Hi! I’m somewhat new to EA—I’d heard of the ideas years ago but only started engaging with the community recently after doing the Intro to EA Virtual Program.
I work in International Tax Policy and am more sympathetic to neartermist causes such as global health and poverty reduction than longtermist ones.
I read a lot of non-fiction books and summarise them on my website, To Summarise.
Coming to this post a bit late, but I completely agree that summaries are underrated. In fact, I started a website this year called To Summarise. My initial focus was not on EA, but just on sharing (unusually quite detailed) summaries of books I’ve read. One of those was for Doing Good Better, and another was for Destined for War by Graham Allison, which I think was recommended on some 80k Hours or other EA website.
Just this week I posted my first podcast summary for an 80k hours interview with Hilary Greaves on longtermism, cluelessness and existence comparativism. It was very dense, so perhaps not the best choice for my first podcast summary, but I plan to do some other ones later—I was thinking of maybe doing the recent 80k interview with Will MacAskill. I am mostly doing this for fun right now (I work mostly full-time at a non-EA job) but would be interested in pursuing this further if others also think it is useful for the community.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks Rob! As you can tell, I really appreciate the show and the work you do on it.
That’s a good idea! I’ll try posting the Will MacAskill interview later since that one is relatively recent.
Is the future good in expectation? Thoughts on Will MacAskill’s most recent 80k Hours podcast
My full summary of this podcast is on my website here. Below are my thoughts on the question posed above—whether the future is good in expectation.
Why Will thinks the future looks good
Will thinks the future trajectory looks good. He mainly relies on an asymmetry between altruism and sadism in reaching this conclusion: some altruistic agents will systematically pursue things that are good, but very, very few sadistic agents will systematically pursue things that are bad.
Will therefore believes there’s a strong asymmetry where the very best possible futures are somewhat plausible, but the very worst possible futures are not. He accepts that it’s entirely plausible that we squander our potential and bring about a society that’s not the very best, but he finds it much, much less plausible that we bring about the truly worst society.
My thoughts
I am highly uncertain on this point and, while I have not thought about it as much as Will seems to have, I found his reasoning unpersuasive. In particular:
I think that it’s largely irrelevant whether a “truly worst” society is plausible. It makes more sense to focus on the respective likelihoods of all “worse than existence” and all “better than existence” societies (weighted by just how good or bad each future would be), rather than just the likelihoods of the best and worst-case scenarios.
It makes sense to view altruism as positive and sadism as negative, but I don’t think indifference equates to 0 as Rob and Will imply. By “indifference”, they really seem to mean “selfish”, and the latter has more negative connotations than the former. Pure indifference or selfishness may well end up as negative overall (though obviously not as negative as sadism) because of negative externalities. I think the vast majority of agents in the world are largely indifferent, and only a few are altruists, particularly if you include non-human beings in the calculation. The world could still be a net negative in this case.
There’s also a question about the distribution of power. Even if the impact of indifferents really were 0, and even if altruists and indifferents outnumber sadists, sadists may have more power and more ability to affect the world negatively. It seems plausible there is a positive correlation between having power and being sadistic. Put another way, there could be a negative correlation between having power and being altruistic. This may be because:
Altruistic people would be more inclined to give away money and power than sadistic or selfish people; and
Obtaining power sometimes requires morally dubious acts that altruistic people may not want to do.
(On the other hand, I think that people tend to be more altruistic once they have a certain level of wealth and power. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – once your basic needs are accounted for, you can focus on helping others.)
People are also not entirely altruistic, entirely sadistic, or entirely selfish. Even someone who identifies as an altruist (effective or otherwise) will be selfish to some degree, and their selfish acts may have larger impacts than their altruistic ones (perhaps more so for non-effective altruists who are less focused on impact). It’s therefore possible for altruistic groups to outnumber sadistic groups, but for sadistic acts to outnumber – or out-impact – altruistic acts.
To the people who have disagreed with this comment—I would be interested to learn why you disagree, if you care to share. What am I missing or getting wrong?
Thanks for the explanation. I agree it’s possible that smarter people could coordinate better and produce better outcomes for the world. I did recognise in my original post that a factor suggesting the future could be better was that, as people get richer and have their basic needs met, it’s easier to become altruistic. I find that argument very plausible; it was the asymmetry one I found unconvincing.
FWIW, I’m fine with others disagreeing with my view. It would be great to find out I’m wrong and that there is more evidence to suggest the future is rosier in expectation than I had originally thought. I just wanted people to let me know if there was a logical error or something in my original post, so thank you for taking the time to explain your thinking (and for retracting your disagreement on further consideration).
I’ve just been reading up on earlier EA forum posts about democracy and billionaire spending in light of the FTX saga that broke this week.
This comment did not age well.
I agree with you that the original comment, taken literally, is probably false and that EAs consorting with billionaires can still retain some power.
But I think the original comment by Berta had a good point in that there seemed to be a general naivete by EA about power and other people’s intentions. However, that is just from my vantage point as someone who does not work at an EA org and is not in any inner EA circle.
I think recent events have definitely lowered the general level of trust within the EA community. But that is not necessarily a good thing and I hope EA does not overcorrect, either. Getting the balance right will be tricky, but I think Berta was on the right track in that EA could benefit from thinking and talking about power more.
