Open Thread

Facebook is a terrible medium for discussion, so I hope everyone, or at least all the cool people, come over here and we have an active community. I don't know if this will happen. I think this forum would be a good place for links with discussion and not just blog posts.

Also, what's the relationship between the EA forum and the EA hub? http://effectivealtruismhub.com/

I've chatted to Ryan about this, and the idea is that the forum is the place for people's writings on and discussion of EA, whereas the projects on http://effectivealtruismhub.com/ are for other things. For instance the EA Profiles are the place for information about people - e.g. showing more about who the people writing here are, and (we plan) linking to those writings. So in that sense they should be nicely complementary.

I thought the EA Facebook group was going to play "LW Discussion" to the EA Forum's "LW Main". Though the open thread does blur that line.

There's also an EA Reddit for posting articles.

Hey Jess. Good questions. Obviously, the relationship between these is mostly decided by the community, rather than by one individual, and will emerge gradually over some number of weeks.

That said, I think it's good for most substantive discussion to move here. Here should also have some blog-length posts that are lighter and fun to read.

Since most people are using the same names on Facebook as here, there are some advantages to keeping it open. It's a kind of bridge between internet and real world. It helps people to put faces to the names of people they're interacting with, which should increase willingness to meet or collaborate. As for what goes there, I think the stuff that goes there will include:

• some links (e.g. Elon Musk made a bunch more dough of this nasa deal)
• practical real-world stuff will go there, (e.g. "I'm going to X city, does anyone have a room to offer there")
• specific topics (similar to the Open Threads. There should be enough minor EA discussion to go around)

I'm kicking around a rough guidline in my head. Somethnig like "post it to the forum if it's at least three of 'fun to read', 'substantial', 'relevant' and 'reasoned'. If it's two of those things, then an open thread or facebook is more suitable. If it's only one of those things, then it's no good.

Tom and I are thinking of ways to tie-in with the Hub. I think that the Hub could use the Forum to run a survey, whereas the Forum could use the Hub's map to identify people who might want to attend a meetup.

Feedback helps, especially on the FB/Forum border. Anyway, I'll bundle these thoughts into my next update post.

I feel like a lot of potential is lost if we don't encourage asking questions and making smaller contributions (like on fb and the open thread) on the forum. I do understand that these kinds of posts don't fit into the main section of the forum. But what's the reasoning behind not having any subforums? I often think of issues I would post in subforums of this site, which I wouldn't bring up facebook (because 100s or 1000s will read it) and that doesn't fit into Main.

An open thread is a nice step in the right direction. It does have significant disadvantages to subforum(s) though in my estimation:

• No headlines for posts, so it's not scanable
• You have to see the full post rather than the headline only
• It's not that visible and the headline "open thread" doesn't really intrigue me as much as other posts.

Also, I feel like topic-specific subforums would generally lower the barrier for people to post something. I guess I have this intuition because the posts won't be seen by (as many) people who are not interested in your post's topic.

By now I've read Ryan's comment on subforums (https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/743662675690092/?comment_id=744027525653607&offset=0&total_comments=14). In my estimation the lost potential outweighs the costs, so consider this a vote for subforums (or at least main/discussion). I'm happy to be convinced otherwise though.

Another example, though not as good, could be effective environmentalism. It's a classic cause among altruists and looks like an x-risk.

I think the lack of EA work on bad policy comes largely from the heavy competition in the area. To an extent, improving policy is zero-sum in that there are lots of people who are actively working against any particular policy (some good policies receive minimal opposition, but there probably aren't many of these). Whereas if you, say, donate money to AMF, few people will try to stop you. Even those who disagree with your decision won't actually prevent you from giving the money and won't prevent AMF from distributing the bednets.

At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, each of Geoff Anders, Peter Thiel, and Holden Karnofsky identified three heuristic criteria for effective altruists to use in selecting a cause area:

• neglected
• valuable
• tractable

I. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect Ant-Aging?

Anti-aging doesn't seem very tractable on its face, but neither does existential risk reduction. Despite both being causes within emphasized by rationalists and transhumanists, anti-aging has been left outside of effective altruism thus far. I believe this is because the rationalist community as a precursor to effective altruism better coordinated their concern over existential risk better than their concern over anti-aging efforts.

