Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
I have noticed recently that while there's a large discussion about how to help the poorest people in the world, I've been unable to find any research simply asking the beneficiaries themselves what they think would help them most. Does anyone know more about the state of such research - whether it exists or not, and why?
It seems important to know what problems or even what interventions the poorest people in the world think would help them the most. There are local details that an EA working on global poverty from an ocean away simply doesn't have access to. Comparing the results of such a survey to empirical impact evaluations could tell us a lot about how important such local knowledge actually is, compared to resources like education and data. Until then, it seems like bad practice to assume we are in a better position to decide on interventions than the beneficiaries with much more detailed knowledge of their situation.
Here's one piece of research -- it'd be wonderful if there were much more in this vein: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mKGbeX5tQu4zshY4j/alice-redfern-moral-weights-in-the-developing-world
I think this is one of the principals of GiveDirectly. I imagine that more complicated attempts at this could get pretty hairy (try to get the local population to come up with large coordinated proposals like education reform), but could be interesting.