This is a great question, and the same should be asked of governments (as in: "why doesn't the UK aid budget simply all go to mosquito nets?")

A likely explanation for why the Gates Foundation doesn't give to GiveWell's top charities is that those charities don't currently have much room for more funding (GiveWell had to rollover funding last year because they couldn't spend it all. A recent blog posts suggests they may have more room for funding soon https://blog.givewell.org/2022/07/05/update-on-givewells-funding-projections/)

A likely explanation for why ... (read more)

Thanks for asking this. I can chime in, although obviously I can't speak for all the organizations listed, or for "EA leadership." Also, I'm writing as myself — not a representative of my organization (although I mention the work that my team does). 

1. I think the Forum team takes this worry seriously, and we hope that the Forum contributes to making the EA community more truth-seeking in a way that disregards status or similar phenomena (as much as possible). One of the goals for the Forum is to improve community norms and epistemics, and this (criticism of established ideas and entities) is a relevant dimension; we want to find out the truth, regardless of whether it's inconvenient to leadership. We also try to make it easy for people to share concerns anonymously, which I think makes it easier to overcome these barriers.
   1. I personally haven't encountered this problem (that there are reasons to be afraid of criticizing leadership or established norms) — no one ever hinted at this, and I've never encountered repercussions for encouraging criticism, writing some myself, etc. I think it's possible that this happens, though, and I also think it's a problem even if people in the commu

Quoting Kelsey Piper:

If I tell you “I’m torturing an animal in my apartment,” do you go “well, if there are no other animals being tortured anywhere in the world, then that’s really terrible! But there are some, so it’s probably not as terrible. Let me go check how many animals are being tortured.”

(a minute later)

“Oh, like ten billion. In that case you’re not doing anything morally bad, carry on.”

I can’t see why a person’s suffering would be less morally significant depending on how many other people are suffering. And as a general principle, arbitrarily bounding variables because you’re distressed by their behavior at the limits seems risky.

Hm, I think that most of the people who participated in this experiment: 

three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2,000 / 20,000 / 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88.¹ This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved—the scope of the altruistic action—had little effect on willingness to pay.

would agree after the results were shown to them that they were doing something irrational that they wouldn't endorse if aware of it. (Ex... (read more)

I think scope insensitivity could be a form of risk aversion over the difference you make in the world (=difference-making) (scope insensitivity is related at least). I explain here why I think that risk aversion over the difference you make is irrational even though risk aversion over states of the world is not. 

Various social aggregation theorems (e.g. Harsanyi's) show that "rational" people must aggregate welfare additively.

(I think this is a technical version of Thomas Kwa's comment.)

To answer this question in short: It is so because it's innate. Like any other bias scope insensitivity comes from within, in the case of an individual as well as an organization run by individuals. We may generalize it as the product of human values because of the long-running history of constant 'Self-Value' teachings(not the spiritual ones). But there will always be a disparity when considering the ever-evolving nature of human values, especially in the current era.
 

--------

On the contrary, most of the time, I do consider scope insensitivity as the... (read more)

Looking at your profile I think you have a good idea of answers already, but for the benefit of everyone else who upvoted this question looking for an answer, here's my take:

Are there AI risk scenarios which involve narrow AIs?

Yes, a notable one being military AI i.e. autonomous weapons (there are plenty of related posts on the EA forum). There are also multipolar failure modes on risks from multiple AI-enabled superpowers instead of a single superintelligent AGI.

Why does most AI risk research and writing focus on artificial general intelligence?

A misalign... (read more)

What happens when we create AI companions for children that are more “engaging” than humans? Would children stop making friends and prefer AI companions?
What happens when we create AI avatars of mothers that are as or more “engaging” to babies than real mothers, and people start using them to babysit? How might that affect a baby’s development?
What happens when AI becomes as good as an average judge at examining evidence, arguments, and reaching a verdict?
 

1. "AGI" is largely an imprecisely-used initialism: when people talk about AGI, we usually don't care about generality and instead just mean about human-level AI. It's usually correct to implicitly substitute "human-level AI" for "AGI" outside of discussions of generality. (Caveat: "AGI" has some connotations of agency.)
2. There are risk scenarios with narrow AI, including catastrophic misuse, conflict (caused or exacerbated by narrow AI), and alignment failure. On alignment failure, there are some good stories. Each of these possibilities is considered reasonab

1. OpenPhil has commissioned various reviews of its work, e.g. on power-seeking AI.
2. Less formal, but there was this facebook debate between some big names in AI.

