Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
But I've seen a lot of push back against this kind of thinking in some political groups. For example saying that you should follow norms of niceness when promoting a cause - people call that tone policing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing
You could say you should criticise the people who are tone policing rather than the people who are worked up about a cause that personally effects them so aren't managing to be very polite, but the problem is not the people who try to tone police you, it's the people who don't like your tone and don't criticise you for it - they silently just ignore your cause or vote against it.
If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care to make.
How many pro-choice people do you think are persuaded by the people screaming "murderer" outside of Planned Parenthood?
People have a limited amount of time to deal with all of the issues in the world. If you can't explain your argument in a calm, rational manner, people who are on the fence will shut you out.
See what Howard Dean's screaming did to his campaign.
Sometimes you need to make waves in order to advance a cause.
Now that doesn't mean you should be uncivil (like screaming "you fucking moron!"), but it can be a fine line to walk. So it's understandable that tone policing itself can become a controversial topic.
If we're talking about the Jim Crow south, that's one thing. King even wrote a whole essay about how white moderates 'tone policing' the civil rights movement needed to get on board or get out of the way. And he was right. Emmett Till's lynching had just happened, they were being categorically denied rights, and then getting fucking attack dogs unleashed on them, churches firebombed, etc, when they spoke up.
Some of the noisier people on twitter and in our workspaces in 2018, however... their net effect is giving talking points to Sean Hannity. At least 80% of America is turned off by their rhetorical excess.
King's body of work was productive. He was after results, not after feeding his own ego or outrage.
In 1955 there was a higher murder rate and a higher rate of disease. Just because both are lower in 2018 doesn't mean we don't continue to invest significant effort into working on both murder and disease.
In 1955, Jim Crow laws were appalling and inhuman. Lynchings were accepted by large segments of society. In 2018, we still have strong systemic bias in police forces that handle black criminals with a significantly higher rate of violence than white criminals leading to many preventable deaths. And we still have a justice system that punishes black criminals more severely than white criminals, affecting community cohesion and health.
These are still serious problems that need significant effort into solving. That is 99% of what the noisy people on twitter and in your workspaces are talking about. But Sean Hannity and Co pick up on the 1%, or misintepret the 99% and present it as some rhetorical excess about feelings and safe spaces and outrage.
No. It's still about human lives.
2) I'm not arguing that racism doesn't exist. I'm arguing that the outrage-addicts are ineffective, and that they suffer from a bias towards slacktivism and purity-gating.
Contrast with King and especially LBJ. Making change requires building bridges.
It's that very letter, isn't it?
"I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is ... the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice"
Absolutely nailed it. If you're unpleasant/uncivilised to deal with then the content of your argument becomes irrelevant because a decent portion - and perhaps even the majority - of people won't want to have anything to do with you.
Being obnoxious is another class of communication where good content is masked by bad delivery, the same as if you fail to communicate and explain your point clearly: again, the message gets lost. People switch off and disengage.
Good manners really do oil the wheels of communication on difficult and contentious topics even if it means the process takes longer than you'd like.
How many pro-choice people do
you think are persuaded by
If you can't explain your
argument in a calm, rational
manner,
What screaming (or the university equivalent: bad grades) achieves is not so much conviction, but communicating urgency. How to react to urgency a different matter.
A second social function of screaming (re-)producing simple us/them group identities.
Both are attempting to force change or prevent change. For all values in calm rational discussion pleasant discussion, it does not bring change. It makes you pleasant, but does not really bring results where real stakes are in question.
That's quite one-sided...
When it comes to more abstract concepts, the average person will ignore the screaming lunatics and side with the person that appears sane at first glance, even if they're really the crazy ones.
Agreed.
>or how cheating will make them fail a course because the screaming person will be the one failing them.
Completely disagree. In my life, there have been plenty of people for whom this is not effective. Screaming is good for urgent events that will have immediate and serious consequences. Failing a course is a long term consequence.
