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Authors: John Halstead, Hauke Hillebrandt
Opinions are ours, not those of our employers.
Summary
Randomista development (RD) is a form of development economics which evaluates and promotes interventions that can be tested by randomised controlled trials (RCTs). It is exemplified by GiveWell (which primarily works in health) and the randomista movement in economics (which primarily works in economic development).
Here we argue for the following claims, which we believe to be quite weak:
- Prominent economists make plausible arguments which suggest that research on and advocacy for economic growth in l
The following is a heavily edited transcript of a talk I gave for the Stanford Effective Altruism club on 19 Jan 2020. I had rev.com transcribe it, and then Linchuan Zhang, Rob Bensinger and I edited it for style and clarity, and also to occasionally have me say smarter things than I actually said. Linch and I both added a few notes throughout. Thanks also to Bill Zito, Ben Weinstein-Raun, and Howie Lempel for comments.
I feel slightly weird about posting something so long, but this is the natural place to put it.
Over the last year my beliefs about AI risk have shifted moderately; I expect tha... (Read more)
Sorry, I wasn't very clear on the first point: There isn't a 'correct' prior.
In our context (by context I mean both the small number of observations and the implicit hypotheses that we're trying to differentiate between), the prior has a large enough weight that it affects the eventual result in a way that makes the method unhelpful.
Crossposted from Charity Entrepreneurship's Blog here
Introduction
There has been recent discussion within effective altruism around global mental health as a new cause area. In the 2018 EA survey, it was included as a potential top cause area, and around 4% of EAs identified it as their top priority [1]. This has led us to think about whether Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) should do prioritisation research on mental health as a potentially high-impact cause area. Many of us at CE have been convinced that this is a promising enough area to investigate as one of the four areas for our 2020... (Read more)
The Procreation Asymmetry consists of these two claims together:
- it’s bad to bring into existence an individual who would have a bad existence, other things being equal, or the fact that an individual would have a bad existence is a reason to not bring them into existence; and
- it’s at best indifferent to bring into existence an individual who would have a good existence, other things being equal, or the fact that an individual would have a good existence is not a reason to bring them into existence.
However, if a bad existence can be an "existential harm" (according to c... (Read more)
Here's a more thorough treatment of a similar approach:
Teruji Thomas: The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term
And also, what interventions can be done to increase the amount of human-digestible calories (as well as various nutrients) in the ocean that would be available after some global catastrophe?
Actually, similar questions also apply for other calorie sources. For example, maybe eating insects is good on utilitarian grounds because it encourages the insect industry which can more easily continue to thrive even if the Sun gets blocked.
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You’ve also suggested that we eat bacteria. How would that work?
There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting ... (Read more)
Some information I found
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Could the oceans feed us?
If you looked at the amount of fish that we currently eat, it’s just a tiny fraction of the human diet. You can expand that much more without wiping out all the fisheries. If you have significant climate change, that will result in more upwelling [seawater rise from the depth of the ocean to the surface], which will be like fertilizing the ocean surface, and you get more fish. Similarly we can purposely fertilize the ocean in order to get more fish. So then we have enough fish to feed everyone... (read more)
The Weapon of Openness is an essay published by Arthur Kantrowitz and the Foresight Institute in 1989. In it, Kantrowitz argues that the long-term costs of secrecy in adversarial technology development outweigh the benefits, and that openness (defined as "public access to the information needed for the making of public decisions") will therefore lead to better technology relative to adversaries and hence greater national security. As a result, more open societies will tend to outperform more secretive societies, and policymakers should tend strongly towards openness even in cases where secrecy
... (Read more)All else equal, I would expect a secret organisation to have worse epistemics and be more prone to corruption than an open one, both of which would impair its ability to pursue its goals. Do you disagree?
No I agree with these pro tanto costs of secrecy (and the others you mentioned before). But key to the argument is whether these problems inexorably get worse as time goes on. If so, then the benefits of secrecy inevitably have a sell-by date, and once the corrosive effects spread far enough one is better off 'cutting ones losses' - or never goin... (read more)
Artificial intelligence alignment is believed by many to be one of the most important challenges we face right now. I understand the argument that once AGI is developed it's game over unless we have solved alignment, and I am completely convinced by this. However, I have never seen anyone explain the reasoning that leads experts in the field to believe that AGI could be here in the near future. Claims that there is an X% chance of AGI in the next Y years (where X is fairly large and Y fairly small) are rarely supported by an actual argument.