Like, through Less Wrong, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, (almost) every existential risk reduction organization got in touch with another. This formed a solid voice advocating for this cause when effective altruism started. On the other hand, Aubrey de Grey and his organization, SENS, seem like the only one(s) in contact with effective altruism, while the rest of the major anti-aging advocates run their organizations out of touch with us, and each other.

Another thing about ant-aging is that while it on its own may seem like a worthy intervention, it often gets lumped with cryonics, and other transhumanist technologies, that seem even less tractable than anti-aging research. That is, those aspects are frequently dismissed by rationalist, let alone effective altruists. So, if the most vocal advocates for anti-aging research only communicate that signal with a bunch of noise, effective altruists may be less likely to consider it.

This seems like a historical contingency to me, based on how the rationalist community organized itself with some circles but not others. This makes possible but by no means definite that the rationalist community has not emphasized anti-aging enough within effective altruism, relative to existential risk reduction.

II. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect (Better) Policy Advocacy?

This also seems to be due in part to historical contingency. First of all, there is the wariness among the rationalist community that delving into the trenches of politics will be much less tractable than aiding the world through other means. I believe I mildly perceive the same strain of thinking as an undercurrent of utilitarians such as Toby Ord, or Peter Singer.

Also, Givewell thought it much more difficult to assess policy advocacy when measuring impact qualifications for it was much more difficult. In other words, Givewell wanted to cut their teeth, and gain experience, in an area more measurable than policy advocacy. Before, like other charity evaluators they were giving recommendations to individual donors. Now, with Good Ventures, they're giving recommendations for foundations, with much more money.

In conversation with my friend Joey Savoie a few weeks ago, we discussed maybe Givewell is exploring policy advocacy through the Open Philanthropy Project now because noticeable gains in policy change can only be affected with large investments, and it's only now with Good Ventures that Givewell has an ally with sufficient weight to get that happening.

What are some examples of things that could have been popular EA causes, but weren't, for reasons that are not completely obvious (and may have to do with historical contingency)?

I'm surprised in some sense that there hasn't been more discussion about religion (moreso Eastern religions) in EA, and spreading/working with those religions as an EA cause. Also, psychology and spreading ideas for raising the hedonic treadmill of human populations.

Although I think the causes EA landed on are pretty independent of the historic details, since many independent groups came up with the same causes and they fit objective cause-finding heuristics (e.g. targeting large, marginalized populations).

However, for whatever reason, it hasn't been identified with EA.

Anti-aging has come up several times over the years, and it's never seemed promising enough to warrant further consideration (Edit: on the scale of the other big EA causes). I'm not really sure where the altruism lies here, since most people don't see death as inherently bad phenomenon. (Edit: I now see that anti-aging research is also focused on increasing quality-of-life rather than just increasing lifespan, so I see the altruism!)

Lots of economist-types are attracted to EA, so it's interesting that the policy arena has been relatively neglected until recently.

Policy discussion has been around for a while. I think it's more-so that we're now reaching the size where we can more easily affect it, which is a good reason to start discussing it more.

Personally, I believe I know a whole community which collectively knows how to use resources (much) better than average, and at a larger/leveraged scale, if not for the whole world. This is because I'm concerned about (apparent) hubris and arrogance within effective altruism, but I identify as one regardless.

Most people believe they know better than others, even if they don't claim to know better than everyone else.

I believe what may be overlooked in the original question is the base rate of people who believe they're doing the best work. That is, humans have at least somewhat of a natural tendency towards privileging their own ideas for doing good as the best. Since effectiveness isn't emphasized in most altruism, I believe most people don't think their own approaches are 'literally the best', so much as naively thinking they're just 'very very good'.

If one individual is the only one to express their disagreement with some form of charity, especially if it's represented by a big movement, they're likely to be lambasted ad hominem. So, there's a disincentive for publicly criticizing charity, even for correct opinions widely held in secret.

Promoting doing 'the most good' requires courage but has drawbacks.

In an civil and media environment when criticizing charitable endeavors is controversial, claiming to (try to) do the best may be taboo. I believe effective altruists have thought about what to do more than most others and, I don't believe we're missing out on some hidden heuristic for philanthropy that works really well for everyone else. People identify with the good they do, so they may get defensive. When pressed, we admit we don't claim absolute confidence in our evaluations, that we seek to change our own minds, and that we're merely doing the best we can.

Putting up the stronger front of advocacy that is trying to literally be the best comes at the cost of (apparently) having hubris. I believe this presents an image problem which will need to constantly be mitigated, and also a real problem we must constantly protect against.

