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Is Climate-sensitivity super-wrong?
Thomas Homer-Dixon on why James Hansen's latest climate findings matter
"The bottom line is startling: Hansen’s team argues that mainstream climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s reports, underestimates climate sensitivity to CO2 by about 50 percent. Their research suggests that the “short-term”—century time scale—equilibrium warming from a doubling of CO2e should be 4.5 degrees C, not the standard estimate of 3 degrees.
The reason for this error, in the view of Hansen and his team, is that conventional climate science...
Maybe I didn't understand it properly, but I guess there's something wrong when the total welfare score of chimps is 47 and, for humans in low middle-income countries it's 32.
Depending on your population ethics, one may think "we should improve the prospects in poor countries", but others can say "we should have more chimps."
Or this scale has serious problems for comparisons between different species.
Hey Ramiro and Thomas,
Thanks for your engagement with this system. I think in general our system has lots of room for improvement - we are in fact working on refining it right now. However, I am pretty strongly in favor of having evaluation systems even if the numbers are not based on all the data we would like them to be or even if they come to surprising results.
Cross species comparison is of course very complex when it comes to welfare. Some factors are fairly easy to measure across species (such as death rates) while others are much more difficult (diseases rates are a good example of where it's hard to find good data for wild animals). I can imagine researchers coming to different conclusions given the same initial data.
It’s worth underlining that our system does not aim to evaluate the moral weight of a given species, but merely to assess a plausible state of welfare. (Thomas: this would be one caveat to add when sharing.) In regards to moral weight (e.g. what moral weight do we accord a honey bee relative to a chicken etc.) – that is not really covered by our system. We included the estimates of probability of consciousness per Open Phil’s and Re...
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Thanks for this clarifying comment. I see your point - and I am particularly in agreement with the need for evaluation systems for cross-species comparison. I just wonder if a scale designed for cross-species comparison might be not very well-suited for interpersonal comparisons, and vice-versa - at least at the same time.
Really, I'm more puzzled than anything else - and also surprised that I haven't seen more people puzzled about it. If we are actually using this scale to compare societies, I wonder if we shouldn't change the way welfare economists assess things like quality of life. In the original post, the Countries compared were Canada (Pop: 36 mi, HDI: .922, IHDI: .841) and India (Pop: 1.3 bi, HDI: .647, IHDI: .538)
Finally, really, please, don't take this as a criticism (I'm a major fan of CE), but:
First, I am not sure how people from developing countries (particularly India) would rate the welfare of current humans vis-à-vis chimps, but I wonder if it'd be majorly different from your overall result. Second, I am not sure about the relevance of mentioning hunther-gatherers; I wouldn't know how to compare the hypothetical welfare of the world's super predator before civilization with current chimps with current people. Even if I knew, I would take life expectancy as an important factor (a general proxy for how someone is affected by health issues).
Someone I know also noticed this a couple of months ago, so I looked into the methodology and found some possible issues. I emailed Joey Savoie, one of the authors of the report; he hasn't responded yet. Here's the email I sent him:
Someone posted an article you co-authored in 2018 in the Stanford Arete Fellowship mentors group, and the conclusion that wild chimps had a higher welfare score than humans in India seemed off to me. I had the intuition that chimps can control their environment less well than human hunter-gatherers, plus have a less egalitarian social structure, plus the huge amount of infrastructure in food. This seemed like it could reveal either a surprising truth, or a methodological flaw or biases in the evaluators; I read through the full report and have some thoughts which I hope are constructive.
- The way humans are compared to non-humans seems too superficial. I think 6 points to humans in India vs 9 points in wild chimpanzees based on the high level of diagnosed disability among people in India is misleading, because we've spent billions more on diagnosing human diseases than chimps....
- Giving 0 points to humans in India for thirst/hunge
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Thanks. I'm glad to see I wasn't profoundly misunderstanding it. Now, I think this is a very important issue: either there's something really wrong with Charity Entreneurship assessment of welfare in different species, or I will really have to rethink my priorities ;)
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When you post a chart like this, I recommend linking to the source. Thomas linked to a blog post below, but this was also posted on the Forum. The initial comment touches on your concern, but I don't think explains CE's beliefs fully.
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True, thanks.
I inserted a link to the CE's webpage on the Weighted Factor Model
Anyone else consders the case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland (application no. 53600/20) of the European Court of Human Rights a possibly useful for GCR litigation?
Idea for free (feel free to use, abuse, steal): a tool to automatize donations + birthday messages. Imagine a tool that captures your contacts and their corresponding birthdays from Facebook; then, you will make (or schedule) one (or more) donations to a number of charities, and the tool will customize birthday messages with a card mentioning that you donated $ in their honor and send it on their corresponding birthdays.
For instance: imagine you use this tool today; it’ll then map all the birthdays of your acquaintances for the next year. Then you’ll selec...