Also, beyond a certain frequency, screaming loses effect. I once transferred to a school that had lots of screaming and heavy corporal punishment. It was very clear: The screaming and punishment had virtually no effect on the students. It would reduce them to tears, and once the tears were gone, the behavior continued. In my prior school the frequency of such disciplinary measures was much lower, and almost always was more effective because it was rare.
So activists who are always screaming are destined to being ignored (this being only one of the reasons).
There are some situations in life that are genuinely complicated (eg, running the logistic system that gets food from farms to houses). I think it might be flat-out impossible to communicate a complicated solution to a large crowd. The best I've ever seen a large crowd do is pick someone who looks like they might be able to tackle the problem and then the collective accepts whatever they get - good or bad.
Realistically, people piping up with some variant of "this simple solution will fix the problem", on topics where they have no actual skin in the game, are the problem. They undermine complicated efforts to resolve situations. Moderation, balance, compromise and attempting to deal with the complexity forthrightly come together to give much better results than using silver bullets.
characterising a debate as
having precisely two well
defined sides
...If your aim is to persuade, you have to speak the language of the other. Talking about fairness to a conservative, or morality to a liberal, fails at the starting gate. The other side just can’t hear what you are saying."
http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/02/15/how-to-persuade-the-other...
Thanks again. Of course Adams has his own political bias but at least he appears to be trying to bridge the gap here.
i don't think this is a very accurate characterization. for one thing, fairness itself is a moral value. however, i do think liberals and conservatives tend to have different moral systems. in broad strokes, liberals tend to have more of a utilitarian perspective, while conservatives tend to be more deontological.
I don't think your characterization of either side is particularly accurate. Neither side is utilitarian, and both sides are plenty deontological, just with different rule sets. Both sides are rationalizing deeply-held instinctual beliefs, or the lack thereof.
His abortion example strikes me as particularly off-base. Again, it's not that US liberals don't care about morality. Of course liberals think murder is wrong! They just don't consider a fetus to have the moral standing of a human.
Anyway, some direct links regarding moral foundations theory (though I highly recommend Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind):
Grades are both an expensive signal, and an adjustment to an incentive gradient: Opportunities to send the signal are limited, and their use is constrained by both written and unwritten rules.
Giving someone a bad grade and a way to do better redirects whatever value they place on grades into doing what you asked. It's like a performance bonus, or cheese at the end of a maze.
Screaming, however, is nearly pure signal. A relatively cheap signal, if overused. The only expense is trading off your reputation, in exchange for immediate attention. If you're screaming at The Outgroup, you have no reputation to lose, so there's no value to the signal.
To get the people outside Planned Parenthood to listen, you'd have to incentivize them the way grades incentivize a student--or at least give an expensive signal that you're worth listening to.
That screaming produces group identities I don't doubt, but it seems unlikely that once you've converted them into them, you will be able to convince them of much.
I would point out that they probably remember your advice, it's just not "connected" to the part of their brains that does the driving under stress of deadline.
I find you can make a lot of true predictions by extending the "system 1/system 2 thinking" model into a complete disjunction: that everyone is, internally, one person who listens and talks and learns social mores; and then another person who acts and reacts and learns by doing; and that—other than sharing a body—these two internal people have nothing in common and you should assume that any lesson that's been imparted "through" one of them has absolutely not been imparted to the other.
I.e., if you tell someone something, they'll be able to tell you what you said, and it will affect what side of a debate they engage in in the future, but it won't affect their behavior in the slightest, except insofar as they verbally precommit to doing something in a way that then forces doing-them to do it.
And, if you get someone to, say, play a video-game simulation of some complex system that imparts a particular lesson about that system into them, then they'll still verbally argue on the "wrong" side regarding how that system works, until someone essentially forces them to sit down and have their "social mind" go over the experience their "doing mind" just had, explaining it to themselves to convince themselves. (Some people probably do this "narrating themselves observing their doing mind" by default to some degree; these people are probably measurably better at some meta-skill like learning or teaching.)
