I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University. Within effective altruism, I am interested in broad longtermism, long-term institutions and values, and animal welfare. In economics, my areas of interest include political economy, behavioral economics, and public economics.
zdgroff
Karma: 2,173
Lobbying architects of the future
Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
Advocacy often focuses on changing politics, but the most important decisions about the future of civilization may be made in domains that receive relatively less attention. Examples include the reward functions of generally intelligent algorithms that eventually get scaled up, the design of the first space colonies, and the structure of virtual reality. We would like to see one or more organizations focused on getting the right values considered by influential decision-makers at institutions like NASA and Google. We would be excited about targeted outreach to promote consideration of aligned artificial intelligence, existential risks, the interests of future generations, and nonhuman (both animal and digital) minds. The nature of this work could take various forms, but some potential strategies are prestigious conferences in important industries, retreats including a small number of highly-influential professionals, or shareholder activism.
Yeah, I think this would be good context—the CO gov’s husband is a die-hard animal rights activist and seems to have influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlon_Reis
He declared a “MeatOut” day recently to support plant-based eating and has signed various animal welfare initiatives into law, such as a cage-free law.
So it seems that someone very EA-minded could get this position if they apply.
I’m really excited to see this and look into it. I’m working on some long-term persistence issues, and this is largely in line with my intuitive feel for the literature. I haven’t looked at the Church-WEIRDness one, though, and now I’m eager to read that one.
Let me note that on top of all your concrete accomplishments, you’re just a very sweet and caring person, which has got to help a lot in building this vibrant community. I’m happy to know you!
There is nothing special about longtermism compared to any other big desideratum in this regard.
I’m not sure this is the case. E.g. Steven Pinker in Better Angels makes the case that utopian movements systematically tend to commit atrocities because this all-important end goal justifies anyting in the medium term. I haven’t rigorously examined this argument and think it would be valuable for someone to do so, but much of longtermism in the EA community, especially of the strong variety, is based on something like utopia.
One reason why you might intuitively think there would be a relationship is that shorter-term impacts are typically somewhat more bounded; e.g. if thousands of American schoolchildren are getting suboptimal lunches, this obviously doesn’t justify torturing hundreds of thousands of people. With the strong longtermist claims it’s much less clear that there’s any sort of upper bound, so to draw a firm line against atrocities you end up looking to somewhat more convoluted reasoning (e.g. some notion of deontological restraint that isn’t completely absolute but yet can withstand astronomical consequences, or a sketchy and loose notion that atrocities have an instrumental downside).
I think the persistence studies stuff is the best bet. One thing to note there is that the literature is sort of a set of existence proofs. It shows that there are various things that have long-term impacts, but it might not give you a strong sense of the average long-term impact of poverty alleviation.
This is really impressive work. I’ve been looking for something like this to cite for economics work on animal welfare, and this seems well-suited for that.
I just wanted to give major kudos for evaluating a prediction you made and very publicly sharing the results even though they were not fully in line with your prediction.
Thanks. I’m aware of this sort of argument, though I think most of what’s out there relies on anecdotes, and it’s unclear exactly what the effect is (since there is likely some level of confounding here).
I guess there are still two things holding me up here. (1) It’s not clear that the media is changing preferences or just offering [mis/dis]information. (2) I’m not sure it’s a small leap. News channels’ effects on preferences likely involve prolonged exposure, not a one-time sitting. For an algorithm to expose someone in a prolonged way, it has to either repeatedly recommend videos or recommend one video that leads to their watching many, many videos. The latter strikes me as unlikely; again, behavior is malleable but not that malleable. In the former case, I would think the direct effect on the reward function of all of those individual videos recommended and clicked on has to be way larger than the effect on the person’s behavior after seeing the videos. If my reasoning were wrong, I would find that quite scary, because it would be evidence of substantially greater vulnerability to current algorithms than I previously thought.
Right. I mean, I privilege this simpler explanation you mention. He seems to have reason to think it’s not the right explanation, but I can’t figure out why.
BTW, I am interested in studying this question if anyone is interested in partnering up. I’m not entirely sure how to study it, as (given the post) I suspect the result may be a null, which is only interesting if we have access to one of the algorithms he is talking about and data on the scale such an algorithm would typically have.
My general approach would be an online experiment where I expose one group of people to a recommender system and don’t expose another. Then place both groups in the same environment and observe whether the first group is now more predictable. (This does not account for the issue of information, though.)
It seems that dystopian novels are overrepresented relative to their share of the classics. I’m curious for others’ thoughts why that is. I could imagine a case that they’re more action-relevant than, e.g., Pride and Prejudice, but I also wonder if they might shape our expectations of the future in bad ways. (I say this as someone currently rereading 1984, which I adore...)
Links should be fixed! Thanks for pointing this out.
Thanks for pointing this out. It should work now.
Sorry—you’re right that this doesn’t work. To clarify, I was thinking that the method of picking the color should be fixed ex-ante (e.g. “I pick red as the color with 50% probability”), but that doesn’t do the trick because you need to pool the colors for ambiguity to arise.
The issue is that the problem the paper identifies does not come up in your example. If I’m offered the two bets simultaneously, then an ambiguity averse decision maker, like an EU decision maker, will take both bets. If I’m offered the bets sequentially without knowing I’ll be offered both when I’m offered the first one, then neither an ambiguity-averse nor a risk-averse EU decision-maker will take them. The reason is that the first one offers the EU decision-maker a 50% chance of winning, so given risk-aversion its value is less than 50% of $1. So your example doesn’t distinguish a risk-averse EU decision-maker from an ambiguity-averse one.
So I think unfortunately we need to go with the more complicated examples in the paper. They are obviously very theoretical. I think it could be a valuable project for someone to translate these into more practical settings to show how these problems can come up in a real-world sense.
