tylermjohn

Karma: 635

tylermjohn 12 Nov 2023 19:12 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA Explorer GPT: A New Tool to Explore Effective Altruism
I haven’t tried this, but I’m excited about the idea! Effective Altruism as an idea seems unusually difficult to communicate faithfully, and creating a GPT that can be probed on various details and correct misconceptions seems like a great way to increase communication fidelity.

tylermjohn 29 Sep 2023 17:17 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Net global welfare may be negative and declining
On your future directions / tentative reflections (with apologies that I haven’t looked into your model, which is probably cool and valuable!):

To the extent that we think this is relevant for things like lock-in and x-risk prioritisation we need to also think that current trends are predictive of future trends. But it’s not at all clear that they are once you take into account the possibility of explosive growth a la https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/. Moreover, worlds where there is explosive growth have way more moral patients, so if their probability is non-negligible they tend to dominate moral considerations.

Once we focus on explosive growth scenarios as the most important, I find much more persuasive considerations like these: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/the-expected-value-of-extinction-risk-reduction-is-positive

I’ve written up decently extended reflections on why we shouldn’t give much weight to the fact that the history and presency of our world is an utter moral hellscape that I’m happy to share privately if these questions are important for you.

(All that said, I do think lock-in is undervalued in longtermism and I’m excited to see more work on that, and I do think the path to x-risk prioritisation is much more complicated than many EAs think and that these kinds of considerations you point out are exactly why.)

tylermjohn 22 Sep 2023 15:34 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Should Effective Altruists be Valuists instead of utilitarians?
I’ve only skimmed the essay but it looks pretty good! Many of the ideas I had in mind are covered here, and I respond very differently to this than to your post here.

I don’t know what most EAs believe about ethics and metaethics, but I took this post to be about the truth, or desirability of these metaethical, ethical, and methodological positions, not whether they’re better than what most EAs believe. And that’s what I’m commenting on here.

tylermjohn 22 Sep 2023 11:00 UTC
17 points
5 ∶ 1
on: Should Effective Altruists be Valuists instead of utilitarians?
Hi Spencer and Amber,

There’s a pretty chunky literature on some of these issues in metaethics, e.g.:
- Moral fictionalism, or why it could make sense to talk in terms of moral truths even if there aren’t any
- Moral antirealism/constructivism, or why there can be moral “shoulds” and “oughts” even if these are just mental attitudes
- Why even if you’re a pluralist, utilitarian considerations dominate your reasoning on a range of psychologically typical value systems given how much welfare matters to people compared to other things, and how much we can affect it given effective altruism
- How there can be different ways of valuing things, some that you endorse and some that you don’t (especially among constructivists like Street, Korsgaard, and Velleman), and why it could make sense to only act on values you endorse acting on
- Relatedly, how your moral theory might be different from your spontaneous sentiments because you can think through these sentiments and bring them into harmony (e.g. the discussion of reflective equilibrium)
Obviously it would be a high bar to have to have a PhD level training on these topics and read through the whole literature before posting on the EA Forum, so I’m not suggesting that! But I think it would be useful to talk some of these ideas through with antirealist metaethicists because they have responses to a bunch of these criticisms. I know Spencer and I chatted about this once and probably we should chat again! I could also refer you to some other EA folks who would be good to chat to about this, probably over DM.

All of that said, I do think there are useful things about what you’re doing here, especially e.g. part 2, and I do think that some antirealist utilitarianism is mistaken for broadly the reasons you say! And the philosophers definitely haven’t gotten everything right, I actually think most metaethicists are confused. But especially claims like those made in part 3 have a lot of good responses in existing discussion.

ETA: Actually if you’re still in NYC one person I’ll nominate to chat with about this topic is Jeff Sebo.

tylermjohn 30 Jul 2023 14:44 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Why isn’t there a charity evaluator for longtermist projects?
I’d be pretty excited to see a new platform for retail donors giving to x-risk charities. For this, you’d want to have some x-risk opportunities that are highly scaleable (can do ≥ $10m p.a., will execute the project over years reliably without intervention or outside pressure), measurable (you can write out a legible, robust, well-quantifed theory of change from marginal dollars to x-risk), have a pretty smooth returns curve (so people can have decent confidence that their donations have the returns that they expect, whether they are a retail donors or a large donor). And then you could build out cost effectiveness models given different assumptions about values (e.g. time preference, population ethics) and extinction risk models that people might have, and offer retail donors a few different ways of thinking about and modeling the impacts of their donations (e.g. lives saved, micro- or picodooms).