I totally agree with everything you said, except this isn’t a fair or good example of what you’re talking about at all. That meme was a manufactured attack. Dean was rallying, and if you watch it in context, there’s nothing there. The clip was taken out of context to make him look irrational. You can do that to pretty much any politician with videos from rallies.
Howard Dean's scream wasn't. The scream was no louder than the audience: it was merely isolated by a directional mike.
This is a good reason not just to avoiding debates with screaming people, but also to ignore them.
People are sometimes wrong. Happens to the best of us. Other people give us feedback. The screaming person who responds to feedback by more screaming... is more likely to be wrong.
In theory, one could first spend a lot of time debating patiently and politely with as many people as possible, weigh the arguments, and determine what is most likely to be true. And then, start screaming at people, to spread the message quickly to many people. But in practice, people who are screaming now were most likely also screaming yesterday.
If you sound like a shouty crank with a weird idea then good luck trying to get public + politicians to make said idea happen.
It seems the internal dynamics of political groups can reward being shouty and extreme. So yeah I can imagine the message doesn't go down well there and is met with: 'yeah but X is SO important'.
In practice, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference.
Both are big issues and especially their combination can give huge advantage to one side. Their combination can effectively amount to expectation that one side is submissive to the other.
There's a ton of data. Compulsory implicit bias training, for example, will most likely be bad for diversity (and whether implicit bias exists itself is another whole kettle of fish).
I think the problem begins with the notion of should. And more broadly the notion that people have obligations. On top of that, people use the word should in a lazy manner. They don't want (or are incapable) of having a (significantly) deeper discussion on the issue - it takes a lot of work. To avoid that mental burden, shoulds come out.
Note, I'm not merely referring to your use of the word, but the larger idea that both sides have. Take this:
>but the problem is not the people who try to tone police you, it's the people who don't like your tone and don't criticise you for it - they silently just ignore your cause or vote against it.
As a general rule, when someone who thinks differently from you starts using the language of obligation, it will raise the defenses on the other side. The expected outcome is one of fight (counterargument, or merely raised voices), or flight (the behavior you describe).
There's likely a hidden obligation implicit in your comment. That I am somehow obligated to learn about wrongs being done to others, and obligated to help them (via voting, activism, whatever). And so the tower of obligations gets higher and higher.
In the last two years, I've read 3 books on effective communication, and they all describe this - one goes all the way and suggests you stop using words like should. Others are more nuanced but are saying the same thing: As long as your posture is that of "I know what's right" (which "should" automatically confers) vs "Let's explore and see how I might be wrong", you'll have this problem. (Internally you may be open, but what matters is your showing it - often the outward posture is different from your inner state).
In my experience, and in the experience of the authors, the behavior you describe is what is to be expected. So labeling them as the problem may, on some higher plane, be correct. But if your goal is to actually effect change instead of categorizing, the approach is ineffective.
The books suggest the reader try to be above all of this. They urge the reader to ignore the tone and focus on the message. But they also emphasize that expecting others to reach this level is expecting too much.
BTW, lest I be misunderstood, neither I nor the books are saying there isn't anything like an obligation, and that you should not have shoulds. Of course everyone will have them. The key is to realize that your set of shoulds will be incompatible with others. You could have a long, multi-day conversation with the other to align your sets, but if you just change the style (and tone) of the conversation, you won't need to.
Tone policing is a broad concept. For some who do it, it is very sincere advice. For others, it is a way of not dealing with the issue. Don't fall into the trap of lumping the two crowds in the same boat.
Finally, there's another reason people silently ignore or are turned off from aggressive tones. Many activists have the mentality of "Always find ways not to be ignored" which often translates to "Shout louder and be in their face" (literally have heard some say this). Their whole strategy becomes one of "Escalate till you can't be ignored". This rubs many (most?) people the wrong way. Without even knowing anything about the subject at hand, a lot of people will automatically switch to "Oh yeah! Let me show you how well I can ignore you!"
