Open Thread 2

The question is not going to be whether we should moderate ourselves- yes or no - but when and how much. Moderating yourself, consciously or unconsciously is part of being a functioning human.

Great question. We should definitely consider these reputational effects as they could be large.

I'd start by thinking about what portfolio might look best from the point of view of helping to grow the movement well. My guess is that this isn't necessarily having everyone "as normal as possible", but could well be in that direction from where we are right now.

Then when we're thinking about deviations we can think about how large the reputational effect is and how large the benefit is. It's actually pretty hard to estimate the size of reputational effect, but we should try. For example thinking about what the effect might be if the whole movement were doing it might be a reasonable first approximation. In some cases that probably underestimates the costs -- if your behaviour is extreme even within the movement, it's more likely to be picked up on and have a high reputational cost. In some cases that may overestimate the costs -- e.g. if the whole movement were vegetarian that might appear weird and discourage growth, but having half the movement be vegetarian probably doesn't.

It sounds to me that living in a van is likely to be erring too far on the side of ignoring reputation.

In your case, it might be that the best thing to do is to quietly continue not to take overseas holidays, but not talk about it much. Or to only take them occasionally. (Of course it could be that the not taking overseas holidays provides a useful talking point and helps more than it hurts -- it isn't obvious to me, but I'm glad you're at least considering the question.)

I don't think it's a matter of reputation as much as a matter of socialization and network building. Humans are at their best when they're interacting with other humans (generally speaking). If your actions based in EA motivations are hurting your personal relationships or your ability to socialize, either by constraining your living situation or by limiting your social interactions due to cost / time considerations, then they may be doing more harm than good. I think building a strong network of friends and colleagues is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and shouldn't be easily discounted for the sake of simply giving as much money as you can.

Similarly, while going overseas for vacation is expensive and bad for the environment, sometimes seeing another place or culture in real life can have a lot of altruism-related benefits.

I don't mean this to disparage your particular life choices, but rather to say that a "typical" EA shouldn't be expected to make the same choices, and it shouldn't be implied that making those choices makes you more effective or more altruistic than somebody else who focuses more on network building and travel, for instance.

First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1].

The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they're starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It's currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle.

Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, 'anyone giving $10 to Oxfam' was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like.

The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn't sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as:

• does this include income before or after taxes?

Personally, I would qualify this commitment with what each individual effective altruist honestly tries as hard as they can to figure out what the best charity is given their best estimates and their personal values, even as they differ from those of others. In practice, such research is difficult, so I would recommend looking to evaluations independent of one another, organizationally, and across disciplines, converging upon the same solutions. This is what effective altruism calls cluster thinking, and it's an epistemology the effective altruist movement is turning toward.

Of course, the 10% commitment was chosen as a round number favored historically by the donation standard prescribed by various world religions. How arbitrary it really is, and if effective altruism should rethink it, may be a challenged posed by the possible future success of The Life You Can Save. If the The Life You Can Save, which only encourages people to pledge at least only 1% of their income, ever hits some critical mass in how much awareness it raises, and the amount of money from as many people as possible, that no other effective altruist organization had yet achieved, it may force effective altruism to rethink how it presents itself.

In a way, the already thousands of effective altruists, hopefully of whom as many as possible will continue to be effective altruists, will demonstrate a cluster-thinking approach to lifestyle design for effective altruists. Effective altruism is a voluntary movement in which, aside from the narrow standard, not yet well-defined, above, one can choose to live how they wish. The commonalities of what makes life more functional for effective altruists will come to light as time passes, so what's 'normal' for effective altruism, while still being 'normal' for the rest of the world at large, will become apparent.

I wish more effective altruists would share their personal stories, and how they differ not only in their donations, but lifestyle choices, from others. Luckily, effective altruists don't even need their own blogs to do so, as they can post them to this forum. I will indeed make a new thread next time encouraging others to do this.

