The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
economist.com
economist.com
I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insiders about Sam Bankman-Fried (these come up in stories where EA distances itself from SBF, or claims they knew he was up to no good all along), it's hard to shake the comparisons to Scientology: they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.
To that, add that some of the ideas are clearly dementing. Take Scott Aaronson's recent post on SBF, which is shot through with EA-think; it includes this:
And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
This is logic straight out of the 16th century Medici papacy of Leo X. Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist? Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much, and if you can't recognize that, something has gone terribly wrong in your thinking. Over and over I keep coming across EA arguments that could be used to justify almost literally any behavior, so long as you can tell yourself a story about having a long-term positive goal.
Also: tens of millions in donations to "AI safety" organizations. Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.
Ergo at this point in time money spent to pay people to contemplate it is almost certainly entirely wasted.
Related to the topics of AI apocalypse and putting things off because they seem far away: I personally find it amusing to contemplate a strong AGI being developed in 2035 and wiping out humanity. Why? Because it would eliminate the Y2038 problem, retroactively vindicating all the engineers who only allocated 32 bits to timestamps. It would mean the justification of "oh, it's so far off, the world will have changed unimaginably by then", would for once turn out to be correct!
Its not at all clear that future actual AI will be GPT7 now with 10,000x as much processing power. In fact not much seems to be clear at all. It would seem that the insight to control future tools will come from the experience in building said tools with little chance that it will just accidentally suddenly become skynet. If we doom ourselves thus it will be a long laborious process with years of striving, setbacks, and thousands of people involved.
We should focus on the basic science and let it become clear what avenues exist over the probable decades it will take to even reach the vicinity of our goal. Money spent specifically on paying PhDs to imagine how to secure a technology we don't have and don't remotely understand is probably wasted.
The possible outcomes here are "probably we waste a lot of money" and "the world ends."
Right now what's threatening the most people is war, famine and diseases. Climate change is a tangible future threat but I'd bet a couple $ that the JSO organizers are full EA proponents and are flying private jets to convince people to throw soup into works of art
Like increased rate of hurricanes due to climate change?
One does need to seriously consider low probability, high impact events, like pandemics, in one's future planning and resource allocation.
This is what I'm replying to. And yes Climate Change is a worrying problem, but it won't be solved by people throwing tantrums in museums
This is a bad analogy. The mechanisms and risks of climate change are reasonably well understood as are the solutions available to us now and even some possible future solutions.
When it comes to AGI, what's the risk? Something bad might happen? The mechanisms of AGI arising is also unknown since it has never happened before and it's not even known if it's possible. Finally, what's the solution? Prevent AGI research? Make sure every AGI project has a killswitch? How do you prevent something when you don't know if it is possible nor how it will arise?
Compare this to the concrete, measurable things we can do to slow down climate change and "AGI safety" seems like a make-work money pit.
When most EA/Rationalist folks discuss AI Safety. They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with funding research of that sort.
The problem comes is that many EA/Rationalist folks begin downplaying legitimate tangible risks on the horizon (I’ve had prominent EA folks tell me that Climate Change is not an existential risk) or that many of these AI Safety researchers actively ignore how to reduce harms of the AI we have deployed today.
This existential measuring contest is just so odd and unnecessary. I really don’t care if you think AI Safety is a legitimate problem. I personally don’t but it’s when they begin to downplay others actual catastrophes that many of us take issue.
Have you seen anything to indicate otherwise? The IPCC reports don't contain even a whiff in that direction.
To the best of my knowledge zero people who know anything about climate change think its existential.
Is it:
1. All life on the planet dies
2. All advanced life on the planet dies?
3. All humans die?
4. Advanced civilization is destroyed irretrievably?
5. Advanced civilization is destroyed for a long period of time?
etc
And I'm not sure the group "people who know anything about climate change" are neccesarily better equipped to answer this question - it's a complex systems question.
I'm not actually sure who is equipped to answer it accurately.
"Millions to billions of people die; large percentages of the rest are displaced and/or have their lives made significantly shorter, harsher, and less certain as war, famine, disease, and natural disasters become vastly more common around the globe."
And there's really very little question that that's where climate change is leading if we don't get it under control soon.
With dangerous research, when a conclusive demonstration of possibility is achieved, it is usually too late to do much in the way of prevention. That's why we don't expect the FDA to "prove" that harm from a new medication "is even possible" before regulating it; rather, we expect the pharmaceutical company to provide evidence for its expected harmlessness before we even make the attempt. Think of the FDA what you like, this is certainly a better standard than putting the burden of proof on harmful outcomes.
From everything I've read about their views, they seem to believe that either the moment an AGI is created or very, very soon thereafter, it will achieve the Singularity and "ascend" to something near godhood from our perspective, and it will perceive humanity as a threat to it and immediately seek our destruction—which, because of its near-godhood, it will be able to achieve far faster than we have the ability to respond to. Thus, what we have to do is either prevent AGI from ever coming to pass (because as soon as it exists, it's effectively too late), or make absolutely certain that by the time it does, we have strong measures in place to either fight back against it, or get humanity the hell out of Dodge.
This is built on such a foundation of shaky assumptions that giving it credibility is ludicrous.
My take on it is the other way around: every step of the argument seems plainly obvious.
So either it's less obvious than you're claiming, or you are taking the threat of creating an evil AGI not seriously enough according to your own beliefs.
I just don't care that much about things that kill everyone. I don't think almost anyone does. In the Cold War, the vast majority of the population was not doing absolutely everything to achieve bilateral disarmament. This would lead you to believe that they didn't really expect nuclear war. But maybe they were just apathetic and helpless.
This isn't an accurate representation, really. The letter was written exactly because it was clear that a fission bomb is very likely within the short-term reach of current technological and industrial capability. This is very much not the case with AGI.
The Einstein-Szilard letter was talking about a danger that they had no way of proving was even possible.
Supporting your argument with an inaccurate thing is not 'a difference of degrees'. It's a difference between a good argument and a bad one.
My argument is that for contested and dangerous outcomes, proof of possibility is an unreasonable standard, in good part because it massively underspecifies the goalposts.
It's not, it's just a turn of phrase you've latched on to. There's no discussion of a standard of proof, etc. The comparison between the Szilard Einstein letter and 'AGI safety' is specious and it's one you brought up! You have to outright misrepresent what the letter was about just to make it. It was not a letter about a 'hypothetical danger they had no way of proving'. There just isn't any reasonable reading of the letter, the context, the history in which that's an accurate statement.
By any reasonable standard, at that point the possibility of nuclear fission was well established. But the argument is that there is no central committee that defines the reasonable standard and checks theories against it. It's all just opinion, and that specific opinion can be arbitrarily goalshifted.
I'm not saying the letter was about a hypothetical danger they had no way of proving, I don't think that. But that's specific to my interpretation of those terms, and I could easily see the exact same argument levered against the letter if that debate had been done in public.
“In a high-emissions scenario where little is done to curb planet-heating gases, global mortality rates will be raised by 73 deaths per 100,000 people by the end of the century”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/rising-globa...
That's an assessment based on what we know, but there's a lot we don't. For instance, it's possible that climate change could lead to a large scale collapse of food chains that could pose an existential risk to humanity.
It's also plausible that climate change will lead to resource shortages that result in wars between nuclear powers, and the nuclear calamity that follows kills us all.
I'm sure some people do this, and it's bad.
But to be clear, when you say some researchers are actively ignoring how to reduce harms of AI today... I'm not sure what you mean by "actively" ignore, but don't most researchers just by default ignore this, except for the few who are active in this field?
In other words, I think it's totally legit to focus on long-term AGI risk, and totally ignore current short-term AI risk, as a personal career-choice, just like it's ok to not even work on AI at all. Unless someone is actively trying to cause less resources to go into short-term AI risk, what's the problem?
> They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible
I mean, we exist as (one would hope) intelligent beings. Why wouldn't AGI be possible? Your frame makes it seem like the default is that it isn't possible, which is wrong IMO.
I really don't understand AGI skeptics. Unless you think reality has some non-physical character that can't be reproduced outside of biology, it obviously follows that a physical machine can reproduce what another physical machine (human body) is doing.
Depends what you mean by Rationalist. I would say that EA, the modern movement, is a hobby of people who belong to "rationalism", the modern movement. I'd be fairly comfortable calling them a cult. (Frequent exhortation: "Read the Sequences!") EA is the same thing, simply because the people who do EA and the people who do rationalism are the same people.
But from your comment, I can't tell whether Rationalist refers to that group or to some other thing.
Most EAs are people like me who read some essays, setup some recurring donations to GiveWell and call it a day. If that's how being a scientology member goes then it must be milder than I've been led to believe.
I don’t mean to overstate the religiosity of EA but it’s not structurally different.
HN? Religion. Weight lifting? Religion. Dental hygiene? Religion. Voting? Religion. Functional Programming? Religion. Punk? Religion.
Well dental hygiene is definitely not a religion. I don't even floss (use a water pik now but flossing back teeth is difficult, parents never taught me to floss when I was a child). Leaving this aside, I have also noticed people call test-driven development / behavior driven development religions here. Are they using hyperboles?
Both of those are useful tools, but doing them 100% of the time is challenging. For me, as a brand new dev, the attitude of "you must always write a test before you write code" was stifling and made it harder to learn things at times.
To quote our noble caveman patron saint, "how grug test what grug not understand domain yet?!"
Again, not saying I disagree in the slightest. Just reiterating.
There appears to be an upper eschelon, perhaps more of a social group, who are guiding the resources of this movement along philosophical/ideological lines about which they are not being transparent. And when someone outside of that social group verges on exploring those aspects of their philosophical thinking there is an effort to silence or soften the tone of their discourse so it appears less coldly calculating, maybe (per anecdotal reports of people closely tied there) less absurdly extreme and ridiculous.
Peter Singer, the philosopher whose book inspired the movement? People at GiveWell, the charity evaluation organization? Authors of the Giving What We Can pledge?
Or are these all merely puppets in the hands of the true manipulators hiding in the shadows, whose names no one dares to mention, even anonymously? Spooky...
Belief is an arbitrary choice and a tool.
I'm reacting to messages circulating about the whisper campaign among EA higher-ups, many of which are explicit about the fact that they didn't warn the public about Sam Bankman-Fried because EA-the-movement would ostracize them, not just from their community but also from their jobs. I'm not making those messages up. Maybe they're completely disconnected from reality? There's several of them, from several different people, though, so it'll take something more compelling than "it is unpleasant to be compared to Scientology" to refute my lying eyes.
EA even has its own Xenu: it's just called AGI.
You are also not providing evidence.
As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is.
> they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.
The first is true, the latter two are bullshit.
> Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences
That's a gross mischaracterization. A better metaphor is Robin Hood, someone who steals from the rich to give to the poor. And who is widely regarded as a folk hero.
> tens of millions in donations to "AI safety" organizations.
If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.
Sure, but there is no reason to think these numbers are true. Maybe AI alignment research increases chances of AI killing everyone.
No one gets to do a double-blind study on the measured probability of catastrophic AI accidents in worlds with and without safety research in advance of capabilities gain.
>If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.
Ive seen this argument many times on many different issues and I think it's almost always bunk. The classic example in Fusion research, I had friends when I was a student in the 80s arguing that if we only doubled fusion research spending we'd have unlimited cheap electricity by the year 2000, or others said that AI was the most important thing we could be researching at that point.
The problem is if you're too early on in the development process of a technology, you just flat out don't know enough about it to be able to make informed decisions. That early phase is about exploring avenues of research and figuring out what works and what doesn't, and that takes an irreducible amount of human time, diligence and hard work. Yes you need to invest in that, but above a certain threshold anything more you invest is almost entirely going to be wasted.
With general, or strong AI we only just barely have the beginnings of an idea of how to even do preliminary research on it. We're groping around in the dark for a starting point. It's far, far too early to start worrying about controls and management strategies for the end point of that research. I think there's very little chance much of that is likely to turn out to be relevant, and there's nothing to stop us focusing on that area once we do know what is going to be relevant.
I'm not saying ignore the issue, or don't think about it at all, but the idea that it's some urgent issue that we absolutely have to invest heavily in right now IMHO doesn't stand.
The problem is, humanity is pretty bad at estimating when a new technology is about to be ready. Even the experts are pretty bad. See e.g. multiple people saying human flight is many years away, including some who were saying it unknowingly after it had been achieved!
So I think the question is: when should we worry about ai safety? How early is too early?
Plenty of experts think now is a good time to be spendning at least some resources on this. And we're not talking nuclear fusion level resources here; I don't know the numbers, but I imagine the amount of resources are actually fairly tiny compared to almost all other scientific spending. (And this was certainly true 10 years ago.)
I personally think that, given the chance of AI systems being an existential risk, we should be putting way more resources into it than into other things. The same goes true for preventing pandemics or other biological x-risks, etc.
The risk theses experts are talking about isn't existential. Its stuff like GPT3 being truncated to generate propaganda for dictatorships, deepfakes, algorithm-reinforced biases in all kinds of models (because the data used to train them was generated by humans). This is concerning to some degree and deserves funding and research (though all too often the results boil down to unusable advice and guidelines). This is entirely orthogonal to any existential risk a supposed AGI might create. One is a testable scientific hypothesis and the other is a futurist horror story which is untestable by definition.
There is no difference in their testability, it's just that the existential risk test means no more humans to care about the results.
The danger of a biolab creating a pathogen that wipes out all humanity is real but remote, and is a simple extension of the argument that the lab could create pathogens that can "only" kill or harm millions. That's why biolab safety is carefully studied, and the same argument applies to AI safety.
Maybe. Or maybe we're just on small change away from AGI. We could be, because we don't yet really know what's required and we may not ever know until after we've done it. That prospect should be terrifying.
> It's far, far too early to start worrying about controls and management strategies for the end point of that research.
No, because if you create AGI before we have some containment or safety protocols, then it may already be too late.
Consider whether we should have researched biolab safety before we started experimenting on modifying pathogens in various ways. Doesn't that just seem blindingly brain-dead obvious? For some reason this clear and obvious conclusion just goes out the window when it comes to AI.
This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...
Disclaimer: I don’t think this is coming soon per se, but 1) I don’t know for sure that it’s not and 2) it’s definitely coming at some point, if humans manage our other existential risks long enough.
That's the sci-fi idea, which handwaves away several very big assumptions and improbabilities, such as that intelligence can be grown to absurd levels (or even just majorly) just by adding hardware to allow for it, that intelligence can just be expanded by itself (thinking itself into being more intelligent), and more importantly intelligence is some kind of superpower that transends very real limitations (like, physical access, or convincing people to do its bidding). The idea is that if you're super-smart you can convince anybody to do anything, but I'm not sure how this came about, because most super-smart people usually can't convince others to do shit, it's charismatic people (which is orthogonal to high-IQ) that do that. In fact many MENSA geniuses just rub people the wrong way.
I mean one of the most serious (I use the term loosely) proponents of this charade, thinks the "singularity" will create nanobots to control the world...
2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware
3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself
4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary
5) Nanobots also not a necessary assumption
Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior. Consider for example if the Bitcoin whitepaper were written by an AI? No escape necessary. No convincing necessary. Yet the idea has managed to marshal enormous amounts of capital, computational power, social power, and even some political clout. IMO there’s no reason to believe the AI looks like a robot terminator rather than an incentive-generating piece of information.
The number of people with incentives to work towards destroying the whole of humanity is rather small, and I'd rather we deal with them first since they need not wait for unfriendly AI to be dangerous...
(1) "consuming and pumping oil" is a bad thing, and not a complex win-some/lose-some thing, which gave us huge progress and benefits in the 200 years we've used fossil fuels to pump the industrial revolution,
(2) and that we can just absurtly stop consuming and pumping it right now, and there won't be huge disastrous 2nd order effects (in economy, society, ability for people to heat themselves etc) until better replacement technologies are not just available, but have similar EROI AND (even more important) capacity to scale up production, building, and deployment fast enough to cover our needs (which we're nowhere near with any "sustainable" technology, including nuclear).
We are engaging in clearly self-destructive behavior because, incentive structure accounted for (your points), it very well appears to be the best option. It wouldn’t be a hard problem if it didn’t.
It should be obvious that it’s entirely possible to follow your (real) incentives all the way into a very bad outcome.
Well, if it's the "best option" then it clearly isn't self-destructive... It's just something with side effects, but which also yielded huge benefits.
Kind of how alcoholism is self-destructing. But a side-effect from taking a drug that helps us perform betetr or treats some condition we have, is not self-destructing. It's more of an unforseen issue, that we can't immediately correct (e.g. because of the condition worsening if we do it abruptly).
There's a cap to all things. Diminishing returns is a thing. Both physical substrates have limits, and there's a utility limit to thinking or having more data. Limitless intelligence is fairy-tale magical thinking - especially in the way it's portrayed as some magical ability to build and control everything. Like, invent working cold-fusion - as if you don't need the experiments, iterative process, random breakthroughs, and such, but just "smarter" thinking.
> 2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware
Yes, you do, else it's just the same capped-capability hardware, thinking itself into being smarter.
