Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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The title of the article doesn’t really line up with what you probably think it contains. It’s more about learning a highly specific regulatory framework or bureaucratic process. Here’s an example:

The specifics of congressional appropriations, federal funding, and procurement: what sorts of things does the government purchase, how does this relate to biotech or AI (software)? Related to this, becoming an expert on the Strategic National Stockpile and understanding the mechanisms of how a vendor managed inventory could work.

I guess it depends on the context, but I think if your goal is to “make the world a better place” (which is ostensibly what EA is aiming at) this is probably bad advice. The attitude here is a very technocratic one, in which the solution to problems is to understand them abstractly and then manipulate societal machinery to solve them. I don’t think this actually works in reality, as many EA examples have shown.

Instead, if you interpret the title to be a little more straightforward, I do think it’s actually good advice. Just make that “something” be something useful in-itself. Become an expert at building computers from scratch, or hydroponics, or repairing diesel engines, or installing solar panels. A world full of people that know how to do stuff is almost certainly better than one full of “experts” that have only abstract knowledge, especially when it comes to things like 3D printing or the security of voting machines. (Mentioned as examples in the article.)

> I don’t think this actually works in reality, as many EA examples have shown.

Can you give some examples of this failing? Naively many examples of things improving that i know of were either very boring bureaucratic endeavors or required heavily involvement in bureaucracy. The Clean Air and Water Act, the FDA, the Civil Rights Act, all required people at the level of government or some other large social group to organize and plan things and make them happen. And thus you need people with the specific area knowledge and group connections in that area to make those things happen.

Or is this a mis-reading of your claim?

I was mostly making a reference to SBF, but sure, certainly there are large scale projects that require boring bureaucratic knowledge. But I am assuming that the audience of the post is not people that want to build a career in policy. Because if that’s the case, this advice is a little too obvious - of course you should become an expert in X thing if you want to build a career in X field.

More generally though, my claim is just that solutions tend to be better when they are implemented locally and pragmatically, and not when thought of as abstract problems that can be solved by study and thought.

Probably not a good idea to judge all of EA but SBF. EA long predates SBF and had some huge wins by seriously asking the question "which charities save the most lives per dollar?" (technically: Quality Adjusted Years of Life, or QUALY). Really helped the world realize that things like mosquito nets in Africa were _grossly_ underfunded[0].

While I'm not an EA myself, accomplishments like Givewell[1] have really helped me keep respect for the movement - walking the walk is always orders of magnitude harder and more complex than talking the talk after all.

[0] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-am... [1] https://www.givewell.org/

EA is just a modified form of utilitarianism, which has plenty of its own flaws.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/z93koy/what_...

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathemat...

Linking to a grab-bag of random claims by people with their own axes to grind is not terribly convincing or conducive to productive discussion. Do you think EA people haven't saved as many lives as they claim (just in the here and now, disregarding the minority of funding going to speculative future causes), or that this is not as important as they claim?

I linked to a number of critiques of EA and of utilitarianism.

I’m not super interested in debating the specifics of it, I am just highly skeptical of movements that place abstract formulas at the center, especially ones that have extensive funding from ethically dubious characters.

That’s all I have to say about it. Better critiques are listed in the links I shared.

EA is ethically and morally bankrupt. SBF is no accident, he's the ideal poster child for the whole movement.

By modified form i think you mean "implemented" form. Unlike pretty much every other ethical theory they actually practice what they believe in, which is really their defining characteristic. Even Christians don't do that much charitable giving nowadays.

Also, frankly, it's really strange to see people rushing to attack them. Are mosquito nets and 3rd world children really so hated?

No, I mean modified. EA is clearly drawing on a lot of utilitarian ideas, but it’s not exactly the same thing.

The comment on implementation is neither here nor there. Plenty of people implement their ethical theories. I don’t know how implementing something is an argument for the correctness of that thing. Certainly it’s good that a lot of people don’t implement their ethical theories.

Even Christians don't do that much charitable giving nowadays.

Every source I can find says exactly the opposite.

> The comment on implementation is neither here nor there.

About as much here or there as the statement that they are implementing utilitarianism at all.

> Every source I can find says exactly the opposite.

There was a post here recently about this exact thing. Detailing the rise of megachurches, how they are stealing away the majority of Christmas from small churches, and how they don't do any charity.

Ah, i see. That makes more sense, although the focus on abstract problems was not the lesson i gathered from the post. In fact, my impression was that this post was actually saying more of the opposite. Don't "dream up novel UN structures, spend time in abstract game theory", but instead get a job in some concrete and simple (i.e non-abstract) field that allows you to then be involved in policy making in some way, either as a policy making leader or an expert who can assist with making said policy. I mean, it's examples of Privacy / data protection laws and Biochemical supply chains are pretty concrete and encourage pragmatic solutions if it's literally your job.

Agreed. This first item is quite entertaining: "I’m especially interested in how liability law would handle spreading infohazards, e.g. if a bio lab publishes a virus sequence that is then used for bioterrorism"

Well, if that happens, it would seem legal liability is not the most important topic or the first line of business...? Fighting the pandemic would be a little more urgent? Is it possible we need more biologists than lawyers?

I would agree with you if that knowledge wasn't the stuff industrial organization was made of. That is expertise many countries currently lack and have experts come in from overseas to deploy.

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