[1] The lifestyle written about in that post was written by Jeff Kaufman about the effective altruist lives his wife and himself are leading. They're earning to give, in addition to raising awareness of effective altruism by updating how they build their life with effective altruism in mind, without sacrifice. Since that article was written, Kaufman and Wise have increased how much of their joint income they give from 30% to 50%, while raising their first child. They may be the best existing example of how normal effective altruism can be for any middle class person.

I think that the Fermi estimate is a good start, but I am more suspicious that it might be a substantial underestimate of the cost-effectiveness.

The strongest case for the Ebola outbreak to be an outstanding giving opportunity seems to be that the outbreak might grow a long way, and intervening now could be an easy way to help containment and give outside agencies enough time to get a proper plan into action.

Perhaps there's a story where we're on route to discover a cure or vaccine, but we'll hit 1 million deaths (say) before this happens, and it will still be on its exponential growth curve at that stage. Then it might be pretty cheap to slow the whole thing down by 1% today, but that could translate to 10,000 fewer deaths at the point where the cure or vaccine comes in.

I don't really think that story has high likelihood, particularly as perturbations can lessen its impact -- if Ebola spreads slower today, perhaps that will also slow down the efforts of people who would eventually deal with it; or if it's no longer in exponential growth phase when we get a solution then the effect will be much smaller. But this looks like a scenario where the tail benefit could dominate, so I'd want to take the possibility seriously if looking at this.

If this is correct then early interventions could be quite a bit better (in expectation) than later ones. My best guess right now is that it's still not good enough to target, though.

More young people attend protests but more older people participate in lobbying, fund political parties, and provide most funding for charities.

Many young people I know basically treat protests as a recreational event.

I think old people just have more resources than young people, so they give less as a proportion of their resources.

Alternatively, you might think old people have had a lot of time to develop commitments to various causes, and so feel obligated to give more.

older people ... provide most funding for charities

Do you have figures for this? They could be relevant for EA groups which focus on raising funds (like local groups with older members, or older people in their social networks).

I agree, because people of all different demographics not only have different kinds of resources, but different opportunities.

Young people are more likely to have time to attend protests, and involve themselves in activism. It's easier to schedule those events around a shift at your part-time job, or a single class you have that day, than a business meeting, crucial to your career, the sort of which will become more common in your thirties. There's also a lower cost to social status if young people do things that look weird, and deviate from societal norms, which tend to be set by an older, possibly less active, generation. At a younger age, what individuals lack is soft power, and influence. After all, if they could change things without protest action, surely they would try do so more readily.

Of course, the older generation, between the ages of 30 and 50, is hardly inactive, really. They just focus on different things, because they have different motivations. This is a time when, keeping up appearances to stay ahead in the rat race, one cannot take as many personal risks without risking career capital. People of this demographic are also more likely to have a large(r) family of dependents, such as young children, and elderly parents. In addition to the high constraints all this may place on time and money, the fact that this is family may cause people to focus less upon distant others. This is understandable. People of this cohort are still altruistic, though. However, upon focusing on their career development, family, and community, they're more likely to support causes that have been brought to their attention by their default circle of influence. They may fund donation drives at their children's school, or at the workplace, they may volunteer locally, and they may count the community involvement they do for fun altruistic in its own right as well. Also, because they have so much to care for, people of prime working age may be minimizing extra costs, such as donated time or money, to hedge against unknown risks such as family emergencies, etc.

As people age, their children, and other family, are no longer dependent upon them. After retirement, people have more time. Even in the later parts of one's career, before retirement, one may own a business, or be in a position for which one doesn't need to put in extra effort beyond the requirements to stay afloat, or get ahead. Elders have more money to donate to political causes, but they also leave legacy gifts, endowments, and the like. This happens at a time when they're more respected in society as elders, and may have more soft power anyway. Additionally, they either have more money than they'll ever need, or they at least have greater confidence in how secure the money they have saved will support them for the remainder of their lives. Finally, they may think about supporting grander causes in a broader way than what they did with altruism earlier in their life, as they think about how they'll want to be known, and remembered.

