Research Associate at the Global Priorities Institute.
Slightly less ignorant about economic theory than about everything else
trammell(Philip Trammell)
Karma: 398
I’m just putting numbers to the previous sentence: “Say the current (instantaneous) hazard rate is 1% per century; my guess is that most of this consists of (instantaneous) risk imposed by existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, existing climate instability, and so on, rather than (instantaneous) risk imposed by research currently ongoing.”
If “most” means “80%” there, then halting growth would lower the hazard rate from 1% to 0.8%.
Hey, thanks for engaging with this, and sorry for not noticing your original comment for so many months. I agree that in reality the hazard rate at t depends not just on the level of output and safety measures maintained at t but also on “experiments that might go wrong” at t. The model is indeed a simplification in this way.
Just to make sure something’s clear, though (and sorry if this was already clear): Toby’s 20% hazard rate isn’t the current hazard rate; it’s the hazard rate this century, but most of that is due to developments he projects occurring later this century. Say the current (instantaneous) hazard rate is 1% per century; my guess is that most of this consists of (instantaneous) risk imposed by existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, existing climate instability, and so on, rather than (instantaneous) risk imposed by research currently ongoing. So if stopping growth would lower the hazard rate, it would be a matter of moving from 1% to 0.8% or something, not from 20% to 1%.
This paper is also relevant to the EA implications of a variety of person-affecting views. https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/Teruji_Thomas_asymmetry_uncertainty.pdf
Glad you liked it, and thanks for the good questions!
#1: I should definitely have spent more time on this / been more careful explaining it. Yes, x-risks should “feed straight into interest rates”, in the sense that a +1% chance of an x-risk per year should mean a 1% higher interest rate. So if you’re going to be
spending on something other than x-risk reduction; or
spending on x-risk reduction but only able to marginally lower the risk in the period you’re spending (i.e. not permanently lower the rate), and think that there will still be similar risk to mitigate in the next period conditional on survival,
then you should be roughly compensated for the risk. That is, under those circumstances, if investing seemed preferable to spending in the absence of the heightened risk, it should still seem that way given the heightened risk. This does all hold despite the fact that the heightened risk would give humanity such a short life expectancy.
But I totally grant that these assumptions may not hold, and that if they don’t, the heightened risk can be a reason to spend more! I just wanted to point out that there is this force pushing the other way that turns out to render the question at least ambiguous.
#2: No, there’s no reductio here. Once you get big enough, i.e. are no longer a marginal contributor to the public goods you’re looking to fund, the diminishing returns to spending make it less worthwhile to grow even bigger. (E.g., in the human consumption case, you’ll eventually be rich enough that spending the first half of your fund would make people richer to the point that spending the second half would do substantially less for them.) Once the gains from further investing fallen to the point that they just balance the (extinction / expropriation / etc) risks, you should start spending, and continue to split between spending and investment so as to stay permanently on the path where you’re indifferent between the two.
If you’re looking to fund some narrow thing only one other person’s interested in funding, and you’re perfectly patient but the other person is about as impatient as people tend to be, and if you start out with funds the same size, I think you’ll be big enough that it’s worth starting to spend after about fifty years. If you’re looking to spend on increasing human consumption in general, you’ll have to hold out till you’re a big fraction of global wealth—maybe on the order of a thousand years. (Note that this means that you’d probably never make it, even though this is still the expected-welfare-maximizing policy.)
#3: Yes. If ethics turns out to contain pure time preference after all, or we have sufficiently weak duties to future generations for some other reason, then patient philanthropy is a bad idea. :(
Glad you liked it!
In the model I’m working on, to try to weigh the main considerations, the goal is to maximize expected philanthropic impact, not to maximize expected returns. I do recommend spending more quickly than I would in a world where the goal were just to maximize expected returns. My tentative conclusion that long-term investing is a good idea already incorporates the conclusion that it will most likely just involve losing a lot of money.
That is, I argue that we’re in a world where the highest-expected-impact strategy (not just the highest-expect-return strategy) is one with a low probability of having a lot of impact and a high probability of having very little impact.
At the risk of repetition, I’d say that by the same reasoning, we could likewise add in our best estimates of saving a life on (just, say) total human welfare up to 2100.
Your response here was that “[p]opulation growth will be net good or bad depending on my credences about what the future would have looked like, but these credences are not robust”. But as with the first beneficiary, we can separate the direct welfare impact of population growth from all its other effects and observe that the former is a part of “sum u_i”, no?
Of course, estimates of shorter-term effects are usually more reliable than those of longer-term effects, for all sorts of reasons; but since we’re not arguing over whether saving lives in certain regions can be expected to increase population size up to 2100, that doesn’t seem to me like the point of dispute in this case.
I’m not sure where we’re failing to communicate exactly, but I’m a little worried that this is clogging the comments section! Let me know if you want to really try to get to the bottom of this sometime, in some other context.