Just sharing some concerns about live exports (yeah, the transportation of living animals in ships)
I wonder if we could do more about live exports. I would like to know if it's worse than some other practices in factory farming that we often highlight (like caging hens), but it seems more susceptible of getting support from meat-eaters who consider it cruel and unnecessary. I know the subject has been mentioned en passant in some Forum posts and it's a subject that may figure in European reforms...
I'm particularly concerned with Brazil, since it's such a large exporter - but the same applies to Australia, too. At least two organizations (Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal - FNDPA , and Mercy for Animals) working with legal measures to ban the practice in Brazil have received support from EA - btw, one can sign a petition on MfA's website. But my (perfunctory) knowledge of Brazilian politics and law makes skeptic that this could work without external pressure.
Daron Acemoglu interesting review of Ord's The Precipice: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/how-to-think-about-existential-and-immediate-risks-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-05
https://www.mopp-journal.org/go-to-main-page/calls-for-papers/ A call for papers on longermism on the Moral philosophy and politics journal
So it's on!
The Effective Thesis Exceptional Research Award (that's how the website calls it), or High-Potential Award (that's how it shows up on Google), or maybe just Award (how apparently everyone calls it) is open to submissions up to Sep 2022.
(I'm pretty sure there's a top post coming, but I thought it'd be cool to mention it in shortform right away. Feels like a scoop)
This award has been established to encourage and recognize promising research by students that has the potential to significantly improve the world.
[...]Submissions can consist of theses, dissertations, or capstone papers at the undergraduate or graduate level. Other substantive work forming part of a graduation semester may also be considered. To be eligible, submissions must have been produced in the academic year 2021 - 2022 and relate to one or multiple research directions prioritised by Effective Thesis. See the list of research directions below or see here for more information.
Opportunity for Austrians
Article by Seána Glennon: “In the coming week, thousands of households across Austria will receive an invitation to participate in a citizens’ assembly with a unique goal: to determine how to spend the €25 million fortune of a 31-year-old heiress, Marlene Engelhorn, who believes that the system that allowed her to inherit such a vast sum of money (tax free) is deeply flawed."
An objection to the non-identity problem: shouldn't disregarding the welfare of non-existent people preclude most interventions on child mortality and education?
One objection against favoring the long-term future is that we don't have duties towards people who still don't exist. However, I believe that, when someone presents a claim like that, probably what they want to state is that we should discount future benefits (for some reason), or that we don't have a duty towards people who will only exist in the far future. But it turns out that such a cla...
How consistent are "global risk reports"?
We know that the track record of pundits is terrible, but many international consultancy firms have been publishing annual "global risks reports" like the WEF's, where they list the main global risks (e.g. top 10) for a certain period (e.g., 2y). Well, I was wondering if someone has measured their consistency; I mean, I suppose that if you publish in 2018 a list of the top 10 risks for 2019 & 2020, you should expect many of the same risks to show up in your 2019 report (i.e., if you are a reliable predictor, ris...
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I guess any report must be considered on its own terms but I’ve been pretty down on this stuff as a category ever since I heard the Center for Strategic and International Studies was cheerleading the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq.
Is there anything like EA Consulting for charities?
I mean, we do have:
(a) meta-charities (e.g., GW, SoGive...) which evaluate projects and organizations;
(b) charity incubators (Charity Entrepreneurship...), which select and incubate ideas for new EA projects;
(c) recommended charities that provide consulting services for policy-makers, such as Innovation in Government Initiative;
(d) some EAs working in consulting firms (EACN) - which, among other things, aim to nudge corporations and co-workers into more effective behavior.
But I didn't find any org providing to non-EA charities consulting services aiming to make them more effective. Would it be low-impact? Or is it a low-hanging fruit?
One might think that this is basically the same job GW already does... Well, yeah, I suppose you would actually use a similar approach to evaluate impact, but it's very different to provide to a charity recommendations that aim to help them achieve their own goals. This would be framed as assistance, not as some sort of examination; while GW's stakeholders are donors, this "consulting charity" would work for the charities themselves. Besides, in order to prevent conflicts of interest, corpo...
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You may have a look at https://docs.google.com/document/d/166I2puwCZl_GUhohq0JVZWJKABT9fbcIr2nwDRTIam4/edit
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Thanks, I didn't know Algosphere. Btw, I saw there are two allies in Sao Paulo. I'd like to get in touch with them, if that's a possibility ;)
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Yes, Ramiro, you may write to me at daoust514@gmail.com and I will transmit your demand to them.
I was thinking about Chad current situation and Vox's piece on Parliamentarism... Has anyone assessed (ITN or EA-style evaluation) political stability as a cause area?