There's a maxim in the field of negotiations: The more pressure you apply, the stronger the wall the other will build around themselves. This dynamic is entirely independent of the message. Their advice is always what you may not want to hear: Change the posture (including the tone).
The really difficult part of any venture is knowing how to distinguish wise advice from just another opinion.
Many great solutions come from people with "crazy" thinking and I would expect they could have caused great damage (or perhaps have - jet engines) but otherwise we would be moving very slowly as a planet?
I would think it matters on what is "right." Are they wrong in the way that Newton was wrong? Still far more correct that anyone else? (Obviously, not to that degree.)
As far as knowledge is concerned, was Newton right for a period until we learned about quantum mechanics or was he always wrong? Was he always right but only within limits that he couldn't know in advance?
Apologies for the philosophy but this is the real complexity of an article about avoiding harm by doing various "good practice" stuff!
What is the claim "the majority are wrong/don't have the solution" meant to support? If I just emphasized on the "wrong" instead of "don't have the solution", apologies.
For Newton, he was always wrong based on his equations abilities to predict everything. He was just closer than many before that point such that it was undetectable for a long time.
Which is my point in asking. If folks are correct in their predictive and application based metrics, it is somewhat silly to belabor them being "wrong" in some absolute sense.
Any judgement that relies on some external context, like the industry state of the art, can no longer be trusted in a different context.
"How quickly can we get something that more or less works for a demo?" is very different from "When will this be ready for mass production?" They can't read your mind and often to consider context you are not even aware of.
I agree. There's something I like to call Asimov's principle[1]: knowledge almost never does harm; the answer to poor or incomplete knowledge is almost always more knowledge (corrections, extensions, alternatives) instead of forgetting.
And there is the possibility of trying to forget in case a knowledge would be so absolutely harmful -- so the downside is practically bounded while the upside is practically unbounded. If you try to hide something harmful it's always possible it will be rediscovered later in very poor timing and the benefit of countermeasures won't be available. If we refrain from discussing AI safety in fear of derailing some holy discussion by the wise sages (what criteria would make anyone good enough to disrupt it?), it seems it'll be more likely when potent general AI emerges we're not ready.
If Einstein tried to hide the mass-energy equivalence, or say all of his theories because of mass-energy equivalence, then when someone later discovered it could be much worse -- if atomic bombs were discovered in the cold war (discoveries usually start unilaterally), one side could very well have started WW3 (in fact the US nearly started a war with USSR in the short period they were the sole possessors of the bomb). The fact is it is extremely hard to predict the impact of any individual action, while it seems quite safe to say that in general thoughtful action is usually benign -- this suggests a strong benefit to discussion and discovery of knowledge versus hiding in fear.
An important principle I would suggest instead is commitment to truth. You can make poor arguments, you can be wrong, but as long as you're committed to truth even the incorrect arguments might prove useful -- they might lead to stronger counterarguments, elucidation of fundamentals, etc.
To exemplify, one of the individuals that perhaps most advanced our understanding of Quantum Mechanics was again Einstein, which was a great critic of it -- his criticisms turned out to be all wrong, but they were so strong (intuitively seemingly right) they brought to light the most interesting features, 'weirdness' of the theory. Even for relativity one of the most useful ways of grasping the theory and its implications is by examining "paradoxes" -- which are essentially failed counterarguments.
This failure of commitment to truth is where climate change deniers ("""skeptics""") go wrong -- it's not trying to prove consensus wrong that's harmful, it is failure to adjust in face of mountains of evidence. Reasonable skepticism probably wasn't so harmful when its impact was less clear -- we've improved our models, measurements, etc to address it.
[1] He makes essentially this argument as a foreword to some of his short stories, can't remember which one exactly. I believe it was more or less along the lines of: science and technology (brought by knowledge, discovery) can often be used for great good or great harm, but to reliably avoid the great harm (that could also come from inaction) we usually need more knowledge, more discussion.