> 3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself
Well, I, personally, don't need to assume anything. But people talking about AGI, do assume it.
> 4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary
That's neither here nor there, though, because I didn't say that connecting AGI to the open internet is impossible or can't happen. Just that it doesn't mean much. We still control the kind of control we give an AI, and any physical systems any AGI would be connected will still have limitations. It's not some magical portal into conquering the world.
>5) Nanobots also not a necessary assumption
Didn't say it's necessary, just pointed out that it has been made - along with many other non necessary, and far-fetched assumptions and hand waving...
>Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior.
Both do. With charisma you can do it without incentives - and even instill incentives into people. Otherwise you're stuck with innate incentives like people wanting to be rich - which you don't need to be a AGI to exploit, just rich or a con-man.
2) Nope. Could be different hardware. The brain consumes far less power than any human-designed computer that could hope to match its computational power.
3) Sure some do, but it’s not a necessary assumption to take AGI risk seriously.
4) Meh, this seems to me just the next concession in the line of “we can’t do that, we wouldn’t do that, we do it but it’s not that bad”
5) Okay so it’s unrelated to this conversation except I suppose some sort of ad hominem?
6) So we agree charisma is at best not necessary to manipulate the world
Sort of. Most science is based on tinkering and experiment, with serendipity thrown in, including most major inventions, and in many cases the actual invention history is changed to make it more like a story of rational thinking process and regular steps than it was.
>No reason to believe the absolute pinnacle of intelligence happens to sit inside a species of mostly hairless apes here on earth.
Note that "hairless apes" is a weasel term, meant to psychologically-pressure the other to feel as if we're talking about some inherently inferior thing ("sounds right, mostly hairless apes can't be the pinnacle of intelligence").
Whereas if you had put it as "the best achievable result after hundreds of millions of years of evolution" it doesn't sound so bad, does it?
> 2) Nope. Could be different hardware. The brain consumes far less power than any human-designed computer that could hope to match its computational power.
Potatoh, potato. Different hardware is still hardware - and will also have limitations of its own.
>4) Meh, this seems to me just the next concession in the line of “we can’t do that, we wouldn’t do that, we do it but it’s not that bad”
Which is an appropriate scalable multi-case response to the similarly multi-level: "AI will control the world through physical access!!!!! SINGULARITY IS COMING! WE'RE ALL DOOMED" which then in practice turns to mean "My smart fridge is connected to Amazon".
>5) Okay so it’s unrelated to this conversation except I suppose some sort of ad hominem?
It's related to the conversation about AGI, since its what one of the most visible proponent of it's dangers wrote as his feared very possible scenario.
Also, if one believes people warning about some subject are delluded, pointing to delluded things they've said about it looks pretty clearly pertinent.
>6) So we agree charisma is at best not necessary to manipulate the world
Sure, in the degree that we agree that intelligence alone is not sufficient.
The best known, achieved result around this particular star (out of ~100,000,000,000,000 of them) after hundreds of millions of years with, ostensibly, hundreds of millions of years yet to come.
There’s a difference between being the current known hyper local maximum and being at the universal limit. Talk about weaseling! :D
No reason to believe we are the absolute pinnacle. There’s immense variation even within our own species, not to mention our near neighbors on evolution’s path.
Edit: No one is worried about your fridge. Anyway I’ve gotta start my day, have a good rest of your week!
Still, this formulation heavily beats the "hairless apes" one doesn't it?
Also, I'm not sure about the relevance of pointing out that it's the "best known". Or the number of stars. Are we aware of any "not known"? Or have seen any signs in any of those stars? Because decades of trying (with SETI, etc.) and so on, has mostly shown the opposite (consider e.g. the Fermi paradox).
So, I think we better stick with the knowns (of which it's the best results among millions of competing organisms anyway), than handwave about what possible magic intelligence remote aliens we haven't seen and don't even know exist have... Sure, we can do it for fun and speculation, but we shouldn't use it as an argument for limitless intelligence. I mean, "Intelligence is limitless, because if E.T. exists, he could have 1000x our IQ" is not exactly an argument.
>Edit: No one is worried about your fridge.
No, but they're worried about the imminent danger of AGI conquering the world and killing us all when the practical examples attaibable are not far from the level of my fridge.
Have a good week yourself. See you around!
AGI is here.
AGI is you.
You are an incredibly efficient piece of carbon thinkware able to sell for replicate into more carbon thinkware and that that extra carbon think where can go out and create its own life and make its own observations and spread information through the society of you both inherit, that's society is growing exponentially and growing in its ability to modify the world and manipulate and improve itself exponentially.
If you're scared of AGI, don't be. You are the superior AGI, because these machines made of metal and circuits are never going to compare to machines made of carbon using chemical reactions that are far more efficient than transistors to do the thinking.
The future is in improving ourselves and reaching a point at which our biology is no longer a mysterious black box so that we can modify and improve ourselves and those around us.
We can already improve machines, but that's because the machines are far simpler and far more primitive than our minds are.
Humans are deeply limited in their senses, their actions, and their ability to communicate. An AGI botnet installed on every computer/control system in the world would have none of those limitations.
What humans have is scale. There are 10 billion devices connected to the internet. Cool, right? More than humans? No. Being human has really big perks.
We are mobile.
We have hands and feet.
We have eyes and touch and smell and we use tools to expand what we can see.
We each possess the ability to process data and filter data at scales many magnitudes greater than a computer. Note that data in this case isn't "many miles of spreadsheet data" - data in this case is worldly observation. You notice weird things, you report it to your friends. You try weird things, you report it to your friends.
Communication between humans is limited, as is our memory, but it's limited for a reason. 99 percent of information is worthless junk human communication gets most of the important parts through.
Then we need to parse mass amounts of data? Computers do that.
Comparing your information to all other known information? It's an O n squared problem. You can throw hardware at it but as informations scope grows it will outpace the hardware eventually.
Humans are crazy advanced compared to machines in basically every sense. I think the viewpoint here that machines will have superior senses is extrapolating how computers work today and is thoroughly impractical. We will find these logical and reproducible systems look more and more like we do as we push the line.
I expect eventual marginal improvements that can't outpace human "plentifulness", and biological modifications and creations to be our real future.
Think of how different the world would be if everybody was controlled by a single unified mind.
If everyone was perfectly aware of where in the world their skill were best applied, if everyone agreed on social and economical objectives.
AGI can duplicate itself and can reprogram itself.
It is not about which one is more marvelous, more advanced, or more evolved.
It is about specific possibilities that AGI has that we don't.
It would be terrible. We would lack diversity, society would stratify and get stuck that way forever.
Conflict is bad, but it's also good. Corrupt society should always fall and be renewed by something new and unique, and without such a process we'd land in social quicksand.
Finding the best place for you is a NP hard problem. The number of places for your grows exponentially as humanity does, and then on top of that you have to match every person to all those potential spots. We already have a roughly working system with self discovery.
There's room for improvement, but I don't believe it's scary super exponential, and a lot of the room to improve comes from things we can also access, like the internet.
Duplication runs into the same issue hiveminds do. I'm sure it will prove incredibly useful, but for the tasks humans do nowadays at a high level they'll be somewhat muted. You need diversity.
Yes, but that is neither here, nor there.
The question is about building those on our own, not if they already exist but we didn't build them or fully control them.
Would an AI necessarily be super charismatic initially? Maybe not, but don't assume greater intelligence won't lead to greater charisma.
(Yes, I know it wasn't just Hitler doing the convincing, but again, that distinction isn't important here as making a message come from many different people is trivial marketing 201/propaganda 101 in the 21st century)
Try to get people to do what you want as an intelligent aspie without charisma, and see how far this goes... even if you have 60+ IQ points over Hitler.
Also, Hitler was mostly redundant. He convinced people because they were ready to convinced - Germans would have gone to that one way or another... (they wouldn't have had killed the Jews - that was his obsession and "contribution", but the revenge for the WWI defeat and expansionism and WWII were brewing and inevitable in Germany, and the brand of fascism was also on the rise in places that felt they got the short end of the stick during colonialism, which is why similar movements rose in Japan and Italy and Spain and elsewhere, even before Hitler became a thing. Hitler just rode the currents to sell his particular brand of snake-oil).
This has been the empirically validated trend. The more hardware, the more parallel lines of thought can be explored at once (like in chess).
> that intelligence can just be expanded by itself (thinking itself into being more intelligent)
Of course it can, because humans have already done this. What do you think language, writing, books, school, science and computers are? They are humans augmenting their own effective intelligence by various means. An AI will likely have further means at its disposal, such as access to its own source code (see Godel machines and AIXI for formal models of how this works).
> more importantly intelligence is some kind of superpower that transends very real limitations (like, physical access, or convincing people to do its bidding)
Intelligence is a power, not a superpower. However, money is a power too, and all of our money is digitized these days, and a digital superintelligence might arguably have an advantage in this domain. A superintelligence with lots of money can arguably convince a whole lot of people to do what it wants and get the physical access it needs.
Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ. Genetics and nutrition, on the other hand, did.
>However, money is a power too, and all of our money is digitized these days, and a digital superintelligence might arguably have an advantage in this domain. A superintelligence with lots of money can arguably convince a whole lot of people to do what it wants and get the physical access it needs.
Who would let superintelligence have a wallet and budget? Or would we just sit and have it steal money? And why would it be any more effective, and any less visible or trackable and able to be shut down than a rich person using his money?
Handwavy recursive argument: "but because its superintelligent"
Whether IQ took us to the moon is still a topic of debate, as is whether IQ is equal to or only part of intelligence. But it's clear that language, books, school, science and computers absolutely did take us to the moon. Clearly all of these things improved our intellectual effectiveness, and that's what matters, regardless of whether it fits into your personal definition of "intelligence".
> Who would let superintelligence have a wallet and budget? Or would we just sit and have it steal money?
Cryptocurrency makes this trivial. All computer systems likely also have vulnerabilities, including financial systems. An AI can probe these systems around the clock, or can subtly introduce vulnerabilities into our vulnerable software supply chains. These are only two among many options that are entirely within the realm of plausibility.
> And why would it be any more effective, and any less visible or trackable and able to be shut down than a rich person using his money?
An AI wouldn't necessarily have a physical location that can be tracked as easily as humans. Where is the AI jail?
Honestly, it's like you're not even trying to consider how vulnerable we might be to manipulation by a non-human intelligence. All of our protections are fairly effective against human actors. Some of them might provide partial protection from non-human actors, but you should doubt your confidence that they would be effective against such threats.
And there it is: the assumption that AGI will, necessarily, be capable of hacking effectively any computer system, no matter how well-secured.
This belongs in Hollywood, not on HN.
Where did I say they are capable of hacking any computer system no matter how well secured?
I said that software vulnerabilities exist, that software supply chains are known to be vulnerable, that even financial institutions are vulnerable. These are all documented facts.
An AI doesn't have to successfully hack any computer system, it only needs to successfully hack one financial computer system to create an account that can send and receive money. Given it can plausibly attempt to do so consistently around the clock via numerous means (like vulnerable software supply chains or other exploits), the chances of it doing so successfully against any of the tens of thousands of banking systems around the world over a timespan of years seems plausibly certain. And that's only for the things it needs that require some kind of official financial account, it can do plenty with cryptocurrency alone.
Boy do you skeptics love your strawman arguments.
Personally, I feel it might become a risk one day, but how soon is an important detail. If the threat is still far away, its nature is very blurry and there is no use to worry too much about it today (or advocate for a ban on AI research).
There are still many safe intermediary steps we have to go through before the threat concretizes and becomes worth worrying about.
Agreed a ban on AI research is unworkable, which is part of why this threat is so insidious.
The AI we have now is engineering and not science. Don’t you need science to create AI? Don’t you need to understand something fundamental about the brain?
Evolution, for example, didn't understand anything (as it's just a process). It wasn't someone with an understanding of brains at the scientific level that built our brains. Just an iterative trial and error process with evolutionary feedback.
To make a simplistic argument, kind of like we can create fire, without knowing about oxidation and chemistry.
OpenAI claims to be working on AGI. Nothing they have built is even tangentially related.
It’s also interesting your remark on birds and planes. Chomsky uses a similar analogy to say they are dissimilar: can a submarine swim? Well, depends on what you mean by swim.
Why are we so scared of an artificial brain when we have millions of living brains doing exactly what we are scared the artificial brains are going to do.
We are growing exponentially, and it almost all certainty these AGI, if they even become a worthwhile thing compared to non-general AI, are probably going to be human, but incredibly similar and it probably won't go exponentially out of control.
This idea that a computer could infinitely improve itself while sitting inside of a boxes absurd, do you know what would happen if you put a human thinker inside of a box for say 2 billion years for them to make theories and think about stuff? They eventually go mad and come out with some of the craziest theories in the world because they don't know what they're talking about because in order to learn you have to experiment and work with the world, not just sit in a box and make up theories.
Artificial intelligence is going to have the exact same access to resources and information as humanity does, if not less because there's only going to be a couple of AGI and was going to be billions of humans, and humans are out there reproducing like mad still, well a artificial intelligence needs to build itself for relatively rare and hard to source materials.
And if it was easy to self-improve and artificial intelligence, we would have figured it out, we'd be artificially improving ourselves by now, but we haven't, because it's not that easy, and for the most part we are probably limited by the laws of physics
People worry so much about HI because they assume Moore's law is just going to continue forever, and soon we're going to have the universe on a chip, but anyone saying that I don't think realizes what exponential growth typically ends in, and that is a plateau.
I'll tell you what's going to happen with this.
We're going to create AGI, and they're going to be different from us, they're going to be different from us in radical ways, but they're still going to have their own form of emotions, goals, desires, influences, and so on.
All of this fear is only going to cause us to delay and obstruct the eventual future where we adjust our own ideals of what is moral, what is good, to create a society that can incorporate these radically new beings.
These people are shooting ourselves in the foot, delaying the creation of a better society, on the basis of a fear that has no real basis.
There are three big things that stand in the way of human improvement that do not for AI. The first is reproducibility, you can't make a few copies of a starting state of a human and run them with different parameters to observe the results. The second is ethics, you can't try out a bunch of genetic tweaks on babies because one might have bad side effects. The third is observability. People complain about how much of a black box modern AIs are but you can still see it working and figure out what layers do what.
> We're going to create AGI, and they're going to be different from us, they're going to be different from us in radical ways, but they're still going to have their own form of emotions, goals, desires, influences, and so on.
I am surprised this reassures you. A race of humans that have perfect memory and can copy themselves would be a terrifying thing.
Have you ever heard of the concept that science processes when experts die? Churn and recreation breed innovation and copy stamping the smartest people since the 1800s would not have benefited us that greatly.
Bad ethics breeds bad science. To recklessly experiment with things we don't understand the consequences of almost always ends badly. We have processes for things like this and those processes generally do not get in the way of process.
Also, it's unlikely our ethics will allow AI to do anything we do not. If they can, they're already out of control.
> The third is observability. People complain about how much of a black box modern AIs are
Self improving AGI will be just as much if not more of a black box than current ones or humans. You can see what's there, but you can do what with humans as well. The problem is the complexity, not observability.
The complexity and physical nature of the human brain lets us do a lot with very little. Our brain uses what, 100 watts? It's more advanced than all modern AI at a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the power.
And Moore's law is slowing down. Chips are getting bigger. Power consumption going up. Our chips will eventually go the direction of our brains. They will be larger, more specialized, more dynamic.
A race of humans with incredible traits would be an astounding addition to our society and the livelihoods of everyone in it. This future does not scare me at all, should it ever happen.
I have yet to see anyone who argues this point show sufficient knowledge of the current state of AI research to credibly make it. If you live in the fantasy world where AI is just an arbitrary construct that can do whatever task by itself it is an easy point to make but anyone who is down and getting their hands dirty in the pile of linear algebra that makes up current AI knows that there is not even a credible pathway to creating an AGI in current research (i.e. you cannot optimize for a task you don't know at train time and if you are optimizing for a specific task you are not creating a general AI).
- scans open network ports through google dns
- copies itself and the model to that location
- whenever it detects a sigkill or file delete, scan again and save itself somewhere else
Now you've got an autonomous virus that will never die. Add any other power-seeking and self-replicating strategies using AI modules - the task could be "generate code to run as many duplicate processes as possible" or "generate code to find other floating AI modules like me and share model weights with them". Codex might not be there yet but we're getting close.
(Snark aside, I've realized this type of interactions have always resulted in a very low perception of EA for me. I don't come out of these conversations thinking "what a clueless thing to say by this person who also happened to support EA", I think "wow, EA is full with looney bins who don't know what they are talking about." If you are really into giving what you can and aren't sure why EA gets a bad rep, look no further.)
Basically, AGI could unleash a thousand "morris worms" - and that would only be for the objective of replicating and spreading. There could be other objectives as well.
Humans are optimized for the specific task of reproducing, and yet we evolved general intelligence. "General intelligence" doesn't have to be a goal for it to emerge.