I’d guess there are some bio interventions that fit these criteria. For AI safety there could be a crowd-funded compute cluster for safety research. This could be pretty boring and difficult to model robustly unless there was good reporting on the wins that came out of research using the cluster and further iteration on the model based on the track record.

tylermjohn 18 May 2023 21:53 UTC
11 points
4 ∶ 0
on: U.S. Regulatory Updates to Benefit-Cost Analysis: Highlights and Encouragement to Submit Public Comments
Noting that I think that making substantive public comments on this draft (including positive comments about what it gets right) is one of the very best volunteer opportunities for EAs right now! I plan to send a comment on the draft before the deadline of 6 June.

tylermjohn 1 Apr 2023 9:05 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sam Anschell’s comment on: What’s surprised me as an entry-level generalist at Open Phil & my recommendations to early career professionals
Thanks Sam! I don’t have much more to say about this right now since on a couple things we just have different impressions, but I did talk to someone at 80k last night about this. They basically said: some people need the advice Tyler gave, some people need the advice Sam gave. The best general advice is probably “apply broadly”: apply to some EA jobs, to some high-impact jobs outside of EA, to some upskilling jobs, etc. And then pick the highest EV job you were accepted to (where EV is comprehensive and includes things like improvements to your future career from credentialing and upskilling).

tylermjohn 31 Mar 2023 3:02 UTC
72 points
20 ∶ 2
on: What’s surprised me as an entry-level generalist at Open Phil & my recommendations to early career professionals
Hi readers! I work as a Programme Officer at a longtermist organisation. (These views are my own and don’t represent my employer!) I think there’s some valuable advice in this post, especially about not being constrained too much by what you majored in. But after running several hiring rounds, I would frame my advice a bit differently. Working at a grantmaking organisation did change my views on the value of my time. But I also learned a bunch of other things, like:
1. The majority of people who apply for EA jobs are not qualified for them.
2. Junior EA talent is oversupplied, because of management constraints, top of funnel growth, and because EAs really want to work at EA organisations.
3. The value that you bring to your organisation/to the world is directly proportional to your skills and your fit for the role.
Because of this, typically when I talk to junior EAs my advice is not to apply to lots more EA jobs but rather to find ways of skilling up — especially by working at a non-EA organisation that has excellent managers and invests in training its staff — so that one can build key skills that make one indispensable to EA organisations.

Here’s a probably overly strong way of stating my view that might bring the point home: try to never apply to EA jobs, and instead get so good at something that EA orgs will headhunt you and fight over you.

I know that there are lots of nice things about working at EA organisations (culture, community, tangible feelings of impact) but if you really value work at EA organisations, then you should value highly skilled work at EA organisations even more (I think a lot more!). Having more junior EAs find ways to train up their skills and spend less time looking for EA work is the only way I can see to convert top of funnel community growth into healthy middle of funnel community growth.

tylermjohn 16 Mar 2023 12:40 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Write a Book?
I’m not sure if this fits your concept, but it might be helpful to have a guidebook that caters specifically to new EAs, to help give guidance to people excited about the ideas but unsure how to put them into practice in daily life, in order to convert top of funnel growth into healthy middle of funnel growth. This could maybe couple with a more general audience book that appeals to people who are antecedently interested in the ideas.

A couple things I’d like to see in this are the reasoning transparency stuff, guidance on going out and getting skills outside of the EA community to bring into the community, anti-burnout stuff, and various cultural elements that will help community health and epistemics.

tylermjohn 25 Feb 2023 23:51 UTC
2 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Updates from the Mental Health Funder’s Circle
Congrats, Will!

tylermjohn 31 Jan 2023 12:56 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Follow-Up Survey: Major Layoffs at Tech Giants [recruiting support]
I’ve just shared the survey. I think it would be useful if the survey included more information on who will use it, who the data will be available, who is running the survey, and the like.

tylermjohn 20 Jan 2023 9:52 UTC
16 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: zdgroff’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
That argument would be seen as too weak in the political theory context. Then powerful states would have to enfranchise everyone in the world and form a global democracy. It also is too strong in this context, since it implies global democratic control of EA funds, not community control.

tylermjohn 19 Jan 2023 10:06 UTC
26 points
8 ∶ 1
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
I think it could make sense in various instances to form a trade agreement between people earning and people doing direct work, where the latter group has additional control over how resources are spent.

It could also make sense to act like that trade agreement which was not in fact made was in fact made, if that incentivises people to do useful direct work.