And note how my examples are for very impactful work in the brink of wars and political stability, and still discussion and knowledge seems to have been positive. How many people really should worry about the risk of triggering catastrophe from their daily jobs? Some of the points in the article might be applicable, in very restrict cases -- basically if you're dealing with catastrophic scenarios (how many people routinely are exposed to that?). If you ever find a flashing red button while alone in a power station, or find a break for a major cryptographic protocol, you want to triple check with specialists and be very careful. Otherwise it can turn into futile paralization by fear (which is harmful to yourself and others).
The usual advice is to choose a trusted advisor with lots of experience in the field, listen to and follow his advice and see if it works. If it doesn’t, adapt.
Every other way is wallowing in indecision, losing time. A decision won’t get better with ten opinions of which more than half are unfounded or even incorrect to begin with.
Take Thanos: with one snap of the fingers he destroys 50% of the intelligent beings in the universe and ends all of the problems associated with overpopulation, right?
But, to quote a story I heard somewhere, if you have a coke bottle in a landfill growing bacteria, who double in population in 30 minutes, such that the number of bacteria will overwhelm the available resources at 12:00 noon, when is the bottle half-full? 11:30. At 11:00 they look around and 3/4th of the bottle is free. If they find another identical bottle next to them, that prevents the crash...until 12:30.
Thanos is a complete idiot.
On the other hand, sure, the majority may be completely wrong, but if you ignore them, your solution probably isn't going anywhere.
Credit
One of the sayings that I know to be (mostly) absolutely true is, "there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." I have a (much more successful, and respected) friend to whom it is something of a mantra.
On the other side, seeking credit has a lot of pitfalls. The obvious one is taking credit for someone else's work; that's just bad and leads to bad results. But further, by aggressively taking credit for things you've done, you can actively force other people out of the field you're working on. Has anyone been bitten by the off-handed, "yeah, we took a look that several years ago" comment?
Further, becoming the face of some project means that you with all of your warts hanging out come to represent the project and its goals. Take care.
Goals
Choose the goals of your project carefully. For one thing, they can take on a life of their own. On one hand, our modern financial services system has the excellent goal of allocating resources where they can do the most good, but they have become so complex as to be a maze with great freakin' bear traps all over the place.
Then there's opportunity cost. Some goals are laudable, but take on too much emphasis at the expense of other, more reachable, more effective goals. Take the "reducing extinction risk" mentioned (repeatedly) in the article. Sure, somebody should probably worry a bit about the risk of human extinction, but...
"Many experts who study these issues estimate that the total chance of human extinction in the next century is between 1 and 20%.
"For instance, an informal poll in 2008 at a conference on catastrophic risks found they believe it’s pretty likely we’ll face a catastrophe that kills over a billion people, and estimate a 19% chance of extinction before 2100."
The risks they came up with are, molecular nanotech weapons, nanotech accidents, superintelligent AI, wars, nuclear wars, nuclear terrorism, engineered pandemics, and natural pandemics. (I'm surprised; global warming didn't make the list in 2008.)
Here's the dealy-o, though: what actually is the risk of human extinction before 2100? 19%? (1 in 5, really?) Their conservative 3%?
"Nanotech" currently is at most an OSHA problem. (Don't breathe in the microparticles!) The risk of "grey goo" is likely pretty damn low, given the history of the last 30 years of nanotechnology. (First thought on hearing of the possibility of nano-machines? "Ya mean, like proteins?")
Conventional wars don't actually kill that many people; they tend to disperse too easily. I'm even given to understand that the effect of major wars is an increase in the rate of population growth. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are very, very bad...for cities. But they're unlikely to do anything noticeable to people in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, the Australian outback, or Mongolia.
Pandemics have been a problem before, they'll be a problem again, but I'll let somebody else describe the problems with an infectious agent capable of killing all of its hosts. Likewise, climate changes have been problems before, and have led to bad outcomes. But killing everyone isn't ever been on the table. And for AI, I'm more concerned with the AI that runs your car off the road because it's not actually able to perceive the lane markers.