This model above is a hypothesis for a trend. Of course, there will be outliers. Mark Zuckerburg is influencing the world in ways many in their twenties couldn't have dreamed of, while they're still trying to get on the career track. On the converse, it would be crass of us to just assume the typical senior has money they're sitting on that they could give away, when many pensioners themselves are in need. Indeed, I believe that increasing the healthspan of seniors could be considered one of the most effective altruism opportunities available, given the right research, and application of it. Anyway, this model seems simple enough to verify, or falsify, by checking the right sort of data.

What I'm trying to show is that it seems intuitively plausible that everyone has ideals, and everyone cares, but society drives people to care about different things in different ways over the course of their lives. To a parent, 'ensuring my child grows up happy, healthy, and safe' may be an ideal felt as strongly by a young activist yet without children pushing for some greater equity, or equality, in society. Cynicism of any particular generation doesn't need to be rejected on the basis that it's unattractive; rather, the cynical approach of older generations don't care, or young people are too naive, may not explain as much as simply as this other model.

Ryan, if you think this hypothesis may hold weight, where could someone access the data to check? If not you, would someone at 80,000 Hours know? I feel as if that if we could figure this out, it could be not only an optimistic but also truer message that, e.g., Will MacAskill could put into his book. For people of any age, effective altruism will be non-conformist. If we can paint a positive picture that everyone cares, and wants to care, about the world, but just socially pushed in different directions, people new to effective altruism might realize that they can get off the hedonic treadmill anytime they like, rethink where they focus their resources for doing good, and find support in others.

I was involved in the initial facebook thread on the topic. At the time, I made less than 30k, didn't ever expect to make much more than $30k (I'm a nanny), and was highly turned off by the conversation.

Two cross-country moves later, I have actually doubled my income, but I still am highly turned off by elitist EA conversations that assume that all the readers are high-potential-earners in their 20s with strong social safety nets.

It would have been much easier to convince me to donate 10% of a $30k income, than to upend my life in order to make some kind of career change.

I think that if the Standard EA Recommendation for middle- to low-income people is "come back when you make more money", no middle- to low-income people (to a first approximation) will ever become interested in EA.

I think if I made 30k a year and asked someone what EA-related things I could do and they told me "you don't make enough to worry about donating, try to optimize your income some more and then we'll talk," my reaction would be "Ack! I don't want to upend my entire life! I just want to help some people! These guys are mean." And then I would stop paying attention to effective altruism.

My general heuristic for stuff like this is that it's more important for general recommendations to look reasonable than for them to be optimal (within reason). This is because by the time someone is wondering whether your policy is actually optimal, they care enough to be thinking like an effective altruist already, and are less likely to be scared off by a wrong answer than someone who's evaluating the surface-reasonableness.

A strong consideration in favour of donating on that sort of modest wage is that it gets you into the habit of doing so, rather keeping on putting it off until you're richer. It also makes you better able to influence others to donate.

Also, an admittedly cursory look at Wikipedia suggests that the median adult income in the US is $24k/year, which'd suggest that telling these people not to donate would exclude half of all adults. (I expect that $24k/year is not the most relevant figure to use here, but the point stands that it's easy to underestimate how wealthy we are even compared to others in the developed world.)

most EA's (at least on facebook)

Yeah, this is a problem in gauging the majority opinions of effective altruists on anything. The best assessment of that for real will come out with the results of the 2014 effective altruism survey, which are being processed now. Even still, though, issues like this are still too new, specific, and narrow within effective altruism for a reliable record of consensus to be known. The issue is that the people who post, or comment, regularly in the Facebook group select themselves to be people who have fun discussing conundrums in giant forums. I am like this. Notice how I am commenting on everything, rather than spending my time earning more money, and then giving it away.

I would estimate that only 10% of effective altruists regularly discuss it on social media, and I don't believe the few major perspectives put forward in any one discussion thread can be reliably thought of as representative of all positions effective altruists might take on that discussion. I believe to curb this issue is the reason, in part, this forum was started.