But if this trade has never in fact transpired, explicitly or tacitly, I see no sense in which these resources “are meaningfully owned by the people who have forsaken direct control over that money in order to pursue our object-level priorities.”

tylermjohn 19 Jan 2023 9:06 UTC
50 points
22 ∶ 3
in reply to: Alexander_Berger’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
Also, the (normative, rather than instrumental) arguments for democratisation in political theory are very often based on the idea that states coerce or subjugate their members, and so the only way to justify (or eliminate) this coercion is through something like consent or agreement. Here we find ourselves in quite a radically different situation.

tylermjohn 18 Jan 2023 23:48 UTC
32 points
13 ∶ 0
on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
Much as I am sympathetic to many of the points in this post, I don’t understand the purpose of the section, “Can you demand ten billion dollars?”. As I understand the proposal to democratise EA it’s just that: a proposal about what, morally, EA ought to do. It certainly doesn’t follow that any particular person or group should try to enforce that norm. So pointing out that it would be a bad idea to try to use force to establish this is not a meaningful criticism of the proposal.

tylermjohn 7 Apr 2022 10:55 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: “Long-Termism” vs. “Existential Risk”
I’d love to hear what you think we’d be doing differently. With JackM, I think if we thought that hinginess was pretty evenly distributed across centuries ex ante we’d be doing a lot of movement-building and saving, and then distributing some of our resources at the hingiest opportunities we come across at each time interval. And in fact that looks like what we’re doing. Would you just expect a bigger focus on investment? I’m not sure I would, given how much EA is poised to grow and how comparably little we’ve spent so far. (Cf. Phil Trammell’s disbursement tool https://www.philiptrammell.com/dpptool/)

tylermjohn 1 Feb 2022 18:47 UTC
30 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright
Strong agree. All of the evidence cited in this post is about philosopher-bioethicists, and my experience working in bioethics (including at the NIH Department of Bioethics) says that philosopher-bioethicsts are much more progressive than bioethicists with a health background. And unfortunately, bioethicists with a health background have much stronger ties to the medical community and health care policy. One major piece of evidence for this is that none of the “bioethicists” mentioned in this post (other than Art Caplan) are members of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the main professional organisation in bioethics which “represents nearly 1,800 physicians, nurses, social workers, members of the clergy, educators, researchers, and other healthcare professionals interested in the specialty of bioethics and the health humanities.” (Evidence: I know most of them personally, have been to the ASBH conference three times, have a strong sense of who is there + what the conversations are like.) My experience attending the ASBH conference three times in the past suggests that most members of the ASBH see the philosophers mentioned as excessively radical, and they’re routinely ignored by the core bioethics community.

tylermjohn 14 Oct 2020 17:23 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Longtermist reasons to work for innovative governments
This is great and under-emphasized. I think it was @weeatquince who told me that the primary determinant of what gets implemented by governments is what has successfully been tried before, and while I haven’t seen much empirical data on this it strikes me as plausible.
One counter-point comes from Michael Rose’s book Zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie, which finds that low institutional path-dependence (approximated by the rate of recent constitutional changes) had no effect on the institutionalization of powerful proxies for future generations in a (pretty small) fuzzy-set analysis.
On the other hand, former Welsh minister Jane Davidson says that Wales was able to implement their Well-being of Future Generations Act due to the innovativeness of the Welsh government in her new book #FutureGen.
In addition to seeing more EAs get into innovative governments to run policy experiments, it would be great to see further research on policy diffusion and on the importance and proper characterization of governmental innovativeness in the sense you outline here.

tylermjohn 31 Jul 2020 13:55 UTC
16 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Link: Longtermist Institutional Reform
Thanks for posting this here as well as Jess’s excellent questions! This seems like a nice place to continue the conversation around the paper, so I’ll respond to what I take to be the most pertinent issues in the blog post here. As Jess notes, this is a relatively early attempt to formulate these ideas and the literature on longtermist institutional reform is extremely young, so the more conversation the better.

How will (short-term) vested interests try to capture these in-government research groups, and how will that be prevented? Why is this better done within the government rather than done in academia using grants from the government or philanthropists?
Most governments are swamped with expertise. It’s not that they have too little of it, but that they are overwhelmed with it, can’t absorb it, and don’t know who to turn to as a reliable source of information. Governments need one or a small body of epistemically reliable and nonpartisan research groups that they can turn to which fill the function of synthesizing extant research into consumable reports for government. These research groups in turn need to have strong working relationships and good lines of communication with government. If an academic or privately-funded research institute could play that role, that would be fine, but it’s harder to see how this would be possible, and in-government research groups and advisory boards have a good track record of playing this sort of role. (We use the OTA as one prominent example, but there are many others on smaller scale.) One additional benefit of research institutes that are set up by government is that when the government is perceived as legitimate, these institutes will also be seen as legitimate and reliable sources of information. It would be valuable for the described research institutes to have public legitimacy, so that if their publicly disseminated research were ignored by government this fact could precipitate public censure.
If public censure isn’t enough to command the attention of government to the research, then a research institute with government authority could also have the “put-it-in-their-face-power” we suggest in the paper, forcing reading and a response by government.
Short-term interest capture is an important worry, and we see this already in privately-funded research groups as well as in academia. One mechanism we propose in the paper for preventing capture by interest groups and industry is to have researchers selected by professional associations or by lot. If the research body is large enough and its key members and leadership are shuffled frequently enough, this should prevent a great deal of corruption. But of course, we are open to other ideas depending on the additional concerns that arise.

