weeatquince

• weeatquince 5 Oct 2019 17:40 UTC

  28 points

  on: Some per­sonal thoughts on EA and sys­temic change

  In one key way this post very solidly com­pletely misses the point.
  
  The post makes a num­ber of very good points about sys­temic change. But bases all of the points on fi­nan­cial cost-effec­tive es­ti­mates. It is em­bed­ded in the lan­guage through­out, dis­cussing: op­tions that “out­performed GiveWell style char­i­ties”, the “cost … per marginal vote”, les­sons for “large-scale spend­ing” or for a “small donor”, etc.
  
  I think a way the EA com­mu­nity has ne­glected sys­temic change in ex­actly in this man­ner. Money is not the only thing that can be lev­er­aged in the world to make change (and in some cases money is not a thing peo­ple can give).
  I think this some part of what peo­ple are point­ing to when they crit­i­cise EA.
  
  To be con­struc­tive I think we should re­think cause pri­o­ti­sa­tion, but not from a fi­nan­cial point of view. Eg:
  - If you have poli­ti­cal power how best to spend it?
  - If you have a pub­lic voice how best to use it?
  - If you can or­ganise ac­tivism what should it fo­cus on?
  
  (PS. Happy to sup­port with money or time peo­ple do­ing this kind of re­search)
  
  I think we could get no­tice­ably differ­ent re­sults. I think things like fi­nan­cial sta­bil­ity (hard to donate to but very im­por­tant) might show up as more of a pri­or­ity in the EA space if we start look­ing at things this way.
  
  I think the EA com­mu­nity cur­rently has a limited amount to say to any­one with power. For ex­am­ple:
  • I met the civil ser­vant with over­sight of UK’s £8bn in­ter­na­tional de­vel­op­ment spend­ing who seemed in­ter­ested in EA but did not feel it was rele­vant to them – I think they were cor­rect, I had noth­ing to say they didn’t already know.
  • Another case is an EA I know who does not have a huge amount to donate but lots of ex­pe­rience in poli­ti­cal or­ganis­ing and ac­tivism, I doubt the EA com­mu­nity pro­vides them much use­ful di­rec­tion.
  
  It is not that the EA com­mu­nity does none of this, just that we are slow. It feels like it took 80000 Hours a while to start recom­mend­ing policy/​poli­tics as a ca­reer path and it is still un­clear what peo­ple should do once in po­si­tions of power. (HIPE.org.uk if do­ing some re­search on this for Govern­ment ca­reers)
  
  --
  Over­all a very in­ter­est­ing post. Thank you for post­ing.

  I note you men­tion a “rel­a­tive gap in long-ter­mist and high-risk global poverty work”. I think this is in­ter­est­ing. I would love it if any­one has the time to do some back of the en­velope eval­u­a­tions of in­ter­na­tional de­vel­op­ment gov­er­nance re­form or­gani­sa­tions (like Trans­parency In­ter­na­tional)

• weeatquince 5 Oct 2019 16:44 UTC

  10 points

  on: [up­dated] Global de­vel­op­ment in­ter­ven­tions are gen­er­ally more effec­tive than Cli­mate change interventions

  Tl;dr: This as­sumes pure rate of time dis­count­ing. I cu­ri­ous how well your anal­y­sis works for any­one who do not think that we should dis­count harms in the fu­ture sim­ply by virtue of be­ing in the fu­ture.
  
  --
  1.
  THIS IS SO GOOD
  This is su­per good re­search and su­per de­tailed and I am hugely im­pressed and hope many many peo­ple donate to Let’s Fund and sup­port you with this kind of re­search!!!
  
  --
  2.
  LET’S BE MORE EXPLICIT ABOUT THE ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS MADE
  
  I en­joyed read­ing Ap­pendix 3
  • I agree with Pindyck that mod­els of the so­cial cost of car­bon (SCC) re­quire a host of un­der­ly­ing eth­i­cal de­ci­sions and so can be highly mis­lead­ing.
  • I don’t how­ever agree with Pindyck that there is no al­ter­na­tive so we might as well ig­nore this prob­lem
  
  At least for the pur­poses of mak­ing de­ci­sions within the EA com­mu­nity, I think we can ap­ply mod­els but be ex­plicit about what eth­i­cal as­sump­tions have been made and how they af­fect the mod­els con­clu­sions. Many peo­ple on this fo­rum have a de­cent un­der­stand­ing of their eth­i­cal views and how that af­fects de­ci­sions and so be­ing more ex­plicit would sup­port good cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion de­ci­sions of donors and oth­ers.
  