Effective altruism seems to have good defense mechanisms against attracting arrogance.

I believe some effective altruists will be afflicted with over-confidence, and hubris. However, continually normalizing critical thinking, openness to (self-)criticism, and the proper use of humility mitigates this. In particular, being a self-critical movement includes effective altruists criticizing ideas of other effective altruists as they're newly presented. I've observed even on Facebook effective altruists of all stripes are quick to neutralize cocky people, who tend to bring arguments that aren't as well thought-out.

There seem to be two questions here:

(1) Does believing in or identifying as EA require having a certain amount of hubris and arrogance?

(2) Is EA more likely to attract arrogant people than more modest people?

I think the answer to (1) is clearly no - you can believe that you should try to work out what the best way to use resources is, without thinking you are necessarily better than other people at doing it - it's just that other people aren't thinking about it. My impression is a lot of EAs are like this - they don't think they're in a better position to figure out the most effective ways of doing good than others, but given that most other people aren't thinking about this, they may as well try.

I'm less sure about (2), and it depends what the comparison is - are we asking, "Is the average person who is attracted to EA more likely to be arrogant than the average person who is interested in altruism in a broader sense?". It seems plausible that of all the people who are interested in altruism, those who are more arrogant are more likely to be drawn to effective altruism than other forms of altruism. But I'm not sure that EAs are on the whole more arrogant than people who promote other altruistic cause areas - in a way, EAs seem less arrogant to me because they are more willing to accept that they might be wrong, and less dogmatic in asserting that their specific cause is the most important one.

There's a third question which I think is also important: is EA more likely to be perceived as arrogant from the outside than other similar social movements or specific causes? I think here there is a risk - stating that you are trying to figure out the best thing can certainly sound arrogant to someone else (even though, as I said above, it actually seems less arrogant to me than being dogmatic about a specific cause!) So maybe it's important for us to think about how to present EA in ways that doesn't come across as arrogant. One idea would be to talk more about ourselves as "aspiring" effective altruists that as simply effective altruists - we're not trying to claim that we're better at altruism than everyone else really, but rather that we are trying to figure out what the best way is.

I don't think you have to know the best way to use resources to make the better place. All you have to do is want to know it, try to figure it out, and act on your best guess.

Upvoted for visibility

That's really useful, thanks Jeff. I feel like I get into these kinds of discussions a lot (when discussing GWWC). I often find it frustrating, because it just doesn't seem like what we should be focusing on. But at the same time I can see it being important for people to really know that the pledge has real substantive content, and that people stick to it.

I was going to (at the very least) start a discussion on a similar dichotomy. At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, heads of different effective altruist organizations differed on how they believe effective altruism can best grow as a movement. The following is what I perceived:

• William MacAskill of the Centre of Effective Altruism believes effective altruism should grow bigger, with many more people get involved, perhaps to the point at which effective altruism hits critical mass as a social movement.

• Anna Salamon of the Center for Applied Rationality believes getting individual effective altruists to be more effective should dominate as an approach over trying to grow to a point of critical mass, in the present. It seems Ms. Salamon is concerned that if effective altruism 'goes viral', it may be diluted to the point at which the signal:noise ratio becomes too low for effective coordination to take place. It seems Ms. Salamon would prefer effective altruism be 'thick' rather than 'thin', although pertaining to lifestyle strategies more than principled commitments.

• Geoff Anders of Leverage Research seemed to prefer an approach between those of MacAskill and Salamon, though I found his position somewhat inscrutable.

Personally, I agree with Anna Salamon the most, as it seems appropriately conservative, though I'll be excited to see MacAskill, or Anders, proven correct. The plans presented at the effective altruism summit were about what effective altruism might do in the near-term, i.e., next year or two. In the long-term, I believe "slicing effective altruism into competing ways of thick and thin" will be the best approach.

Vipul, I believe this discussion will happen at a wider, better scale if its given a post in its own right. If you (help) get something like that up on the site, I'll share the link, provide feedback, and help the conversation get started.

What are some of these other communities of similar size that you have in mind?

What do you mean by "internal support system"? I've personally found the EA community to have way more internal support system than other communities I've been involved in (atheism, rationalism, animal rights).

Agreed.

There's quite a bit of internal discussion on this at CEA.

