Red team: Is the expected value of extinction risk reduction positive?

Relevant articles:

• The expected value of extinction risk reduction is positive - EA Forum
• A longtermist critique of “The expected value of extinction risk reduction is positive” - EA Forum

Red team: This is not the most important century.

Context: https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/

I'll just add all mine in one comment, since I'm assuming you won't base your decision off the number of upvotes. Most of these are about movement-building, since that's probably what I spend most of my time thinking about

• The EA community should not be trying to grow.
  • This research would advocate for something like stronger gatekeeping/less outreach.
• Giving pledges (GWWC, OFTW) are no longer relevant for engaged EAs 
  • Perhaps linked to ETG becoming less of a priority
• Despite many community builders pushing for them, fellowships are not the best way to get new people involved in EA
• AGI will never be developed, so we don't need to worry about AI safety
  • There are many possible arguments for this. Here is one.

Every project idea from the Future Fund is probably a useful goal to red-team as it might affect how a lot of money will be spend.

https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/

They also explicitely ask for criticism as their last project suggestion:

Critiquing our approach

Research That Can Help Us Improve

We’d love to fund research that changes our worldview—for example, by highlighting a billion-dollar cause area we are missing—or significantly narrows down our range of uncertainty. We’d also be excited to fund research that tries to identify mistakes in our reasoning or approach, or in the reasoning or approach of effective altruism or longtermism more generally.

• Why might one not believe in the arguments for: epistemics training of any kind makes people better / clearer / more rigorous thinkers
• Why might one not believe in the arguments for: personal assistants make people meaningfully more productive
• Has focus on AGI in EA contributed more to capabilities than to safety?
• Look for times when beneficiaries of charity would rather get less money / value in the way of goods in exchange for: more fairness, justice, durable over nondurable goods, etc.
• Red-team: how much is impact / success etc predictable from eliteness of school attended
• Red-team the claim: PR should be a major concern for EA orgs and writers (ie how likely is backlash, negative consequences, and how bad are those)
• Red-team: camps/outreach to young people are worth the risks of harm to those young people

Red team: Why might one not believe in the arguments for wild animals having net negative welfare?

Red team: What non-arbitrary views in population axiology do avoid the “Very Repugnant Conclusion” (VRC)?

Context/Explanation:

According to Budolfson & Spears (2018), “the VRC cannot be avoided by any leading welfarist axiology despite prior consensus in the literature to the contrary”, and “[the extended] VRC cannot be avoided by any other welfarist axiology in the literature.”

Yet surely we need not limit our views to the ones that were included in their analysis.

Bonus points if the team scrutinizes some assumptions that are commonly taken as unquestioned starting points, such as additive aggregationism, impersonal compensation, or independent positive value.

(By “non-arbitrary”, I mean that the views would be attractive for other reasons besides avoiding the VRC.)

Cool idea! :) In case you haven't seen it, Linch listed a few ideas in a shortform a couple months ago (Note: Linch is my manager).

Red team: Is existential security likely, assuming that we avoid existential catastrophe for a century or two?

Some reasons that I have to doubt that existential security is the default outcome we should expect:

• Even superintelligent aligned AI might be flawed and fail catastrophically eventually
• Vulnerable world hypothesis
• Society is fairly unstable
• Unregulated expansion throughout the galaxy may reduce extinction risk but may increase s-risks, and may not be desirable

Red team: Argue that moral circle expansion is or is not an effective lever for improving the long-term future. Subpoint: challenge the claim that ending factory farming effectively promotes moral circle expansion to wild animals or digital sentient beings.

Related:

• Why I prioritize moral circle expansion over artificial intelligence alignment - EA Forum and the comments on the post

Red team: Scrutinize this career profile on medical careers. Why might it turn out to be misleading /counterproductive /unhelpful for a young aspiring EA?

Red-team - "Are longtermism and virtue ethics actually compatible?"

A convincing red-team wouldn't need a complex philosophical analysis, but rather a summary of divergences between the two theories and an exploration of five or six  'case studies' where consequentialist-type behaviour and thinking is clearly 'unvirtuous'. 

Explanation - Given just how large and valuable the long-term future could be, it seems plausible that longtermists should depart from standard heuristics around virtue. For instance, a longtermist working in biosecurity who cares for a sick relative might have good consequentialist reasons to abandon their caring obligations if a sufficiently promising position came up at an influential overseas lobbying group. I don't think EAs have really accepted that there is a tension here; doing so seems important if we are to have open, honest conversations about what EA is, and what it should be.

Red-team - "Examine the magnitude of impact that can be made from contributing to EA-relevant Wikipedia pages. Might it be a good idea for many more EA members to be making edits on Wikipedia?" 