I mean, it's pretty relevant for peace (I guess most wars result from conflict of factions or succession crises) and for a well functioning government. People talk about the dangers of polarization, about why nations fail, or autoritarianism, or iidm... It's not neglected per se (it's been the focus of some of classical works in political phil & sci), but I'm not sure all low-hanging has been eaten; plus, thinking about interventions as increasing / decreasing political stability might help assessing other areas (like IIDM).
Let me share SBTi's requests for feeddback:
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T20 Brasil | T20 BRASIL CALL FOR POLICY BRIEF ABSTRACTS: LET’S RETHINK THE WORLD
The T20 Brasil process will put forward policy recommendations to G20 officials involved in the Sherpa and Finance tracks in the form of a final communiqué and task forces recommendations.
To inform these documents, we are calling upon think tanks and research centres around the world – this invitation extends beyond G20 members – to build and/or reach out to their networks, share evidence, exchange ideas, and develop joint proposals for policy briefs. The latter should pu...
I was thinking about Urukagina, the first monarch ever mentioned for his benevolence instead of military prowess. Are there any common traces among them? Should we write something like that Forum post on dark trait rulers - but with opposite sign? I googled a bit about benevolent kings (I thought it'd provide more insight than looking to XXth century biographies), but, except maybe for enlightened despots, most of the guys (like Suleiman, the magnificent) in these lists are conquerors who just weren't brutal and were kind law-givers to their people - which...
Shouldn't we have more EA editors in Philpapers categories?
Philpapers is this huge index/community of academic philosophers and texts. It's a good place to start researching a topic. Part of the work is done by voluntary editors and assistants, who assume the responsibility of categorizing and including relevant bibliography; in exchange, they are constantly in touch with the corresponding subject. Some EAs are responsible for their corresponding fields; however, I noticed that some relevant EA-related categories currently have no editor (e.g.: Impact of Artificial Intelligence). I wonder: wouldn't it be useful if EAs assumed these positions?
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I'm not familiar with academic philosophy/how Philpapers is typically used. Can you say more about what you'd expect the positive outcome(s) to be if EAs volunteer to help out? I can imagine that this might improve the quality of papers on EA-adjacent topics, but your mention of volunteers always being up-to-date on the literature makes me wonder if you're also thinking of beneficial learning for the volunteers themselves.
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I'm thinking on both: adequately categorizing papers may have an indirect impact on how other scholars select their bibliographical references; and the volunteer editors themselves may acquire (or anticipate its acquisition - I suppose that, if a paper is really good, you'll likely end up finding it anyway) knowledge of their corresponding domains.
Of course, perhaps the answer is "it's already hard enough to catch up with the posts on such-and-such subjects in the EA and rationalist community, and read the standard literature, and do original work, etc. - and you still want me to work as a quasi-librarian for free?"
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This suggestion is worth posting in other places. You could consider emailing places like Forethought or FHI that have a lot of philosophers, or posting in FB groups like "EA Fundamental Research" or "EA Volunteering".
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Too bad I don't have a Facebook account anymore... I'd appreciate if someone else (whou found it useful, of course) could raise this subject in those groups.
(man, do I miss the memes!)
Or I could just post it as a Question in this forum, to get more visibility.
Thanks.
Why don't we have more advices / mentions about donating through a last will - like Effective Legacy? Is it too obvious? Or absurd?
All other cases of someone discussing charity & wills were about the dilemma "give now vs. (invest) post mortem". But we can expect that even GWWC pledgers save something for retirement or emergency; so why not to legate a part of it to the most effective charities, too? Besides, this may attract non-pledgers equally: even if you're not willing to sacrifice a portion of your consumption for the sake of the greater good, why not those savings for retirement, in case you die before spending it all?
Of course, I'm not saying this would be super-effective; but it might be a low-hanging fruit. Has anyone explored this "path"?
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I agree with you that this is an important area. I wrote a whole essay on the technical aspects of planned giving. https://medium.com/@aaronhamlin/planned-giving-for-everyone-15b9baf88632
I have some more related essays here: https://www.aaronhamlin.com/articles/#philanthropy
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Thanks. Your post strengthened my conviction that EAs should think about the subject - of course, the optimal strategy may vary a lot according to one's age, wealth, country, personal plans, etc.
But I still wonder: a) would similar arguments convince non-EA people? b) why don't EA (even pledgers) do something like that (i.e., take their deaths into account)? Or If they do it "discretely", why don't they talk about it? (I know most people don't think too much about what is gonna happen if they die, but EAs are kinda different)
(I greatly admire your work, btw)
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I'm aware of many people in EA who have done some amount of legacy planning. Ideally, the number would be "100%", but this sort of thing does take time which might not be worthwhile for many people in the community given their levels of health and wealth.
I used this Charity Science page to put together a will, which I've left in the care of my spouse (though my parents are also signatories).
Why don't we have an "Effective App"?
