Are most acts of sexual violence committed by a select particularly egregious few or by the presumably more common ‘casual rapist’? Answering this question is relevant for picking the strategies to focus on.
Lisak and Miller (link repeated for convenience: http://www.davidlisak.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/RepeatRapeinUndetectedRapists.pdf) give decent data on the distribution. 91% of rapes/attempted rapes are from repeat offenders.
Yes, I saw that part. But first, just because there are lots of unknown factors doesn’t mean we should ignore the ones that we do know. Suppose we’re too busy to look at anything besides demographics, that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that we should deliberately ignore the information that we have about demographics. We’ll have an inaccurate estimate, but it’s still less inaccurate than the estimate we had before. If you don’t/didn’t have time to originally do this adjustment, that’s fine, like I said you already did a lot of work getting a good statistical foundation here. But we have more information so let’s update accordingly.
Now the statistics could be incorrect because of different rates of conviction or indictment or something of the sort. Sure, that is a different possibility, and if we have any suspicions about it then we can make some guesses in order to facilitate a better overall estimate. I would assume, from the outset, uniform priors for conviction rates. Maybe whites are under-represented due to bias in the system, or maybe they are over-represented due to the subcultures in which they live and the social independence or access to legal/judicial resources of their victims.
What are the facts? Sexual offense victims report (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf) that 57% of offenders are white, exactly in line with my other source. Only 27% report the offender as black, which is significantly less than my other source suggests though of comparatively little consequence for EA going by statistical averages. 6% say other and 8% say unknown.
In this case you are right that it seems like there was a disparity, blacks are apparently convicted disproportionately. But here at least we have an apparently more reliable source of perpetrator demographics and it says roughly the same thing about what EA base rates would be relative to that of the broader population.
Again—I’m not making any demand about putting a lot of effort into the research. I think it’s totally okay to make simple, off-the-cuff estimates, as long as better information isn’t easy to find.
On this particular question though, we can definitely do better than calculating as if the figure is 100%. I mean, just think about it, think about how many of EAs’ social and sexual interactions involve people outside of EA. So of course it’s going to be less than 100%, significantly less. Maybe 50%, maybe 75%, we can’t come up with a great estimate, but at least it will be an improvement. I can do it if you want. And you didn’t write that the number was 100%, but the way the calculation was written made it seem like someone (like me) could come away with the impression that it was 100% if they weren’t super careful. That’s all I’m suggesting.
Of course that would be suboptimal, hundreds of hours calculating base rates would certainly not be worthwhile. I’m not offering to do it and I’m not demanding that anyone do it. Hundreds of hours directly studying EA would surely be more worthwhile, I agree on that. All I’m saying is that this information we have now is better than that information which we had an hour ago.
I think the same sheltering happens if you talk about ignoring small probabilities, even if the probability of the x-risk is in fact extremely small.
The probability that $3000 to AMF saves a life is significant. But the probability that it saves the life of any one particular individual is extremely low. We can divide up the possibility space any number of ways. To me it seems like this is a pretty damning problem for the idea of ignoring small probabilities.
We can say that the outcome of the AMF donation has lower variance than the outcome of an x-risk donation, assuming equal EV. So we could talk about preferring low variance, or being averse to having no impact. But I don’t know if that will seem as intuitively reasonable when we circle our new framework back to more everyday, tangible thought experiments.
Good post but we shouldn’t assume the “funnel” distribution to be symmetric about the line of 0 utility. We can expect that unlikely outcomes are good in expectation just as we expect that likely outcomes are good in expectation. Your last two images show actions which have an immediate expected utility of 0. But if we are talking about an action with generally good effects, we can expect the funnel (or bullet) to start at a positive number. We also might expect it to follow an upward-sloping line, rather than equally diverging to positive and negative outcomes. In other words, bed nets are more likely to please interdimensional travelers than they are to displease them, and so on.
Also, the distribution of outcomes at any level of probability should follow a roughly Gaussian distribution. Most bizarre, contorted possibilities lead to outcomes that are neither unusually good nor unusually bad. This means it’s not clear that the utility is undefined; as you keep you looking to sets of unlikelier outcomes you are getting a series of tightly finite expectations rather than big broad ones that might easily turn out to be hugely positive or negative based on minor factors. Your images of the funnel and bullet should show much more density along the middle, with less density at the top and bottom. We still get an infinite series, so there is that philosophical problem for people who want a rigorous idea of utilitarianism, but it’s not a big problem for practical decision making because it’s easy to talk about some interventions being better than others.