Individually, each of those is bad. They'll possibly kill billions of people and possibly lead to the collapse of civilizations---some of them have done so before. But complete extinction is incredibly unlikely and "ending all life on Earth" is just silly.
But human extinction is an issue that will get attention. It'll sell newspapers. And more than some minimal level of resources spent on it means less resources for other issues. Like, say, identifying and addressing actual problems with nanomaterials or wars or infectious agents.
There's just so many of us, and every last one of us would be hellbent on survival. At this point in our technology and understanding, I bet there could be survivors of extinction level events equaling the K-T extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
People already have bomb shelters that can last them months; feeding people does not require sunlight, only dirt, water, lamps and electricity. Nuclear winter can't stop the flow of electricity, survivors of any event can jerry-rig surviving wind turbines, nuclear power, geothermal, or hydro to create life sustaining electricity.
Would the survivors be smart enough to accomplish such feats? Of course, assuming they could read. The internet may collapse but the abundance of printed material, even doomsday vaults containing encyclopedias can provide for entertainment and education in long post-apocalyptic nights.
These things exist: https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/amazing-doomsday-bunkers-of...
When people fret and worry about the fate of the human race.
I'm not worried. People will adapt and figure it out like they always have. The only thing people need to worry about is their own survival in harsh times.
Excepting nuclear, where do you think the energy for those things comes from?
For example I don't dislike Nick Bostrom but I feel like he's being quoted so uncritically in this article - not totally unlike how a few years ago some HN commenters could quote Paul Graham essays as holy scripture.
The only thing I can put my finger on is this: those organisations - and this article - present themselves as being above-average rational and insightful. At least that's my impression. Yet many of these suggestions seem to be speculation based on very small data, for example the point about them not having competitors. Many others could simply be rephrased as "take a holistic view", for example considering whether recruiting people to your company is good for the cause as a whole.
Don't get me wrong, there is some insight here, it's well-written, and some of these heuristics might turn out to be helpful to some people. I just think that the website it's published on is inflating its perceived significance.
Now, ask yourself, if you don't disagree, why did you write this?
I know from actual experience that a large number of people, when their actions do harm, fall back on "I was just trying to help." I wish more people read, and following, this kind of advice.
> why did you write this?
I was exploring a shared, unexplained feeling of discomfort. This is an intellectually and emotionally fulfilling thing to do.
> I know from actual experience that a large number of people, when their actions do harm, fall back on "I was just trying to help." I wish more people read, and following, this kind of advice.
In my experience those people are not the same types that would read this article, nor do they seem to be the target audience. The target audience appears to be leaders and employers in "fragile fields".
> I have the same feeling. It concerns me because I'm not sure how to differentiate between my subconscious conservatism and my instinctive backlash against cultishness and/or over-complication.
I agree somewhat with your sentiment with regards to where they are now, with a lot of their focus on far-future risk avoidance. That stuff can't really fit, because it can't be reasoned about very precisely/scientifically. It's gone from a movement with emphasis on measurement and scientific methods to having a lot of emphasis on things that can't be measured. I think part of the problem is literally it started with some of the brightest guys around and as it gets disseminated to general pop, they lose and distort the message.
I certainly hope that I'm mistaken, but that sounds awfully a lot like a pro - eugenics bit of propaganda.
Personally, I would suggest that people with a clear intent toward 'love thy neighbor' rather than 'We're the best set of people to fix your problem for you' is best for humanity.
If you thought they were referring to something else, I wonder where you got that idea.
I likewise question the efficacy of efforts like eradicating malaria. I can't help but feel all that money would be better spent on technology (not startups, but like fusion and other energy research, nanotech, space industry etc), even if for-profit. Like, no mater how many Africans you can save from malaria, they will keep dying or living shitty lives because of poverty, famine, wars... Only technology can actually change the world (and politics, but we can't really seem to be able to do much about that...).
Not even. I think it's more about, what to work towards - i.e. the goal. I mean, feeding hungry people is definitely a worthwhile goal, but... you have to do it again, tomorrow. It's not a scalable solution.
