to Epoch for use of their benchmarks suite.
to me this does seem like it implicates a more mainstream view of a potential conflict-of-interest.
I think there are two main appeals to libertarianism. One “practical libertarianism” is based on a belief that on current margins moving towards less government would be beneficial. I’m sympathetic to this position and I think one can hold it for purely consequentialist reasons.
The above argument is “philosophical libertarianism”. I’m not so convinced by these arguments.
I think the reason a lot of libertarian theories bite this bullet is that failing to do so seems to be abandoning the alleged reasons for libertarianism. For example, the article argues that one of the common sense reasons why other concepts of government fail is that they seem to imply the government can do things that normal people can’t do, like take people’s property. But we have now just said that actually, it is allowed for normal people, not just governments, to take people’s property if their is a good reason. We could go through an entire sequence of hypotheticals, like can you take money from someone to buy bread if you’re starving? If you aren’t starving but someone else is, can you take money from someone else to buy bread to give it to the starving person? The upshot of that sequence is that if you don’t bite the bullet, then there’s no limiting principle. You’re basically saying redistribution is in fact allowed.
Likewise for the lifeboat example. I don’t see how any principled approach to libertarianism can give the answer that you can threaten the rest of the passengers. That’s literal coercion! If you then engage in the insane terminological gerrymandering where that counts as “self-defense” then so does so much other stuff. Is it “self-defense” if you force a doctor to give you a surgery you can’t afford? None of the desired libertarian conclusions would follow. Especially given that libertarianism also needs to justify why private property is a thing, and most justification I have seen go back to freedom of a person’s labor by way of homesteading. Giving the answer the author seems to give for the lifeboat hypo seems like a massive problem for libertarianism.
I’m not sure why there is a requirement that a theory of government be content-independent. This seems like an arbitrary requirement the author has imposed on theories they don’t favor. Kind of by definition, a consequentialism wouldn’t support a “content-independent” position? But they could still support government based on an expectation about the distribution of government actions they expect to actually be realized. They could also support something like an-cap, for a consequentialist it seems like a modeling/empirical question (and kind of collapse back to practical libertarianism potentially).
I think there is essentially a moral hypothetical no-free-lunch theorem. No principled moral theory can exist that matches “common sense” intuitions on all hypotheticals. Although I’m open to practical libertarianism, nothing here seems convincing that philosophical libertarianism is the “least bad” option.