Effective altruism and the current funding situation
forum.effectivealtruism.org
forum.effectivealtruism.org
I love the idea of Effective Altruism and what they're trying to accomplish, but in practice it frequently turns into funding for intellectuals to sit around and pontificate about AI risk and other things, as opposed to actually going out into the world and doing altruistic acts.
Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter")
The EA movement has become a bit of a joke in many circles after making too many moves like this, so hopefully this serves as a wake-up call for them to start getting more practical.
I'm sure there are other areas, but I haven't put an effort into listing them. Global priorities work is pretty hard.
Also, apparently 80,000 Hours now considers AI safety only "somewhat neglected", so perhaps the EAs behind 80,000 Hours agree with me more than I thought. https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/positively-shaping-a...
This phenomena is not unique to AI safety. It often is driven by management incentives.
I agree that AI safety is not a solved problem in practice, but that doesn't mean it's neglected. AI safety gets a lot of attention, and it is important, but it's not "neglected" in the sense that too few people work on it or that there isn't enough money in it [0]. I think the marginal impact of a new person in AI safety is roughly zero, all else equal. AI safety folks would probably do best to change their priorities away from "ivory tower" sort of issues towards the practical issues you bring up.
[0] EAs typically use people or money to measure neglectedness. https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#how-to-as...
AI ethics isn’t neglected because AI ethics doesn’t matter. AI alignment matters. If a self-bootstrapping generally intelligent AI emerges the only important thing about it is “Is this aligned with human values?”. If the answer is no we’re all going to die because we’re made of atoms at the bottom of a gravity well and it’s going to use all the atoms there before getting out. The ethics of AI is completely irrelevant in comparison.
The fact that you’re grouping AI alignment with is kind of an indication of the problem; most people have heard so little about AI alignment problems that they assume it’s the same thing as AI ethics.
Completely unrelated? Even you must accept that they are related through AI.
But, I now see that AI ethics and AI alignment are different. Thank you. However, I think my larger point still stands as I was thinking mostly about efforts under the banners of "AI safety" and "AI alignment" when I wrote my comments here. I do not believe these efforts are "neglected" in the sense 80,000 Hours uses.
The former sounds like it would be full of reasonable cases for taking it seriously.
Let me guess, you work in tech and in a city? I personally believe that if a super intelligent AI were to be created, then it would have the same effect on society as the advent of nuclear weapons. So I respectfully disagree that it's not neglected, I don't think the common American thinks about how close we are to human level intelligence or what that would mean for society.
Also: I'm not a professional programmer, though programming has been one of my job responsibilities in the past, but never all of my job. And I live in a rural area at the moment. Not that any of these are relevant.
The only place I know of alignment actually being covered in normal media is Vox’s Future Perfect (and by Matt Yglesias, who used to work there) and that’s because EAs literally pay them to cover it.
Is this how money is laundered in non profits?
It's also worth noting that this was 28k out of 923k USD, so not a too big part of it (~2%). Of course the money should be used for other things if it's estimated to be more effective though.
The reasoning is in the post you linked which I think gives a pretty good explanation. They're given to 650 math medalists (so ~43 USD/person) which they deemed to have good target audience for this.
You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives.
...by distributing copies of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction?
I agree that charities that save lives are doing good things. That's why I brought up the fact that some of their spending has historically been kind of ludicrously off base.
Derision for fan fiction and/or Harry Potter can't be the beginning and end of your argument for why HPMOR isn't a good book to introduce nerdy school kids to a handful of valuable ideas.
The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices.
If a group of people is so poor that they don't have access to digital devices, maybe printing out rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction shouldn't be at the top of the priority list for a charity trying to spend money to improve their lives.
I suppose we could be equally upset that Sesame street uses puppets?
