Ah ok, gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding.
Tom_Ash
Karma: 1,151
Should people downvote (or upvote) posts or comments purely because they disagree with them? I’ve heard people argue that they shouldn’t, and the text that appears when you other over the upvote/downvote icons suggests as much.
This was recently discussed here, especially here within that. There have been some other discussions of this over the history of the forum which someone might dig up should they have the time and inclination. :)
Should people downvote just because they disagree? I’m not saying they shouldn’t, just that it’d be good to have a discussion of this. :) I’ve just started one in the latest open thread. I’ve heard people argue that they shouldn’t, and the text that appears when you other over the upvote/downvote icons suggests as much.
Agreed—despite being counterintuitive, it’s not obviously a flawed argument.
Explications of ‘social rate of return’:
“Improving health today has significant flow-on effects to the future, by ensuring people and their children are healthier, and better able to learn, work and make their countries prosperous. The earlier in time these health improvements are achieved, the more people benefit from these flow-on effects.”
“Interestingly, just as the returns on your investment would compound over time, donating to a charity now may also yield compounding benefits. In the case of donations to global poverty charities, the benefits that accrue to those immediately helped by a particular intervention (e.g. those freed from intestinal worms by ones donation to a deworming charity) also compound at a social rate of return. The idea here is that the direct benefits of the intervention (e.g. improvement of an individuals health) lead to societal knock-on benefits that compound over time (e.g. increased productivity and likelihood to reproduce, which may themselves have beneficial economic and non-economic spill-over effects on the rest of society).”
Is the following another way of making a similar point?
2015 $ raised now could be invested with above-inflation annual interest and then given in 2055.
$1000 given in 2015 does more good than $1000 (inflation-adjusted) given in 2055, partly because the former has a ‘social rate of return’ (which is plausibly greater than 5%).
You have to accept this or else accept that it’d be better to invest 2015 $ raised now and only give the money in 2055. (Absent some other strong reason not to, like thinking that there will be fewer low-hanging fruit then).
By agnostic, I just mean thinking there’s a decent chance (10%+) any of these could be the best approach for someone, and so not using this difference as the key issue on which you judge projects.
That’s much more plausible than total neutrality! I agree that there’s no theoretical argument (that I know of) for thinking that (2) is very likely to be worse than AMF. So it all depends on what the best available candidates for (2) are. Perhaps people could make progress by discussing a real world example of (2). (Ideally this wouldn’t be an org anyone has ties to, to allow for especially neutral discussion of it.)
On post 1, this is a good observation, and it certainly speaks in favour of riskier donations. But it’s not clear that it does so very strongly, and I’d expect it to be a relatively weak consideration once you start directly considering candidate charities (e.g. AMF vs. an outfit that lobbies for a US carbon tax).
I think you attribute an overly strong position to the highly skeptical EAs in post 2, as discussed in my longer comment on this. To illustrate this briefly, I’d distinguish between two positions:
(1) We should never fund activities which are [much?] more speculative than GiveWell recommendations.
(2) We should sometimes fund activities which are [much?] more speculative than GiveWell recommendations, but less often than the average EA would accept.
I’d only defend (2), not (1).
I figure I fall into the “skeptical EA” camp, so let me try defending it. :) It’d be good to make progress on this issue so I appreciate your engaging with it! Here I’ll consider your two key steps in post 2.
To take your first step first:
“Highly skeptical EAs think you need strong evidence to prove that something works / is true / will happen.”
This would be self-refuting, as you say. But I don’t think most have quite as strong a position as that. After all, ‘provenness’ is a matter of degree. It’s more that we’re relatively negative about speculative activities.
It’s also worth distinguishing between:
(1) charities which definitely have a 1% chance of doing an enormous of good. For example, a charity which’d definitely do 101 times as much good as AMF if a 100-sided die were rolled and came up 100.
(2) charities which may have a 1% chance of doing an enormous amount of good, but lack robust evidence for this. E.g. they have no track record, no precedent, no broad expert/academic endorsement. But a back of the envelope calculation including some very rough guesses suggests that they have a 1% chance of doing 101 times as much good as AMF.
I’d give to (1) over AMF, but not (2).
To consider your third step:
“But the claim that it’s higher expected value to do the best ‘proven’ thing rather than a speculative/unproven thing (that on its face looks important, neglected and tractable) is itself unproven to a high standard of evidence.”
True. This would be a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that we should only ever believe ‘proven’ propositions (which we could perhaps define as those which an ideally rational agent in our position would have >90% credence in). But ‘skeptical EAs’ rarely claim anything so implausible.
The best epistemic approach on these issues is clearly far from proven, so we have no choice but to pick our best bet (adjusting for our uncertainty). It could still be the case, without inconsistency, that the best epistemic approach is to rate relatively speculative activities lower than the average EA does.
“Indeed, it’s a very hard claim to ever prove and would require a very large project involving lots of people over a long period of time looking at the average return on e.g. basic science research.”
This sort of look at the historical track record of different epistemic approaches does indeed seem the best approach. You’re right that the correct answer is far from 90% proven.
“(In my view, we don’t really know at the moment and should be agnostic on this issue.)”
If by ‘agnostic’ you mean ‘completely neutral’ (which you may very well not?) then I disagree. Some approaches seem better than others, and we should take our best bet.
Excellent response Gleb. :)
Thanks for suggesting a tweak to the forum and doing so in such a clear way. I agree that voting is relatively limited, but it’d be good to first know whether this is an inevitable result of a relatively limited audience who are interested in voting. I’d be curious to hear Ryan Carey’s view as to that. If that’s the primary explanation, then I don’t think we can justify the time arranging for the experiment that you suggest. (It sounds relatively simple technically, but tweaks always take longer than you expect, and we’ve found the forum code can be surprisingly slow to work with.)
Sounds great, thanks for the update! How many groups will be taking part, and will you be reporting on the outcomes in future project updates?
Hmm, that’s a good point and I don’t know what to think any more.
EA projects update—November 2015
Yep, and the GWWC Trust is the official way to donate to GiveDirectly from the UK right? That could account for some of the donors.
I likewise don’t think it’s worrying or surprising that many people who choose to donate to effective charities don’t give 10% of their income—like you say, that’s a pretty big ask.
This means you can transfer them money at any time, without their permission, without needing much coordination, without needing to set up a way to make payments between each other, in any country where a donation can be made, regardless of what country they are in. It’s also a power only really available to EAs. …And that’s kinda cool to think about.
It’s worth noting that this is a financially efficient way to ‘transfer’ money to people in other countries (for example when paying them for goods or services), without any of the currency exchange or bank fees that are normally associated with this.
I think some (rare!) pieces deserve to be downvoted, and am not a huge fan of this one. But it’d be nice if people who downvote could leave a brief comment precisely explaining their reasons. I realise this norm would make downvoting more onerous, but that seems an acceptable cost.
This makes sense. :) Ideally people should get to specify whether they prefer to have public versus private criticism, as having public criticism forced on them without their requesting it would likely put a lot of people off entering into EA discussions altogether.