Thanks! Helpful follow-ups.
On the first point, I think your intuition does capture the information aversion here, but I still think information aversion is an accurate description. Offered a bet that pays $X if I pick a color and then see if a random ball matches that color, you’ll pay more than for a bet that pays $X if a random ball is red. The only difference between these situations is that you have more information in the latter: you know the color to match is red. That makes you less willing to pay. And there’s no obvious reason why this information aversion would be something like a useful heuristic.
I don’t quite get the second point. Commitment doesn’t seem very relevant here since it’s really just a difference in what you would pay for each situation. If one comes first, I don’t see any reason why it would make sense to commit, so I don’t think that strengthens the case for ambiguity aversion in any way. But I think I might be confused here.
Yeah, that’s the part I’m referring to. I take his comment that expectations are not random variables to be criticizing taking expectations over expected utility with respect to uncertain probabilities.
I think the critical review of ambiguity aversion I linked to us sufficiently general that any alternatives to taking expectations with respect to uncertain probabilities will have seriously undesirable features.
Thanks for writing this. I think it’s very valuable to be having this discussion. Longtermism is a novel, strange, and highly demanding idea, so it merits a great deal of scrutiny. That said, I agree with the thesis and don’t currently find your objections against longtermism persuasive (although in one case I think they suggest a specific set of approaches to longtermism).
I’ll start with the expected value argument, specifically the note that probabilities here are uncertain and therefore random valuables, whereas in traditional EU they’re constant. To me a charitable version of Greaves and MacAskill’s argument is that, taking the expectation over the probabilities times the outcomes, you have a large future in expectation. (What you need for the randomness of probabilities to sink longtermism is for the probabilities to correlate inversely and strongly with the size of the future.) I don’t think they’d claim the probabilities are certain.
Maybe the claim you want to make, then, is that we should treat random probabilities differently from certain probabilities, i.e. you should not “take expectations” over probabilities in the way I’ve described. The problem with this is that (a) alternatives to taking expectations over probabilities have been explored in the literature, and they have a lot of undesirable features; and (b) alternatives to taking expectations over probabilities do not necessarily reject longtermism. I’ll discuss (b), since it involves providing an example for (a).
(b) In economics at least, Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) propose what’s probably the best-known alternative to EU when the probabilities are uncertain, which involves maximizing expected utility for the prior according to which utility is the lowest, sort of a meta-level risk aversion. They prove that this is the optimal decision rule according to some remarkably weak assumptions. If you take this approach, it’s far from clear you’ll reject longtermism: more likely, you end up with a sort of longtermism focused on averting long-term suffering, i.e. focused on maximizing expected value according to the most pessimistic probabilities. There’s a bunch of other approaches, but they tend to have similar flavors. So alternatives on EU may agree on longtermism and just disagree on the flavor of it.
(a) Moving away from EU leads to a lot of problems. As I’m sure you know given your technical background, EU derives from a really nice set of axioms (The Savage Axioms). Things go awry when you leave it. Al-Najjar and Weinstein (2009) offer a persuasive discussion of this (H/T Phil Trammell). For example, non-EU models imply information aversion. Now, a certain sort of information aversion might make sense in the context of longtermism. In line with your Popper quote, it might make sense to avoid information about the feasibility of highly-specific future scenarios. But that’s not really the sort of information non-EU models imply aversion to. Instead, they imply aversion to info that would shift you toward the option that currently has a lot of ambiguity about it because you dislike it based on its current ambiguity.
So I don’t think we can leave behind EU for another approach to evaluating outcomes. The problems, to me, seem to lie elsewhere. I think there are problems with the way we’re arriving at probabilities (inventing subjective ones that invite biases and failing to adequately stick to base rates, for example). I also think there might be a point to be made about having priors on unlikely conclusions so that, for example, the conclusion of strong longtermism is so strange that we should be disinclined to buy into it based on the uncertainty about probabilities feeding into the claim. But the approach itself seems right to me. I honestly spent some time looking for alternative approaches because of these last two concerns I mentioned and came away thinking that EU is the best we’ve got.
I’d note, finally, that I take the utopianism point well and wold like to see more discussion of this. Utopian movements have a sordid history, and Popper is spot-on. Longtermism doesn’t have to be utopian, though. Avoiding really bad outcomes, or striving for a middling outcome, is not utopian. This seems to me to dovetail with my proposal in the last paragraph to improve our probability estimates. Sticking carefully to base rates and things we have some idea about seems to be a good way to avoid utopianism and its pitfalls. So I’d suggest a form of longtermism that is humble about what we know and strives to get the least-bad empirical data possible, but I still think longtermism comes out on top.
This this this! As a PhD student in economics, I’m always pushing for the same thing in academia. People usually think saying nice job is useless, because it doesn’t help people improve. It’s important for people to know what they’re doing right, though. It’s also important for people to get positive reinforcement to keep going down a path, so if you want someone to keep persevering (which I hope we generally do), it’s good to give them a boost when they do a good job.
Advocacy for digital minds
Artificial Intelligence, Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
Digital sentience is likely to be widespread in the most important future scenarios. It may be possible to shape the development and deployment of artificially sentient beings in various ways, e.g. through corporate outreach and lobbying. For example, constitutions can be drafted or revised to grant personhood on the basis of sentience; corporate charters can include responsibilities to sentient subroutines; and laws regarding safe artificial intelligence can be tailored to consider the interests of a sentient system. We would like to see an organization dedicated to identifying and pursuing opportunities to protect the interests of digital minds. There could be one or multiple organizations. We expect foundational research to be crucial here; a successful effort would hinge on thorough research into potential policies and the best ways of identifying digital suffering.