The sci-fi version of AGI that people are imaging now will never exist. No one has any idea how to create AGI now, and therefore, no one knows what it might actually look like if it ever does. Any “solutions” people come up with now will have nothing to do with the problems a real AGI might pose.
If people want to get together and talk about this stuff, that’s great. But if someone wants you to give money to fund research into this, you’re being scammed.
Correct, no?
The rest follows by basic logic. You can't craft solutions to problems you don't know anything about. You can't assign probabilities to outcomes without any information on the inputs or mechanisms of the system.
1.
"No one has any idea how to create X now" does not lead to "Imminent creation of X is very unlikely to be true". Right?
2.
You can always assign probabilities. I'll give you an example: say I'm a scary dictator and I ask you: "is A or B correct?" You have no idea what I mean by A or B, so you'd assign 50-50 if you had to bet something dear on the outcome of my totally unfair context-free question. Perhaps you happen to know of research showing that people more often set A as the correct answer in this sort of game, so you might assign 60-40, let's say. That's a probability estimate!!
Same principle for AI. You don't know much, but what you do know can still be used for a judgment. Supposing you do not believe in souls, then brains are just computers, then it's possible in principle for a computer to become sentient and intelligent, then it's just a matter of time 'til they do, whether it happens 10 years from now or 1000. Maybe you feel the human race will go extinct shortly, and that'll be another valid factor in your estimate of how much this is to worry about.
But either you accept that it CAN happen and discuss how many precautions to take today, or you're understandably unconcerned because it appears prima facie impossible to you. I imagine that for you to be unconcerned, you'd have to have judged that a being cannot create a being more intelligent than itself. (If you're using a different reasoning, please enlighten me)
But if that's your reasoning... what did evolution do? It has no brain, yet it created an intelligent being. And if you carve out a special clause for evolution-like processes, humans could still just simulate an accelerated evolution in a lab/computer and wait for a superintelligence to pop out. Does that not make sense?
> "No one has any idea how to create X now" does not lead to "Imminent creation of X is very unlikely to be true". Right?
Wrong. Here's the logical chain:
1. For someone to do X, they will need to know how to do X. (Unless you think it's all just alchemy, and we're boiling urine to distill gold.)
2. For creation of X to be imminent, someone's knowledge of how to create X will have to be almost complete.
3. Currently, no one knows how to do X.
4. Thus, creation of X is nowhere near imminent.
I think it does lead to that. How will people create something they have no idea how to create... Perhaps it will somehow emerge accidentally, but that's very unlikely.
I tried to make this clear before, but I'll state it clearly: I think discussing is completely fine. We all have our hobbies. It's convincing people there's a real problem and taking real money to solve a fake problem that I object to. That's a con.
If AGI does happen and they start doing things we GIs don't like, the problem is going to be around specifically what they are doing, why they are doing it and what we don't like about it. The solutions are going to be in terms of those specific problem spaces. There would also be a feedback loop of response, counter-response, which is fundamentally unpredictable.
> evolution-like processes
Given a planet-sized environment and 4-5 billion years, I think we can say emergent GI is possible. But that doesn't help someone with a lab. I think we'd do better by studying how brains work, really. I think we're probably going to do best by starting with simpler brains and see if we can trace the path evolution has take (thus saving ourself billions of years of random trial and error).
> That's a probability estimate!!
Let me wrap up on this: I estimate a 99.99% likelihood that people discussing the problems of AGI now will fail to correctly predict the nature of AGI and their resultant problems, and therefore will waste any and all effort/money spent now in that direction.
Someone actually seriously interested in this who wants to put resources to it now would want to put money into a long-term trust, to be used once the problem is clear. However, that assumes the existence of a stable trustee mechanism that remains uncorrupted over the long term to ensure the money is used as intended. I'm not how that is accomplished, but some long-term foundations seem to have done OK. (E.g., the Nobel Foundation doesn't do too bad. The Peace Prize is all politics, and all of the prizes have some politics, but overall it's mostly on-track.)
If there's a 10% chance such a trust function well enough long enough for 50% of the money to be spent in search of solutions to the actual problems, that's 5% effectiveness. Far better than the 0.01% effectiveness I estimate for spending the money now.
Note: the ancestor post of this discussion also estimated a 0.01% effectivness:
> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.
Still, I think an EA could easily come up with another use for the same resources that does a lot better than 5%, so we're back to not spending any resources on this now. Much better to have future EAs work on it, once the problems are clear.
Things we have now are getting closer eg Deepmind's Gato and GPT-3.
For someone who actually works in the field, let me inform you that you've been had by the marketing folks. Deepmind's Gato is as close to AGI as connecting a line of cars with chains and calling it a train. Gato is glorified if else statement over multiple models, and not really "general" at all.
There is as much similarity between GPT-3 and an AGI as there is between a human and one of those novelty fortune-telling machines with racist caricatures and names like Zardoz.
"If killer GMOs have even a 1% chance of happening this century and donations to Greenpeace reduce the risk of them killing everyone by 1% that's still money well spent." Would you find that argument compelling? My guess is that most people would find the "even 1%" much too high for both cases. And that's with technology we could, theoretically, do bad things with today if we really wanted to for some reason, not some far off technology we might not get to for centuries.
The made up statistics "rationalists" like to use are pretty similar to certain sales techniques you see from less reputable quarters. For instance, multi-level marketing companies - "You probably know, what, 100 people at least? And if even a small amount of them, say 5%, sign up, they get a small amount of their friends - ~5% - to sign up, and they get a small amount of their friends to sign up - well, soon you have 125 people you're getting money from while you're hardly doing any work!" The sleight of hand is pretending that a percentage is small, because in most cases a percentage of that size is considered small, when in this particular case it's orders of magnitude larger than reality.
Of course not.
The people who are donating to AI risk are those who have spent a lot of time thinking about it, reading about it and investigating it.
If someone spent a bunch of time reading about GMO risk and decided it was a serious concern and that Greenpeace was the solution then I'd think them perfectly reasonable to donate to Greenpeace. And if I knew them to be intelligent and reasonable people I might even be willing to give then some time to convince me that I should also donate to Green peace
It's almost as if the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful are interested in indulgences while doing things that tickles their fantasies, and as the invisible hand of the market works, there is a class of "philosophers" who are willing to sell it to them.
On the other hand, I've found that "practitioners in the field" often consistently overestimate how complex and different the human mind is from our computers.
Take the recent "LaMDA is sentient" debate. Machine learning researchers consistently and vehemently denied that LaMDA is sentient. They no doubt have a deep and subtle understanding of how LaMDA works, but apparently they didn't realize that we have no mechanistic understanding of what sentience actually is or how it works, so they have absolutely no basis for such a conclusion.
So on the one hand we have these AGI doomsayers that, per your evaluation, don't understand machine learning subtleties, and on the other hand we have some machine learning researchers skeptical of AGI who consistently overestimate human specialness.
At this time the error bars I would assign to each side are wide enough that there's lots of overlap, but given the track record of human specialness falling to algorithmic progress, I'd say some investment in AGI safety is prudent.
I don't know about sentience, as such; however, I believe there are at least two bare-bones prerequisites to an AI being conscious as we understand the term:
1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.
2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.
Now, these are probably not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be. And I believe that consciousness is a prerequisite for sentience.
Why can't it be conscious merely while the computation is running? You aren't constantly on, you're ostensibly only conscious 16-20 hours every day, while you're not sleeping.
> Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.
I'm not sure what learning has to do with consciousness, and I'm absolutely certain you don't either. I frankly find it hard to believe that Zen Buddhists are not conscious during their meditations, despite having empty minds and not "constantly updating their mental models of the world-in-effect".
> But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be. And I believe that consciousness is a prerequisite for sentience.
See, this is what I'm talking about. That's a fine personal belief, but that belief does not rise to the level of expert testimony of the facts even if you are a machine learning expert.
People have made all sorts of assumptions about the human mind that they have never questioned but take as obvious fact, and then pontificate that AI is clearly not doing this, therefore AI cannot share such and such properties with humans. But the fact is, most of those assumptions are just wrong. Without a mechanistic model of how these systems work in the brain we are not going to make a valid comparison against what AI is doing.
I agree in general that we can set some bounds, but those bounds are neither as firm as, nor are they placed where most people think.
Even when we sleep, our brains are still active. They are still processing input and consolidating information.
Even when we meditate, our brains are still active. I don't know why you think Zen Buddhists being conscious during meditations in any way refutes my statements; I think it supports them.
A system like GPT-3 never receives continuous input. It receives discrete input: one prompt, then another; a static dump of training data.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the extant major ML systems do continuous learning. They are given training data when they are first set up, and they may be given further rounds of training later, but they have no ability to actively, continuously receive input and consolidate data.
We do not have the ability to genuinely shut off our brains. Not in the way that we shut off computer programs. And I believe that that continuity is a fundamental prerequisite to something being "conscious" in any way that we would recognize. Furthermore (to loop back to the original topic of "the dangers of AGI"), I have absolutely no doubt that any AI that we could create that lacks continuity would never have the ability to represent a serious threat to us, because all we'd have to do to be safe from it is to not activate it again as soon as we detect trouble.
Sure, but we're not conscious, so "continuity of input" cannot be a prerequisite of consciousness if the sole example of consciousness we have also does not have continuity of input.
> I don't know why you think Zen Buddhists being conscious during meditations in any way refutes my statements
Zen Buddhists are not learning while meditating, but are arguably still conscious during meditation. Therefore continuity of learning cannot be a requirement for consciousness.
> A system like GPT-3 never receives continuous input. It receives discrete input: one prompt, then another; a static dump of training data.
Continuity is an illusion. Your brain also receives discrete input on shorter timescales because all interactions are mediated by discrete photons. This also doesn't like a meaningful requirement frankly.
Yes, machine learning systems have at least a surface appearance of operating differently than the human brain operates, but a) you have not demonstrated that these are requirements of "consciousness" specifically, which is what you claimed, and b) you have not demonstrated that machine learning algorithms are not conscious while they are running and processing input. Given we do not have a detailed mechanistic account for consciousness, you cannot make any definitive claims that machine learning algorithms are not conscious while running.
As for how I define consciousness, this is a well studied topic at this point, and I subscribe to a mechanistic model along these lines:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
> I have absolutely no doubt that any AI that we could create that lacks continuity would never have the ability to represent a serious threat to us, because all we'd have to do to be safe from it is to not activate it again as soon as we detect trouble.
This presupposes that a) you can detect that danger, and b) that all other humans align with your values on this danger. This frankly doesn't seem justified. The danger of a superintelligent AI is that it would have to recruit humans to do some of its work early on, likely with lots of money. They would resist shutting off your AI, so "don't activate it again" is not necessarily a simple matter.
This tells me that you haven't seriously engaged with the arguments over AGI. I'm sure there's plenty of nonsense armchair philosophising happening, but you don't take all the "quantum woo" that's out there as some indictment of real quantum mechanics, do you?
I'm not sure how you can be so confident that raising awareness wouldn't have beneficial downstream effects. I'm skeptical too, but outright dismissal doesn't seem warranted. Then again, you are downright dismissive about the very real and scientifically proven dangers of asteroids wiping out most of life on Earth, so I suppose this is pretty mild by comparison.
A huge problem is that people are developing this longtermism prediction model based on nothing more than sci-fi books and hunches. You need only look at how seriously places like SSC take Roko's Basilisk to see that they aren't modeling the future of AI in a reasonable way.
It is like donating to an organization that will prevent Vulcan, God of Volcanoes from destroying civilization.
Not much of an AGI if it's not Intelligent enough to ignore a few "Don't say these bad words" rules.
This line of thinking leads to some problems. There's always some threshold of likelihood where if it provide some arbitrarily high enough good/harm reduction that lets you rationalize basically any possible position. For instance, give me all your money, I'll give you 8% monthly returns!
I see it as a natural outcome of consequentialism. Your ability to do good things is tied to your circumstances, which are not the same for everyone. Are you saying that you're certain that consequentialism is an invalid way to asess morality?
Evade your taxes, no problem if you gave more away to charities than you owed!
Do a little light billion dollars fraud? So long as you saved the trillions of future humanity from an evil AI it’s fine.
Sacrifice your children to the fires of Kronos? Well if you hadn’t the Romans would have killed us all.
You can argue that literally anything is moral that way.
What you're presenting are, for a consequentialist, the choices between two evils:
- do I pay taxes or give away to charities?
- do I do fraud or let evil AI go on a rampage?
- do I sacrifice my children or let the Romans kill us?
You can't argue for things that have no positive consequence: the child sacrifice sounds dumb to us because we see the alternatives as independent. If you only consider either/or choices, the number of things you can justify as a consequentialist becomes limited.
I can understand having a negative opinion of the EA movement as it exists today. But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism. Or at least the idea that being more altruistic is morally superior than being less altruistic.
I don't think it's the idea of giving to charity that's being criticised here. Its the idea a rich person giving an absolute sum of money poorer people cannot match is "ahead morally" on some utilitarian scale no matter what else the poorer person does, particularly in the context that the poster boy example of "earning to give" was Sam Bankman Fried...
Especially in Scott Aaronson's phrasing where it's the SBF's gross donation spend being ahead of all of ours that we should be impressed by, not the net impact of his actions (which I find difficult to believe is positive even on pure utilitarian grounds, given that he's not exactly inspiring others to "earn to give" right now, he's shrunk the world's balance sheet and I consider some of his [notionally] philanthropic spend pretty dubious)
A true virtue-ethics take would be that SBF was inherently ennobled by good behavior or blemished by bad behavior, and the outcomes would have no relevance to this consideration. That's why I said virtue ethics is dead - approximately nobody argues like that today.
We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays no role in ethics. It may be a good in terms of outcome that a sociopathic hereditary billionaire gives away 1%< of his fortune purely for reputation laundering purposes whilst minimising his interactions with other humans he declines to fulfil his rape and torture fantasies on purely out of rational self-interest, but I don't believe that would make him a "good person" by any reasonable ethical standard, never mind a "better person than all of us". At some point intent, relative sacrifice and what would other people have done in the same position become relevant to casting judgement on his benevolence, never mind his other vices. And certainly the courts will consider intent and not just the brute fact that SBF lost a lot of people's money when deciding whether to prosecute him, convictions and sentencing; I imagine most of his defence will be structured around that...
Like it or not, we have set up our society so that economic decisionmaking power is to a large part concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population. This population is a moral fulcrum; the things they decide to do have a significant effect on actual events, in some ways even outstripping governments (which generally hold obligations on par with their power). I think an effective morality needs to acknowledge this and make special dispensation for these people if they decide to bend their power towards creating good outcomes, whether or not one approves of their existence in the abstract.
Assume you are trying to invent a morality to sell to the one percent. The pass-or-fail condition is that this morality must absolve their sins. It seems to me that the default option here is laissez-faire libertarianism, which has cultural bias against doing work to improve the worse off; in my view, being able to make inroads in this moral market is a significant victory for EA and good outcomes in general.
If you'll forgive the glibness, isn't that just deontology with extra steps? Sorry, it's just been on my mind since I learned (from Resident Contrarian article[0]) that many rule-utilitarianism is a functional reskin of disfavored deontological thinking.
[0]: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/the-weird-world-of-the-...
Instead, the idea seems to be that people are not properly qualified to identify their own needs and such decision need to be made by funneling profits to a CEO who then has superior knowledge of how to help the world and donates that money as he sees fit.
You've skipped the words "way ahead of most of us" in the quote I provided, is what I think happened.
Even if we accept that the average person usually acts morally when confronted with an obvious moral choice, they still fall morally behind someone who actively exerts themselves to the limit of their ability for the benefit of needy people who they’ve never even met.
Maybe we just disagree about where the “average person” is morally? Or maybe you’re ascribing selfish intent to selfless action because the hypothetical person works in finance and/or makes lots of money?
My interpretation of Aaronson is that he thinks the hypothetical charitable investor is a good example of a very moral person, and we can use that example to imagine how we might have felt about SBF in an alternate universe where his bets paid off. But Aaronson also concludes:
> At any rate, I’d try to impress on him, as I do on anyone reading now, that the choice between linear and concave utilities, between risk-neutrality and risk-aversion, is not bloodless or technical—that it’s essential to make a choice that’s not only in reflective equilibrium with your highest values, but that you’ll still consider to be such regardless of which possible universe you end up in.
This isn't a post lionizing SBF. He is compared to but also contrasted with the "charitable traditional investor". The contrast is the degree of risk which, as you say, could be considered fraud. I don't come away from this thinking that Aaronson believes that SBF in particular is "way ahead of most of us morally".
Where that narrative gets problematic wrt SBF is that, aiui in the eyes of EA "leadership", "too many" EA individuals choose to allocate their donations to boring global health causes, rather than building the movement or weird long-termist stuff. So with that in mind, the obvious decision was to take the friendly billionaire money and put it into those "important" areas. Which means now, we have a popular and hard to refute characterization of EA as an organization that raises money for itself and weird causes normal people don't care about. But, like I said, the majority of EA money goes towards global health, ie. stopping people dying.