  Of course this is hold­ing peo­ple on this fo­rum to a higher stan­dard of rigor than pro­fes­sional aca­demic economists reach so should be seen as a nice to have rather than a de­fault, but lets see what we can do...
  
  --
  3.
  DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE, AND OTHER ASSUMPTIONS
  

  3.1
  My (very rough) un­der­stand­ing of cli­mate anal­y­sis is that the SCC is very highly de­pen­dent on the dis­count rate.

  (Ap­pendix 3 makes this point. Also the pa­per you link to on SCC per coun­try says “Dis­count­ing as­sump­tions have con­sis­tently been one of the biggest de­ter­mi­nants of differ­ences be­tween es­ti­ma­tions of the so­cial cost of car­bon”).

  The pa­per you draw your ev­i­dence from seems to uses a pure rate of time dis­count­ing of 1-2%. This ba­si­cally as­sumes that fu­ture peo­ple mat­ter less.
  I think many read­ers of this fo­rum do not be­lieve that fu­ture peo­ple mat­ter less than peo­ple to­day.

  I do not know how much this mat­ters for the anal­y­sis. A high so­cial cost of car­bon seems, from the num­bers in your ar­ti­cle, to make cli­mate in­ter­ven­tions of the same or­der of mag­ni­tude but slightly less effec­tive than cash trans­fers.
  
  3.2
  I also un­der­stand that es­ti­mates of the SCC is also de­pen­dent on the calcu­la­tion of the worse case tail-end effects and there is some con­cern among peo­ple in the x-risk re­search space that small chances of very catas­trophic af­fects are ig­nored in cli­mate eco­nomics. I do not know how much this mat­ters ei­ther.
  
  3.3
  I could also imag­ine that many peo­ple (es­pe­cially nega­tive lean­ing util­i­tar­i­ans) are more con­cerned by stop­ping the dam­age caused from cli­mate change than im­pressed by the benefits of cash trans­fers.
  
  SO:
  I do not have an­swers to what effects these things have on the anal­y­sis. I would love to get your views on this.
  
  Thank you for you work on this!!!

• weeatquince 3 Oct 2019 18:30 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  Hi,

  If I had to guess and (and I feel un­com­fortable do­ing so as not re­ally go­ing on any­thing here but my gut) I would say that at an en­try level it is all pretty similar but that an en­try level job in the civil ser­vice is likely slightly higher im­pact than an en­try level job as an MP’s re­search but the vari­a­tion be­tween jobs and MPs is likely more im­por­tant. I think your per­sonal ex­pected value is dom­i­nated by the jobs you get in later ca­reer rather than at an en­try level so this is small on the scale of your ca­reer.

  Value of in­for­ma­tion to the broader EA com­mu­nity is good, as is any other low-hang­ing-fruit benefits gained by be­ing an early EA mover into a space.

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:40 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  Hi, I think the 80K ad­vice is still fairly ap­pli­ca­ble (also I don’t think it would be a sec­ond opinion as my views were taken into ac­count in that 80K ar­ti­cle)

  Would prob­a­bly put the diplo­matic fast-stream on par with the gen­er­al­ist one (al­though not very sure about this)

  I would say that do not for­get you can go in di­rect en­try into a job and if you have a bit of ex­pe­rience (even a year or 2) get­ting an SEO job (or higher) may well be prefer­able to the FastStream.

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pablo_Stafforini's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  This image dis­plays for me. I am not sure what I need to do to make it dis­play prop­erly for you or what has gone wrong. Can some­one ad­min-y in­ves­ti­gate?