Thank you for posting this. I haven’t been in any of these EA circles myself, so do not have any experience with these issue. The more widespread this is, the more important this conversation is. But even if it only happens in one or two EA circles, it is still important.
I’m sorry to hear that this has been your experience with the NYC and SF EA circles.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve never heard of this Anki deck idea before and am intrigued. I have used Anki before for language learning. But I really like your idea of more deliberately “consuming” pleasant memories—I’ve often thought it’s a shame how little we savour most of our nice memories.
If you don’t mind me asking:
How many cards are in your deck right now?
Roughly how often do you add new memories to it?
Do you review daily, weekly, or whenever you feel like it?
Adjacently, some are arguing EA could have vetted FTX and Sam better, and averted this situation. This reeks of hindsight bias! Probably EA could not have done better than all the investors who originally vetted FTX before giving them a buttload of money!
I’ve seen this mentioned quite a few times, most prominently by Eliezer Yudowsky . I take the point that there were sophisticated investors such as Sequioa, and BlackRock who researched the company and could not detect FTX’s possible self-dealing with Alameda. I think it’s fair to say that EA probably could not have detected this FTX situation would blow up in exactly the way it did, even with more due diligence.
I also think that it’s rational to expect that you apply due diligence to where you are investing your money than where you are receiving it from—and my understanding is that EA (on the whole) was not actually investing in FTX.
However, what I think should not be lost sight of is that FTX funding made up a very significant amount of EA’s funding as a whole: in 2021, it was estimated FTX team’s funding made up $16.5 billion of $46.1 billion (roughly 36%). (Moskovitz’s funding was even larger—roughly 49%.)
This is incredibly undiversified, especially given how volatile SBF and Moskovitz’s wealth is . I am sure that this is far more undiversified than any large investor who actually put money in FTX. EA therefore stands to lose a lot more if the funding from FTX (or Moskovitz) fell away. I don’t want this point to get lost in the debate.
Now, I’m not sure that the answer was that EA should have vetted its funding more. When people are offering you “free” money,[1] I don’t think there is too much obligation to vet it (above any legal obligations that might exist). I think the answer is probably that EA should have thought about its risk exposure more, given how undiversified and volatile its funding is. In particular:
what might happen if FTX or Moskovitz’s funding dries up for any reason; and
how any negative consequences of that situation could be mitigated.
For example, I did see somewhere that there had been a statement somewhere suggesting that EAs personally should diversify away from crypto, given how exposed EA is to it generally, but that did not seem to be a very prominent, widely-advertised piece of advice.
I know also that there is some general career advice for people to build up a decent financial runway for themselves. Perhaps there should have been greater emphasis to the community that if they rely on funding (grants, salaries) that is undiversified, they should factor that risk in and weigh it with their personal risk appetite.
I leave aside the question of whether SBF was using EA to “launder” his reputation and therefore arguably the money was not entirely “free”. I don’t have an informed view on that.
I guess it depends on what we mean by “vetting funding”. EA should definitely do more to understand and manage the nature and extent of the risks it is exposed to—i.e. general risk management. I don’t think we need to wait for much more information to make such an assessment—the way this has unfolded with so many grant recipients, etc seeming to have been caught completely unprepared is enough evidence that the EA community’s risk management and communication were lacking.
But some people also seem to suggest “vetting funding” means EA should be trying to find fraud or other malfeasance in its donors. (That is suggested by the OP’s post and is what I meant by “vetting funding” in my previous comment). I’m less sure about this claim. It’s not clear how much due diligence is required in these cases vs how much due diligence EA actually did. So this is something that, as the OP suggests, would benefit from more information before coming to a conclusion.
Edit: Put another way, I think there are two questions:
Should EA have conducted better risk management? I think the answer on this question is quite clearly “yes”.
Would that “better risk management” have detected this fraud?
I’ve seen some discussions conflating the two. Even if the answer to the second is “no “or “unclear”, EA’s risk management practices could still be improved. That’s all I’m saying.
Upvoted with the benefit of hindsight bias.
In particular, I’m impressed with how these parts hit the nail on the head for recent events:
On average we are young and inexperienced. We have not yet experienced a scandal / major problem and have not yet started to think through how to avoid that happening again.
And:
Many EA organisations have very concentrated sources of funding. Donors therefore often fulfil the accountability and governance functions. Donors are analogous to customers, which can wield significant influence in for-profits.
Re: “I think many of these orgs have also dysfunctional aspects (e.g., I think most orgs are struggling with sexual harassment and concentration of formal and informal power)”
I agree with that, but I also think there’s something to be learned from dysfunctional orgs. Why are they dysfunction? How did they become dysfunctional? Why have attempts to make them less dysfunctional failed?
There is just as much — possibly more — to be learned from failures as there is to learn from successes.
Hi—I’m new to the forums and just want to provide some support for your point here. I’ve just completed the 8-week Intro to EA Virtual Program and I definitely got really hung up on the Longtermism and Existential Risk weeks. I’ve spent quite a few hours reading through materials on the Total View and Person-Affecting View and am currently drafting a blog post to work through and organise my thoughts.
I still feel highly sceptical of the Total View, to the point that I’ve been questioning how much I identify with longtermism and even “EA”, more generally, given my scepticism. I personally find some implications of the Total View quite disturbing and potentially dangerous.
So anyway, I just wanted to support your post and also thank you for reminding us that caring about AI alignment and biorisks does not require subscribing to controversial beliefs in moral philosophy.