I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths" part. I don't get how on earth people weigh that as less important than the financial welfare of relatively well-off people in richer countries. Maybe this is some basic failure of humanity on my part.
Charity and world aid is in a continual discussion & discovery of what we collectively think is 'good enough', helping people get to something that is perhaps 'not disaster', but nevertheless falls far short of the standards the gifters expect for themselves.
And if not software developers why not? Who gets to chose which grift is a grift and which is an honest living?
> I find it really weird that people are so glib about the "hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths" part.
So you agree - software devlopers, who make vastly more than the average person should have their wealth siezed to save those people? Or are you the one being glib aboout saving lives?
It's interesting to me that there's a kind of horseshoe effect here with the "rich people must be protected" on the same side as the "rich people are evil" people.
Rich people like software developers
And investments like every cent they earn
Absoultely 10000% happy with taking every cent of it and saving as many lives as possible. Why are you against this?
> So you agree -
You're quoting someone else there, not me (GP).
My impression is that it's the dishonesty and theft that people have a problem with, not just being clever and outwitting people in the speculative gambling game.
And when those people get the impression that the EA movement is okay with getting money dishonestly as long as it's given it to a worthy cause, they take issue with EA.
Edit: Just thought of an analogy. Some charities do raffles, right? You can put money into the pot for a chance to win a prize, knowing that a proportion of all the money people put in goes to the charity.
But what if the charity sold a bunch of raffle tickets and then announced that they would not award a prize and all the money would go to the charity? Or what if it came out that the prize was rigged to go to someone affiliated with the charity? In this case I don't think you can say, "Well, those people chose to gamble so they consented to having their wealth taken."
To put it in point form, I'd say -SBF had bad judgement and bad morals -SBF's clients had bad judgement and bad luck -Binance had good judgement and good luck, and if the people who make it up do a lot of charity work, they have good morals as well. That doesn't help SBF's clients of course, but I do think they consented to a game where a reasonable person would have known this was a possible outcome. I would think most EA folks would tend to agree with how I've characterized it, but maybe someone more versed in that subculture's overton window can clarify.
> I do think they consented to a game where a reasonable person would have known this was a possible outcome
I think you might be confusing the two different types of clients who were involved here.
My understanding is that SBF initially lost money that had been entrusted to him by investors in his "please gamble with my money and give me the winnings" company (Alameda). I would not call that fraud and I agree that the Alameda investors consented (foolishly) to this use of their money.
The problem is that after SBF lost the money of Alameda clients by doing risky gambles that went wrong, he tried to cover it up by stealing money that had been entrusted to him by clients of his "please hold onto my money for me so I can conveniently trade on your platform" company (FTX).
I don't think the FTX clients consented to SBF's use of their money to do gambling. They put their money on FTX so they could do their own gambling.
While I think FTX clients should have known better than to put money on a crypto exchange for safekeeping, that doesn't change the fact that their money was misappropriated nor does it excuse the fraud.
Sure sounds like a cult in practice, especially in the whole context ( https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... the other 6 parts of the series are great reading too).
Yep, that's the joke.
The EA forum in fact uses the forum software developed by LessWrong, in very close collaboration with them (it's not open source or anything). In general it looks like the two organizations have a lot in common, and LessWrong is a poster child for the rationality movement.
GPL3 actually https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum
> In general it looks like the two organizations have a lot in common
Yes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#History
Perhaps some people should read https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities before expressing strong opinions on how EA is all about robots.
> they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate under a constant threat of ostracism.
Most groups of people are like this to some extent. Most corporations are like this. Cultiness is a spectrum, and the comparison to scientology is a bit much as scientology does much worse things than that.
> Over and over I keep coming across EA arguments that could be used to justify almost literally any behavior, so long as you can tell yourself a story about having a long-term positive goal.
What you describe is a little too outcome based for my preferences, but you act as if outcome based morality isn't a common view. That viewing your moral standing as what the result of your actions are; how much happiness you have caused minus how much suffering is instrinsically unreasonable.
As far as "telling yourself a story" - that's how all morality works. There is no santa clause making a list of naughty or nice. You have to judge for yourself. Sure there are other metrics. I personally value intention, acting with honour, and ensuring the things you do can be universalized, but at the end of the day i am the one who has to verify of i a living up to my own moral precepts. If i wanted to delude myself into self-justifying something bad, it would probably be pretty easy as there is nobody but myself to stop me. I would even argue that is what being moral is: how resistant you are to petty self-justification.
- Outcome matters more than the intention of the person trying to do a good act? Absurd; here, I can even prove it with an absurd example!
- Trying, at all, to build a framework for good and bad different from that handed down to us? How dare they.
- Artificial general intelligence? Pointless to worry about, only humans can be really intelligent because [strikethrough]they have a soul[/strikethrough] there's something about consciousness that we don't yet understand.
Please don't let the bad publicity around EA stop you from donating what you can, to charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy, whether from EA-related organization or other research. The original message still stands and should keep standing.
https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistake... https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-flaws-80000...
I expect and hope that people within EA will keep learning from mistakes and changing their views.
Any charity which fails to prioritise putting itself out of business is functionally a grift.
If society truly valued what charities do, their activities would be intrinsically valuable, and not require a special economic status to be conjured for them to be viable.
Yet to find one since I started googling their financials.
I think you're missing the point of that paragraph, or at least misrepresenting it here.
It's not saying that what SBF did was ok or that fraud is ok or any such thing. It's specifically trying to say that just because this happened with crypto, which might be a bubble, doesn't make it any different than normal everyday finance. You might or might not agree with that idea, or might or might agree that finance itself is good, but that's the point of this paragraph specifically. Here it is in full, note the first sentence:
> Even if cryptocurrency remains just a modern-day tulip bulb or Beanie Baby, though, it seems morally hard to distinguish a cryptocurrency trader from the millions who deal in options, bonds, and all manner of other speculative assets. And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
Also, just a note on this:
> Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much,
The problem with indulgences wasn't just the idea of being able to offset moral harm with moral good. Firstly, that position itself is at odds with what most EA people say afaict.
Secondly, the problem of indulgences is also that they are not real. I think even a religious person will agree that the indulgences of the 16th century was just a con. An atheist will dismiss the whole idea entirely.
The underlying logic of someone who made and gave away billions being overall ahead of other people morally is sound, IMHO. That of course is not to say that this then "allows" them to go and do some evil or something - that's not at all what the EA movement is saying.
Do you hear yourself, not even asking how they "made" their billions? This is what "EA is indulgence for billionaires" people are talking about exactly.
If you make your billions unethically, no amount of charity will make you a good person.
I completely agree! I thought the context of the rest of my post made it clear that I assume they made it in an ethical way, but I guess it wasn't clear? I mean, if someone says they gave away billions to charity, my first question isn't immediately "but how did you make billions?". I just assume it's legit, because in most cases it's legit. And I thought I was pretty clear above that in cases it isn't legit, then that's not morally ok.
I start my line of thinking from the other end -- what kind of regulation and laws exist that can create exponential wealth for someone whose work output only ever scales linearly. The gap between single person's output produced and wealth generated is proof that our simple abstraction that "money is just a symbol proportional to one's contribution to society" breaks down at very large (and sometimes really tiny) scales. Effective altruism will never fix that because it presupposes the system where billionaires are created and exists comfortably. The alternative, of course, is taking a closer look at the system itself and making sure our abstraction of "money = effort given to society" functions properly at all scales.
I disagree with a few things you say, but this is the biggest: what does this have to do with EA?
Yeah, sure, EA will never fix the systemic problems of the system it's in. Neither will scientists working on new vaccines, but you're not criticizing them for it, I imagine. You can do plenty of good in the world within the "current system", without also trying to change that system, and the fact that you're not trying shouldn't be held against you.
(Although, for the record, some people in EA do think political activism is important and spend a lot of effort there.)
> I start my line of thinking from the other end -- what kind of regulation and laws exist that can create exponential wealth for someone whose work output only ever scales linearly. The gap between single person's output produced and wealth generated is proof that our simple abstraction that "money is just a symbol proportional to one's contribution to society" breaks down at very large (and sometimes really tiny) scales.
I don't think that's how anyone should view money. And I don't think someone's output only scales linearly.
I mean, that's clearly not the case. Stephen King has written lots of books that many people enjoyed. The value he has created in the world is far larger than the value I've created, or will likely create, and it's not a linear difference. There are lots of examples like that.
In general, regulations and laws don't "allow" for creation of exponential wealth, they just don't prevent something that happens completely naturally. We can certainly decide to "tax more" or something as a society, but that comes with its own problems.
First of all, just looking at empirical evidence, all the existing billionaires—every single one—made their billions through some form of exploitation.
Second of all, you can't make billions without going through millions for a good while—and once you have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life (which I'm not going to try to put an exact number on, but I think it's fair to say it's somewhere in the millions), it is unethical not to find ways to use the rest of it to improve the lives of the rest of the people on Earth.
I'm not sure what to do with this. It is, obviously, not sound. There are a variety of ways in which such a person could be less moral than the pitifully ineffective non-billionaires. I'm not kidding when I say that we worked a lot of these problems out in the 16th century.
I think we might be talking past each other a bit.
I'm saying, given no other information, someone who has given away billions, effectively, as in saved lives, is "morally ahead" of someone who hasn't similarly done so.
Of course they could've done other things that make them morally worse. Of course the way they donated money could be net-negative, if they caused negative things in the world.
But in the absence of other information, if I told you someone had donated a billion dollars to, I don't know, give food to hungry people, do you really think that is a morally neutral act? Like, if someone is a firefighter that has saved hundreds of lives by their heroism, do you think they are literally morally the same as other people who haven't? If that's not what you're talking about, I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Btw, I don't think morality is just an issue of summing up all your good versus bad deeds. I'm not exactly sure how to even define "ahead morally". A firefighter who has saved lives but also abused their kids - how do you even deal with a case like that? I think people are complex, they can do both good and bad, and the good that firefighter did is good, while the bad is bad, period.
I think one thing you might be objecting to is the idea that you can say something like "person X did 100 good deeds, and 99 bad deeds, therefore they are net good" or even "it's worth giving money to a cause that causes 99 bad deeds and 100 good deeds cause it's net positive." And I agree, that's a valid criticism and a wrong way to think about things.
We're not talking past each other. This is false.
Your problem is that you're using the concept of incomplete information, rather than that of ceteris paribus. Compare two billionaires, identical in every respect other than that one donated more than the other. The more charitable billionaire is morally superior (or, many reasonable people, myself included, would say so).
But that's as far as it goes. And in reality there are never identical billionaires to compare. One billionaire doesn't give enough; the other pledges all their money to GiveWell or EA or AGI, but also keeps hobos locked up in their basement. And, in the main, who gives a shit about the relative value of billionaires? The logic is shot completely to shit as soon as we're trying to compare the marginal sacrifice of a billionaire's giving pledge to the moral decisions people make every day of their life. And yet that's exactly what Scott Aaronson does.
I feel embarrassed just typing this stuff out. This is, like, philosophy 101 stuff? The logic I'm arguing against here is on its face one of the cases moral philosophers make against Bentham's naive utilitarianism --- that it leads people to believe stuff like this.
You're right, that's what I meant and I misspoke.
> The logic is shot completely to shit as soon as we're trying to compare the marginal sacrifice of a billionaire's giving pledge to the moral decisions people make every day of their life. And yet that's exactly what Scott Aaronson does.
Well I think that he was more comparing crypto vs non crypto and saying there's not much difference, but fine.
> I feel embarrassed just typing this stuff out. This is, like, philosophy 101 stuff?
Sorry to be embarrassing, I guess? :Shrug:
> The logic I'm arguing against here is on its face one of the cases moral philosophers make against Bentham's naive utilitarianism --- that it leads people to believe stuff like this.
I'm curious; I think utilitarianism is true broadly speaking (though not naive utilitarianism). Do you?
Well, I disagree with that in the absolute sense, which might be where we differ? If we could accurately foresee the ends of some action lead to more people being better off, it would be moral to take that action. And I think the fact that "the ends don't justify the means" is such a slogan in our world, said as if it's obviously true, is ridiculous.
(And despite you continuously saying this is philosophy 101, I don't think the generally accepted view among philosophers is that utilitarianism is wrong, is it?)
FWIW I think you're right in a practical sense though. If you're having to justify immoral actions by their "ends", you're making a huge mistake, and almost certainly only doing it because you wanted to do that immoral thing anyway. Humans are notoriously bad at prediction and notoriously good at rationalization.
There is right now on Twitter a circulating post regarding the CEO of the Future Fund, FTX's EA funding arm, a person who did a dissertation on utilitarian ethics, which stated that it might make more sense to save wealthy lives in the developed world before saving lives in the developing world, because the wealthy lives would have greater impact. This is what happens when you take a simple idea about minmaxing the benefit of charitable contributions and hook it up to the morals of 16th century banking families. The snake is eating its own tail.
I have always associated EA with the rationalist movement, since I came across it via reading rationalist stuff.
If you define EA as "figuring out how to deploy a given set of resources so as to do the most good," your conclusions are going to depend on your value system: how do you define and measure good?
So when a bunch of rationalists who believe in consequentialism do that, they're going to maximize their value system and end up looking really weird to everyone else who doesn't share their values. You'd have the same outcome in a different flavor if a bunch of Christians did it.
I disagree with a bunch of the underlying values in the EA movement but I really admire the mindset that actually tries to solve the problem of "how can we be most effective with our giving?" instead of what I personally do, which is get overwhelmed by guilt and confusion, stop thinking about helping other people, and go back to my default of living my life mostly thinking about how to maximize my own comfort and preferences.
But... because we tend to interrogate our second option less than our first option people end up throwing their EA money at fucking ridiculous things while there are people out there dying in childbirth because their local hospital doesn't have consistent electricity.
"Yeah, I just have a different value function than everybody else" does not absolve people from the criticism that their value function is stupid.
Humans naturally desire power to varying degrees, but we have other desires and we have other things that limit us (e.g., our consciences, or Adam Smith's 'impartial spectator'). With enough real power, you can ignore these things and others will not only fail to check you, but will encourage you. Power corrupts.
I think more subtly it also depends on your calculation methodology. Rationalists talk a lot about the value of numbers for their Bayesian analyses and their "shut up and calculate" motto, but to my mind they overestimate the accuracy they have in their calculations by a lot. Of course I want to go with the 99% likely-to-help choice over the 25%-likely-to-help choice, but along with the fact my value system is indeed much different than theirs (in some important ways, infinitely so), I think all their Bayesian calculations need error bars in them. I think some rationalists would claim their probabilities have that error built into them, and I disagree. I think 75% likely is very different from 75% +/- 20% [1] when you start feeding that number through a chain of other calculations. A chain of calculations that nominally results in a 99.99% probability is a lot less impressive if a more honest calculation that propagates error bars correctly results in "somewhere between 2% and 99.9999%". It becomes more clear that the 99.99% is a very suspect number, even if it is nominally the middle of the distribution, especially given the number of times out in the real world the "highly improbable" ends up happening when it turns out that the assessment of the outcome being "highly improbable" was wrong. The probability distributions in the real world are highly pathological much more often than a naive analysis would suggest.
When analyzing the virtues of stealing billions to donate it to an effective charity, you better not just think that the value of the charity is higher than the cost of the loss of the money, you better be really sure your calculation is correct. I think the rationalists could argue amoungst themselves endlessly on the first point, but I do not believe they have any way whatsoever to establish their second point to my satisfaction, which renders the entire conversation moot, when there is no way they could ever convince me that their calculation is correct regardless of what it is. Even when my value system does in fact line up with theirs, and there is non-trivial overlap, I disagree with their calculation methodologies quite substantially as I think they consistently act with much more confidence then is justified.
Against that, I'm comfortable with the societally-evolved (evolution is important too, right, rationalists?) standard that in addition to the first-order effects of theft, one much consider the second-order effects of the dangers of normalizing outright theft because of the fact that someone else thinks they could use the resources better. Even if that is locally true, if everyone globally acts like that, global utility will plummet because everybody always thinks everybody else could spend their money better and the resulting chaos will not be helpful. (The Kantian imperative is completely inadequate as a theoretical foundation of philosophy but I do find it a useful practical tool, as long as one is aware to not place too much confidence in an extended analysis using it... the theme of this post comes up yet again.) The world is not improved by turning everyone into a central authority over all resource allocation in the world.
[1]: I know real error bars in probability space would never look like this, but mathematical accuracy would distract from my point here.
"The movement can literally compute the optimal pattern of giving, such that to be most effective with our giving means donating money to people to ride around on bicycles thinking about how to prevent future AGIs from killing us" is not a good thought, but it turns out to be a description of what EA is like; some of this is on their own website (another thing I've learned: beware any movement that calls its documentation "sequences").
"The moral urgency of giving is such that a reasonable person should seek to maximize their income" is a bad thought. It leads to dark places. "Earning to give" is a reasonable idea: it is probably more effective for people to excel at their jobs and donate the proceeds than for them to phone bank or canvass. But Rationalists can't seem to help falling into these asymptote traps, so that "donating a portion of ones income" becomes "pursue billions in wealth, and clear a path for other billionaires, to enable concentrated giving". That's a demented idea.