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  There are maybe 40 peo­ple who are in the EA com­mu­nity cur­rently in the UK civil ser­vice and none cur­rently in poli­tics. I think most peo­ple I know would agree that it is com­par­a­tively more use­ful and more ne­glected for EAs to move to­wards poli­tics.

  I also think it is gen­er­ally more im­pact­ful to do well in poli­tics than to do well in the civil ser­vice, as ul­ti­mately poli­ti­ci­ans make the de­ci­sions. Although I do know EAs would dis­agree with this and point out that peo­ple do not have po­si­tions of poli­ti­cal power for very long.

  I think poli­tics is more challeng­ing: I think it is more com­pet­i­tive to do very well in. Also I think if you want to go into poli­tics you need to re­ally com­mit to that path and spend your time en­gaged in party poli­tics whereas I think it is eas­ier to move in and out of the civil ser­vice.

UK policy and poli­tics careers

• weeatquince 30 Aug 2019 12:54 UTC

  8 points

  on: Cam­paign fi­nance re­form as an EA pri­or­ity?

  I have been think­ing a fair bit about im­prov­ing in­sti­tu­tional de­ci­sion mak­ing prac­tices. I buy the ar­gu­ment that if you fix sys­tems you can make a bet­ter world and that mak­ing sys­tems that can make good de­ci­sions is su­per im­por­tant.

  There are many things you might want to change to make sys­tems work bet­ter. [1]

  I am out­side the US and re­ally do not un­der­stand the US sys­tem and cer­tainly do not know of any good anal­y­sis on this topic and any com­ments should be taken with that in mind, but my weak out­side view is that cam­paign fi­nanc­ing is the biggest is­sue with US poli­tics.

  As such this seems to me to be plau­si­bly the most im­por­tant thing for EA folk to be work­ing on in the world to­day. I am happy to put my money where my mouth is and sup­port (talk to, low level fund, etc) peo­ple to do an “EA-style anal­y­sis of US cam­paign fi­nance re­form”.

  
  

  [1] https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​cpJRB7thJpESTquBK/​​in­tro­duc­ing-gpi-s-new-re­search-agenda#Zy8kTJfGrY9z7HRYH

• weeatquince 27 Aug 2019 14:23 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: AI & Policy 1/​3: On know­ing the effect of to­day’s poli­cies on Trans­for­ma­tive AI risks, and the case for in­sti­tu­tional im­prove­ments.

  Thank you for the use­ful feed­back: Cor­rected!

AI & Policy 1/​3: On know­ing the effect of to­day’s poli­cies on Trans­for­ma­tive AI risks, and the case for in­sti­tu­tional im­prove­ments.

• weeatquince 20 Aug 2019 22:16 UTC

  20 points

  on: List of ways in which cost-effec­tive­ness es­ti­mates can be misleading

  DOUBLE COUNTING

  Similar to not cost­ing oth­ers work, you can end up in situ­a­tions where the same im­pact is counted mul­ti­ple times across all the char­i­ties in­volved, giv­ing an in­flated pic­ture of the to­tal im­pact.

  Eg. If Effec­tive Altru­ism (EA) Lon­don runs an event and this leads to an in­di­vi­d­ual sign­ing the Giv­ing What We Can (GWWC) pledge and donat­ing more the char­ity, both EA Lon­don and GWWC and the in­di­vi­d­ual may take 100% of the credit in their im­pact mea­sure­ment.

• weeatquince 1 Aug 2019 23:03 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: weeatquince's comment on: Age-Weighted Voting

  Also I do plan to write this up as a top level post soon

• weeatquince 1 Aug 2019 22:31 UTC

  38 points

  on: Age-Weighted Voting

  It is an in­ter­est­ing sug­ges­tion and I had not come across the idea be­fore and it is great to have peo­ple think­ing of new in­no­va­tive policy ideas. I agree that this idea is worth in­ves­ti­gat­ing.
  
  I think my main point to add is just to set out the wider con­text. I think it is worth peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in this be­ing aware that there is already a vast ar­ray of tried and tested policy solu­tions that are known to en­courage more long term think­ing in gov­ern­ments. I would lean to­wards the view that al­most all of the ideas I list be­low: have very strong ev­i­dence of work­ing well, would be much eas­ier to push for than age-weighted vot­ing, and would have a big­ger effect size than age-weighted vot­ing.
  