Context here (fixed)

These are good well-established concepts. I have some suggestions that are styled more as subjective advice that I would give to newcomers based on my experience.

• System 1 and System 2 in applied rationality: people often have low motivation if their intuitions conflict with their analysis. If you're pretty sure something is correct, it's good to support it with emotional drivers like friendship or chocolate.
• Signalling: if you're trying to model why people do good, a lot of it can be explained by assuming that they are trying to make themselves good. It seems like it might be a major driver of charitable behaviour.
• Pitfalls of expected value thinking: we're not perfect reasoning machines, and we shouldn't try to be. If you try to evaluate the expected value of everything, then you might spend too much time paralysed, or you might become untrustworthy. It's important not to just act in a way that would make you look like an extreme effective altruist but to act in a way that will make you a good ally too. (cf signalling)
• Virtue ethics: If you want to do good, it often pays to get into a habit of doing good. This means practising being nice, being generous, being successful, being thoughtful, being scholarly, being loyal, and so on. Not at the expense of thinking independently, but in order to be happily coexist with most of your neighbours most of the time.

• Net present value - even some EAs do not understand this idea.
• Statistics concepts - especially regression to the mean.
• Inside view vs Outside view.

Also not answering your question but Joey and Xio dabbled in this project previously, and you will want to check out their effort.

I know this isn't answering your question, but I think Mihai Badic was working on making a high-quality intro video at the EA summit and retreat earlier this year, so it would be worth talking to him.

What about something like this for introducing the idea of comparing causes?

Nick Beckstead's thesis "On the Overwhelming Importance of the Far Future" deals thoroughly with these questions from the perspective of Effective Altruism (albeit within the framework of a Philosophy PhD). See especially chapter 4.

http://tinyurl.com/BecksteadFuture

Working through the thought experiments he presents and seeing the different unintuitive consequences of each theory changed my mind: I had strong intuitions that creating extra happy lives had no moral value, but I'm now convinced that doesn't make sense. I also agree with Ryan that the question becomes less about what is worth adding and what isn't, and more about what we fundamentally value and whether that will be increased.

Reproduction can't be morally neutral.

Imagine a thought experiment where you have to push exactly one of three buttons:

• a - a person is created from thin air and tortured horribly for 1,000 years, then vanishes
• b - nothing happens
• c - a person is created from thin air and lives in unimaginably intense bliss and subjective freedom for 1,000 years, then vanishes

I can accept someone saying there should be no laws that mandate or ban reproduction for various practical and political reasons.

But I can't take someone seriously who says it's morally neutral which button you push in the thought experiment above.

I'll write more on this but for now, I'll just state my beliefs without really explaining why I believe them:

• Asking 'how should I feel about adding a life is the wrong kind of question to ask
• The right question to ask is 'what is valuable in life, and will this be present in that person's life
• It's not clear that we have a good concept of identity that persist over time but separate people
• We should evaluate actions based on their impact on people's lives, treating all people equally - present or future (or possibly past, depending on your moral system and philosophy of physics), local or far away, existent or not-yet-existent.
• All population ethical systems have some unintuitive consequences. It's a matter of picking the best. (or formulating a compromise)
• If you try to make a bonus or a penalty for each life created, then you get weird results, and it becomes even less intuitive.
• To the extent that we take a hard-line utilitarian view, we should judge the creation of lives purely based on the life that is created, without bonuses or penalties.

To me, the decision (freely made) to have children is morally neutral -- I am not utilitarian on this topic.

Birth rates usually fall substantially as female education levels rise and women become more empowered generally. I would be happier about the world if countries that currently have high birth rates see those birth rates fall thanks to better education levels etc. The sort of drastic fall in birth rates seen in, e.g., South Korea and Iran, are caused by large society-wide changes, and I don't think it's likely that as an outside donor I can do anything to help bring about similar society-wide change in, e.g., Nigeria.