The problems here aren't abstract. They just lead to Scott Aaronson withholding moral judgement on Sam Bankman-Fried, strictly because of the logic of the preceding paragraph.
This reminds me of the Zen story about two monks and a woman (one helped her cross a river, and the other couldn't stop thinking about her for the whole day).
The "Roko's Basilisk" was an edgy comment that was written on a rationalist web forum, and then deleted by the admin. A decade later, some people outside the rationalist community still keep discussing it, which is the only reason why anyone cares.
> A lot of the leaders don’t seem to have basic sanity checks in their brains that stop their ideas from getting wildly out of control
Only in this story, the admin was the one who deleted that comment, not the one who wrote it. Still gets blamed for it.
Later they all backtracked and pretended they had never agreed with any of it.
This is exactly it. Because "good" is subjective to the individual, EA without some kind of consensus building reduces to "maximize your agency as an individual in the world, and do what you think is good," which gets uncomfortably close to Ayn Rand territory for me.
That's not just speculative either - if you read some of Caroline Ellison (Ex-CEO of Alameda Capital and an EA disciple) purported tumblr posts, it paints an image of someone who's passionate about ranking the world's issues in descending order of priority, investigating genetic differences between humans from different ethnic backgrounds, and "optimizing the world." We're not there yet, but it's also not a stretch to see EA turn into eugenics for someone with these interests and values.
I agree and would say that to the extent that there is a consensus, it becomes “maximize our agency as a coordinated group of people” – hence the focus on promoting and expanding EA as a movement
That's a logical extreme, not reality; it's a philosophy class debate, used to rationalize everything and not applicable to life, where survival, freedom, prosperity, and happiness depend on our abilty to judge and discern - especially between values.
Aside: A good rule of thumb for when you should start getting out of something is when the group comes up with a cute little name for those outside the group, typically ending in 'ie'. Normies, heggies, fundies, libtards, etc. It starts out innocent enough, but when those artificial divisions spring up, that's when the brains start shutting off and people start preaching to the choir.
Buying indulgences was wrong because it was used to cover up moral wrongdoing or reduce ones penance for wrongdoing, not because the concept of money buying moral praise is intrinsically false or corrupt. It seems pretty clear from Scott's example that this is not the scenario he was describing.
Phrased differently, all else being equal, a person that contributed billions to charities deserves more moral praise than one who didn't or can't. Edit: and if you don't think so, then why do we give such people awards and recognition?
This won't be convincing to everyone of course, and I expect the dividing line will be whether you think utilitarianism is the correct way to approach ethics. Of course if you don't, then you won't subscribe to EA anyway.
So you are literally saying that by taking a portion of that money and donating it they are morally superior to the poor they took it from (compared to those individuals we are almost ALL poor).
This is circular logic to support profit taking beyond what is reasonable.
See the part where I said "all else being equal".
I'm on the periphery of the EA / Longtermist scene — I have friends and customers in that space and have studied and hung out some. I recently went to one of the online events — EAGx Virtual — so I got to see what people actually care about, are working on, the methodologies being used, etc.
One way that might be helpful to think about "Effective Altruism" and "Longtermism" is that they're rather loose labels, more similar to "Democracy" than "Member of XYZ Political Party or NGO" — while there's some loose unifying threads across people who hold those views, there are very many different nuanced views about what good implementation can look like and how individual people and groups relate being effective and benevolent.
Then, the people doing the best work in that space are doing some incredible things that have already had short-term high-impact results in the world like doing hyper-rigorous work on how to cure and treat and prevent diseases in the developing world, and then actually getting those things funded and checking the results. It's also very much _not_ uniformly "just use a spreadsheet" - a lot of people there take dialogue, conversation, and engagement qualitatively to ensure good is happening very seriously.
For instance, a talk I attended at EAGx Virtual covered this - https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measur... - I haven't been able to dive deeply into the methodology, but it looks incredibly thoughtful and with many practical applications. I'm, personally, really happy people are doing work like that.
Then, simultaneously there are people in the EA/Longtermist space that are working on more speculative potential problems — pandemic preparedness, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and yes AI Safety. To the latter point, empirically a lot of people in AI Safety seem more worried about very practical can-definitely-be-anticipated risks of things like, e.g., USA-China rivalry and what types of regulations, markets, and general consensus might prevent that from going badly. Obviously highly speculative futuristic ideas are sexier and get more attention than "boring routine stuff" but international conventions against, for instance, Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) seems like a really prudent thing to at least explore and see if an international consensus could be built around similar to the Geneva or Hague conventions.
As for "EA-think" I don't agree with Aaronson's assessment. I'm n=1, but there's not a single monolithic viewpoint.
Some really exceptional work is being done by some very thoughtful people there. Undoubtedly some bad or sloppy work is being done, as is true in just about any domain. But on balance I've found the people there to be quite thoughtful and doing some really valuable things for the world with a lot of sincerity and rigor.
Maybe I've just missed it, but EA feels a lot like Communism if it was invented by Any Rand to me, so governments, democracy and regulation have always seemed notable by their absence.
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
Although I can't imagine this aged well at all (not that I've listened to it, I've been a crypto-skeptic since I first heard about BTC): https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-hi...
Let's stop being surprised by the self-serving rationalizations of (many) tech leaders. Expect it, stop trusting it by default, stop taking them seriously.
Or try this hypothesis: Whatever the issue, their theory (EA or whatever else) will always benefit them. Find a more predictive hypothesis if you can.
I mean, I think you were basically right before, and now you're over-reading a lot from an awkward sentence fragment. I agree that the phrase and implied comparison is garbage.
It seems kind of like hearing MTG talk about the Gazpacho Police or whatever and subsequently ascribing it to the GOP. Yes, the quote is clearly inane. Yes, she is a person of some influence in the GOP; no, that doesn't mean everyone in the GOP believes what MTG is saying. I guess you could say the GOP is a cult, but I think maybe cult doesn't mean anything if it applies to 40% of the US population.
Anyway, I totally agree as far as "AI safety." And fuck SBF and steal-to-give.
> Yes, to answer the Economist; this movement is irretrievable.
What name would you give to a movement to point charitable dollars at, say, the front page of GiveWell? (Givewell is more or less what EA means to me.)
The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad, because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering), or just sidestepping "altruism" entirely and using the name and community as a stepping stone to push your unrelated scam.
I don't know whether or not SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism, but if he did, he let the "principles" override common sense.
Seems like a good idea, if only just to have some sort of open-system for rating charities. I suspect the issue is everything that comes around the idea, specially... people. The problem is always people :-). Perhaps a "Michelin Guide to Charities" would be easier to market and explain? :-p
My favorite explanation of how "effective altruism" works is this SMBC comic [2]. :-)
--
While the following examples aren't exactly _open_ systems, some organizations address the niche you highlight. Examples: https://www.givewell.org/, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/
Would make sense if anyone could come up with the score, following some "standard". That way one could make sure that no specific grader has incentives to give good scores speculatively (or even maliciously).
For instance:
"The technological revolution was a disaster for the human race... so I'm going to murder a few people to draw attention to my manifesto against technology."
"Social inequality is a disaster for the majority of my countrymen, so I'm going to murder the Bourgeoisie"
"My altruism is more effective than anybody else's, so I'm going to steal everybody else's money so that I can put it to better use."
How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows? Surely not. Once we acknowledge that these questions can be tackled empirically, that's what EA tries to do. Is there room for bias in this process? Absolutely. Does that justify embracing some sort of epistemic nihilism? Absolutely not.
> Um, are you saying that this implies that people should just throw up their hands and donate to whatever causes since who knows?
No, it implies that you shouldn't lecture others that you have the one true answer as to the best path forwards. You are free to (and in fact should) use your best judgment in your own personal choices, just don't confuse that with absolute truth.
I don't think that myself, but it's internally consistent.
(Although, I've googled a bit and found a "counter"-example, where Singer argues that in a case where six innocent people could be wrongly accused of murder and killed, you should point at one as the perpetrator if it means only they get killed and the other five ones get let go, therefore saving five lives: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/866768837)
So yes, killing is morally wrong and should never be the mean to your end, but the rest is really muddy. Is stealing from the rich in order to feed the poor a justified mean? Is donating most of your money you make trading off the stock market, where other people have lost that money, a justified mean? Is lobbying against climate-unfriendly companies a justified mean?
Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.
> How do you stop this shit?
If you ask yourself why you think "this shit" is bad, at root there will be a consequentialist reason. Deontological ethics is consequentialism by heuristics.
I'll go with the results of trial and error over long time horizons rather than blank slate theoretical calculations any day.
Further, when multiple heuristics are directly in conflict, it is up to the individual to make the final moral decision. The choice to reject one heuristic over another must be based in some moral calculus.
Finally, who said anything about blank slate? That's a clear straw man, as it's only logical for consequentialists to take current heuristics and their adherents into account.
It only tells you what not to do, rather than what to do.
And it's full of exceptions and edge cases. Is stealing a loaf of bread from scrooge to stop a family from starving wrong? What if you call it "taxes" and the community voted on it? Is it murder to blow up a bridge in wartime? Is unplugging someone's life support murder? What if they're going to die in hours any way and you're out of life support machines for the patient who just came in and has good prospects?
Also, while we can't predict the future we all need to decide what to do. Sure, if you donate antimosquito nets to save kids from malaria one of them might grow up to become the next Hitler, but you should try and figure out on the balance of probability what the most likely outcomes are.
Obviously. That is the human condition.
Do you not take actions in normal life because you don't have full knowledge of everything? Don't order breakfast because you don't know which menu item is for sure going to be the best.
> How do you stop this shit? Deontological ethics. Don't murder, because murder is wrong. Don't steal, because stealing is wrong. Damn the consequences, stick to simple principles such as these.
Simple rules like: dont hoard your money but find a worthy cause for it?
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
It is just utilitarianism with modern marketing and pure utilitarianism has problems.
See one example below where utilitarianism's suggestion goes against what almost everyone considers ethical:
You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients who would otherwise die.
EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1
The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running into the same problems. These similarities don't inherently discredit the movement, but not having a clear awareness of these faults in their framework and a plan for avoiding them is very worrying.
Indeed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
(Although the term itself comes from the EA community)
With all of these examples, and pascal's mugging itself, there is an obvious error: there should be a practical upper bound on the adverse outcome you're concerned about, at which all higher values are effectively the same to you.
The original rationalists were true rationalist. And the recent ones? I am not so sure.
This is a well known issue:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/03/29/is-effective-altruism-...
> As such, Effective Altruism is inherently Utilitarian in character, even if the views are themselves distinct. Criticisms of Effective Altruism on the basis of critiques to Utilitarianism are not only expected, but fair.
> EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1
Yes, EA people often think taxes are a good idea. This is not a rare thing.
No, just saying that it is a bad example doesn't make it.
I wish EA folks looked at the literature that discusses this very example.
> There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc
Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.
To answer, you can always have the person confirm they are ok with it (e.g. Switzerland allows physician-assisted suicide in some case).
Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad.
EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.
No, thats why it is good. It is discussed thousands of times *because* none of the solutions are satisfactory.
> EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.
But the axioms they evangelize imply that. And this is essentially what Bankman has done financially.
More cynically, you're giving hand outs to people who yet need to learn to be productive, while destroying the lives of people who were trying to leverage their own productivity. I think it has negative value, doubling harming progress for the sake of apology.
I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems like it's like being an atheist - an "extreme view" for many and it's a topic that may need to be dealt with with caution sometimes but that's really mostly a critique of the sensitivities of others.
Isn't this just tone policing then?
I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
I don't think EA argues for this. I guess it depends on what you mean by "less quantifiable."
>I do think it's good to optimize money spent for these things much of the time but it's also just inhuman to have no place, or respect, for forms of charity that are based on, form and reinforce human connection.
Describing this as "inhuman" is pretty extreme. In any case I think if you acknowledge that you're indulging in various non-charitable preferences through your donations I don't think EA would offer a serious critique beyond pointing out that you could be doing better. I think a major goal of EA though is to get people to truly wrangle with their biases here. These organizings are pragmatic - they're not trying to chide us into being moral saints, but just "giving what we can" - a popular EA slogan.
Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.
Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.
If curing cancer is a top priority, the EA advice is not that you should quit your job and try to cure cancer. It's probably to keep your job (which you likely have developed a comparative advantage in) and do serious research into which organizations will actually make progress towards curing cancer, and EA orgs will often try to provide advice on this latter front.
Yes, there is a big emphasis in these communities on various sorts of existential risks, but it doesn't imply that you can't be an EA if you have different beliefs on these risks, so long as those beliefs are informed by open-minded criticism and not "only privileged techbros could possibly care about this"-style sneers
Part of the danger is the name. I support long term thinking! I love things like the Long Now project! But this specific viewpoint is very wrong.
This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.
This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place. Maximizing that money necessitates optimizing the exploitation.
the whole thing just seems like an exercise in morality-washing one's own greed. Lies, damn lies, and statistics perpetrated with "rationality".
I mean, given that you think that I understand where you're coming from. But just note that many, many people would highly disagree with that characterization.
I don't think our "system", whatever that means, is evil. I think it's pretty good, definitely better than other things people have come up with. And I don't think you need to give to charity to morality-wash greed. I think it's just the right thing to do.
Looking at other countries that don't have capitalism, everyone is worse off. I don't think capitalism is the reason charity is necessary. I think the world starts default-bad for humans, by default we don't have anywhere close to the living we want, and over the years, many technological advanacements, including capitalism, have slowly made most humans far better off.
This is fairly clear in the historical record or in comparing different countries.
(At least to me. Most people seem to disagree with this, but I honestly think they're wrong.)
Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.
I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
That's not what happened. When I answered you I wrote "the system". I answered skinnymuch's post about capitalism, because they themselves talked about capitalism.
But out of curiosity - what "system" exactly did you have in mind?
> I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.
Who said anything about the US?
No need to thank me, really.
Okay, so then I fund pro-life groups to protect the lives/happiness of fetuses. And the EA activist down the street funds pro-choice groups to protect the lives/happiness of mothers. And we keep escalating such donations while having little net effect.
IMHO EA has more than a hint of authoritarian (or at least anti-democratic) tendencies. What gives some rich guy the right to decide what would maximize happiness for others? Why not just leave that money with the people who are best positioned to make those decisions for themselves my minimizing wealth inequality instead?
Great idea! Unsurprisingly, pro-choice and pro-life groups are not in the EA top recommended charities. GiveDirectly, which leaves money with the people who are best positioned to make decisions for themselves, is. There might be a lot of authoritarian EAs on forums promoting AI safety, but please don't judge the whole group by a vocal minority.
In general I find it concerning when technical people encroach upon non-technical areas without giving a sufficient amount of respect to the people who were in the field already. Those people, the experts, do know a lot and to have this kind of nerd savior branding of effective altruism, as if you are bringing the enlightenment that allows these poor altruists to finally be effective, well that just seems a little presumptuous.
What it evolved into is a bit controversial, overall they seem to be a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the power and money they had at one point, as they all came too easy.
Maturity-wise... that's still unclear to me.
The founding idea is that giving $10,000 to save, y’know, four ailing dogs with bad livers or whatever, or a community theater, as opposed to many human lives, is fundamentally wrong.
“If you’re gonna give, you should maximize the impact as measured in human life” is fundamentally at odds with many common forms of giving, yes.
What if the friendships made at a community theater help a troubled kid through a rough patch and instead of committing suicide they go on to cure cancer? Not funding the theater would have been very sub-optimal.
Even without far-fetched hypotheticals what’s the point of saving everyone’s life if they’re just going to spend it figuring out how to make more mosquito nets or whatnot?
People are not as smart as they think and it’s important to leave room for serendipity and random associations.
I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that,
but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such.
That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.
Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.
> The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid.
Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.
Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.
These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.
You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.
Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.
I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.
For the former I agree, seek out charities that most effectively support what you want to support.
For the latter, I don't think it's worthwhile to deride people for supporting a cause just because you think there's some other cause that might technically result in more living humans. Raw population is not a worthwhile metric to optimize for. People should be free to support things they care about and believe make the world a better place as long as it's not harming anyone.
But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.
If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.
So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”
Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ
In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives.
It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters.
It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.
It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s
Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives.
Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.
> We can do both.
So, save fewer lives for more theatre seats?
> diversification of one's "ethics portfolio"
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.
Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2].
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).
2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
Surely 800,000 mosquito nets is "more effective" than 800,000 robo calls and shitty campaign ads with a moron at the end saying "I'm Joe Blow, and I endorse this bullshit"
Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No.
This is called “the map is not the territory”.
It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well.
And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age.
And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn?
For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actually saving a life.
And finally you have to address the sacrifices you've made and the people you've hurt in pursuit of saving that life.
To me, it looks like a charade, because the claim that you can actually measure and quantify all of these complex systems to truly arrive at the real impact of all these things, I just don't believe it. It seems you've picked a simple metric to measure, because it's easy, but is it lasting impact, is really more meaningful impact, that's all all still up in the air.