Let GiveWell direct your donation
GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund
Support GiveWell's top charities
Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program
Against Malaria Foundation
Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program
SCI Foundation (Schistosomiasis Control Initiative)
Sightsavers' deworming program
New Incentives
Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative
END Fund's deworming program
GiveDirectly
https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund
the largest of which was $7.8 million to "Sightsavers — Deworming in Nigeria and Cameroon (February 2022)"
Please don't let the fact that some people are concerned about AI safety detract from EA's overarching goal of doing the most good per dollar donated.
Like I said in my comment, I'm hoping this blog post is a signal that they're going to start maturing the organization a bit more and hopefully distance themselves from some of the weirdness that tries to ride the coattails of the Effective Altruism movement.
Go ahead and spin up all of the AI think tank and Harry Potter fan fiction distribution under a different name, but forcing it under the Effective Altruism banner only drives away donations from people who go into this expecting an organization focused on doing charitable acts in the real world, not funding additional think tanks.
Not that all organizations need to work on immediate practical problems. But I think all organizations that are named things like "effective altruism" should.
And do they work against any of the actual current problems with applied "AI?" Or is it all just singularitarianist eschatology still?
EA basically splits into extremely hard-nosed short term projects and much riskier, but potentially extremely valuable projects guaranteeing the long term future of humanity. This is a consequence of those extremes being the most neglected.
* Some researchers recently built an AI system to generate low-toxicity molecules as candidates for medicines. They realised if they changed their system to maximise toxicity, it designed thousands of toxic molecule candidates including the VX nerve agent (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9)
* When GitHub released their Copilot AI code completion tool, it could autocomplete things like `API_KEY: `
* AI models used for decision-making in hospitals and courts frequently exhibit extreme racial prejudice (eg https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6)
* and many many, other examples
There's a real sense of utopianism and not much consideration of misuse even on a very short timescale. Even if you don't think AI will become an existential risk in the future, there are enough problems caused by misuse of current systems that it warrants attention.
All of the money I've seen flowing in the AI safety EA space has been put to extremely good use - $30k to a YouTuber making videos on AI safety who introduced me to the field and is my go-to for explaining topics like alignment (what you want vs what you say you want), grants to extremely productive AI safety researchers, grants to fund educational bootcamps and scholarships, etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm an EA aligned person myself so I'm fairly biased!)
In fact, GP is suggesting those factions do continue to raise, under a different banner.
GP’s concern, which I share, is that there’s a greater deal of effectiveness that’s being impacted by outside perceptions.
EA should inherently be concerned with making the top of their altruism dollar funnel as wide as possible, to channel the most good most effectively.
If the potential non-AI-safety money being left on the table is a greater amount than the money raised for AI-safety causes, is that most effective? For whom?
In a world where that potential money enters the funnel, and AI-safety has and grows a separate funnel of its own, how is that not better?
I feel like EAs see global poverty almost as a solved problem when there is a lot of work to be done still.
You may disagree that HPMOR is effective at teaching science, but at least they did it openly. That page has a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this grant, including the possibility that it could cause "reputational risk" (i.e. people like you making fun of them for it). AFAICT they took that seriously, and decided to do it anyway because they really do believe that it's effective at teaching science.
My Fermi estimate is probably off, but it’s a pretty sensible argument to me.
I think the snark comes from "30000$" being spent to distribute a "free" book. If you think about it in terms of spending 46$ per person to advertise to a very select group of 650 people it might not sound so stupid.
From the very first chapter :
> "Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see.
Chapter 8 introduces how to think about peculiar phenomenons through children games and so on and so forth.
Though I found it online and not from the $30K distributed, I have since as a result of being introduced to Effective Altruism there donated much more than $30K to highly effective charities and caused hundreds of other people to get into donating to highly effective charities too. I also started a company inspired by the EA concepts of working on "neglected problems" - https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definitio...
I might be wrong, but I suspect there's a decent chance there was at least 1 person like me of the people in that $30k distribution.
This is just a creative way to advertise, and I don’t see what’s wrong with charities trying to get their message out there.