Overall, I think a) this would be cool to see more of and b) it would be a service to the community if someone collected all the existing examples together.

Not exactly what you're describing, but MIRI and other safety researchers did the MIRI conversations and also sort of debated at events. They were helpful and I would be excited about having more, but I think there are at least three obstacles to identifying cruxes:

• Yudkowsky just has the pessimism dial set way higher than anyone else (it's not clear that this is wrong, but this makes it hard to debate whether a plan will work)
• Often two research agendas are built in different ontologies, and this causes a lot of friction especially when researcher A's ontol

The debate on this subject has been ongoing between individuals who are within or adjacent to the EA/LessWrong communities (see posts that other comments have linked and other links that are sure to follow). However, these debates often are highly insular and primarily are between people who share core assumptions about:

1. AGI being an existential risk with a high probability of occurring
2. Extinction via AGI having a significant probability of occurring within our lifetimes (next 10-50 years)
3. Other extinction risks (e.g pandemics or nuclear war) not likely m

I'd also be very interested in the reverse of this. Is there anyone who has thought very hard about AI risk and decided to de-prioritise it?

Thank you for asking this! Some fascinating replies!

A related question:

Considering other existential risks like engineered pandemics, etc., is there an ethical case for continuing to escalate the advancement of AI development despite the possibly-pressing risk of unaligned AGI for addressing/mitigating other risks, such as developing better vaccines, increasing the rate of progress in climate technology research, etc.?

[I'll be assuming a consequentialist moral framework in this response, since most EAs are in fact consequentialists. I'm sure other moral systems have their own arguments for (de)prioritizing AI.]

Almost all the disputes on prioritizing AI safety are really epistemological, rather than ethical; the two big exceptions being a disagreement about how to value future persons, and one on ethics with very high numbers of people (Pascal's Mugging-adjacent situations).

I'll use the importance-tractability-neglectedness (ITN) framework to explain what I mean. The ITN... (read more)

FYI I'm also interested in this. 
I do think it's consistent to be pro-choice and place a high value on future lives (both because people might be able to create more future lives by (eg) working on longtermist causes than by having kids themself, and because you can place a high value on lives but say that it is outweighed by the harm done by forcing someone to give birth. But I think that pro-natalist and non-person-affecting views do have implications for reproductive rights and the ethics of reproduction that are seldom noticed or made explicit.

Richard Chappell wrote this piece, though IMHO it doesn't really get to the heart of the tension.

I've only just stumbled upon this question and I'm not sure if you'll see this, but I wrote up some of my thoughts on the problems with the Total View  of population ethics (see "Abortion and Contraception" heading specifically). 

Personally, I think there is a tension there which does not seem to have been discussed much in the EA forum. 

Here is a good post on the side of being pro-life: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ADuroAEX5mJMxY5sG/blind-spots-compartmentalizing

I have thought about this a lot, and I think pro-life might actually win out in terms of utility maximization if it doesn't increase existential risk.

[My impression. I haven't worked on grantmaking for a long time.] I think this depends on the topic, size of the grant, technicality of the grant, etc. Some grantmakers are themselves experts. Some grantmakers have experts in house. For technical/complicated grants, I think non-expert grantmakers will usually talk to at least some experts before pulling the trigger but it depends on how clearcut the case for the grant is, how big the grant is, etc.

I might be missing the part of my brain that makes these concerns make sense, but this would roughly be my answer: Imagine that you and everyone in your household consume water with lead it in every day. You have the chance to learn if there is lead in the the water. If you learn that it does, you'll feel very bad but also you'll be able to change your source of water going forward. If you learn that it does not, you'll no longer have this nagging doubt about the water quality. I think learning about EA is kind of like this. It will be right or wrong to eat animals regardless of whether you think about it, but only if you learn about it can you change for the better. The only truly shameful stance, at least to me, is to intentionally put your head in the sand.