Yup, no disagreement here. You’re looking at what happens when we introduce uncertainty holding the absolute expected return constant, and I was discussing what happens when we introduce uncertainty holding the expected annual rate of return constant.
If you give me a causal model, and claim A has a certain effect on B, without justifying rough effect sizes, I am by default skeptical of that claim and treat that like simple cluelessness: B conditional on changing A is identically distributed to B. You have not yet justified a systematic effect of A on B.
What I’m saying is, “Michael: you’ve given me a causal model, and claimed A (saving lives) has a positive effect on B (total moral value in the universe, given all the indirect effects), without justifying a rough effect size. You just justified a rough effect size on C (value to direct beneficiaries), but that’s not ultimately what matters. By default I think A has no systematic effect on B, and you have not yet justified one.”
Is this an example of CC?
Yes, you have CC in that circumstance if you don’t have evidential symmetry with respect to X.
Hey, I know that episode : )
Thanks for these numbers. Yes: holding expected returns equal, our propensity to invest should be decreasing in volatility.
But symmetric uncertainty about the long-run average rate of return—or to a lesser extent, as in your example, time-independent symmetric uncertainty about short-run returns at every period—increases expected returns. (I think this is the point I made that you’re referring to.) This is just the converse of your observation that, to keep expected returns equal upon introducing volatility, we have to lower the long-run rate from r to q = r – s^2/2.
Whether these increased expected returns mean that patient philanthropists should invest more or less than they would under certainty is in principle sensitive to (a) the shape of the function from resources to philanthropic impact and (b) the behavior of other funders of the things we care about; but on balance, on the current margin, I’d argue it implies that patient philanthropists should invest more. I’ll try writing more on this at some point, and apologies if you would have liked a deeper discussion about this on the podcast.
Population growth will be net good or bad depending on my credences about what the future would have looked like, but these credences are not robust.
Suppose for simplicity that we can split the effects of saving a life into
1) benefits accruing to the beneficiary;
2) benefits accruing to future generations up to 2100, through increased size (following from (1)); and
3) further effects (following from (2)).
It seems like you’re saying that there’s some proposition X such that (3) is overall good if X and bad if not-X, where we can only guess at the probability of X; and that in this circumstance we can say that the overall effect of (2 & 3) is ~zero in expectation.
If that’s right, what I’m struggling to see is why we can’t likewise say that there’s some proposition Y such that (2 & 3) is overall good if Y and bad if not-Y, where we can only guess at the probability of Y, and that the overall effect of (1 & 2 & 3) is therefore ~zero in expectation.
Is the point that I’m confident they’re larger in magnitude, but still not confident enough to estimate their expected magnitudes more precisely?
Yes, exactly—that’s the point of the African population growth example.
Maybe I have a good idea of the impacts over each possible future, but I’m very uncertain about the distribution of possible futures. I could be confident about the sign of the effect of population growth when comparing pairs of counterfactuals, one with the child saved, and the other not, but I’m not confident enough to form distributions over the two sets of counterfactuals to be able to determine the sign of the expected value.
I don’t understand this paragraph. Could you clarify?
I don’t think I understand this either:
I’m doubting the signs of the effects that don’t come with estimates. If I have a plausible argument that doing X affects Y and Y affects Z, which I value directly and the effect should be good, but I don’t have an estimate for the effect through this causal path, I’m not actually convinced that the effect through this path isn’t bad.
Say you have a plausible argument that pushing a switch (doing X) pulls some number n > 0 of strings (so Y := #strings_pulled goes from 0 to n), each of which releases some food to m > 0 hungry lab mice (so Z := #fed_mice goes from 0 to nm), and you know that X and Y have no other consequences. You know that n, m > 0 but don’t have estimates for them. At face value you seem to be saying you’re not convinced that the effect of pushing the switch isn’t bad, but that can’t be right!
No worries, sorry if I didn’t write it as clearly as I could have!
BTW, I’ve had this conversation enough times now that last summer I wrote down my thoughts on cluelessness in a document that I’ve been told is pretty accessible—this is the doc I link to from the words “don’t have an expected value”. I know it can be annoying just to be pointed off the page, but just letting you know in case you find it helpful or interesting.
Hold on—now it seems like you might be talking past the OP on the issue of complex cluelessness. I 1000% agree that changing population size has many effects beyond those I listed, and that we can’t weigh them; but that’s the whole problem!
The claim is that CC arises when (a) there are both predictably positive and predictably negative indirect effects of (say) saving lives which are larger in magnitude than the direct effects, and (b) you can’t weigh them all against each other so as to arise at an all-things-considered judgment of the sign of the value of the intervention.
A common response to the phenomenon of CC is to say, “I know that the direct effects are good, and I struggle to weigh all of the indirect effects, so the latter are zero for me in expectation, and the intervention is appealing”. But (unless there’s a strong counterargument to Hilary’s observation about this in “Cluelessness” which I’m unaware of), this response is invalid. We know this because if this response were valid, we could by identical reasoning pick out any category of effect whose effects we can estimate—the effect on farmed chicken welfare next year from saving a chicken-eater’s life, say—and say “I know that the next-year-chicken effects are bad, and I struggle to weigh all of the non-next-year-chicken effects, so the latter are zero for me in expectation, and the intervention is unappealing”.