I think GGP may have been going for a different point though, which is - is EA getting an overly harmful outward reputation / giving the wrong impression to laypeople and others, in a way that inhibits the overall potential reach of the movement? Is the creative advertising causing more harm than good?
At least, that’s the question I’m asking after reading these three posts.
It seems like it’s a common theme among rationalist groups to take a strongly inside view of the situation, based on all the observable facts and known good being done, and totally ignore the bigger picture outside view.
The universe is allowed to decide the Donald Trump will be president in 2016 despite all the reasons to think it was crazy that he would become president. The universe is allowed to decide that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be elected president of Ukraine on the basis of having starring as the president in a comedy.
And I guess the universe is allowed to decide that a piece of fanfic that is desperately in need of an editor will be successful at recruiting talent for the rationalist or AI Safety communities.
I expect you are probably skeptical of AI Safety, but then your criticism would be a criticism of the final objective, not the method (distribution of HPMoR) used to achieve the objective.
EA has done a great job bringing attention and resources to causes that are clear wins - it's just obvious that global poverty interventions like Against Malaria and GiveDirectly are highly beneficial.
But effectiveness doesn't always doing the most obviously effective thing. It means doing the highest expected value thing. Sometimes that means trying things with low expectation of success, but a high potential payoff.
There's a trade off between exploring the space of potential interventions, and exploiting known good ones. EA needs to keep its healthy focus on exploration, or risk getting stuck in a local minimum. Suppose the X-risk people are right - if we get that wrong there won't be any more people left to help. Certainly EA was sounding the alarm about lack of pandemic preparedness ages ago, and while that wasn't existential, it was the right direction to be looking in. Imagine if we'd had a bit better foresight, been a bit better prepared, and been able to prevent 6 million people dying of COVID.
Something sounding "weird" isn't sufficient reason to discard it. There needs to be an actual convincing argument. And let me tell you, the weird ideas have survived some pretty rigorous debate.
Among the "rationalist" crowd, this is commonly done for both AI alignment and longevity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
And they're not because EA is tackling a diverse set of issues, not just AI alignment and longevity, as the top spot of donations is going to malaria nets in Africa.
However, if you believe that AGI will be created, then you have to admit that societal impacts will be tremendous, the same level as the advent of nukes.
People are pointing out the problems in discrimination that we face with current sub human AI. Imagine AI systems smarter than 90% of humans or smarter than all humans. Wouldn't that make all current problems in AI minuscule if we couldn't control such a program?
The link https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fd3iQRkmCKCCL289u/... circles back to itself, with no simple explanation.
The "intro" from the front page has 2800+ words and isn't clear either: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...
That intro is itself prefaced with a paragraph in italics that recommends a whole "handbook" for a "more thorough introduction". I'm afraid to click on that for fear it leads to a whole library of volumes discussing general ideas about life, freedom, religion and other minor and trivial concepts.
Why can't organizations' blogs have a simple, clear and easily accessible "about us" link that describes what they do in one sentence.
> Effective altruism is a social movement and philosophy focused on maximising the good you can do in your career, projects, and other life decisions.
That's the 'what they do in one sentence' from the frontpage of https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/8...
Asking because, while all the risks laid out are quite serious, nothing in the language of the report (that I can find) mentions anything about the planet becoming unsurvivable altogether.
The language that does talk about impacted populations speaks in terms of hundreds of millions of people. For instance, section A.5.5 specifically connects number of human lives impacted under different levels of projected temperature rise.
My point is: climate change is a really big problem, and we should absolutely take action on these recommendations. Using language like “existential threat” is hyperbolic and, imo, harms the cause.
I feel the word 'existential' is appropriate (and by the way that word was used by EA not me) because for hundreds of millions of people - maybe more - food and water shortages, accompanied by disease may well have such an effect. When the scientists talk about human lives impacted under different levels, we know these are best estimates, and most likely deliberately cautious.
When the summary says 'Approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change (high confidence)', what does that mean? Highly vulnerable to me doesn't mean they'll just feel uncomfortable, but something more. Optimist vs pessimist perhaps?