See, e.g., Ribon - an app that gives you points (“ribons”) for reading positive news (e.g. “handicapped walks again thanks to exoskeleton”) sponsored by corporations; then you choose one of the TLYCS charities, and your points are converted into a donation.
Ribon is a Brazilian for-profit; they claim to donate 70% of what they receive from sponsors, but I haven’t found precise stats. It has skyrocketed this year: from their informed impact, I estimate they have donated about U$ 33k to TLYCS – which is a lot for Brazilian standards. They intend to expand (they gathered more than R$ 1 mi – roughly U$250k - from investors this year) and will soon launch an ICO. Perhaps an EA non-profit could do even more good?
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I'd never heard of this app before -- thanks for bringing it to my attention!
The most prominent "EA donation" app I'm aware of is Momentum, which has multiple full-time employees and seems to be pushing hard to get American users. I don't know what their user acquisition numbers are like thus far.
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I love Momentum - to me, it's like a kind of cosmic pigouvian tax ("someone has to pay when Trump tweets, and this time it's gonna be me"); it still demands some kind of committment, though. Ribon is completely different, it's not an app that only altruistic people use; actually, that's why I didn't really like it at first, because it didn't ask people to give anything or to be effective... but then, perhaps that's why it scales well - particularly in societies without an altruistic culture. It's a low-hanging fruit: we already see lots of ads on the internet, for free, and usually (most) don't read but the headlines of news like "Shelly-Ann breaks a new record"... so why not game it all a little bit (you have points, can gain "badges", compete with your friends...) and make companies pay for your attention (ads) in donations?
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The Life You Can Save is working with an app-development company called Meepo (which is doing pro bono work) to build a non-profit donation app, which is currently in beta. You can learn more about this project, and how to download the beta version, here.
What I miss when I read about the morality of discounting is a disanalogy that explains why hyperbolic or exponential discount rates might be reasonable for individuals with limited lifespans and such and such opportunity costs, but not for intertemporal collective decision-making. Then we could understand why pure discount is tempting, and maybe even realize there's something that temporal impartiality doesn't capture. If there's any literature about it, I'd like to know. Please, not the basic heuristics & bias stuff - I did my homework. For instance,...
I was recently reading about the International Panel for Social Progress: https://www.ipsp.org/ I had never heard of it before. Which surprised me, since it's kind of like the IPCC, but for social progress. I got the impression that it somehow failed - in reaching significant consensus, in influencing policy... but why?
I was thinking about the EA criticism contest... did anyone submit something like "FTX"? Then give that person a prize! Forecaster of the year! And second place for the best entries talking about accountability and governance. If not... then maybe it's interesting to highlight: all of those "critiques" didn't foresee the main risks that materialized in the community this year. Maybe if we had framed it as a forecasting contest instead... and yet, we have many remarkable forecasters around, and apparently none of them suggested it was dangerous to place so much faith on one person. Or it's just a matter of attention. So I ask: what is the most impactful negative event that will happen to EA community in 2023?
A criticism contest submission related to FTX was highlighted by a panelist, but did not win a prize: https://medium.com/@sven_rone/the-effective-altruism-movement-is-not-above-conflicts-of-interest-25f7125220a5
...The Effective Altruism movement is not above conflicts of interest
Summary
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a major donator to the Effective Altruism ecosystem and has pledged to eventually donate his entire fortune to causes aligned with Effective Altruism.
By relying heavily on ultra-wealthy individuals like Sam Bankman-Fried for funding, the Effective Altruim community is incentivized to accept political stances and moral judgments based on their alignment with the interests of its wealthy donators, instead of relying on a careful and rational examination of the quality and merits of these ideas. Yet, the Effective Altruism community does not appear to recognize that this creates potential conflicts with its stated mission of doing the most good by adhering to high standards of rationality and critical thought.
In practice, Sam Bankman-Fried has enjoyed highly-favourable coverage from 80,000 Hours, an important actor in the Effective Alt
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I spent SO much time trying to find this entry after the FTX news broke. It didn't forecast FTX fraud, but it has still absolutely been elevated by recent events. You should re-up this on the forum to see if more people will engage with it now.
3[anonymous]
Posted: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T85NxgeZTTZZpqBq2/the-effective-altruism-movement-is-not-above-conflicts-of
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I agree.
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I'm a bit wary of awarding a prize to any post mentioning FTX without regard to how accurate it is.
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Should donations be counter-cyclical? At least as a "matter of when" (I remember a previous similar conversation on Reddit, but it was mainly about deciding where to donate to). I don't think patient philanthropists should "give now instead of later" just because of that (we'll probably have worse crisis), but it seems like frequent donors (like GWWC pledgers) should consider anticipating their donations (particularly if their personal spending has decreased) - and also take into account expectations about future exchange rates. Does it make any sense?