The above reasoning doesn’t invalidate that kind of response to simple cluelessness, because there the indirect effects have a feature—symmetry—which breaks when you cut up the space of consequences differently. But this means that, unless one can demonstrate that the distribution of non-direct effects has a sort of evidential symmetry that the distribution of non-next-year-chicken effects does not, one is not yet in a position to put a sign to the value of saving a life.
So, the response to
What’s the expected value (on net) of the indirect effects to you? Is its absolute value much greater than the direct effects’ expected value?
is that, given an inability to weigh all the effects, and an absence of evidential symmetry, I simply don’t have an expected value (or even a sign) of the indirect effects, or the total effects, of saving a life.
Does that clarify things at all, or am I the one doing the talking-past?
Agreed that, at least from a utilitarian perspective, identity effects aren’t what matter and feel pretty symmetrical, and that they’re therefore not the right way to illustrate complex cluelessness. But when you say
you need an example where you can justify that the outcome distributions are significantly different. I actually haven’t been convinced that this is the case for any longtermist intervention
—maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I believe the proposition being defended here is that the distribution of long-term welfare outcomes from a short-termist intervention differs substantially from the status quo distribution of long-term welfare outcomes (and that this distribution-difference is much larger than the intervention’s direct benefits). Do you mean that you’re not convinced that this is the case for any short-termist intervention?
Even though we don’t know the magnitudes of today’s interventions’ long-term effects, I do think we can sometimes confidently say that the distribution-difference is larger than the direct effect. For instance, the UN’s 95% confidence interval is that the population of Africa will multiply by about 3x to 5x by 2100 (here, p.7). One might think their confidence interval should be wider, but I don’t see why the range would be upwards-biased in particular. Assuming that fertility in saved children isn’t dramatically lower than population fertility, this strikes me as a strong reason to think that the indirect welfare effects of saving a young person’s life in Africa today—indeed, even a majority of the effects on total human welfare before 2100—will be larger than the direct welfare effect.
Saving lives might lower fertility somewhat, thus offsetting this effect, But the (tentative) conclusion of what I believe is the only in-depth investigation on this is that there are some regions in which this offsetting is negligible. And note that if those UN projections are any guide, the fertility-lowering effect would have to be not just non-negligible but very close to complete for the direct welfare effects to outweigh the indirect.
Does that seem wrong to you?
No.
Yeah, agreed that using the white supremacist label needlessly poisons the discussion in both cases.
For whatever it’s worth, my own tentative guess would actually be that saving a life in the developing world contributes more to growth in the long run than saving a life in the developed world. Fertility in the former is much higher, and in the long run I expect growth and technological development to be increasing in global population size (at least over the ranges we can expect to see).
Maybe this is a bit off-topic, but I think it’s worth illustrating that there’s no sense in which the longtermist discussion about saving lives necessarily pushes in a so-called “white supremacist” direction.
Thanks for pointing that out!
For those who might worry that you’re being hyperbolic, I’d say that the linked paper doesn’t say that they are white supremacists. But it does claim that a major claim from Nick Beckstead’s thesis is white supremacist. Here is the relevant quote, from pages 27-28:
“As he [Beckstead] makes the point,
>> saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards, at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards, saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.
This is overtly white-supremacist.”
The document elsewhere clarifies that it is using the term white supremacism to refer to systems that reinforce white power, not only to explicit, conscious racism. But I agree that this is far enough from how most people use the terminology that it doesn’t seem like a very helpful contribution to the discussion.
I downvoted the comment because it’s off-topic.
Thanks!
I’m far from qualified to give career advice to people who are already full-time academics, but I suppose I’d say,
If you’ve just graduated and are looking for a post-doc opportunity, or are coming from outside academia and willing to move to Oxford, then apply to GPI.
If you’re already an academic elsewhere, then get in touch, come to one of the workshops GPI holds at the end of each Oxford term, and try shifting your research in a GPR direction. (We put together such a long research agenda partly in the hope that lots of interested researchers elsewhere will find something in it that they can get excited about.)
If you’re a senior enough academic that you could set up a respectable global priorities research center elsewhere, then definitely get in touch! That could turn out to be a great idea, especially if you’re an economist at a higher-ranked department than Oxford’s. Forethought—GPI’s sister org, which funds GPR activity outside of Oxford—would be a place to apply for funding for a project along those lines.
I don’t know what counts as a core principle of EA exactly, but most people involved with EA are quite consequentialist.
Whatever you should in fact do here, you probably wouldn’t find a public recommendation to be dishonest. On purely consequentialist grounds, after accounting for the value of the reputation of the EA community and so on, what community guidelines (and what EA Forum advice) do you think would be better to write: those that go out of their way to emphasize honesty or those that sound more consequentialist?