  Here’s the list (ex­am­ple of ev­i­dence it helps in brack­ets)
  
  * Longer elec­tion cy­cles (UK com­pared to Aus)
  * A non-demo­cratic sec­ond house (UK House of Lords)
  * Hav­ing a per­ma­nent neu­tral civil ser­vice (as in UK)
  * An ex­plicit state­ment of policy in­tent set­ting out a con­sis­tent cross-gov­ern­ment view that policy mak­ers should think long-term.
  * A for­mal guide to best prac­tice on dis­count­ing or on how to make policy that bal­ances the needs of pre­sent and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. (UK Trea­sury Green Book, but more long term fo­cused)
  * An in­de­pen­dent Office for Fu­ture Gen­er­a­tions, or similar, with a re­spon­si­bil­ity to en­sure that Govern­ment is act­ing in a long term man­ner. (as in Wales)
  * In­de­pen­dent gov­ern­ment over­sight bod­ies, (UKs Na­tional Au­dit Office, but more long term fo­cused)
  * Var­i­ous other com­bi­na­tions of tech­noc­racy and democ­racy, where de­tails are left to ex­perts. (UK’s Bank of England, In­fras­truc­ture Com­mis­sion, etc, etc)
  * A duty on Ministers to con­sider the long term. (as in Wales)
  * Hori­zon scan­ning and fore­sight skills, sup­port, tools and train­ing brought into gov­ern­ment (UK Gov Office for Science).
  * Risk man­age­ment skills, sup­port, tools and train­ing brought into gov­ern­ment (this must hap­pen some­where right?).
  * Good con­nec­tions be­tween academia and sci­ence and gov­ern­ment. (UK Open In­no­va­tion Team)
  * A gov­ern­ment body that can sup­port and fa­cil­i­tate oth­ers in gov­ern­ment with long term plan­ning. (UK Gov Office for Science, but ideally more long term fo­cused).
  * Trans­parency of long term think­ing. Through pub­li­ca­tion of statis­tics, im­pact as­sess­ments, etc (Eg. UK Office for Na­tional Statis­tics)
  * Ad­di­tional demo­cratic over­sight of long term is­sues (UK par­li­a­men­tary com­mit­tees)
  * Leg­is­la­tively bind­ing long term tar­gets (UKs cli­mate change laws)
  * Rules forc­ing Ministers to stay in po­si­tion longer (untested to my knowl­edge)
  * Be­ing a dic­ta­tor­ship (China, it does work al­though I don’t recom­mend)
  
  
  I hope to find time to do more work to col­late sug­ges­tions and the ev­i­dence for them and do a thor­ough liter­a­ture re­view
  (If any­one wants to vol­un­teer to help then get in touch). Some links here. My notes are at: https://​​docs.google.com/​​doc­u­ment/​​d/​​1KGLc_6bKhi5ClZPGBeEQIDF1cC4Dy8mo/​​edit#head­ing=h.mefn6dbmnz2See also: http://​​re­search­briefings.files.par­li­a­ment.uk/​​doc­u­ments/​​LLN-2019-0076/​​LLN-2019-0076.pdf
  
  As an aside I have a per­sonal lit­tle bug­bear with peo­ple fo­cus­ing on the vot­ing sys­tem when they try to think about how to make policy work. It is a tiny tiny part of the sys­tem and one where ev­i­dence of how to do it bet­ter is of­ten min­i­mal and tractabil­ity to change is low. I have writ­ten about this here: https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​cpJRB7thJpESTquBK/​​in­tro­duc­ing-gpi-s-new-re­search-agenda#Zy8kTJfGrY9z7HRYH Also my top tip for any­one think­ing about tractable policy op­tions is to start with ask­ing: do we already know how to make sig­nifi­cant steps to solve this prob­lem, from ex­ist­ing policy best prac­tice. (I think in this case we do.)
  

  What links here?