What will incentivize the citizen assembly to actually benefit future citizens? Merely because they are “explicitly tasked with the sole mandate”, with no enforcement or feedback?
The citizens’ assembly proposed doesn’t have a strong mechanism for amplifying the concern of assembly members for future people. It is assumed that they already have some interest in doing this, as roughly all people do. The role of the citizens’ assembly isn’t to amplify personal motivation, but rather to i) reduce election and funding incentives that disincentivize the electorate from focusing on the long-term, ii) reduce the deleterious effects of polarization on long-term deliberation, and iii) create designated agenda time for long-term issues. All of these sources of short-termism hamper governmental motivation to focus on the long-term, so we should expect the citizens’ assembly to be much more motivated to benefit future generations than existing government organs. The motivation comes from the citizens themselves, but it has far fewer obstacles to overcome than the motivation of the electorate.
That said, the literature on assemblies does suggest that participation in assemblies decreases citizen political apathy and increases empathy between deliberation participants, so there could be some salutary motivational effects of citizens’ assemblies that we haven’t considered here. Moreover, political decisions tend to operate with 2-5 year timelines, and the assembly members will in general live for much longer than this. Given that the citizens’ assembly will be deliberative and better-informed than the general public, it is possible that it will function more rationally, seeking to promote the diverse interests of the diverse group of people within the assembly across their lifespans, rather than over the next 2-5 years, and this would significantly decrease short-termism. But this is rather speculative, and the central purpose of the assembly is not to increase this kind of motivation.

Does thinking that the citizen assembly would be effective imply that most government assemblies should be selected by sortition (which, right or wrong, has deployed pretty rarely worldwide)? Or is there something about the future and/or soft-power that makes sortition particularly well suited for this body? (Personally, I like sortition as a governing mechanism in general, but if we can’t get hardly anyone to use it generally, why might they here?)
Sortition has perhaps been deployed less rarely than you think! There have been at least 120 citizens’ assemblies and citizen juries deployed worldwide, and sortition is regularly used for the selection of court juries. But it’s true that they’ve rarely been used for the selection of long-lasting government positions.
The role of the citizens’ assembly I mentioned above, I think, shows why sortition should be especially helpful here: it removes perverse election incentives to attend to the short-term, and it also reduces the effect of partisan forces, decreasing polarization. These seem especially important when considering long-term issues where our situation is epistemically precarious, but you’re right to point out that they are generally very important. I am personally quite open to the idea that a very large proportion of political leaders should be selected randomly. My own dissertation supervisor, Alex Guerrero, is writing an excellent book defending this idea at this very moment.
On why we might be able to get government to use it here: citizens’ assemblies have a relatively strong tradition of use for gathering information on the informed views of citizens, and have in the last decade become increasingly popular. As above, I would advocate for greater experimentation with sortition, but they have most popularly been used in citizens’ assemblies that are similar to that which we describe, and we expect it to continue to be popular in these institutions.

Will prosperity impact statements obviously improve the long-term future more than it will be used to block/delay projects for near-term reasons? Certainly, environmental impact statements suffer from this problem, and EIS have the advantage that at least there is often some way to objectively check whether they were right or wrong in a reasonable amount of time.
This is the issue raised in the blog post that I find trickiest. It’s certainly true that EIAs have frequently been used to block and delay projects on spurious grounds, and the point here that PIAs are less epistemically tractable is spot-on and important. One advantage of PIAs in the legislature is that many more resources can be put to ensuring that they are objective and accurate than can be put into, say, local jurisdictions, given the much greater resources of the federal government and the fewer number of items requiring assessment. An idea we considered but didn’t include here is that an independent, non-partisan body such as the in-government research institutions we defend could perform the impact assessments, taking them out of the hands of politicians who might use them for more obstructionist ends. But I remain quite uncertain on the best mechanism for ensuring that PIAs fulfill their information-gathering and soft censure functions rather than becoming used primarily to fuel partisan obstructionism, and I’d certainly be interested in other ideas.

tylermjohn 29 Jun 2020 18:01 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias_Baumann’s comment on: Representing future generations in the political process
Ah, it looks like I read your post to be a bit more committal than you meant it to be! Thanks for your reply! And sorry for the misnomer, I’ll correct that in the top-level comment.