Rough answer  - "I suspect it's the case that only a small proportion of total EA members make edits to the EAF-wiki. Perhaps the intersection of EA members and people who edit Wikipedia is about the same size, but my intuition is that this group is even smaller than the EAF wiki editors. Given that Wikipedia seems to receive  a decent amount of Internet traffic (I assume this probably also applies to EA-relevant pages on Wikipedia), it is very likely the case that contributing to Wikipedia is a neglected activity within EA; should an effort be made by EA members to contribute more to Wikipedia, the EA community might grow or might become more epistemically accessible, which seem like good outcomes."

Red team : Many EA causes seem to assume that the current society will continue on its current trajectory for a long time, despite the fact that it is dependant on a massive amount of non-renewable fossil fuels, and is thus unsustainable. It is unlikely that alternatives sources of energy, like solar, wind or nuclear can replace fossil fuels at the speed and scale required since they themselves depend on a limited supply of metals, and depend on fossil fuels for their transportation (trucks) and manufacturing (extraction of minerals).

Given that, shouldn't EA causes be repriorized based on the assumption that the current energy-intensive industrial society is a temporary thing?

A few more element of context :

• Oil is expected to decline in the medium to short term, between 2025 and 2040, even with high discoveries. Trends that prevented such decline in the past (better technology, more investment) appear to have reached their limits.
• 90% of products are made of or transported by oil. Food production is also very dependent on fossil fuels. Most post-WWII recessions have been preceded by high oil prices, including the 2008 crisis, so a prolonged energy descent could mean the end of growth, leading to a disruptions of political and economic systems.
• This would make some causes with energy-intensive solutions less promising, since they would be unattractive in an energy-constrained world.  I have in mind most longtermist causes, asteroid prevention, or even development of cultured meat. Depending on the timing (so more uncertain), the development of artificial intelligence might  also be impaired for the same reasons.

You can find the detailed reasoning and sources in a draft that we are currently writing for the EA Forum : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mte_x4hsW5XiccCkHkW-iAUvNM_qwenKMCQazXxNJrc/edit# (and we are looking for reviewers, if someone is interested!)

Reposting my post: “At what price estimate do you think Elsevier can be acquired?

Could acquiring Elsevier and reforming it to be less rent-seeking be feasible?”

Why might one believe that MacAskill and Ord's idea of The Long Reflection is actually a bad idea, or impossible, or that it should be dropped from longtermist discourse for some other reason?

Robin Hanson's argument here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/10/long-reflection-is-crazy-bad-idea.html

Red team: is it actually rational to have imprecise credences in possible longrun/indirect effects of our actions rather than precise ones?

Why: my understanding from Greaves (2016) and Mogensen (2020) is that this has been necessary to argue for the cluelessness worry.

Red team: Certain types of prosaic AI alignment (e.g., arguably InstructGPT) promote the illusion of safety without genuinely reducing existential risk from AI, or are capabilities research disguised as safety research. (A claim that I've heard from EleutherAI, rather indelicately phrased, and would like to see investigated)

1. Red team against hedonism and objectively cardinally measurable hedonistic welfare in particular.
2. Red team against objectively cardinally measurable welfare generally.
3. Red team against expected value maximization and the importance of formal guarantees against Dutch books/money pumps, perhaps relative to other considerations and alternatives.

Red-team: Is it a good idea to have a contest for critiques and red-teaming? 

Red team: There are no easy ways that [EA org*] strategy can be better optimised towards achieving that organisation's stated goals and/or the broader goals of doing the mots good.

Honestly, not the easiest question but practically quite useful if anyone listens.

* E.g. CEA, OpenPhil, GiveWell, FTX Future Fund, Charity Entrepreneurship, HLI, etc.

Make the best case against: "Some non-trivial fraction of highly talented EAs should be part- or full-time community builders." The argument in favor would be pointing to the multiplier effect. Assume you could attract the equivalent of one person as good as yourself to EA within one year of full-time community building. If this person is young and we assume the length of a career to be 40 years, then you have just invested 1 year and gotten 40 years in return. By the most naive / straightforward estimate then, a chance of about 1/40 of you attracting one you-equivalent would be break even. Arguably that's too optimistic and the true break-even point is somewhat bigger than 1/40; maybe 1/10. But that seems prima facie very doable in a full-time year. Hence, a non-trivial fraction of highly-talented EAs should do community building.

(I have a few arguments against the above reasoning in mind, but I believe listing them here would be against the spirit of this question. I still would be genuinely interested to see this question be red-teamed.)

Red Team: Toby Ord states that to safeguard humanity will require "...new institutions, filled with people of keen intellect and sound judgement, endowed with a substantial budget and real influence over policy" argue this is not the case.

Quote is from The Precipice, page 196.

When discussing the future of humanity Toby Ord states "I find it useful to consider our predicament from humanity's point of view: casting humanity as a coherent agent, and considering the strategic choices it would make were it sufficiently rational and wise" why might this approach be more misleading than useful?

Quote is from The Precipice, page 188.

Red team: reducing existential risks is still the best use of our resources even if you have population ethical views other than total utilitarianism. (More precisely: … defend it for either I. non identitarian person affecting views, or ii. ‘average utilitarianism with a minimum population constraint’)