But improved access to contraceptives and family planning information help at least some couples choose to have fewer children, and that is something that I would plausibly donate towards. (I don't know what sort of cost-per-unwanted-birth-averted figure I'd need to prefer a donation to, say, Marie Stopes over a donation to SCI, but it's something I would carefully consider if I did see those figures.)

I can't think of any realistic cases where I would pay for extra people to be born.

Here's my own opinions:

1. I think that there's no essential difference between making someone in the future better off and changing who's born in the future so that those who are born are better off. "Person A with good quality of life vs. Person A with poor quality of life" isn't very different from 'Person A with good quality of life vs. Person B with poor quality of life", because it shouldn't matter whether the two lives are "different people" or not.
2. Given (1), causing a person with poor quality of life not to be born and independently causing a person with good quality of life to be born combine to give a very good outcome, so at least one of these changes should be very good, since the benefits of independent interventions should be additive. This doesn't determine the benefit of any individual intervention, though. You could think that it's not important for more good-quality-of-life people to be born and very important for fewer poor-quality-of-life people to be born, or the reverse, or something in between. I don't think there's very strong arguments for which one of those you should choose, but I would personally value future lives fairly highly.
3. "Pure" population interventions like increasing the availability of contraception or funding infertility treatments are not very cost-effective right now, compared to "indirect" interventions. Preventing fatal diseases increases population, while economic development decreases it, and both of these things have very good non-population effects as well. Your opinion on population ethics might affect your choice between the two, however. I personally favor health interventions since I value future lives relatively highly.
4. There should be more research on the costs of changing population size - currently, it's hard to estimate how difficult it is to change population in location X by amount Y.
5. Effective altruists should think about population ethics more quantitatively. There are lots of statistics available about health, GDP, income inequality, population, etc., but I haven't seen any discussion of tradeoffs between population and the other metrics (e.g. what % population change, either positive or negative, is required to compensate for a 5% reduction in per capita GDP or a 1 year decrease in life expectancy?). Even if you don't care about the global population per se, the population size of individual countries is still important! If a country has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, adding one person to that country increases global life expectancy just as much as lengthening one person's life by 10 years does.

Ryan Carey is the only moderator, and there are maybe only 100 other people using this forum so far, so trying out something new is like a feature request that you can implement yourself. Also, forum norms here seem to be an even nicer version of norms on Less Wrong.

Also, for the record, I too think Dr. Caplan makes a nice point. There's a Facebook group I shared the link with, called 'the Economics of Doing Good'. It's the discussion group for the economics by effective altruists, and it's drawn a disproportionate number of economics scholars/enthusiasts. There's some discussion of the link there, so if you're on Facebook, join the group, and we'll see you over there!

Would this have a drawback of disrupting local farming/food economies?

Improved practical knowledge and demand to make nutrition-complete affordable vegan food

Could you explain the causal mechanism you have in mind? It seems that such a charity would increase overall demand for vegan food, because it is buying some, but reduce demand from everyone else, because some people who would otherwise have eaten vegan food will instead just take from this charity.

Also I think it would be good if you could outline some thoughts about possible disadvantages of such a charity.

There's also a charity called Vegfam - http://www.vegfamcharity.org.uk/ - not sure how effective they are though.

To delete a comment forever, first retract it, then click on the permalink, then click on the 'delete' button. Note: this applies to comments that haven't been replied to; comments with replies can be retracted, but not deleted. (In this case, you wouldn't have been able to delete the comment, since Ryan had already replied to it when you decided to strike it from the record.)

Hi Ben - thanks for the feature request. Anton Geraschenko, who founded Math Overflow, advised me that it's important to keep object-level and meta-discussion separate so that the latter doesn't take focus away from the former. So can you please put this discussion here: Improvements to the EA Forum.

It's great to see improvements like these. If you have more feature suggestions, rather than scattering these suggestions all over the site, it's best to concentrate them in this thread or in this Google form (responses here).