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One challenge will be that any attempt to time donations based on economic conditions risks becoming a backdoor attempt to time the market, which is notoriously hard.
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I don't think this is a big concern. When people say "timing the market" they mean acting before the market does. But donating countercyclically means acting after the market does, which is obviously much easier :)
I was Reading about Meghan Sullivan “principle of non-arbitrariness,” and it reminded me Parfit’s argument against subjectivist reasoning in On What Matters… but why are philosophers (well, and people in general) against arbitrariness? I mean, I do agree it’s a tempting intuition, but I’ve never seen (a) a formal enunciation of what counts as arbitrary (is "arbitrary" arbitrary?), and (b) an a priori argument against. Of course, if someone’s preference ordering varies totally randomly, we can’t represent them with a utility function, and perhaps we co...
Can Longtermists "profit" from short-term bias?
We often think about human short-term bias (and the associated hyperbolic discount) and the uncertainty of the future as (among the) long-termism’s main drawbacks; i.e., people won’t think about policies concerning the future because they can’t appreciate or compute their value. However, those features may actually provide some advantages, too – by evoking something analogous to the effect of the veil of ignorance:
- They allow long-termism to provide some sort of focal poi
 The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute is looking for collaborators and advisees!
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Is it just me or is the landmass on that globe not to scale?
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is that what you're concerned with? I am trying to find out what's this blue mist trail on the right. It looks like Earth's become a comet
My research group is designing a course on Global Risks for academic students in Brazil. I am looking for syllabi and teaching materials that could help inspire us. Right now I am using the WEF report, the Global Challenges report, the Legal Topics in Effective Altruism |and taking a look at the more practical topics in teaching materials from GPI. But I would like to see something from CSER, maybe? Anyone has any tips?
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There might be something useful here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y8mBXCKmkS9eBokhG/ea-syllabi-and-teaching-materials
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Send me a DM if you're interested, I'd be happy to provide a bunch of resources and to put you in contact with some people who could help send a bunch of resources
Philosophers and economists seem to disagree about the marginalist/arbitrage argument that a social discount rate should equal (or at least be majorly influenced by) the marginal social opportunity cost of capital. I wonder if there's any discussion of this topic in the context of negative interest rates. For example, would defenders of that argument accept that, as those opportunity costs decline, so should the SDR?
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Yes, governments lower the SDR as the interest rate changes. See for example the US Council of Economic Advisers's recommendation on this three years ago: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/201701_cea_discounting_issue_brief.pdf
While the "risk-free" interest rate is roughly zero these days, the interest rate to use when discounting payoffs from a public project is the rate of return on investments whose risk profile is similar to that of the public project in question. This is still positive for basically any normal public project.
Assessing the impact of Brazilian donors and EA community
We’re thinking about testing if our actions for promoting EA in this year (translations, meetings, networking...) have led to an observable increase in donations from Brazil - particularly outside the group of more "engaged" members. Even if we haven't observed an increase in high-quality engagement (such as GWWC pledges), we do see an increase in some "cheaper signals", such as the number of Facebook group members and the amount of donations to AMF (which, curious...
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Hi Ramiro.
I think that Point 1 will be difficult to test in this way. What you want to do sounds a bit like a regression discontinuity analysis, but (as I understand it) there isn't really a sharp time point for when you started promoting EA more; the translations/meetings etc. increased steadily since Oct 2018, right? I think this will make it harder to see the effect during the first year that you are scaling up outreach (particularly if compared by month, as there is probably seasonal variation in both donation and outreach). Brazil has also had a fairly distinct set of news worthy events (i.e. election and major political change, arrest of two former presidents during ongoing corruption scandals, amazon fires, etc.) over the same time period you increased outreach. If these events influence donation behaviour, then comparisons to other countries might not be particularly relevant (and it further complicates your monthly comparison). I think a better way to try and observe a quantitative effect would be if you compare the total donations for three years: pre-Oct 2018, Oct 2018-Oct 2019, post-Oct 2019 (provided you keep your level of outreach similar for the next year, and are patient). Aggregating over year will remove the seasonal effect of donations and some of the effect of current events, and if this shows an increase for 2019-2020, then you could (cautiously) look at comparing the monthly donation behaviour (three years of data will be better to compensate for monthly variation).
At this point, I think tracking your impact more subjectively by using questionnaires and interviews would produce more useful information. Not sure if charities would link their donors to you (maybe getting the contact of Brazilians who report donating in the EA survey would be more likely), but you could also try adding a annual questionnaire link to your newsletter/facebook/site like 80,000 hours does. I'd specifically try to ask people who made their first donations, or who
I just answered to UNESCO Public Online Consultation on the draft of a Recommendation on AI Ethics - it was longer and more complex than I thought.