My secondary approach would be to say that you can't change your past but you can change your future. There is no use feeling guilt and shame about past mistakes if you've already fixed them going forward. Focus your time and attention on what you can control.

What has helped me most is this quote from Seneca:

Even this, the fact that it [the mind] perceives the failings it was unaware of in itself before, is evidence for a change for the better in one's character.

That helped me feel a lot better about finding unnoticed flaws and problems in myself, which always felt like a step backwards before. 

I also sometimes tell myself a slightly shortened Litany of Gendlin:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
People can stand what is true,
for ... (read more)

My personal approach:

• I no longer think of myself as "a good person" or "a bad person", which may have something to do with my leaning towards moral anti-realism. I recognize that I did bad things in the past and even now, but refuse to label myself "morally bad" because of them; similarly, I refuse to label myself "morally good" because of my good deeds. 
  • Despite this, sometimes I still feel like I'm a bad person. When this happens, I tell myself: "I may have been a bad person, so what? Nobody should stop me from doing good, even if I'm the worst perso

I think You Don't Need To Justify Everything is a somewhat less related post (than others that have been shared in this thread already) that is nevertheless on point (and great).

3. I'm not sure they do as much bespoke advising as Longview, but I'd say GiveWell and Farmed Animal Funders. I think you could contact either one with the amount you're thinking of giving and they could tell you what kind of advising they can provide. 

The 80k podcast also has some potentially relevant episodes though they're prob not directly what you most want.

• https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/
• https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-ambition-longtermism-mental-health/
  • Maybe especially the section on patient philanthropy.
• https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/
• https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-high-risk-approach-to-crypto-and-doing-good/
  • Some bits of this. E.g. some of the bits on politica

If "EA is a question," and that question is how to do the most good, I think Peter Singer will always consider himself an effective altruist.

However, he seems to disagree about whether the answer to that question entails a predominant focus on common longtermist topics. I suspect, while he will always see himself as an EA, it will be as an EA that has important differences in cause area prioritization. For more info, he discusses his views about longtermism here, perhaps captured best by the following quote:

When taking steps to reduce the risk that we will become extinct, we should focus on means that also further the interests of present and near-future people. If we are at the hinge of history, enabling people to escape poverty and get an education is as likely to move things in the right direction as almost anything else we might do; and if we are not at that critical point, it will have been a good thing to do anyway.

It's the standard term used in impact evaluation. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_evaluation#Counterfactual_evaluation_designs 

I think that it's very tractable. For example, I estimated that corporate campaigns improve 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent and this improvement seems to be very significant. It would likely cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to improve a life of one human to such a degree, even in developing countries. There are many caveats to this comparison that I can talk about upon request but I don't think that they change the conclusion.

Another way to see tractability is to look at the big wins for animal advocacy in 2021 or 2020. This progress i... (read more)

I believe they are largely tractable, there's a variety of different intervention types (Policy, Direct work, Meta, Research), cause areas (Alt Proteins, Farmed Animals, Wild animal suffering, Insects), organisations and geographies to pursue them in. Of particular note may be potentially highly tractable and impactful work in LMIC (Africa, Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe)

I will say animal welfare is a newer and less explored area than global health but that may mean that your donation can be more impactful and make more of a difference as there could be... (read more)

The "alignment problem for advanced agents" or "AI alignment" is the overarching research topic of how to develop sufficiently advanced machine intelligences such that running them produces good outcomes in the real world.

Both 'advanced agent' and 'good' should be understood as metasyntactic placeholders for complicated ideas still under debate. The term 'alignment' is intended to convey the idea of pointing an AI in a direction--just like, once you build a rocket, it has to be pointed in a particular direction.

"AI alignment theory" is meant as an overarch

Hi Jason, I'm the author of the aforementioned research into IUDs, artificial wombs, and legislative solutions, which is indeed very cursory. The research is included at the bottom of a [larger draft](https://docs.google.com/document/d/10VL9m-GW2f428WZSEs834kiDrHFxtfPNQzc6ljLwTyc/edit?usp=sharing) of an eventual EA forum post outlining reasons why EAs might oppose abortion and potential interventions in that regard.

The draft's philosophical arguments against abortion are much more mature than its section on potential interventions, partially because I've t... (read more)