I think the goals of NGOs working in that space are generally in the right place. It's true that they seldom do anything scalable in the sense of transformational research or marked improvement in processes, but the structure (of funding) somewhat prevents them to. I think the most scalable thing we can do for poor countries right now is make information, education and food and essential medication as available and as cheap as possible for as much of their population as possible, and let these children's children save themselves.
Because of this, I’m very skeptical of the idea that dealing with malaria isn’t one of the most effective use of resources in improving countless lives right now.
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html
I feel like that pretty comprehensively answers your question. Givewell is a[n ea affiliated] charity which empirically evaluates the effectiveness of other charities, and aims to convince charitable givers to give to those they deem most effective. They've had a lot of success in this goal. Their top charities are listed and in depth reasoning for their evaluations are available.
The basic drive to empirically evaluate one's actions is also sound, had been simmering in the "traditional" community for quite a while, and would have become more relevant in some way or another (eventually). If you look the output of GiveWell, to cite just one example, their deep dives on policies and charities make for fascinating reading.
Yet, of course, any such trend is bound to find people overdoing it, or cargo-culting it, or whatever. Just look at the split within the community to see this perfectly illustrated: there's one group that wants to focus exclusively on AI risks, because they assess it as having the potential to wipe out humanity (rendering the probability meaningless in their calculations).
And there is another group that wants to focus on animal suffering in the wild. Tadpoles, this group says, die in the billions each year, and the difference of their nervous system from humans' is just a question of degree.
I don't want to redirect all of human effort to reducing animal suffering, but I would sleep a lot better if I were sure these people are wrong.
Look, don’t get me wrong. Publicising good causes and helping people direct their charity can do no harm. I won’t criticise that. But instructing your readers to do economics PhDs, or join an investment bank, or take an internship at a thinktank, is assuming they enjoy some enormous opportunities.
Most people cannot do those things, not even if they went to Oxford. They cannot do an MBA or live on the subsistence wages of the modern academic. Like most human beings in the history of civilisation they can only choose how to be instruments of power and capital, which often means doing things only indirectly related to the public good.
Tangentially, I think you're underestimating what a typical Oxford grad can do. Most of them absolutely can do one of those things, especially if they decide to before they graduate.
Possibly I could do it now, but even if I obtained that golden policy job - how would I survive in London? Housing here is more expensive than even San Francisco.
My degree has opened many opportunities - sure. But I can't pay my rent with it.
Then he's not following his first aid training. One of the first things they taught in my first aid class is to send someone for help first -- find someone in the crowd and tell them specifically to call 911. Don't just tell the crowd in general to call for help or everyone may assume someone else is doing it, direct someone in particular to call.
"You take on a challenging project and make a mistake through lack of experience or poor judgment"
The student thought they were doing good, but they did not ask someone to call for help due to lack of experience / poor judgement, worsening the situation potentially.
No, you didn't have to do anything. Doing nothing is actually sometimes better than doing something stupid.
They removed Nuclear from their energy sources and now need to use coal instead to compensate.
But it gets better than that.
Denmark focused primarily on wind energy with the consequence that this summers heatwave resulted in them having to get their energy from Germany who now without Nuclear had to use even more coal.
Nope, it's not 2022 yet [1].
> and now need to use coal instead to compensate.
Looks to me that wind/solar is compensating for the gradual decline in nuclear, and also for the bulk of increasing demand [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closu...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
But a few too many beautification projects and property taxes start to go up. Now you’re pricing people out of their neighborhood. With renters they don’t even get the benefit of selling their house.
Most of the solutions I can think of could be easily gamed by speculators, which makes me wonder if the others just have a flaw I don’t see.
The circumstance though isn't unique and is applicable in a lot of different markets. Investing in almost anything makes it more valuable. Be that housing, a country, a company, a farm or a person. That is why education is such a potent force multiplier.