I'd really love to know what other EA's think of it. I'm very unsure about how useful it is going to be, particularly since US left the organization in 2018. But it's the first Recommendation of a UN agency on this, the text address many interesting points (despite greatly emphasizing short-term issues, it does address "long-term catastrophic harms"), I haven't seen many discus...
Is 'donations as gifts' neglected?
I enjoy sending 'donations as gifts' - i.e., donating to GD, GW or AMF in honor of someone else (e.g., as a birthday gift). It doesn't actually affect my overall budget for donations; but this way, I try to subtly nudge this person to consider doing the same with their friends, or maybe even becoming a regular donor.
I wonder if other EAs do that. Perhaps it seems very obvious (for some cultures where donations are common), but I haven't seen any remark or analysis about it (well, maybe I'...
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I don't know what you mean by 'neglected'. I know a lot of people who say they want this and a similar number who are deeply offended by the concept. (Personally, I'm against the idea of giving charitable donations to my favourite charity as a gift, although I'd consider a donation to the recipient's favourite charity.)
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Thanks. Maybe it's just my blindspot. I couldn't find anyone discussing this for more than 5min, except for this one. I googled it and found some blogs that are not about what I have in mind
I agree that donating to my favourite charity instead of my friend's favorite one would be unpolite, at least; however, I was thinking about friends who are not EAs, or who don't use to donate at all. It might be a better gift than a card or a lame souvenir, and perhaps interest this friend in EA charities (I try to think about which charity would interest this person most). Is there any reason against it?
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If your friend doesn't donate normally, then probably their preferred person to spend money on is themself. It still seems rude to me to say you're giving them a gift, which should be something they want, and instead give them something they don't want.
For example, my mother likes flowers. I normally get her flowers for mother's day. If I switch to giving her a donation to AMF instead of buying her flowers, she will be counterfactually worse off - she is no longer getting the flowers she enjoys. I don't think that kind of experience would make her more likely to start donating, either.
Did UNESCO draft recommendation on AI principles involve anyone concerned with AI safety? The draft hasn't been leaked yet, and I didn't see anything in EA community - maybe my bubble is too small. https://en.unesco.org/artificial-intelligence
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Are we in an Original Position regarding the interests of our descendants?
If you:
- Had to make a decision about the basic structure of a society where your distant descendants will live (in 200 or 2000 years), and
- only care about their welfare, and
- don’t know (almost) anything about who they will be, how many, how their society will be structured, etc.,
Then you are under some sort of veil of ignorance, in a situation quite similar to Rawls’s Original Position… with one major difference: it’s not an abstract thought experiment for ideal political theory.
What le...
Two researchers at the RAND Corporation recently argued for a related idea. From our Future Matters summary:
Douglas Ligor and Luke Matthews's Outer space and the veil of ignorance proposes a framework for thinking about space regulation. The authors credit John Rawls with an idea actually first developed by the utilitarian economist John Harsanyi: that to decide what rules should govern society, we must ask what each member would prefer if they ignored in advance their own position in it. The authors then note that, when it comes to space governance, humanity is currently behind a de facto veil of ignorance. As they write, "we still do not know who will shoulder the burden to clean up our space debris, or which nation or company will be the first to capitalize on mining extraterrestrial resources." Since the passage of time will gradually lift this veil, and reveal which nations benefit from which rules, the authors argue that this is a unique time for the international community to agree on binding rules for space governance.
So, I saw Vox's article on how air filters create huge educational gains; I'm particularly surprised that indoor air quality (actually, indoor environmental conditions) is kinda neglected everywhere (except, maybe, in dagerous jobs). But then I saw this (convincing) critique of the underlying paper.
It seems to me that this is a suitable case for a blind RCT: you could install fake air filters in order to control for placebo effects, etc. But then I googled a little bit... and I haven't found significant studies using blind RCTs in social sci...
Two “non-spoilers” for the movie Oppenheimer
Since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Elders have been talking about this lately…
1) "Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
The famous passage from Bhagavad Gita (BG), the Hindu religious epic. It suggests that Nolan is associating Oppie with the terrible form of Vishvaruppa – call this the “promethean” interpretation. But Oppie is actually more similar to prince Arjuna: the hero with a crisis of conscience who doesn't want to join the battlefield of Kurukshetra because it will bring incontroll...
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I thought it was a good movie, but was sad at how little it focused on:
1. The actual making of the bomb
2. The attempts of scientists to influence the politics of whether and how to use it
3. Moral regret
Is this a setback in animal welfare laws? https://www.publico.pt/2023/01/18/sociedade/noticia/ministerio-publico-pede-inconstitucionalidade-norma-lei-maus-tratos-animais-2035566 I was surprised that Portuguese constitutional legal doctrine prevented criminalizing torturing animals
https://www.tribunalconstitucional.pt/tc/acordaos/20210867.html There are quite definitive precedents
Might"A Beacon in the Galaxy" be our new "Three-body problem" (by Cixin Liu)
This paper proposes to transmit an "updated Arecibo-like" message to a star cluster near the galaxy’s center, a "selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed".