There are several reasons for discounting. Some of them are quite correctly applied in social policy contexts, whereas some are not applicable (as the case you highlight, which is often called 'pure rate of time preference'). They are also sometimes misapplied.

I do think that helping to make sure that discounting is done correctly according to context is an important goal, and this is something that the Global Priorities Project may push for. But trying to remove discounting altogether in analysis may harm future people rather than help them.

This paper by Dasgupta has some good discussion of the different purposes of discounting (but I wouldn't take too much from its discussion of eta).

Obviously, if I'm going to die unless I eat that apple in the next ten minutes, the apple has extremely high value now and zero after 10 minutes.

Extending that idea, you are integrating across all the probabilities that the apple will become useless or reduce in value between now and when you're going to get it.

Why is it exponential? Maybe stretching a bit, but I would guess that the apple changes in value according to a poisson process 1 where the dominating force is "the apple becomes useless to you".

Many assets have compounding value (e.g., interest) that comes from owning things earlier. But I don't think human life is one of those things.

To answer your object-level question, I believe that something resembling the idea of "Replaceability of Social Change" would enter our minds eventually. For the last few months, there has been conversation in the Facebook group about the importance of, and how to assess, the history of social movements. Additionally, groups like the Open Philanthropy Project are pushing forward the idea of assessing political change. From our point of view, variable change will affect the probability that a certain idea will come to us for any given point in time. As we discussed other ideas factoring into this one, over time, it seems like we might eventually come across it.

Anyway, you're trying to figure out what important social change we would want that would not happen, or fail, if we didn't intervene. I agree with Robby Bensinger that all of history added up together is very fragile, with small changes to the initial state of any point possibly causing huge changes later. So, again, I believe this is difficult, and that we need to get more specific.

Thanks for asking these tough questions. I appreciate it.

I've given this some more thought, and I think I've at least partially explained why my model of social change involves less fragility than others'. I think of modern human society similarly to how I think about evolutionary human society (i.e. when we still faced obvious natural selection pressures) and similarly to how I think about evolution as a whole. In biology, it's in some way true that "All evolution is random," in that mutations in genetic code are arbitrary. I think of people in this same way. Yes, I agree that what MLK did in particular probably had causation in random things like his birthday or a specific event in his childhood or other randomness, but on the macro-scale, this randomness evens out in some sense and all possible micro-worlds converge, like they (mostly) do in evolution.

To specify what you mean, I believe the important idea is a question: how can we use replaceability to measure the impact (or expected value) of social change?

I believe traction can be made towards solving this problem, but I still believe it will be difficult. I notice that you use the historical example of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s activism, but you want to measure social impact in the present, or for the future. However, I notice that I can't recall reading about anyone, effective altruists or otherwise, ever measuring the impact of social change in the past. Like, we take Martin Luther King, Jr.'s success for granted, even though we haven't tried quantifying it at all. We could then try comparing King's success to other activist strategies: those which worked well, and others less so.

In measuring the impact of historical efforts, we are measuring in a field where we have access to all the measurable data. So, that makes studying history good practice grounds for figuring out what to look for in estimating social impact in the future.

Here's some suggestions for doing that:

• One can learn how to measure anything, and practice for free, which should help in measuring something as abstract as the impact of social change. I believe trying to measure other intangibles as practice a bit will give one experience to gauge how to measure the impact of social change. From there, realizing getting some kind, any kind of metric(s) placed on what you're trying to measure in social change is better than having no metric(s).

• One can also study Givewell's History of Philanthropy Project to get a sense of how they determined which historical points were worth considering. Then, you can try replicating it a bit in studying the history of social change. Note that Givewell's project focuses upon the history of philanthropy in the United States, which might be a narrower and simpler section to assess than the history of social change.

• In regards to determining where to start with at a point in history, asking some historians, and the community, what heuristics they would use could help. Givewell itself hired some actual historians.

• The guide How To Measure Anything may give some ideas, but I believe the metric you'll be developing for social impact will be more similar to metrics used in global studies or reports from the WHO, or other NGOs, or in charity evaluation. Perhaps review the field of sociology for any ideas it has for measuring social change.

This is a framework for figuring out how to measure the impact that we must create for ourselves. Frankly, the idea of replaceability, let measurement, in social change might be rare enough that we might be the first ones to put that method together.

Quick answer: I think it changes a bit, but not too much. PPP adjustments aren't an enormous factor compared to the wealth disparity between rich and poor (which is what drives a lot of the conclusions).