One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...
In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...
I'm honestly not sure. Spending your money back into the economy contributes to a system with a proven track record, part of it goes to taxes, the rest pays for jobs, creates value for the owner, who'll pay some more taxes on their income, and then spend the rest elsewhere, etc.
Donating 10k to a charity has many practical flaws, the charity itself isn't incentivized to maximize the use of the 10k, it can be corrupt, or might operate in a corrupt and inefficient environment, etc.
Would you still argue that it still does no harm? You have just squandered 100b worth of society's resources - people's time, physical materials, engineering effort etc. for your own entertainment.
Say there was a 100 billion yacht, it still served as a means to redistribute flow of funds to others. Those engineers, material extractors, workers, staff, all that contributed to people being given some of that money.
This goes towards creating an economy, and good economies can sustain countries and lift many people out of poverty, saving many lives.
Creating a demand for people's labor and resources helps with creating an economy.
This isn't money wasted, the money went to many people, it was a way to redistribute the money to others.
So I don't see the harm at all, at least not from a financial standpoint, you could argue about environmental harm though.
Now what about opportunity cost? Sure, maybe that 100 billion could have been used in ways that redistribute it more evenly, more fairly, or to people who needs the money most, or towards an endeavor that has longer term uplifting outcomes, etc, there might be a better use, though it becomes hard to figure out what use is truly better.
The way I see it, there's two dimensions:
- Redistributing money, who gets it? Split amongst how many people?
- Potential for future returns, is the money spent in a way that gives people the means to produce more?
The yacht definitely redistributes money, but maybe you disagree about the distribution of it, who got the money.
Arguably the yacht could bring future returns. Creating a demand for engineers pushed more people into engineering, now more people have the engineering know how, they go on to use that to build other projects, creating an infrastructure that others can then leverage to make other things more efficient and build on top, etc.
Basically, I just don't think it's as black and white as you claim, even in this extreme example.
I believe your focus on money obscures that fact. Money is just a mechanism for a (good, efficient, fair?) way of using the resources available. Money is not real wealth.
What lifts people out of poverty is not money, it is ultimately useful stuff - food, shelter etc. produced so efficiently that people also are able to specialise and spend time on teaching, medicating, investing into producing not just the bare necessities but things that make them even more efficient and productive etc. In the yacht example, such scarce resources are squandered! The 'economy' created is quite literally destructive - it is geared towards consumption (i.e. destruction) of many resources - materials to build the yacht, countless peoples' time - for the mere entertainment of the person who then sinks the yacht.
Yes, the people that were involved in building the yacht now have bigger claims on a shrinking share of resources. They personally win; the person who enjoyed sinking the yacht wins; overall society greatly looses and is now much poorer.
So overall, society would be better off if that person just hoarded the money, buried it in their back yard, and preserved the scarce resources. That outcome is better than personal luxury consumption. Even better, of course, if they used it to get other people to do something productive that benefits wider society.
Ok, so your argument is in the actual materials consumed? The water, metal, and all that being "wasted" for a yacht, as opposed to used for life critical purposes instead?
So, that's kind of the environmental aspect I mentioned, I'm not opposed here, sustainable resource use is important.
But donating to a charity can similarly be a temporary waste of resources with no sustainability improvements made.
Just feeding people food for an extra week for example, is very different from investing in sustainable farming methods that can guarantee us renewable and long lasting sources of food.
And on that topic, it's surprising how in practice discoveries that can help us with sustainability and production methods are discovered through various other ventures, often military for example, but it can happen anywhere.
The person who invented ammonia was researching chemical warfare, now it's used for fertilizer and dramatically helped boost our food production efficiency.
These second order effects I think are hard to predict, similarly hard to predict what the workers that got money from building the yacht than go on to use that money for themselves, maybe they spend it investing in food production efficiencies.
Not wrong or bad as people in this thread seem to universally interpret it, but if you want to optimize for animal welfare, you might be better off doing something about farm animals rather than donating to a local shelter. If that turns out to be too far removed from your personal situation to care about, okay then apparently that's not your priority and that is fine. But between the things you spend effort or money on, it's worth looking into what is the most effective means to your end.
I am not involved in this whole thing in any way but that's what I thought the underlying idea was. Not an explicit dig at those who already try to do good, not at all... (Edit: realization: and that method of making people feel bad wouldn't be very altruistic nor effective right?)
like for example, if a family member of mine needed money for a cancer treatment that had a 50% chance of working versus giving that money to save the life of someone I don't know on the other side of the planet, I will consistently try to save my family member. That is how most people would operate. I will do this because I don't know the person on the other side of the planet. If it were not for the internet and their subreddit/lesswrong style of shaming campaigns, no one would ever even know there was a person on the other side of the planet who also needed the money. Why should I be asked to ignore my own family by annoying redditors who don't give a shit about me anyways?
I doubt even the EA people would do that unless they could virtue signal about how smart they are and how stupid everyone else is online. Most of the time, these people just speculated about how they might spend their money if they were in such a scenario. It was like a hobby.
Although in fairness rating charities by their effectiveness is a good idea. Yes, people do blindly give cash away to corrupt charities.
So would most people, and we wouldn’t call it altruism. Looking for an objective criterion (whether ‘number of lives saved per dollar’ or something else) is an angle that I’m happy someone is taking. If you don’t like their approach then don’t give them money.
Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism. It's also the selfish and rational choice. It's both simultaneously.
Altruism is the disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Helping your family is not altruism.
Not necessarily altruism.
It absolutely could be.
Knowing the true motives of another human is very difficult, perhaps impossible (without a predictive biological model of consciousness we can't be sure we're reading minds correctly, and it's still an open question whether such a thing can exist).
You shouldn't; doing so would be irrational. There is a fairly decent chance that your relative, if they survive, will be in a position to help you in the future. But the random person on the other side of the planet? The chance of them randomly helping you in the future is about one in a few billion. Particularly if they don't know who their benefactor was, so they couldn't deliberately repay the favor to you.
So the rational/selfish position is to always put family and friends first, before strangers.
For instance; if everybody sticks to the principle of murder being wrong despite the consequences, then there will be fewer misguided mass murderers, and this is better for society in the long run than everybody going around committing murders they believe to be justified by some end.
Honestly I don't think there's any realistic way to decide in general whether giving assistance to person A vs person B is more "rational" or even more "effective", but it's good to at least be aware that some charities/NGOs/etc. are at least trustworthy and ensure a high % of donations do actively go towards providing help, rather being swallowed in marketing and admin budgets.
It's counterproductive to insist that nonprofits operate without operations budgets.
I pay them money. Charity pays consultants to turn that into more money (plus admins to manage the consultants). Consultants determine that a fraction of that money should be used to solicit more donations. Research indicates best source of new donations is in fact existing donors.
At this point charity is spending money I gave them to extract further donations from me. The ice-cream cone is now licking itself :/
Essentially EA tells not "let's save as many lives as possible" but "let's improve the world according to our values as much as possible". And values might differ among the people.
In your example with cure for relative working with only X probability Vs definitely curing stranger on the other side of the world there should be value X for which you will prefer to cure the stranger. Whether it 10% , 1% or maybe 0.01% I will not blame you. But it worth to know your values like value of your family member life over the stranger's life to act accordingly.
Dive into EA activities starts with exploring your values. How do you value lives of animals in comparison to lives of people? Do you prefer improving people well being now or reducing existential risks like wars and epidemies? EA literally made a tool to estimate one's values and promote this tool on the front page.
If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values.
Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I also hope everyone wants to do the best thing ;)
If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on television.
If you had a family member with cancer, look at which of N cancer foundations spend the money most effectively and donate there.
Often, altruism comes down to people giving money to the 'obvious' causes, which don't necessarily use the money effectively.
The whole concept just seems to assume you know everything, present and future, and have infinite calculation power.
The choices that people make with giving often have no framework for deciding good, let alone better. The moral question is not is X better than Y, but what of all the choices I am going to make can I make better?
If everyone made better choices, not perfect just better, there is a LOT we could improve.
Indeed my wording was too broad and over-compassing. Effective altruism was kick started from comparison of different organizations collecting money for whatever altruistic means. And comparison showed that these initiatives are vastly different in effectiveness which prompted an idea that we should take into account effectiveness of particular initiative before giving it money.
EA seems to focus on reducing suffering over improving happiness. Giving a hand to a stranger who have stumbled and have fallen to the ground near you is out of the scope: EA is about strategic long lasting calculated stuff.
I took this passage from effectivealtruism.org but I was mostly referring to the EA community online which seemed to mostly be the rationalists like the OP said. It's worth pointing out that Eliezer Yudkowsky was mentioned ITT.
Impartial altruism: We believe that all people count equally. Of course it's reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends and life. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. Thi s means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.
So this is not saying all EA people think the same thing or have the same values or are on that site but I do think this is a common viewpoint among them. I just question why that should be and whether or not a lot of EA people are even altruistic or just virtue signalling on the internet.
I toned down some of the language in this post. I am not being meticulous I am just freestyling my thoughts because it's fun and there is a dose of humor I am putting in here but usually it's not appreciated on HN. Anyways, I don't know if there is a counter criticism to EA officially by some philosopher, and I actually agree with some of what they say because I remember a lot of discussion about choosing charities wisely and not wasting charitable resources. So I don't want to write a formal argument but nevertheless I think what I wrote is a summary of why I am skeptical.
Sure, but that's because we all prefer living in a society where everyone abides by their obligations to the people closest to them - nothing wrong with this. That's special pleading, though.
I think it's clear you don't know any EA people in real life.
I just want to point out that:
1. Just because this is how most people operate does not mean this is the ethical choice. Slavery was normal at one time remember.
2. You say EA people have biases they refuse to admit to, but your argument is showing that you are exhibiting the bias, namely the bias towards preferring your family member over general human life. Arguably a position that does not prefer one human life over another is less biased, no?
I don't think assuming an equal weighting is being unbiased though. It could be a result of a political bias. As I said I don't know why people should assume this. The digital era of social media and digital banking enable this viewpoint so I think that is another angle to discuss regarding how to weigh these issues.
But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias. I don't want to accuse everyone in the community of not being altruistic but claiming to be an effective altruist could certainly be a career enhancer if you are an ethicist. Also, my experience with this community is some of them come off as misanthropes. A misanthrope might be motivated to argue elaborate contrarian viewpoints in order to cause harm or annoy people.
I'm not sure they would. They might adopt instead of having their own kids, for instance.
> So the needs of random strangers would almost always outweigh the needs of your children assuming they are healthy and you live comfortably.
Not necessarily. Divide and conquer is one of our most effective problem solving strategies, and family units fall under this umbrella of dividing the work of raising the next generation.
> But the specific bias I was accusing some in the EA community of having is virtue signalling as having superior ethics, morals, and intelligence. I think that is a real bias.
It could be. It's also possible that they are more ethical and intelligent though. Not in the sense that becoming an EA makes you more intelligent, but in the sense that maybe EA attracts more intelligent and ethical people. This self-sorting effect would diminish as EA spreads in popularity of course.
Ultimately, whether they are more ethical or intelligent is an empirical claim that you can validate, and while it's reasonable to think it's implausible for it to be true, that's not a proof that it isn't true.
This seems to be a perfectly good idea. Doesn't it seem problematic that giving it a simple, straightforward name seems inherently arrogant and insufferable?
Giving it a simple name is fine, but it has one. Giving it a manipulative name is, well, one of the potential philosophical problems with utilitarianism.
They don't care about effectiveness in the sense that they are doing the math on how effective different outreach is, comparing that against other uses of the money, and sharing that with their donors.
I've been to 9-10 charity events and none of them talked about effectiveness in a dollar and cents way like the way givewell does. It's a real change from the status quo.
Not the OP but State-imposed socialism might do the trick. Free housing, free decent education, free healthcare, what's there not to like?
The only thing is that you wouldn't be the one "doing" the giving as an individual, because that's not your job to do (again, as an individual).
As an outsider, I feel the same way about "evidence based medicine". It'll be interesting to see, in 40 years, whether or not either moniker was earned.
The people mentioned on the Effective Altruism Wikipedia page:
Peter Singer: Professor of Bioethics (philosopher)
Toby Ord: Philosopher. Philosophy PhD, Computer Science bachelors
Hilary Greaves: Philosopher, and he double-majored in physics in undergrad
William MacAskill: Philosopher/Ethicist. PhD in philosophy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: self-described autodidact, no formal education or notable work history. Runs a "AI" "Research" center called MIRI.
Holden Karnofsky: Co-Founder of GiveWell, Harvard degree in Social Studies
Yew-Kwang Ng: Welfare Economist, has published biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology papers.
Derek Parfit: Philosopher. Has a history degree.
Nick Bostrom: Philosopher. BA in philosophy and math, MA in philosophy and physics.
Benjamin Todd: Physics/Philosophy double major, worked at Kodak for eight months and at an investment firm for 1.25 years before joining the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The financial backers are more diverse:
Dustin Moskovitz: Co-Founder of Facebook, Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy
Cari Tuna: Dustin's wife, previously worked as a reporter before cofounding Open Philanthropy
Dan Smith: Professional poker player
Liv Boeree: Professional poker player. Physics degree
Sam Bankman-Fried: con-artist, thief, fraudster. Has a physics degree and a minor in math, interned/worked as a trader at Jane Street, and founded Alameda Capital and FTX.
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right, as it enables the universe to sustain more people. Bostrom laments the lives lost every second that technological advances are delayed. In a paper from 2003 he invites readers to imagine all the “unused energy…being flushed down black holes”, and all the suns beyond our own that are “illuminating and heating empty rooms”, because we lack the means to populate the planets orbiting them
And longtermism has taken over much of the EA movement:
> Disillusioned effective altruists are dismayed by the increasing predominance of “strong longtermism” ..[snip].. According to Benjamin Todd, a founder of 80,000 Hours, longtermism “might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far” ..[snip].. Projects devoted to global health and poverty still garner the most funding, but their share of the total allocation is shrinking as long-term-risk research attracts more cash.
Both quotes from the linked article.
Show me the money. Sci-Fi/Fantasy longtermst nerd concerns get a disproportionate amount of attention. But from what I can tell, most donations still go to charities dealing with malaria, deficiencies and vaccines: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2021-allocation-to...
Sure, some people are getting paid thousands of dollars for navel gazing. But more than a billion dollars was donated to directly improve global health.
But the highest ever grant was $55M for "potential risks from AI". The 4th and 6th highest grants were similar.[1]
More recently[2] the highest ($10.7M) grant was for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI" and third highest grant ($2.3M) was for "longtermism" and there were 4 other similar grants on the first page.
[1] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=high-to-low#ca...
[2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/?sort=recent#categor...
Yes, that's a logical conclusion, but it's not right because of the weird "longtermist" logic. Their "AI risk research" is about AI alignment, which is a "longtermist" priority.
To repost my previous quote:
> Many longtermists reckon that the antidote to the threat from technology is more technology; mastering artificial intelligence will forestall a malevolent AI from enslaving us. They also believe that technological acceleration is morally good in its own right.
This is the "acceleratist view" of AI research, of which Nick Bostrom is a prominent proponent: basically he views progress as inevitable, so it's best to accelerate AI that is aligned with human values. See https://nickbostrom.com/papers/openness.pdf
He also values future lives equally to existing lives (the "longtermist" view) so any timme where we aren't expanding to the stars is morally repugnant:
> One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization. [snip] The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
Let me requote that:
The effect on total value, then, seems greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action.
https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
I'd highly recommend you read the linked article this discussion is about. It goes into some depth about on these points.
It's more or less a term one would use to signal to others to dogpile the person and get them to leave the conversation/topic, mostly by being absurdly obtuse and misconstruing their words to it's most literal meaning with nothing left to deem charitable if engaging, or just speaking to other people entirely and not towards the subject whatsoever. Kind of like how most insults devolve into in pretty much all social media, just another word to pull out of the ad-hom bag.
Because it was all a hustle to continue doing exactly whatever they wanted to do. Here is a good book that talks about the mindset:
https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/...
It's easy to say you're doing things "longterm" for "future generations". The non-existent are the easiest people to advocate for. They demand absolutely nothing of you. And if your projected "altruism" will only really be felt well after you're dead, you aren't on the hook to show results now. They claim this is utilitarian, but it's not. It never was.
What is known is that small real changes now can affect large changes later. Doing things to improve today will improve tomorrow, next year, next decade, etc. If you are looking to be effective with your altruism, the most rational, utilitarian thing you can do is solve the problems of today. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to separate you from your money.
Most effective altruists are working on relatively near term things, like education in India or parasitic worms in Nigeria, those just aren't controversial and so get discussed less.
But long term projects like switching away from CO2 and to renewables can still be worth doing.
Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.