Considering that most people would be unhappy to be told that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race, we should have a strong prior that many Effective Altruists would feel the same way.
Well I saw statistics that suggest that I’m more likely to be a rapist since I’m a man, the post explicitly said that I have a 6% chance of being a rapist as a man in EA, and that didn’t make me unhappy. And I haven’t seen anyone who has actually expressed any personal discomfort at the OP nor any of my posts, leaving aside the secondhand outrage expressed by characters such as yourself. So my prior is that this is false.
Apart from Lila’s argument, this “non-white people are more likely to be rapists” is a terrible line of thinking because (IMO) it’s likely to build racist modes of thought: assigning negative characteristics to minorities based on dubious evidence
Well you can actually ask rape victims what race their attacker was and then see what the statistics are, as RAINN did in the link I provided. That’s not dubious evidence.
If the evidence were incontrovertible, this might be acceptable, but it’s nowhere near the required standard of proof to overcome the strong prior that humans are equally likely to commit crimes regardless of race
Huh? Why on earth would you have that prior, given the long long history of different ethnic groups behaving differently and being treated differently throughout Western history? And we have damningly strong evidence that people of difference races commit crimes at different rates, as a pure statistical fact backed up by mountains of data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and many other institutions. What you want to attribute that to is up to you, but refusing to acknowledge it is the height of denialism which even race and progressive activists don’t do. The actually well-informed progressive/leftist activists and philosophers don’t grasp at concepts of rationality to try to throw together some skepticism about whether different races commit crimes at different rates, they just say that the cause of these differential rates is social and a result of structurally racist society, but if you gave a whiff of charity to my posts then you would know that nothing that I have said in any way assumes that the increased propensity of blacks to commit rapes relative to whites in the Western world is not a direct result of structurally racist society.
among other reasons, because race is largely a social construct).
This is a silly cop-out. Only uninformed right wing pundits who strawman poststructuralism think that for something to be a social construct implies that it doesn’t matter and isn’t real. We can define race as minimally as “the color that people check on surveys when they are asked about their race” and it is still true that people commit crimes at different rates in correspondence with how they identify. Dodging these issues by disputing how much biological reality there is or isn’t associated with social race constructs blindly sweeps over enormous realities about how race, ethnicity and skin color are perceived and operate in contemporary society.
Additionally, the long history of using false statistics and “science” to bolster white supremacy should make one more skeptical of numbers like this
Those dastardly white supremacists at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network! Or is it the rape victims—you think we shouldn’t believe the rape victims when they tell us what race their aggressor was, is that right? I’m almost offended by that. And yet you try to lecture me about things that will “strengthen bad cognitive patterns and weaken good judgement”...
Pareto Fellowship was shut down? When? What happened?
The Pascal’s Mugging thing has been discussed a lot around here. There isn’t an equivalence between all causes and muggings because the probabilities and outcomes are distinct and still matter. It’s not the case that every religion and every cause and every technology has the same tiny probability of the same large consequences, and you cannot satisfy every one of them because they have major opportunity costs. If you apply EV reasoning to cases like this then you just end up with a strong focus on one or a few of the highest impact issues (like AGI) at heavy short term cost. Unusual, but not a reductio ad absurdum.
There is no philosophical or formal system that properly describes human beliefs because human beliefs are messy, fuzzy neurophysiological phenomena. But we may choose to have a rational system for modeling our beliefs more consistently, and if we do then we may as well go with something that doesn’t give us obviously wrong implications in dutch book cases, because a belief system that has wrong implications does not fit our picture of ‘rational’ (whether we encounter those cases or not).
I know. It’s ten years of savings, because curing is accelerated by ten years.
There are an estimated 276,000 annual cases of female suicide in the entire world (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367275/). If, say, half of them are associated with sexual violence (guess), and you throw males in as well, then the eventual lifesaving potential is maybe 150,000 people per year.
Most of these suicides are in SE Asia and the Western Pacific where I believe healthcare and medication provision are not as comprehensive as they are here in the west.
How long do you think it would take you to upgrade every single estimate to the maximum quality level?
Um I don’t know, I just said I would estimate this one number. I think I was clear that I was talking about “this particular question”.
Assuming 2,300 people in EA per the survey, for every 100 rape victims:
Out of the 25 rape victims who are spouses or partners of the perpetrator (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence), 20 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 45 rape victims who are acquaintances of the perpetrator, 30 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 28 rape victims who are strangers to the perpetrator, 20 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 6 victims who can’t remember or are victimized by multiple people, 4 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
For the 1 victim who is a non-spouse relative, the victim will be outside of EA.
