tobytrem

• tobytrem 2 Dec 2020 11:02 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Make a $10 dona­tion into $35

  Thanks a lot!

How to crit­i­cise Effec­tive Altruism

• tobytrem 17 Jun 2021 9:29 UTC

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  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: How to crit­i­cise Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks! I read this a while back and I remember it was great, but I haven’t yet looked with an eye to taxonomising its arguments. Could be a useful exercise.

• tobytrem 22 Jul 2021 10:25 UTC

  8 points

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  on: A case against strong longtermism

  Thanks for writing this, I’m reading a lot of critiques of longtermism at the moment and this is a very interesting one.

  Apart from the problems that you raise with expected value reasoning about future events, you also question the lack of pure time preference in the Greaves-MacAskill paper. You make a few different points here, some of which could co-exist with longtermism and some couldn’t. I was wondering how much of your disagreement might be meaningfully recast as a differing opinion on how large your impartial altruistic budget should be, as an individual or as a society?

  I think this might be helpful because you say things like: “While longtermism says we should be thinking primarily about the far-future consequences of our actions (which is generally taken to be on the scale of millions or billions of years), strong longtermism says this is the only thing we should think about.” This is slightly misleading because the paper stresses that strong longtermism is only true of your genuinely impartial altruistic resources, therefore even on the section on deontic strong longtermism, there is no claim about what we should exclusively care about. (This seems uber nitpicky but I think it is consequential- though the authors of the paper may have stronger views on the ideal size of impartial altruistic budgets, they are very careful not to tie strong longtermism to the truth of those far less rigourously defined arguments).

  However, a belief that we should be biased towards the present (such as you say you hold) could be understood as shrinking the amount of your time and resources you think should be spent on impartial causes at all, and consequently also on longtermist causes.

  To disambiguate, your other claim that “We should prefer good things to happen sooner, because that might help us to bring these good things about” could plausibly bear on how we should use our impartial resources, as an instrumental reason for acting as if we were partial towards the present. There isn’t an argument in your essay for this but it could be an interesting lever to push on because it would disagree with longtermism more directly.

• tobytrem 10 Aug 2021 16:00 UTC

  15 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Towards a Weaker Longtermism

  Just to second this because it seems to be a really common mistake- Greaves and MacAskill stress in the strong longtermism paper that the aim is to advance an argument about what someone should do with their impartial altruistic budget (of time or resources), not to tell anyone how large that budget should be in the first place.

  Also- I think the author would be able to avoid what they see as a “non-rigorous” decision to weight the short-term and long-term the same by reconceptualising the uneasiness around longtermism dominating their actions as an uneasiness with their totally impartial budget taking up more space in their life. I think everyone I have talked to about this feels a pull to support present day people and problems alongside the future, so it might help to just bracket off the present day section of your commitments away from the totally impartial side, especially if the argument against the longtermist conclusion is that it precludes other things you care about. No one can live an entirely impartial life and we should recognise that, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the arguments for the rightness of doing so are wrong.

• tobytrem 11 Aug 2021 8:21 UTC

  9 points

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  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Towards a Weaker Longtermism

  Thanks for the post and the response David, that helpfully clarifies where you are coming from. What I was trying to get at is that if you want to say that strong longtermism isn’t the correct conclusion for an impartial altruist who wants to know what to do with their resources, then that would call for more argument as to where the strong longtermist’s mistake lies or where the uncertainty should be. On the other hand, it would be perfectly possible to say that the impartial altruist should end up endorsing strong longtermism, while recognising that you yourself are not entirely impartial (and have done with the issue). Personally I also think that strong longtermism relies on very debatable grounds, and I would also put some uncertainty on the claim “the impartial altruist should be a strong longtermist”- the tricky and interesting thing is working out where we disagree with the longtermist.

  (also I recognise as you said that this post is not supposed to be a final word on all these problems, I’m just pointing to where the inquiry could go next).

  On the second part of your response, I think that depends on what motivates you and what your general worldview is. I don’t believe in objective moral facts, but I also generally see the world as a place where each and all could do better. For some that helps motivate action, for some it causes angst- I don’t think there is a correct view there.

  Separately I do actually worry that strong longtermism only works for consequentialists (though you don’t have to believe in objective morality). The recent paper attempts to make the foundations more robust but the work there is still in its infancy. I guess we will see where it goes.

• tobytrem 11 Aug 2021 15:22 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Towards a Weaker Longtermism

  Definitely, cheers!

• tobytrem 19 Oct 2021 10:08 UTC

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  on: Every­day Longtermism

  The way I see this argument in this post is that you pick out a value/​ capacity which you think would be especially desirable for the future to hold- in this case “good decision-making”- and then track back to the individual acts which might help propagate it.

  If this is the correct model of the argument, might it be the case that more narrowly defined values/​capacities are more memetically strong and morally robust? In my opinion many aspects of “good decision-making” might lead to worse outcomes- for example the focus on character in politicians mentioned above might be present in the best possible worlds but in many nearer possible worlds it is a failed proxy which leads to politicians selected because they seem reliable rather than because they have the best policies. Or perhaps many people who learn a few decision-making skills become over confident and stray into a naive version of the goal. In contrast, more finite goals such as “abolish factory farming”, “promote anti-racism” are (in my opinion) less likely to lead to false proxies and clearly propagate along social networks because they incorporate their own ends. Not every aspect of an imperfect decision-making practice is bad or leads to bad outcomes, but with more narrow goals like those mentioned above, falling short of the goals is always bad. My impression is that this is a sign of a better proxy for what is good.

  I’d love to know whether people think this is on the right track- I don’t know very much about the strength of the “good decision-making” goal so it would be great to hear more about its strengths.