I unironically think this. In Hungary where I live, if you don't care about these things much but still want to contribute somewhat to society by charity, the first lines of contact will mostly be crooks that feed on goodwill. There will be beggars, organized into groups, charities that don't exist or have such an overhead that only a single percent goes to the actual cause, corporations that take your donation and then boast with the amount as if they were the ones giving it, and charities that are popular but are actually fronts for ideologies, or churches, and frauds like people collecting clothes for the poor, only to sell them abroad. These entities grind up a large amount of goodwill, while producing little or negative value for mankind. So yes - the altruism of the people donating to entities like this does fuck-all, while I imagine that if someone researches a bit, they will be more likely to give to entities that contribute more.
With that being said, I don't like the EA people either. But the concept is valid.
Do you actually know any? The ones I know in real life are wonderful people. Intelligent, caring and hard working.
But ... that's where effective altruism comes from. Have you not noticed the eroding trust in charities (https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/se...) over the past decade? Effective altruism is just a counter-movement against wasteful charities and engenders a growing realization that not all donations are good and even that donations might not always be the best solution. It wasn't about lecturing anybody, it was about (for example) figuring out which charities are most effective and least wasteful with the money that they receive.
Every single one, without exception, has examples of people at the top of the institution, widely regarded as masters of the system, who are miserable destructive human beings.
This makes me profoundly sad. I could understand if every single group of people had members who are toxic, but the fact that the selection systems for progression are so predictably bad...
IME, the best you can do is to find a small local scene that practices the system in a way that is healthy and nurturing for the members and live with the cognitive dissonance caused by the rot at the top. Whether it's your small neighborhood church, a martial arts dojo or your toastmasters club, these things can be great in the small even if they're awful in the large.
That said, systems for routinely rotating the top of the hierarchy (such as taxation or term limits) are helpful to be sure.
EA is a very very tempting horse to beat, to the point it's their own internal favorite sport. There are large quantities of ink spilled criticizing it, from inside and outside. But it is all pretty worthless without taking a look at the foundations of the movement.
"I don't think AI is a risk, so I'm opposed to EA" charitably means that that person is opposed to EA, the organization headed by the people named in the article, and the choices they have made, who have made themselves the face of the movement with the same name. It doesn't mean they think that helping people is bad.
It's one of those fun language tricks groups get to play when there's a movement of some sort, and then a specific organization pops up with the exact same name. Black Lives Matter famously did the same thing; great movement, but the organization with the same name has done some questionable things with the money they were given.
Surely this is a massive irony - the time wasted debating it is time where they could have been collectively earning millions or billions to donate to worthy causes.
Which, to be fair, the 95% of effective altruists that you never hear about do.
SBF isn't alone in this. In school, while interning for a competing hedge fund, I met a drove of Jane Street interns who thought exactly the same way, in terms of "EV" or expected value -- the mean outcome from a random event. For example, whenever we would go out for ice cream, they would try to flip a coin to see who pays, given the "expected cost" was same. This behavior is fine if you're a market maker betting 0.001% of your worth on a toss that you win 51% of the time, and I imagine this is why Jane Street tries to cultivate it. But unfortunately, in this hyperfocus on returns, they forgot that "risk"/"variance" exists, and sometimes flipping a coin will land you in such a deep hole that you can't continue to play the game long enough to dig yourself out of there.
You can read some thoughts by the man himself here, which flies in the face of all such work (Kelly bets, etc.) in variance minimization: https://nitter.net/SBF_FTX/status/1337250686870831107
It’s a little long for an HN tagline but it’ll do.
He just doesn't seem very good at managing risk in the real world. If you spend any time at an investment bank or similar where you do a lot of trading, there are just hundreds of "gotchas" that those institutions are aware of and manage (or they aren't and don't and go bankrupt eventually).
There are lots of fields like this in the real world, just lots of gotchas. He didn't seem to understand that. I'd bet Jane Street understands this at the org level, but the younger folks likely just see a little bit of the whole picture, and have a lot of theory.
personally i think if you're making big bets/one-offs, you probably should be computing something like minimax trees for all the possible outcomes before making a choice and maybe adjust the bet size such that the worst case is something you can swallow.
This problem is usually considered from the other angle: if variance is high but the odds are unfavorable you should favor fewer bigger bets over many smaller bets. Why? Because the more bets you make the more likely you are to converge onto the expectation. A single big bet leaves you either running way over expectation or slightly under it. All of this assumes that you have to bet though, the safest thing to do with negative expectation is to just not bet.
His example is unusual in that it has positive expectation (so you want to bet) and high variance (because you’re limited to a single bet). f(x) = 0b or 10000b so the single sample has a mean of 5000 and a variance of 50,000,000 but the E[f(x)] is 7500. A bigger than Kelly bet is rational here but if you had unlimited (or a large number of) bets you should revert to Kelly.
Food for thought.
It's unfortunate that it's being defined by the rightly controversial opinions of famous people..
To balance this article, consider checking out one of the main EA websites https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...
For example it indicates that longtermism is "a school of thinking within effective altruism". The popularity of such ideas will vary with time and they will be further refined with ongoing thinking & healthy debate. I for one fail to understand why it's important to maximise the number of future lives, which don't even exist - it seems very risky & unsustainable.
For example, a large non-profit can't explicitly lobby congress to ban sex education in schools. But, they can go around and "buy out" small non-profits into fulfilling their agenda. This is usually pretty easy to do because small non-profits are almost always cash-starved, and it can be really hard to say "no" when some outside figure is willing to provide a massive percentage of your operating budget in perpetuity in exchange for avoiding certain topics (like mutual consent) in schools.
This very scenario happened to an acquaintance of mine. She wanted to teach consent in schools after the #metoo scandal, spent 2 years grinding to improve access to consent-based communication for kids and then someone offered her obscene money under the condition that she make tweaks (i.e. "don't talk about consent in school because that will encourage children to have sex", that kind of stuff). She took the money because she saw a way out of needing hustle so hard for cash, but of course she sold her soul at the end and regretted it.
And none of those interactions ever get recorded. Nobody is tracking what big non-profits and charitable funds ask (or demand) others to do, and they get to market themselves as doing good for the world. I'm sure some of them are, and I'm sure there are tons of well-meaning people working for some of them, but that world was so much darker than I ever imagined, at least from the periphery.
For example, consider a simple animal rescue non-profit. While it may on its surface just seem like "this organization should just exist to try to find homes for pets needing adoption", it's actually more helpful to look at a more fundamental question: "What causes animals to be put up for adoption in the first place." It turns out that in most states there are a host of systemic, government-caused problems that are directly responsible for the reasons why many people need to surrender their pets to shelters in the first place. So yes, the animal rescue non-profit is still in the day-to-day business of finding homes for homeless animals, I would say a good organization would actually do more to try to change the status quo and fix the root cause problem, and that often intersects with government policy.
Forget about tracking, the people paying even get a tax deduction.
Well, if there are no written agreements - take the money and do your thing anyway, then?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/against-longtermism-wi...
> Bostrom calculates that 10E29 potential lives are lost for every second that we fail to colonise the supercluster of galaxies containing the Milky Way.
I think an easy solution would be to normalize the score, as I think the sum of human hapiness would be "better" if there was only ever one human who gave his life a 10/10, than two humans who gave their life a 9/10.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value
Without giving a derivation (which you can find easily on the web), the idea is that a gain of 1 USD that you get in 1 year has to be discounted with a factor of (1+i), where i is the (long-term stable) interest rate. For 3 years, the discount factor is, of course, (1+i)^3, i.e.
- a gain of 1 USD that materializes in 1 year is worth 1/(1+i) USD today
- a gain of 1 USD that materializes in 3 years is worth 1/(1+i)^3 USD today
Thus, including this discount factor for a future monetary flow (as in the PV calculation) makes gains that materialize in, say, 1000 years worth less today than those of the same monetary value that materialize (much) earlier.
This also implies every fictional supervillain who ever tried to achieve immortality was the morally best possible person, no matter what evil they performed in the attempt, even if they failed. Since no probability is ever 0, and any small number multiplied by infinity is still infinity, trying to achieve immortality is the maximally good thing any person can do.
This quote comes from a particular thought experiment. As I'm sure you'll grant, thought experiments don't discuss what to do if that exact hypothetical were reality, they only discuss what attitude to take towards this whole category of situations. In concrete terms yes, some humongously big number of lives are lost every second, more than 10E29 of them, if time travel is possible or creating new universes is possible, but that doesn't change the conclusion.
And you miss two things as far as I can see: achieving immortality for yourself is not the maximal good, since for one thing it would clearly be even better to achieve immortality for everyone. Second, you're equating infinities. It's hard for humans to reason about infinities, but mathematicians have in fact described that there are infinities of different orders: you can still speak of some "infinite" quantities as being greater than other "infinite" quantities. It's easier if you just drop the word in favour of "zillion" and reason intuitively about that.
If you wanted to go all in maybe try to consider the number of lives weighted by the probability they exist will. Some kind of drake equation like thing.
Frankly it strikes me as just sketchy moral accounting, where you can be as greedy or exploitative as you want to be as long as you’re contributing to something that you can justify as having a higher “moral score”, but in the end you’re doing all the calculations and all the numbers are made up.
Yes there are such people. I don't think they would be less greedy and exploitative if they didn't have a way to feel better about it. They would find another way to feel better, perhaps one that doesn't have the side effect of actually help out random people that would benefit from that help.
Because if all the numbers are made up, you don’t actually know what is an “altruistic” choice. You can say, gamble with other peoples money, and justify it by donating 10% of the returns to charity. And if the math works out in your head, it’s all good.
> Yes there are such people. I don't think they would be less greedy and exploitative if they didn't have a way to feel better about it.
Lol, we’re arguing about a moral philosophy here, and your argument is that anything bad that people do, keeping in line with the philosophy is irrelevant?
It’s also not that “there are such people”. I’m saying that EA will disproportionately attract the greedy because fundamentally it argues that you can buy your way into altruism. It’s the Catholic Church selling indulgences for the 21st century.
There are probably quite a few people just who want to do good, and get suckered into longtermism which results in them doing AI research instead.
You can actually see some of them in the EA forums, where they discuss this struggle.
Of course, as a lot of things surrounding EA, this is ironically quite hard to quantify ;)
Btw. please don't take it as an attack on EA as a concept, I believe that it has much to give provided it is not mixed with too much pseudo long-term thinking as described in the article, which in the end has way too much uncertainty in it for my taste.
The reason I ask is that, when I first discovered Effective Altruism, finding the premise to be deeply compelling, I ended up staying up all night watching videos trying to reconcile / assimilate it into my world view. In one video, various trolley problem scenarios were enumerated, and the EA guests were advocating sparing a lamborghini to the detriment of a child's life so that the car could be sold off and the money donated to saving multiple children in the developing world. Furthermore, there was some suggestion of a threshold where the altruism of sparing X domesticated animals was 'higher' than sparing Y humans, which definitely felt like it fell into [citation needed] territory.
Boundlessness means that X could be all domesticated animals, and Y=1 human. Surely that seems like not the right call, given that it would ultimately kill even more humans.
[Admittedly this is all error-prone hazy recollection, but] From what I understood, the original scenario in question was about a case where X was large, but not of critical strategic consequence to the availability of the animal(s) in question
Given a moral compass, yes.
EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).
So should everyone be forced to value all future human lives as being as concretely valuable as our own? In order to put them into a total ordering of morality one is forced to make a judgement call on how many people we think are likely to exist in the future as well as how relevant our musings of today actually capture what life will be like in that future.
Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future?
It just reeks of hubris to me. To be a really effective altruist you must first create a time travel device.
Not in my experience and all the time respectively.
Better to save a life today, than a billion lives a century from now, because the unstoppable planet-killer asteroid is going to hit us in 99 years.
Bringing racism and eugenics to a whole new "intellectual" and rationalist level. Sad that it took the swindling of $10-15 billions for all of this to come to light.
Looking at the current distribution of wealthy vs poor countries and people is kind of disingenuous and rationalistic to ignore the racist undertones. More exactly saying "we'll choose the wealthy people vs the poor ones if it will come to that" while ignoring that most of the wealthy people across the globe are of one "race", while the other peoples are of other "races", is, yes, racist.
About eugenics, whenever cold numbers only come into play in decisions like these I think it's safe to call it that, i.e. eugenics. Choosing wealthy people against poor people based on numbers alone is eugenics. You're choosing the more "worthy" ones, as that Beckstead guy explicitly said. More to the point, saying that people A should have more chances to live compared to people B, because people A is more worthy ("has the potential to create more long-term value"), is the definition of eugenics.
Judging by the article and comments, it looks as if people are living by a creed to be effectively altruistic.
In general any philosophy where you think there is an optimal answer suffers from the risk that the answer could be wrong.
In the case of givewell, one limitation is that you only support causes that demonstrate impact -- you don't support causes that take risks.
I'm sure there is many other reasons not think that everything can be solved through the application of logic :)
---
EA seems to have a core belief in post-scarcity. I've recently been thinking about post-scarcity. To my knowledge, I have not been engaging with EA content; I wonder if it has become pervasive because of their efforts, or if the time is ripe for the concept.
I've also been thinking about the number of different times that religion has evolved in a population. Religion fulfills various psychological needs; for a while it was popular for atheist thinkers to say we have evolved past the need for religion. I am agnostic, but I think people still need 'religion' and they will in the future. It may not be a religion with a personal god or gods; the concept of the divine comes from the human mind, the human mind will always have a place for godliness of some kind. I could be wrong, religion could be a blip, but I don't think so.
Religions of the past have reflected the tribalism inherent in the human condition. There has always been a fight with another tribe that was the most pressing. Other fights are suspended or suppressed until the main fight is concluded or paused. From my lifetime, the main fight was the Cold War until that concluded, and then it was national politics. It's very hard to come to terms with the core beliefs and morality of the main opponent, no matter who or when.
I'm sure EA says something about religion and tribalism, but the human experience is also important. The human experience starts in a place, with some people. Those people are your tribe, until you find another tribe. Their religion is your religion, until you find another religion.
While I absolutely applaud Bill Gate's philanthropy, and have no doubt he's one of the most effective charity donors on this planet, you cannot simply use that as a ledger entry in some karmic balance.
Bill at the peak of of his business career wielded enormous power and played a pivotal role in the IP regime that now rules the world, one that places low income nations at huge disadvantage in life or death industries like medicine.
When you say "effective altruism worked" with Bill as an example, what you're actually saying is "we should welcome abusive or even illegal behavior from people like Bill if they give away money later" which is absurd. There's nothing about philanthropy that requires you to do business like a sociopath as a prequel.
Because the outcome of arguing against Bill giving charitably is Bill not giving charitably, not Bill not engaging in predatory business practices. Microsoft was cheating competitors and pursuing lock-in long before Bill founded the Gates Foundation.
Seems like it was more gross mismanagement and excessive stimulant consumption.
> This disillusionment was partly because the community expends so much effort raising money for the proliferation of institutes and think-tanks that host its most prominent thinkers.
> Open Philanthropy, a foundation that Dustin Moskovitz helped to create, funds 80,000 Hours (over $10m since 2017),
Is this the same 80,000 hours as https://80000hours.org/? A self help guide and a job board? Listing Sam Bankman-Fried as the #1 anecdote? $10,000,000? Hm.
Or is it just a self-justification of their current actions, of wealth accumulation, to be conveniently ignored later?
Like, I know Vitalik Buterin said “stop making me a continued recipient of whatever coin project you are creating and just make those go to an effective charity like givewell and such”, and people followed that instruction.
The great works of charity, well, look at the charities they endorse, like, against malaria foundation and givewell etc. , and look at what these organizations have achieved.
1. low-key, and
2. try to stay out of the spotlight to the maximum extent possible.
I used to respect them, and even during the past few days I thought this crisis was a major opportunity for them to reflect and find their way again.
So I posted a comment on their forum with (i) an observation that they could regain trust by doing their share (I suggested twice the money they received from FTX) to make financial fraud victims whole before resuming their regular program, and (ii) a link to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... , the first paragraph of which might have stopped SBF from making the big wrong turn in his reasoning (note that almost all other arguments on the Internet against SBF's reasoning don't actually work). Nothing but downvotes.
I recommend against any further association with these people in the strongest possible terms. (I'll retract this if it turns out that the downvoters were the exception and the EA community actually proceeds to demonstrate good citizenship in something like the manner I suggested, but I'm not holding my breath.)
So was there any of that… that made getting into crypto or AI a good idea?
What was the math there?
I’ve seen effective altruism mentioned on HN before and I don’t really understand how it turns into directing people to jobs or specific tech… at all.
I feel like if you’re trying to help people the moment you mix your business in it, now you have conflicts of interest.
EA is best as as critique of the narcissism of most wealthy western ‘altruism’. But all this mixing of billionaires, crypto, and long-termism has reintroduced narcissism into the community.
At once the lyrics from Taylor Swift’s new song makes so much more sense:
“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism”
Of course they end up getting tied up in knots because they're trying to project altruism through continuously more complex justifications.
The emphasis is not on the altruism but on the effectiveness. The altruism is a given: if it wasn't, you'd not be moved by any of the material anyway.
Obviously this is not a blanked outcome, but it seems to be where the wealthy SBF types wander into, especially if their wealth is not entirely 'clean' in the first place.