I guess if you invest, you slightly increase the availability of funds for businesses, which slightly grows the economy. And presumably, this slightly increases wealth in your country, in a way that persists over time with usual growth rates. Most investments are probably pretty replaceable though.

I believe the advent of the Internet has allowed scholars into abstract ideas like effective altruism (and associated communities, and cause areas) to coordinate their advocacy, and research, better than ever before. As they find one another, they build a unified and solid front which draws more attention to itself than any lone researcher or advocate could. From there, and for the last few years, the attention snowballs to form a concerned community. Larger, more frequent discussions with more publicity, and better information, accelerate the generation of new ideas.

This recursively happened until a movement formed. Again, this is enabled by the Internet, especially in the last decade, what with Wikipedia, and better search engines, which allow individuals with unconventional ideas to discover others who share similar ideas like never before.

Cause areas such as global poverty, public health, and animal advocacy already have sick children, and cute baby animals, for charities to tell donors they're heroically saving. That gets lots of warm fuzzies. Lots of other charities engage their donors, especially larger and more regular donors, and the general community they're in touch with. This includes fostering a sense of community, expressing gratitude, and evoking positive imagery for them being involved. Effective altruist organizations that I'm aware do this are the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Applied Rationality, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save. One effective altruist organization I wish would do more and better community engagement is 80,000 Hours.

For more abstract cause areas, like helping huge populations that exist in the far future, Brienne Strohl of the CFAR and Leverage Research wrote a guide for Explaining Effective Altruism to System 1 in each of our own brains. Figuring out how to induce an affect like this in donors across multiple mediums of expression could be useful. I don't know how to do that, so maybe try contacting Ms. Strohl about it.

A more accurate characterization, I think, is to say that many or most EAs are consequentialists; utilitarianism is a more specific position that only a subset of consequentialists (and EAs) endorse.

Note that about one quarter of respondents in the recent PhilPapers survey accept or lean towards consequentialism; the remaining three quarters are roughly equally divided between those who accept or lean towards either deontology or virtue ethics, and those who endorse some other moral position. So I think you are exaggerating a bit the tension between the moral views of EAs and those of professional philosophers.

Finally, consequentialism has a feature that makes it unique among rival plausible moral views, namely, that all such views agree that good outcomes are at least part of what matters morally. Consequentialists take the further step of claiming that good outcomes are the only thing that matters. (By contrast, there is no component in deontology of virtue ethics that is shared by all other rival views, other than the consequentialist component.) It follows from this feature that research on what consequentialism implies has, in principle, relevance for all other theories, since such theories could be understood as issuing requirements that coincide with those of consequentialism except when they come into conflict with other requirements that they may issue (e.g., for some forms of deontology, you should maximize good unless this violates people's rights, so when no rights are violated these theories imply that you should act as a consequentialist).

• I'm another effective altruist who is explicitly not a utilitarian. Having followed discussion on, e.g., the 'Effective Altruists' Facebook group for a long time, I've been part of discussions over whether effective altruism is tantamount to utilitarianism arise, and non-utilitarians come out of the wormwood. It hasn't happened very often though.

• I like the points raised from the link Josh You provided below.

• If virtue ethics, and deontology, also both contain a quintessential consequentialist element, then maybe they can just be considered convoluted variants of consequentialism with other fundamental principles installed along with it. If so, perhaps effective altruism can be considered another set of (frameworks for) ethics involving consequentialism, but also valuing other things. Building a framework like that might be necessary for humans because we weren't built to be very effective utilitarians. I believe effective altruism was started by lots of different types of utilitarians, but also non-philosophers who were affected by principles and heuristics effective altruists are designing.

William Macaskill makes a few good points here about why EA does not rely on utilitarianism. It's true that a lot of EAs are utilitarian, but I've seen plenty of discussions on normative ethics among EA circles, so I wouldn't describe it as a silent unanimity.

If your non-utilitarianism makes you "want to maximally remedy unnecessary human indigence", and my utilitarianism* makes me want the same, then what is the issue? It seems that at an operational level, we both want the same thing.

It just seems obvious to me that, all other things equal, helping two people is better than helping one. If various moral theories favoured by academics don't reach that conclusion, then so much worse for them; if they do reach that conclusion, then all the better. And in the latter case, the precise formulations of the theories matter very little to me.

*I'm not purely utilitarian, but I am when it comes to donating.