Housing though has an elephant in the room being how bad the situation has gotten. Its the same class of problem as healthcare because both aren't luxury optional goods. People need housing, and that housing need requires parameters that are in conflict with one another. The worst part is that because sustainability of housing trumps all other aspects of it that means you can easily find yourself in an unsafe, insecure environment out of necessity. Beautification makes the living more enjoyable and prosperous but is trumped by the cost benefit analysis of living there. When people are already sacrificing personal safety for job security they quickly get pushed out if you make the housing more valuable for any reason but enhanced job security.
I find this to be the case with non-profits and others attempting to make big pushes to promote local entrepreneurship. I have objected to several attempts based on the organizers focusing on the wants of donors (not the entrepreneurs), lacking any marketing plan beyond "if you build it they will come" and not having long-term plans for sustainability. Every failed attempt sets back the next one by 2-3 years but no one wants to listen to a naysayer.
I think this is a poor analogy. Or maybe it's an excellent analogy for the dilemma the article glosses over: would the "right" answer be for the medical student to not help someone very obviously in need? Ambulances don't materialize instantaneously out of thin air, nor do they magically teleport themselves (and the patient inside) to a hospital. That hospital might be overcrowded, delaying treatment further.
Or the med student could actually try to help (or at least triage) and at the same time call an ambulance.
If they'd given one direct piece of easily actionable advice the actual impact might have been far larger ...
"So what?" - a Church sermon I heard well over decade ago, the speaker said basically if there's nothing that listeners will remember and act on then your sermon is moot. You can give a tonne of great advice, but sometimes less is more impactful.
Perhaps they do that to. The title gave me high hopes.
> In brief, it raises the importance of finding good mentors, consistently seeking advice and feedback from experienced colleagues, and ensuring you’re a good fit for a project before you take actions with potentially large or long-term consequences.
That way the onus is on me to guess what might work for my case, and meanwhile they can mark the issue resolved.
"You get what you measure."
Reputation and social standing matters, you have to network, be humble and learn from people older and wiser than you, don’t try to go it alone, be willing to work on smaller challenges — these are all things I think people in this specific subculture probably would benefit from hearing.
I've been bit often by:
Poorly Defined Requirements
Incomplete Understanding of the Problem
Incomplete Understanding of the Solution
Customer Created Access Difficulty
Customer created process issues
Poor documentation or data inputs
Excessive Complexity Customization driven by customer needs
I'm getting better with time, and I'm better at determining what the actual requirements are, and I now more fully understand what my solution is capable of too.
Similar to the study a while back of whether VCs would rather fund someone who's a "natural" at what they do or someone who's had to work hard to reach that "natural" level. (It's the former.)
I'd also add that much of what we hear or read has slight effects on us that can be profound over time.
In the case of books, nearly every book I read changes my outlook and direction, sometimes imperceptibly, but I believe the effects can be large over time.
Of course, quality matters - "you are what you eat" or in this case what you read.
Reminds me of a quote by Charles de Gaulle:
"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."
[1] I originally thought "some", then "many", then "most", but all of those words underplay the situation.
But I have to agree that the article could have been written by Chidi Anagonye. It had that "no matter what you do, you're always wrong" sort of vibe.
Bleh. You'll change the world alright. Likely, not for the better.
Like Facebook engineers?
This is not what many, if not most people do, or want to do, when they "try to do good". They simply want to do something based on what _they_ see as 'good'.
So the authors are using 'field' to mean area of study which has standard usage in English I think so probably didn't need to be explained further.
When the authors wrote: "Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is important if we’re going to be serious about having an impact in important but ‘fragile’ fields like reducing extinction risk."
They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.
> They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.
Then this is an unfortunately named field to introduce first, given that the article is about 'risks' which are not 'fields'
There is the (meta-)risk that you harm a field (the 'harming field Y' risk).
They're studying that (meta-)risk here, in an attempt to reduce it. The article is thus squarely in the 'reducing risk Z (of harming field Y (of reducing risk X)))' field.
Your misunderstanding of it poses certain risks, that this comment attempts to reduce, with a concomitant risk of failure, but that gets a bit complicated.