March Open Thread

I assume you've read this series of posts?

Obviously, we must be sensitive in covering the topic, especially in which examples are chosen. Some examples will present edge cases, problems where even the greatest moral philosophers in the world will be hard-pressed to conclusively solve. Some may not seem like edge cases to us in particular, but they may to others. Some examples, even single words used for reference, could be philosophical landmines. It would like to avoid such examples as best we can.

I believe good examples are the ones which are the least controversial among everyone, and are failure modes of consequentialist rationalizing in obviously hazardous ways. I read an article about how one anonymous woman in the United States was making money by writing essays for students at American universities with poor English skills. She was making enough money that I speculated, as an adept student of English, it was worth it for me to take up a career of plagiarism to earn to give. I was dumb. Jack LaSota commented I shouldn't consider it because if I was found out such actions would tarnish effective altruism by association. Months later, in another conversation, someone asked if funneling money into secret Swiss bank accounts to avoid paying taxes so the money could instead be donated to effective charities would be a good idea. Everyone responded 'uh, no', but I gave a lengthy and well-received response as to why it was a bad idea.

Justifying crime and fraud are great, uncontroversial examples of things WE TOTALLY SHOULDN'T DO. I think building from like examples is a good starting point, and we can extrapolate to general rationale behind not doing them to get the thesis across.

The bystander effect! Maybe you should ask someone specific who you know!

Yeah, I think you're right that we need to have some common-sense guidelines, or 'injunctions' or 'deontology' or 'virtue ethics'. And it's not great to act on a view that EAs are extra valuable. But what should we do about it? Why do people come to this position? What mistakes are they making?

Or maybe the issue can be extended other ways, and then it would be a nice juicy big post topic!

I think this is a good starting point for estimating share of externalities in a start-up (particularly the expected externalities that will be caused if the start-up is very successful).

I don't think it will be all that accurate, for the kind of reasons you mention, but it has the major advantages that it is easy to measure and somewhat robust. I expect that replaceability means that it tends to be an overestimate, but typically by less than an order of magnitude.

A warning, though: replaceability can operate on the level of startups as well as the level of jobs. You should consider that if your start-up weren't very successful in the niche it's going for, then someone else might be (even if they're a bit less good). This will tend to make the externalities of the whole company smaller than they first appear.

Hi Yavanna, I helped start the new Effective Altruism Cornell group so you can join that! I'd encourage you to give them an email. In general, anyone can find local EA groups at http://effectivealtruismhub.com/groups

Not sure I know anyone. I suggest also asking Jonathan Courtney, Tom Ash, and a www.lesswrong.com open thread!

I've been tentatively considering a career in the actuarial sciences recently. It seems like the field compensates people pretty well, is primarily merit-based, doesn't require much, if any programming ability (which I don't really have), and doesn't have very many prerequisites to get into, other than strong mathematical ability and a commitment to taking the actuarial exams.

Also, actuarial work seems much slower paced than the work done in many careers that are frequently discussed on 80K Hours, which would make me super happy. I'm a bit burnt out on life right now, and I really don't want to go into a high-stress job, or a job with unusually long hours after I graduate at the end of this semester. I guess that if I wasn't a failure, I would have figured out what I was doing after graduation by now.

Are there any actuaries in the EA movement, or does anyone have any insights about this field that I might not have? My main concern regarding potentially becoming a trainee actuary is that the field is somewhat prone to automation. Page 71 of this paper, which was linked to in 80K Hours' report on career automation, suggests that there's a 21 % chance that actuarial work can be automated. The automation of certain tasks done by actuaries is frequently discussed on the actuary subreddit, as well.

Thanks for reading, and for any advice or thoughts that you might have for me!

I don't think the other comments have really nailed the most challenging parts of working in policy.

1. It is all about the voters. 99% of what politicians care about is reelection, and therefore the will of the majority often wins. Voters are stupid, especially when it comes to the majority. They don't want to see their policymakers spend time (much less money!) on things that don't matter to them. This is why letter-writing (although at much greater scale than the EA community could currently support) is actually somewhat effective.

2. Lobbying is all about relationships. Lobbying does not get done with an appointment set up with a representative. It happens over very long periods of getting to know a number of politicians involved, including frank discussions and the support of a powerful group.

3. Politicians rely on those they've selected as experts. There's no chance they're going to listen to EA at this point... they're going to listen to the head of the World Bank and USAID. They'll pay a little attention to Gates, Amnesty and ONE, but those organizations struggle mightily to influence policy themselves.

OK, now that I was a jerk who discussed huge barriers, here's what I see as opportunities:

1. One thing organizations such as J-PAL have clearly demonstrated is that the details of interventions matter greatly. Luckily, the details are often the things policymakers care the least about. There are opportunities to make what would be considered minute changes in policy, as long as we pay close attention and then work hard to make them happen.

2. Because policymakers represent a single geography, if you can gain scale within a single geography, you can get the attention of that policymaker. A concentrated EA population in Oxford and/or SF for example, can have an outside shot of getting the attention of their representative. If they happen to have a good one, he could help get the ball rolling a bit.

3. Organizations like ONE and Gates have spent many years doing a lot of this work for us. What that means is if we can influence them, or even partner with them, there's the potential to piggy-back those relationships and be heard.

It's definitely a very difficult road, and scaling EA while gaining influence and political contacts is key. Of course, it does open up the potential for enormous long-term opportunity.

I worked for a US Congressman and a US Congress Committee on policy, so let me know if there's questions regarding those experiences that I could help answer.

Good question. Policy is an important area that the EA movement will need to address.

I will add another reason which may have limited policy engagement: policy is hard! Finding policies that would definitely be good and wouldn't face significant opposition requires substantial work. It is also possible to be overconfident about policy ideas: most of our ideas have looked better at a first glance than on closer inspection. This means we shouldn't be too hasty to fix on policies we choose to push.

It's possible to do this work, and GPP is experimenting with fleshing out policies at the moment, but it's not necessarily easy.

Another option is to lobby for "obvious" policies, like increasing foreign aid. But this is hardly a neglected area.

I think this idea raises some good questions. Something that Paul says along these lines is that when you donate funds, we expect that you might get some good flow-through benefits to the recipient and their contacts, but we should often assume that the economic benefits to people will eventually compound at roughly the interest rate.

The challenge is finding opportunities where good can compound faster than a few percent. And investing in the study and career progression of someone who is trying to answer these kinds of questions might be such an example. If you think so, then the question becomes whether you think that CFAR is a good opportunity for compounding your impact like that.