Caleb Schwarf summarizes the issue here. Even if we set aside the possibility of conflict, maybe discussions on Space Governance should include how we might communicate with other types of intelligent life, like "at least don't mention that we kill animals".
Is inequality neglected in EA?
I am inclined to answer "no," because I've seen the subject pop in some discussions on economics in this Forum... on the other hand, I've also seen some EAs disregard matters of economic distribution as secondary - if not an obstacle to economic progress. I remember seeing this subject figure in some critiques to the movement or mentioned en passant when the subject is billionaires' philanthropy. Anyway, I'd like to document and share here some of my impressions resulting from a 30min search on the subject.
My attention was rec...
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Update: new IGM forum survey shows that less than 10% of the consulted economists disagree, and most of them agree, that the increasing share of income and wealth among the richest people in a number of advanced countries is:
a) giving significantly more political power to the wealthy (90% - weighted by confidence);
b) having a significantly negative effect on intergenerational social mobility (79%);
c) a major threat to capitalism (61%).
Global Ultra High Net Worth Individuals fell by 6% this year, according to Wealth-X - after steady increases in the last few years. Thus, I'm afraid the lack of funding from SBF may be the beginning of a trend - at least for community building and longtermism
CONSTITUTIONALIZING THE LONG-TERM FUTURE - ESTABLISHING INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE IN NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS
On Sep 19 and Sep 20
This conference might interest longtermists in general (and people in Legal Priorities especifically)
https://ifilnova.pt/en/events/constitutionalizing-the-long-term-future/
Essay Prize of the Portuguese Philosophy Society - Philosophical papers on Artificial intelligence I'm not sure this will interest top researchers in AI philosophy, but maybe someone might see this as a low-hanging fruit: the "PRÉMIO DE ENSAIO DA SOCIEDADE PORTUGUESA DE FILOSOFIA" of this year is about the challenges AI poses for "the philosophical understanding of the human".
"Que desafios pode a inteligência artificial colocar à compreensão filosófica do humano?” Link: https://www.spfil.pt/regulamento_premio_ensaio_spf deadline: feb 2023 prize: €3,000
Contigent conventions and the Tragedy of "Happy Birthday lock-in"
Will and Rob were talking about how the idea that there’s an inevitable convergence in moral values is wrong, and they mention some examples of contingencies. The first is the “Tragedy of ‘Happy Birthday’ lock-in”:
...The melody for “Happy Birthday” is really atrocious. It’s like a dirge. It has this really large interval; no one can sing it. I can’t sing it. And so really, if you were going to pick a tune to be the most widely sung song in the world, it wouldn’t be that tune. Yet, it’s the one t
Does anyone have any idea / info on what proportion of the infected cases are getting Covid19 inside hospitals?
(Epistemic status: low, but I didin't find any research on that, so the hypothesis deserves a bit more of attention)
1. Nosocomial infections are serious business. Hospitals are basically big buildings full of dying people and the stressed personel who goes from one bed to another try to avoid it. Throw a deadly and very contagious virus in it, and it becomes a slaughterhouse.
2. Previous coronavirus were rapidly spread in hospitals and other c...
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/woman-first-uk-victim-die-coronavirus-caught-hospital-marita-edwards
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Did anyone see the spread of Covid through nursing homes coming before? It seems quite obvious in hindsight - yet, I didn't even mention it above. Some countries report almost half of the deaths from those environments.
(Would it have made any difference? I mean, would people have emphasized patient safety, etc.? I think it's implausible, but has anyone tested if this isn't just some statistical effect, due to the concentration of old-aged people, with chronic diseases?)
IMF climate change challenge "How might we integrate climate change into economic analysis to promote green policies?
To help answer this question, the IMF is organizing an innovation challenge on the economic and financial stability aspects of climate change." https://lnkd.in/dCbZX-B
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If wild animals have bad lives on net, then indiscriminately increasing wild animal populations is bad under any plausible theory of population ethics.
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Obviously. But then, first, Effective Environmentalists are doing great harm, right? We should be arguing more about it. On the other hand, if your basic welfare theory is hedonistic (at least for animals), then one good long life compensates for thousands of short miserable ones - because what matters is qualia, not individuals. And though I don't deny animals suffer all the time, I guess their "default welfare setting" must be positive if their reward system (at least for vertebrates) is to function properly. So I guess it's more likely that we have some sort of instance of the "repugnant conclusion" here. Ofc, this doesn't imply we shouldn't intervene on wild environments to reduce suffering or increase happiness. What is at stake is: U(destroying habitats) > U(restoring habitats)
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This is something interesting that I've been thinking about too, as someone who identifies as an environmentalist and who cares about animals. I would say most mainstream environmentalists promote rewilding but it's not that common with Effective Environmentalism from what I've seen so far. You might say it gets lumped in with afforestation but that isn't exactly rewilding nor that popular within EE anyway. Certainly the issue of more wild animal suffering is one I've raised when talking to less-EA aligned folks about rewilding and that's not gone down well but I haven't seen it discussed much in EE spaces.