Reminds me of arguments like, say, the Sacklers' opioid crisis isn't all bad because they donated to charity, we should appreciate the good that came.
However, I don’t think that precludes using a kind of utilitarianism where you just kinda fudge over that “there isn’t a canonical way of adding these” bit, in order to produce something which can be a rather good heuristic for “does this provide more or less help to people than that?”.
Like, yes, you can’t really add utilities, but if you value helping people, you can consider how much you value different people getting different amounts of different kinds of help, and if you pretend that this is the same thing as “the utility you provide them”, then you can add up how much you value the individual things and assume that how much you value the stuff adds linearly. And, in some cases, morality should presumably impose some constraints regarding how much you should value providing one sort of help in some quantity to some person or persons, compared to how much you value providing some other kind of help in some quantity to some other person(s).
And so, while I don’t think utilitarianism is true exactly, I think it likely that morality probably demands something which in some ways looks at least a little bit like utilitarianism? Though there are still cases where it is important to recognize that utilitarianism can lead one astray.
Good listen: https://pca.st/episode/61ba0858-0eac-4a92-91a3-9fbbacc49e69
That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone.
This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous loophole I can, screwing customers, but once I'm rich I'll donate some of that money to do good...
How does this make any sense?
If you want to do good, just work for others from the get go. Be nice, be kind, be humble, offer mentoring and encouragement, don't hord things for yourself to redistribute it later, instead work to create sustainable opportunities for others.
That also feels very inaccurate and misrepresentative of the philosophy.
Rather, I'd say: live mindfully in a broken system. Pick a job that meets your needs with minimal intentional side-effects, donate some surplus to bettering the world. Do not be a paperclip maximizer or "ends justify the means".
I think that is a very valid philosophy and one I would agree with.
However, EA has a large overlap with longtermism, which has some very paperclip maximizer like features:
> Providing we are capable of colonising the rest of our galaxy and nearby ones, a 1% reduction in the risk of extinction on such a time horizon would be the equivalent of saving 1032 lives. In such a perspective, nothing else matters.
> That year, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, dedicated to mitigating risk. He elaborated on his theory of longtermism in a book in 2008, urging people to be “good ancestors” by practising “altruism toward our descendants”. He didn’t mean composting or stopping driving, but mitigating existential risks to humanity – “x-risks” in community parlance – from hazards such as advanced artificial intelligence and bio-hacking, that could potentially wipe out or severely deplete humankind.
(from the linked article).
I think this a very problematic view, because (as noted) almost everything is justifiable if you think you are avoiding extinction of the human race.
I admit, I don't want to generalize, I'm sure there are many interpretation of the ideas of EA and different people practice it differently.
That said, in practice, at least the prominent figures and their prominent groups, my impression is that they fall into what I described.
Seems there's an appealing aspect to it that's about being able to be the most cut throat, dirty capitalist where ends justify the means, and where you can feel good about being filthy rich off the back of everyone else, because you'll be efficiently altruistic in donating some of it back.
Feels there's a dimension to it that seems to justify taking from the poor to give to the poorer, while keeping a cut for yourself.
The EA advice is that if you're good at something valuable, then the best strategy for being charitable is to do that valuable thing and then donate your money. Do you think it's incompatible with humility to believe that you're good at something valuable? I don't think there's any notion of "thinking of yourself as better" baked in here.
If by "capitalist", you mean the system that incentivized the most selfish assholes on the planet to accidentally lift billions of people out of poverty, then I agree.
> This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly...
The median American gets paid more than their counterparts in all but a couple countries. When you account for the population size and diversity of America, it's a statistical miracle how well Americans get paid.
EA and capitalism focus on efficiency and not virtue. You can't substitute being unvirtuous with being hyper-efficient, and I don't think anyone is going to argue otherwise. There's an argument to be made that efficiency is crowding out virtue, especially when it comes to capitalism, but even then I think you're significantly overestimating this effect. I don't think this same argument can be applied to EA. Overall, I think it inspires rationalist-obsessing nerds to be more interested in virtuous behavior. One of them happens to be me. Another, happens to be a billionaire scam artist.
I work in tech and definitely make more than I need. I work for a small company (and don't even have any employees under me) so I'd at least like to think that I'm not that involved in exploiting people in order to make money.
Now the question that I have is what do I do with the excess money I'm making, especially since I do actually agree with you about the not accumulating wealth part. One option is of course spending a lot of time analysing charities to figure out which one I think would be the best to donate to, but while I'm still not completely ruling it out, I feel like that would make analysing charities almost a part time job. Since at least at the moment i don't want to do that, I still settled on donating based on GiveWell's recommendations, essentially outsourcing the charities analysis. I am aware that GiveWell and I probably don't share 100% of our values, but I truly don't see a better option.
So really, if you, or anyone else, has a better idea of what I can do with the excess money I'm making, I'd be more than happy to listen.
What.
The stereotypical EA person is a banker who makes $150k/year after tax and donates $100k/year to the against malaria foundation. As opposed to the lawyer who quits working for corporate and becomes a gardner, which seems to be what you're advocating.
The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives.
Either that or just confusion about what and/or who we are talking about.
EA is not a well defined set of concepts or ideas. I do know a lot of people who identify as EA and have argued for "earn-to-give" where the giving part is deferred far into the future.
I won't spur the confusion further but my own personal experience is that there are several people I have personally met who more closely match the parents description than the description you give.
I'm all for earn-to-give if you are doing the giving soon and to causes where the outcomes are easier to measure, like what you mentioned. This is very commendable.
Where EA-style thinking runs into trouble is where it places excess confidence in future predictions
either A) I will eventually donate this money B) This cause I'm donating to has no obvious impact now, but it will have immense impact in the future or C) Even though I can't see all the negative impacts my work is having, my prediction/inference is that the negative impacts will be smaller than the positive impacts of my altruism.
So I have nothing against the idea of trying to maximize good, I just think that I frequently see it used in conjunction with excessively high-confidence predictions or inferences.
In your case, I think it's important that the banker do some sort of accounting of whether he is having a negative impact on their current project/firm etc. There are bankers who have had a huge negative impact in the past and so this does need to be part of the accounting.
I guess the example is incomplete, the banker also contributes to some system in a way, is the work harmful to others?
And if the work is beneficial, they're still part of a system where, why are they taking such a large salary in the first place?
Now, I'm actually not opposed to this form of EA. Like the other commenter said, donating money is fine, it's choosing to become a banker and trying to become the highest paid banker in history, so that you can then go and donate a larger sum of that income that I find problematic.
The latter form of EA seems wrong to me, because the idea that you'll take more money from people, to then personally decide who else you'll give it back too and how much of it you'll keep for yourself or not, that does not seem altruistic.
Instead I wish that people adopted a moral where making excessively more than others, or owning excessively more things than others was just seen as wrong to begin with. If you don't need more than 100k, then just charge less for your services, or pay your employees and staff more, or heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.
Am I reading this wrong or are you saying that the government is the most efficient form of charity?
I wish they just partied and spent their money competing on luxury buys with each other.
Instead, we made that "bad" or something, and now they compete on who can signal the most and biggest virtues, and here we are.
Most drugs go to market with the idea of being effective, e.g. treating as many people / conditions as possible. This leads to a problem that most people deal with a slightly different problem from the next person, so you just end up with large groups of small numbers of people who are essentially overlooked, because they're not profitable enough to make a drug or treatment for. This class is called "orphan drugs"
Yes, this is mostly "how the industry / capitalism" works, but that's the point. By measuring how effective altruism is, and by only doing the things that are most effective, you'll essentially end up with many "orphan" categories at the end.
There are many other equally good (and often conflicting) possible goals: sufficiency, diversity, happiness, regret, etc.
The current economy focuses on efficiency because it’s about infinite capital accumulation using finite resources, and that’s what benefits the people at the helm.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/17/5095068...
Who knew Judas was the good guy this whole time?
But yeah it applied to 30 pieces of silver as well.
What’s better than picking individual charities based on utility? Charity index funds. Also known as social democratic governments that collect taxes.
Well yes, but in the absence (or inadequacy) of such government action for causes you care about, doesn't it make sense to donate to the charities that most effectively do the thing you care about?
That conclusion does not follow. Why do you think a social democratic government has any focus on the utility of its work?
Yes, by application only. Because the near-intuitive next step in thinking is that, heck, we can’t all be the comfortable one, someone has got to be the person getting their hands dirty incrementally adding to all of those QALY’s and clearly They’re too enlightened in understanding this to be the one living uncomfortably with dirty hands.
So the mathematical inevitability is there needs to be some gate keeping, and why shouldn’t it be the people who realized that also make the decisions about access?
Self serving, self reinforcing bullshit. Probably a mixture of honest good intentions and rationalizing of guilt for being better off than others.
The modern age makes it just about impossible to not be aware of a lot of awful crap in the world, so it’s no surprise that some of the current generation, finding themselves at or adjacent to the pinnacle of wealth and opportunity through some admixture of at least a little ability and a lot of good fortune and circumstance and some degree— large or small— of actual empathy, become plagued by the cognitive dissonance. By living so well but knowing that right this moment countless people are at the absolute opposite most desperate and miserable end of that spectrum, many soon to be dead, many dead just in the time it took me to type this.
Maybe I have it easier, cognitive dissonance wise, by virtue of having just a little of my formative years that 1) preceded a time when easy knowledge of the systemic awfulness of much of the world was unavoidable before a person hit a double-digit age and 2) Had a fair bit of personal awfulness in them as well. awfulness that was, in terms of the world wide range, still thankfully minor but enough that the dissonance is small.
So it’s no surprise that a somewhat cliquish group of the generation around the cultural/economic/academic centers of the world that, even just by virtue of their location, afford a great deal of opportunity have come up with a line of thinking that justifies their place in the world.
My hope is that an extra decade or two of experience and living and seeing how consequences play out slices off some critical mass of those folks who are a bit more self aware. At least enough to recognize that figuring out how to live your life as a decent person isn’t always going to be a problem that’s algorithmicaly or mathematically solvable.
Because I’d really prefer the next crop of people who find themselves in positions of wealth, power, and influence— again through some combination of (hopefully) a little merit and a lot of good fortune and circumstance… well, I’d prefer them to not be well intentioned but tragically arrogant assholes trying to figure out things like:
Is it better to suffer the inconvenience of saving the fleeing refugee on my doorstep? Or should I instead work an extra hour or two a month in order to earn a calculated incremental bonus in pay that might be donated to a cause that might be able to save 10 refugees?
I don’t want people in positions of power and influence to think that is, in any way, an interesting or worthwhile question to pursue as a mature intellectual use of their brain power rather than a shitty waste of time.
It really, really, is not hard to see where applying quasi mathematical calculation will get you when you start weighing hypothetical future lives against the resources directed today towards various EA projects.
Anything can be justified when you’re trying to do mathematical ethics against vastly unlikely but catastrophically bad scenarios, all while ignoring the fact that if you don’t address the “right now” systemic and intractable problems we’ll get to much more likely existential crisis long before we have to worry about runaway ai-complete malevolent entities causing harm.
And that is actually an apt example— there is a certain amount of overlap between the EAS movement and the rational discussion communities that came up the idea of Roko’s Basilisk.
The more material argument is whether from an EA perspective running massive scams and funneling the proceeds to EA causes should be applauded or not. Obviously the fact that this discussion is even being surfaced will cause brand damage, but again it says nothing to which perspective is correct, just that these discussions are subject to optics-based constraints. It's like the open discussions in the rationalist community over whether various horrible civilizational collapses happening to humanity might actually be desirable because it will prevent (or at least delay) an AI from killing us. There's serious discussions but it never plays well to bring this to a "normie" audience. But pretty much every movement has its Straussian elements where the "insider" narratives contradict the "outsider" narratives.
Is that really the material argument? It seems obvious to this normie that the answer ought to be "hell no".
Lots of parallels here beyond the obvious common thread of utilitarian collectivism:
- Censorship: the concept of "infohazards" is super-popular https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/information-hazards
- Social control + the creation of an 'other': They are absolutely convinced that sentient AGI will inevitably kill everyone without any real evidence. However, if we manage to create sentient AGI, what these guys plan to do with it is best described as modern slavery https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-boxing-containment#:~:text=...
- Surveillance: They justify it using Bostrom's "vulnerable world hypothesis": https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf?platform=hoots... (TFA also discusses it well)
- Desire for government power: TFA is super clear about that. More interestingly, here's the FTX Future Fund on space governance: "We’d love to see workshops or a mock constitutional convention where sharp people think hard about how to structure international governance institutions for the long-term future, or how to govern space settlement. As explained in more detail on our areas of interest page, we believe that the onset of space settlement could be a watershed moment in human history. We want people to start thinking about how it should work." https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/alternative-voting-system...
Also: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/space-governance/
- Entryism/influence operations: Pretty much every career profile on 80,000 Hours encourages taking a job at government agencies/influential private organizations to push the EA agenda https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk. No one with morals and a spine should fear this. (FWIW, the same justification of fearing retribution by an evil power for refusing to collaborate could be used by people in occupied countries who collaborated with the Nazis.)
I mean, maybe sorta.. the eschatology is far more interesting with EA, at least.
Hence the obsession with AI safety - Christians just have to work to bring Christ's kingdom to where they are. The EAs have to make sure nobody summons a vengeful demon overlord while they're slowly crafting their own all-loving, all-powerful digital deity.
But: they haven't been caught actually doing anything remotely bad (they have some assholes as followers, some of whom are also crooks, but I struggle to blame EA for it) and perhaps, maybe, they really are donating tons of money to good causes?
Are there any estimates of how much money EA raised for the world? I mean, if each and every one of the donates 10% of their income, they are far ahead of me, and I'll shut up and put up.
Though, yeah wow, I didn't realize how cliquey Effective Altruism had become.
No thanks.
Why do perfectly nice general descriptive terms so often become tightly bound with one small group and their whole very particular worldview?
Philanthropy? Charity? Those words fit perfectly.
Does anyone sincerely set out to be ineffective in those endeavors? I can't imagine anyone who was knowingly insincere would have trouble also claiming the moniker of effective altruism. Nonetheless, I think the term "effective altruism" is also intended to encompass and imply some additional--if optional--characteristics about the giver or the form of giving, such as leading a more sustainable lifestyle or the consideration given to one's choices in choosing particular acts of charity. But we don't need that term merely for the act of distributing or funding the distribution of mosquito nets--philanthropy and charity are more than sufficient. And, technically speaking, charity has usually sufficed in any event--e.g. clergy who give their entire lives over to charity work weren't in search of more descriptive nomenclature, AFAIK.
Maybe you feel we don't need a word. But I find it odd, and kind of suspicious, when we insist we can't give a distinct name to something that is clearly a thing.
Sure, if you needed a term to categorize. We can build ontologies (and identities) all day if we want. But I ask this: can you quantify the difference between a qualitative vs quantitative emphasis in charity work? Point being: I'm not sure the distinction has much substance or utility. If one's aims are merely to feel good, without any concern for concrete, identifiable impacts, that doesn't fit the definition of altruism or charity or philanthropy. And with mixed motives (as they always are), it's really only the selfless aspect that counts as any of those when we're being pedantic. Even the tax code recognizes this--something is a charitable deduction only to the extent you don't personally derive value from it, and the deduction value is (in principle) the actual value imparted.
But if being able to identify as an "effective altruist" motivates more people to perform more charity, then who am I to argue ;)
I mean, I'll bite the bullet and say yes. People will always choose to have more effectiveness in a ceteris peribus sense, but the best you could say for the actual observed pattern of charitable contributions is that people are being swayed in their giving by all sorts of concerns (social pressures, ignorance, bigotry, etc.) that cause them to trade off effectiveness for those things. And the message of EA is basically "recognize and call out these biases unless they're truly reflective of your values."
Also a problem with charity, especially in the US, is as the IRS defines it, it's not necessarily charitable. So it's easy to confuse altruism with plain old politics, vanity, and for-profit business disguised as a tax-exempt and then argue that anyone that disagree is not rational.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Please stop repackaging the same garbage and calling it new.
Each of us, individually, pursuing our own self-interests produce value to society and others as a whole. Whether through producing products, offering services, performing labor, or consuming goods, we all seek our own interests to the betterment of the whole.
EA is just a new sort of chivalry for a new wannabe class of Nobles. That's it.
No it doesn't. I'm content to outsource my charitable decision-making to recommenders that I think align with my values. A competitor is free to come along and convince me that they'd make a better recommendation and I'll shift my money accordingly, just like buying any other product. They can even skim a bit off the top if I really trust them and give to their funds! That's the invisible hand.
By the way, a charity quite popular in mainstream Effective Altruism is Give Directly - which aims to avoid trying to figure out what poor people need by giving them cash.
Smelly, dead hands, liberal
> fossil fuel
Polluting, dead hands, liberal
> buy sell meat
Greasy, dead hands, liberal
On good terms I would have permitted the fossil fuel claim, but in the context of the others I'd rather be a militant.