I realize that for the EA community to dedicate... (Read more)
Note also that your question has a selection filter where you'd also want to figure out where the best arguments for longer timelines are. In an ideal world these two sets of things tend to live in the same place, in our world this isn't always the case.
Over the long run, technology has improved the human condition. Nevertheless, the economic progress from technological innovation has not arrived equitably or smoothly. While innovation often produces great wealth, it has also often been disruptive to labor, society, and world order. In light of ongoing advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”), we should prepare for the possibility of extreme disruption, and act to mitigate its negative impacts. This report introduces a new policy lever to this discussion: the Windfall Clause.
What is the Windfall Clause?
The Windf
... (Read more)B.2. “The Windfall Clause will shift investment to competitive non-signatory firms.”... (read more)
The concern here is that, when multiple firms are competing for windfall profits, a firm bound by the Clause will be at a competitive disadvantage because unbound firms could offer higher returns on new capital. That is, investors would prefer firms that are not subject to a “tax” on their profits in the form of the Windfall Clause. This is especially bad because it could mean that more prosocial firms (i.e., ones that have signed the Clause) wo
When I reflect back on my experiences at South Bay EA, the one thing that would save us so much time (that we can then use for non-scalable activities like 1:1s) is if we had high quality pre-made discussion sheets.
(To be clear, this is still an ongoing problem).
It takes us ~3-12 hours to make a typical discussion sheet for one meetup.
Naively, it would be really helpful if CEA or a crowdsourced group (eg, this forum) worked on creating high-quality discussion sheets that would save us 90% of the effort.
I could imagine other content being helpful as well, for example ("intro to EA" ... (Read more)
Do you have a sense of whether/how much new material is needed vs. we already have all the existing material and it's just a question of compiling everything together?
If the former, a follow-up question is which new material will be helpful. Would be excited you (or anybody else) also answer this related question:
This shallow review was written by SoGive. SoGive is an organisation which provides services to donors to help them to achieve high impact donations.
This is a very quick, rough model of the cost-effectiveness of promoting clean cookstoves in the developing world. It suggests that:
- If a clean cookstove intervention is successful, it may have roughly the same ballpark of cost-effectiveness as a GiveWell-recommended charity
- C.90% of the impact comes from directly saving lives, in a model which reflected saving lives and climate change impact
This is very much not intended to be a final, polished... (Read more)
Thanks for the encouragement. I think that aiming for a "perfect" write-up has been a barrier to publishing content, so I intend for us to publish more shallow reviews to address this.
To answer your question, I think the best focus areas would be the six bullet points highlighted near the start of the article, with a particular focus on the first two (are the stoves actually used, and are they actually clean?) and the last (what is the best way to fund this work?).
Also, we would further investigate the very useful comments made by MatthewDahlhaus... (read more)
I'm thinking the objective function could have constraints on the expected number of times the AI breaks the law, or the probability that it breaks the law, e.g.
- only actions with a probability of breaking any law < 0.0001 are permissible, or
- only actions for which the expected number of broken laws is < 0.001 are permissible.
There could also be separate constraints for individual laws or groups of laws, and these could depend on the severity of the penalties.
Looser constraints like this seem like they could avoid issues of lexicality and prioritizing avoidance of breaking the law ... (Read more)
Cullen's argument was "alignment may not be enough, even if you solve alignment you might still want to program your AI to follow the law because <reasons>." So in my responses I've been assuming that we have solved alignment; I'm arguing that after solving alignment, AI-powered enforcement will probably be enough to handle the problems Cullen is talking about. Some quotes from Cullen's comment (emphasis mine):
Reasons other than directly getting value alignment from law that you might want to program AI to follow the law... (read more)
We must take evolution into account when we consider animal welfare — whether we’re thinking about which animals are sentient or how animals might respond to a given intervention. In this talk, Wild Animal Initiative’s Michelle Graham presents a brief introduction to the theory of evolution (she also recommends this video for more background), explains how understanding evolution can help us conduct better research, and discusses the ways misconceptions about evolution lead us astray.
We’ve lightly edited Michelle’s talk for clarity. You may also watch it on Y... (Read more)
Since this topic interests me and i'm killing time I decided to comment on a few things in your post.
1. wikipedia has a reasonable article on exaptations as an introduction. i also reccomend looking at the wikip article on sexual selection---in my view these topics overlap. (The wikip article on sexual selection looks less complete---i think 'fisher's runaway process' described in that article is most relevant but some others prefer the 'handicap principal'.
there are much more recent articles on these topi... (read more)
eg, discussion sheets, syllabi, how-to-do {stuff}, etc.
Great comment - strong upvote! :)