  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for July 2019 by aarongertler (20 Aug 2019 7:09 UTC; 24 points)

• weeatquince 5 Jun 2019 22:09 UTC

  6 points

  on: GCRI Call for Ad­visees and Collaborators

  Hi, I’m cu­ri­ous, what are the main aims, ex­pec­ta­tions and things you hope will come from this call out? Cheers

• weeatquince 17 May 2019 11:37 UTC

  9 points

  on: Jade Le­ung: Why Com­pa­nies Should be Lead­ing on AI Governance

  Hi Jade. I dis­agree with you. I think you are mak­ing a straw man of “reg­u­la­tion” and ig­nor­ing what mod­ern best prac­tice reg­u­la­tion ac­tu­ally looks like, whilst paint­ing a rosy pic­ture of in­dus­try led gov­er­nance prac­tice.

  Reg­u­la­tion doesn’t need to be a whole bunch of strict rules that limit cor­po­rate ac­tors. It can (in the­ory) be a set of high level eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples set by so­ciety and by gov­ern­ment who then defer to ex­perts with in­dus­try and policy back­grounds to set more gran­u­lar rules.

  Th­ese gran­u­lar rules can be strict rules that limit cer­tain ac­tions, or can be ‘out­come fo­cused reg­u­la­tion’ that al­lows in­dus­try to do what it wants as long is it is able to demon­strate that it has taken suit­able safety pre­cau­tions, or can in­volve as­sign­ing le­gal re­spon­si­bil­ity to key se­nior in­dus­try ac­tors to help al­ign the in­cen­tives of those ac­tors. (Good UK ex­am­ples in­clude HEFA and the ONR).

  Not to say that in­dus­try can­not or should not take a lead in gov­er­nance is­sues, but that Govern­ments can play a role of similar im­por­tance too.

• weeatquince 12 May 2019 22:15 UTC

  9 points

  on: Lat­est EA Up­dates for April 2019

  David. This is great.

  Your newslet­ters also (as well as the up­dates) also have a short story on what one EA com­mu­nity per­son is do­ing to make the world bet­ter. Why not in­clude those here too?

• weeatquince 6 May 2019 21:18 UTC

  7 points

  on: How do we check for flaws in Effec­tive Altru­ism?

  I very much like the idea of an in­de­pen­dent im­pact au­di­tor for EA orgs.

  I would con­sider fund­ing or oth­er­wise sup­port­ing such a pro­ject, any­one work­ing on, get in touch...

  One solu­tion that hap­pens already is rad­i­cal trans­parency.

  GiveWell and 80,000 Hours both pub­li­cly write about their mis­takes. GiveWell have in the past posted vast amounts of their back­ground work­ing on­line. This level of trans­parency is laud­able.

• weeatquince 6 May 2019 16:16 UTC

  4 points

  on: Should we con­sider the sleep loss epi­demic an ur­gent global is­sue?

  There is a very ob­vi­ous up­side to sleep­ing less: when you are not asleep you are awake and when you are awake you can do stuff.

  On a very quick glace the eco­nomic anal­y­sis refer­enced above (and the quotes from Why Sleep Mat­ters) seems to ig­nore this. If, as Khor­ton says, a per­son is miss­ing sleep to raise kids or work a sec­ond job, then this benefits so­ciety.

  This omis­sion makes me very scep­ti­cal of the anal­y­sis on this topic.

• weeatquince 30 Apr 2019 19:04 UTC

  21 points

  on: Will splashy philan­thropy cause the biose­cu­rity field to fo­cus on the wrong risks?

  Just to note that there’s been some dis­cus­sion on this on Face­book: https://​​m.face­book.com/​​groups/​​437177563005273?view=perma­l­ink&id=2251872561535755

• weeatquince 13 Apr 2019 13:33 UTC

  8 points

  on: An­nounc­ing EA Hub 2.0

  This is amaz­ing. Great work for ev­ery­one who in­putted. Was think­ing that a pos­si­ble fu­ture fea­tures (al­though per­haps not a pri­or­ity) would be in­te­gra­tion to the EA funds dona­tion track­ing and maybe LinkedIn pro­file data.