• tobytrem 20 Oct 2021 17:35 UTC

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  on: EA Creatives and Com­mu­ni­ca­tors Slack

  Hi! I’m Toby. I do a bit of writing and podcasting but would love to do some more. I’m particularly flexible at the moment for more EA projects, so I’d be very interested in joining the slack. (The idea is that you would message me with a link right? I’m not very familiar with slack).

• tobytrem 27 Oct 2021 9:52 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: How long un­til we *will* stop recom­mend­ing Longter­mist re­search effort/​fund­ing on the mar­gin?

  Thanks Stefan, I clarified the ‘we’ but let me know if there are other changes that could make it clearer. I guess I was treating it as a jumping off point for thinking about the trajectories of the field of Longtermist research/​ interventions in the future more than a very specific forecasting question (hence the vagaries). But if that means people won’t be as keen on answering I can shape it up a bit.

• tobytrem 27 Oct 2021 13:42 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: How long un­til we *will* stop recom­mend­ing Longter­mist re­search effort/​fund­ing on the mar­gin?

  great shout with the asterisks, normally italics is my go to but it isn’t possible in titles.

• tobytrem 15 Dec 2021 11:35 UTC

  62 points

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  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: Re­sponse to Re­cent Crit­i­cisms of Longtermism

  Not sure how much to weight this, but perhaps it would be better to have a straightforwardly pro-longtermism piece in one of these outlets, rather than a response to Torres. If edited for Aeon or Current Affairs as a response piece this would need to offer detailed exposition of Torres’s arguments, and might just result in getting more people to read the original.

  I don’t know if either outlet publishes a “letter to the editor” style post. If they did, that might be a better short format which would mostly reach readers of Torres’s article, rather than a full article which would likely just expand the reach of the original.

• tobytrem 16 Dec 2021 12:51 UTC

  27 points

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  in reply to: MathiasKB’s comment on: Re­sponse to Re­cent Crit­i­cisms of Longtermism

  Framing my proposal as “hiding criticism” is perhaps unduly emotive here. I think that it makes sense to be careful and purposive about what types of content you broadcast to a wider audience which is unlikely to do further research or read particularly critically. I agree with Aaron’s comment further down the page where he says that the effect of Torres’s piece is to make people feel “icky” about longtermism. Therefore to achieve the ends which I take as implicit in evelynciara’s comment (counteract some of the effects of Torres’s article and produce a piece of work which could be referenced on wikipedia), I think it makes more sense to just aim to write a fairer piece about longtermism, than to draw more attention to Torres’s piece. I’m all for criticism of longtermism and I think such an article would be incomplete without including some, I just don’t think Torres’s piece offers usable criticism.

  What links here?

  • Row­ing and Steer­ing the Effec­tive Altru­ism Movement by jtm (9 Jan 2022 17:28 UTC; 146 points)

• tobytrem 2 Jan 2022 9:39 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Two Pod­cast Opportunities

  Hi Finn, I’d be happy to help out with these (on recording voice especially, I don’t think I can commit time for audio editing at the moment). I’ve already got a mic for my podcast (Samsung Q2U) so if that was good enough, I wouldn’t need as much set-up time.

(p-)Zom­bie Uni­verse: an­other X-risk

• tobytrem 29 Jul 2022 17:13 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: (p-)Zom­bie Uni­verse: an­other X-risk

  Thanks for flagging- yes I have definitely taken more of the MacAskill-Ord-Greaves party line in this post. Personally, I’m pretty uncertain on total utilitarianism so this should reflect that a little more.

• tobytrem 29 Jul 2022 17:14 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Ariel_ZJ’s comment on: (p-)Zom­bie Uni­verse: an­other X-risk

  Yep- I was going to have a ‘what we should do’ section and then realised that I had nothing very helpful to say. Thanks for those resources, I’ll check them out.

• tobytrem 17 Oct 2022 13:16 UTC

  3 points

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  on: An­nounc­ing Am­plify cre­ative grants

  Update on Amplify Creative Grants: We’ve been really impressed by the number of high-quality applications we’ve received already, so we are likely to spend the majority of the funds we have to disperse in this first round.

  As such, if you have an idea for a creative media project that you want to start soon, it would be best for you to apply by Wednesday the 19th of October.

  That said, Amplify is likely to continue to consider applications beyond this point, so it is still worth your time to apply with non-urgent projects, through the same link.

  As always, email grants [at] hearthisidea.com with any questions.

• tobytrem 8 Nov 2023 10:41 UTC

  3 points

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  on: AMA: Earn­ing to Give

  How have you maintained and nurtured a focus on impact when working in places and communities which follow different incentives?
  Specifically- I can imagine how someone could commit to donating a percentage, and then adhere to that, not worrying about impact day-to-day. But to maintain flexibility (and be able to switch from Earning to Give to a more direct career if and when that becomes the best option) requires a persistent motivation. It looks as though you have achieved that for a long time. What helped?

• tobytrem 10 Nov 2023 15:26 UTC

  26 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Here’s where CEA staff are donat­ing in 2023

  I really appreciate this culture of sharing donation decisions, and admire the reasoning transparency on display here.
  
  I started at CEA this week, and my donation decisions are still incomplete, so I didn’t join in on this post. However, after reading it, I think it would be worthwhile to share where I’m at. I made a resolution to donate 10% this year, for the first year since I became interested in EA in 2019 (I might write about why I delayed this decision in a future post). So far this has meant putting 10% of every paycheck into a pot in my Monzo which accrues some interest while I defer thinking about where the money should go.

  Like Lizka, I’ve decided to donate £1000 to the Donation Election Fund (though, like Lizka, I’m also involved in the project). I’m hoping that the conversations on the Forum leading up to and during the Donation election week will help me decide where to put the rest of my money this year. I’m publicly committing that it will all go somewhere before 2024.