Anyway, as I said, I am not expert enough to make any kind of predictions as to the future. All I do is watch as various predictions in the Reports are reached ahead of time, and it's very worrying. Because we haven't factored in so many things (because we can't). Will runaway catastrophic impacts occur, such as a massive uptick in methane emissions after sufficient permafrost melt? What will that mean? Will the food chain on which billions rely collapse because of ocean warming and increased acidity? Will the increasing unpredictability in weather patterns make mass market farming impossible to guarantee?
There's so much we don't know. This is uncharted territory really, isn't it?
The harm comes from displacement of people from coastal cities, islands, and regions that become unsuitable for agriculture. Billions will try to move to Siberia & Canada. There will be conflict.
Telling people "shut up and change your way of thinking until you agree with you" is a very bad thing to do once you're no longer a fringe movement, even if your way of thinking is right.
I'm also really curious about HN's view of Effective Altruism, and how do individuals here handle their charitable giving.
I'm not a pure utilitarian and try and get a bit of feelgood consumption out of my charity.
I have an automatic monthly deduction to a cause I'm interested in, https://www.orangutan.org.au/ which buys up rainforests and protect orangutans in Borneo.
The reason I go for this instead of "antimalarial bednets" (ie optimal human life saving) is because I have visited Borneo a few times, and think protecting great apes is important to me personally.
I also kick in a few hundred bucks a year to sponsor friends doing various charity challenges.
If I imagined two rooms, one with a child about to die of malaria in it, and another with an orangutan in it, and you told me I could spend $7,000 dollars to save the child or $50,000 to save the orangutan, I'd be very hard pressed to save the orangutan.
I think I would get the same 'feel good consumption' from more effective charitable giving, where my money went further and did more good in the world. The few thousand dollars needed to save a life from malaria would feel as good or better than tens of thousands of dollars needed to fail to save an orangutan.
Buying / leasing rainforest or lobbying government for protection seems pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things, 11k wild oranghutans for 3.3M dollars last year is less than $300 per oranghutan per year
There are 70,000 humans per oranghutan so even though they are more genetically distant from us rarity should count
This person is also straightforward with their reasoning - yeah sure it's not as effective as malaria nets but it's a personal cause they care about. Most people don't even think about how effective the causes they support are - at all! It's mindblowing.
Imagine EA ideas applied to fitness - sure some people may stick to a perfect routine etc but some people just getting off the couch and doing an activity they like enough to keep doing is best.
I'm all for methods to encourage greater rationality. I'm all for a world where, someday, folks are doing this sort of calculus more often in their lives.
We're not there, yet. The approach you are taking here falls short in being a persuasive, and thus effective, argument. imo, more awareness and effort needs to go into the rational community itself trying to get more in touch with what sort of, well, let's call them "less rational", methods work effectively for/with/"on" the general populace.
I know, dark arts and all that. I'm not suggesting to outright lie to people. I am suggesting that falling into the typical mind fallacy is a sort of highly visible antipattern exhibited, in my experience, by rationalists. I'm suggesting that a world where a person helps save orangutans and rainforests and acts as a conscientious, charitable giver is better than the world where they don't. I'm suggesting to focus on that good, and then do work where you can to make the world even more better.
Perhaps a look into the works of David Chapman [1] could help, here. Perhaps a greater appreciation for the complexity and subjective reality of other humans' thought processes and rationalizations, to them, would help you make better use of empathy and prosociality to become even more effective.
I have never heard of it but judging from the comments it's well known? Now I feel like the perfect ignoramus.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/may/10/electronic-art...
But not.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...
>Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.
Granted, EA's QA folks had never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to walk them through installing VMWare on Windows and gave them a Linux operating system image to test it with, but it did pass QA, and they released it in binary on the OLPC as well as in source code form.
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis
Here's the contract with all the legal details:
"Kids... get off my lawn!"