This makes a total of 30% of rape victims of EAs being in EA.
Assuming 13,000 people in EA per the FB group, for every 100 rape victims:
Out of the 25 rape victims who are spouses or partners of the perpetrator (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence), 23 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 45 rape victims who are acquaintances of the perpetrator, 40 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 28 rape victims who are strangers to the perpetrator, 24 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
Out of the 6 victims who can’t remember or are victimized by multiple people, 5 will be outside of EA, when the offender is in EA.
For the 1 victim who is a non-spouse relative, the victim will be outside of EA.
This makes a total of 12% of rape victims of EAs being in EA.
I think we need more reading lists. There have already been one or two for AI safety, but I’ve not seen similar ones for poverty, animal welfare, social movements, or other topics.
We all know how many problems there are with reputation and status seeking. You would lower epistemic standards, cement power users, and make it harder for outsiders and newcomers to get any traction for their ideas.
If we do something like this it should be for very specific capabilities, like reliability, skill or knowledge in a particular domain, rather than generic reputation. That would make it more useful and avoid some of the problems.
Has anyone thought about retiring in a foreign country where the cost of living is low? That seems like a great idea to me—all the benefits of saving money, without worrying about work opportunities.
For low probability of other civilizations, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404.
Humans don’t have obviously formalized goals. But you can formalize human motivation, in which case our final goal is going to be abstract and multifaceted, and it is probably going to be include a very very broad sense of well-being. The model applies just fine.
Because it is tautologically true that agents are motivated against changing their final goals, this is just not possible to dispute. The proof is trivial, it comes from the very stipulation of what a goal is in the first place. It is just a framework for describing an agent. Now, with this framework, humans’ final goals happen to be complex and difficult to discern, and maybe AI goals will be like that too. But we tend to think that AI goals will not be like that. Omohundro argues some economic reasons in his paper on the “basic AI drives”, but also, it just seems clear that you can program an AI with a particular goal function and that will be all there is to it.
Yes, AI may end up with very different interpretations of its given goal but that seems to be one of the core issues in the value alignment problem that Bostrom is worried about, no?
Last thread you said the problem with the funnel is that it makes the decision arbitrarily dependent upon how far you go. But to stop evaluating possibilities violates the regularity assumption. It seems like you are giving an argument against people who follow solution 1 and reject regularity; it’s those people whose decisions depend hugely and arbitrarily on where they define the threshold, especially when a hard limit for p is selected. Meanwhile, the standard view in the premises here has no cutoff.
> One needs a very extreme probability function in order to make this work; the probabilities have to diminish very fast to avoid being outpaced by the utilities.
I’m no sure what you mean by ‘very fast’. The implausibility of such a probability function is an intuition that I don’t share. I think the appendix 8.1 is really going to be the core argument at stake.
Solution #6 seems like an argument about the probability function, not an argument about the decision rule.
We need to factor in QALY or WALY benefits of health improvement in addition to the money saved by users, but we also need to discount for how many people won’t get the new treatment.
Are you assuming that crimes committed by people in EA will be towards other people in EA? According to RAINN, 34% of the time the sex offender is a family member. And most EAs have social circles which mostly comprise people who are not in EA, I would think. (This is certainly the case if you take the whole Facebook group to be the EA movement.)
I think that for all intents and purposes we should just use the survey responses as the template for the size of the EA movement, because if someone is on Facebook but is not even involved enough that we can get them to take a survey then we generally have little hope of influencing their behavior, if they even are in EA.
This seems like a well researched post with accurate statistics, but you didn’t note that EA is demographically somewhat different from the rest of the population. According to (https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF), 58% of American sexual assault offenders are white (this includes Hispanics), 40% are black, and 2% are “other”. Meanwhile the EA survey (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1ex/demographics_ii/) showed that 89% of EAs identify as non-Hispanic white, 3.3% identify as Hispanic, 0.7% identify as black, and 7% identify as Asian (i.e. other). These stats are quite different from the base rate for the US, in a way that suggests the base rate of offenders in EA is lower than it is for the general population.
The 7.2 rapes per offender figure seems like it comes from a survey of paraphiliacs? Lisak and Miller say it is 4 rapes per offender. Maybe that is just because college students are younger.
I think that should be an obvious thing to do. Alcohol already costs money and reduces the intellectual caliber of conversation, we are better off without it.