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Good point, thanks. However, even if EE and Wild animals welfare advocates do not conflict in their intermediary goals, their ultimate goals do collide, right? For the former, habitat destruction is an evil, and habitat restoration is good - even if it's not immediately effective.
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Does your feeling that the default state is positive also apply to farm animals? Their reward system would be shaped by aritifical selection for the past few generations, but it is not immediately clear to me if you think that would make a difference.
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First, it's not a feeling, it's a hypothesis. Please, do not mistake one for the other. It could apply to them if they were not observed to be under stress conditions and captivity, and in behaviors consistent with psychological suffering - like neurotic ticks, vocalization or apathy. (Tbh, I don't quite see your point here, but I guess you possibly don't see mine, either)
Could we have catastrophic risk insurance? Mati Roy once suggested, in this shortform, that we could have "nuclear war insurance," a mutual guarantee to cover losses due to nukes, to deter nations from a first strike; I dismissed the idea because, in this case, it'd not be an effective deterrent (if you have power and reasons enough to nuke someone, insurance costs won't be among your relevant concerns). However, I wonder if this could be extrapolated to other C-risks, such as climate change - something insurance and financial markets are already trying t...
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I no longer endorse this comment because, since then, I found out that there's a lot of research on internalising climate change externalities - and that Weitzman (2012) and others present mitigation as akin to insurance. I still wonder how much of this line of reasoning could extrapolate to other GCR.
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It turns out that I changed my mind again. I don't see why we couldn't establish pigouvian taxes for (some?) c-risks. For instance, taxing nuclear weapons (or their inputs, such as nuclear fuel) according to some tentative guesstimate of the "social cost of nukes" would provide funding for peace efforts and possibly even be in the best interest of (most of?) current nuclear powers, as it would help slow down nuclear proliferation. This is similar to Barratt et al.'s paper on making gian of function researchers buy insurance.
Is there anything like a public repository / document listing articles and discussions on social discount rates (similar to what we have for iidm)? (I mean, I have downloaded a lot of papers on this - Stern, Nordhaus, Greaves, Weitzman, Posner etc. - and there many lit reviews, but I wonder if someone is already approaching it in a more organized way)
Future of Life Institute is looking for translators!
(Forwarded from FLI's Newsletter)
The outreach team is now recruiting Spanish and Portuguese speakers for translation work!
The goal is to make our social media content accessible to our rapidly growing audience in Central America, South America, and Mexico. The translator would be sent between one and five posts a week for translation. In general, these snippets of text would only be as long as a single tweet.
We prefer a commitment of two hours per week but do not expect the work to exceed one hour per wee...
Not super-effective, but given Sanjay's post on ESG, maybe there are people interested:
Ethics and Trust in Finance 8th Global Prize
The Prize is a project of the Observatoire de la Finance (Geneva), a non-profit foundation, working since 1996 on the relationship between the ethos of financial activities and its impact on society. The Observatoire aims to raise awareness of the need to pursue the common good through reconciling the good of persons, organizations, and community.
[...]
The 8th edition (2020-2021) of the Prize was officially launched o...
IMF Blogpost: Social Repercussions of Pandemics - By Philip Barrett, Sophia Chen, and Nan Li
Or something Peter Turchin would agree with:
...But looking beyond the immediate aftermath, the risk of social unrest spikes in the longer term. Using information on the types of unrest, the IMF staff study focuses on the form that unrest typically takes after an epidemic. This analysis shows that, over time, the risk of riots and anti-government demonstrations rises. Furthermore, the study finds evidence of heightened risk of a major government crisis—an event that thr
'Good' news: as expected, as real interest rates fall, so do SDR, increasing the social cost of carbon. (not novelty, ok, but monetary policy-makers explicitly acknowledging it seems to be good)
Bad news: of course, it still seems to be higher than a normative SDR based on time-neutrality.
Legal personality & AI systems
From the first draft of the UNESCO Recommendation on AI Ethics:
Policy Action 11: Ensuring Responsibility, Accountability and Privacy 94. Member States should review and adapt, as appropriate, regulatory and legal frameworks to achieve accountability and responsibility for the content and outcomes of AI systems at the different phases of their lifecycle. Governments should introduce liability frameworks or clarify the interpretation of existing frameworks to make it possible to attribute accountability for the decisions...
Why didn't we have more previous alarm concerning the spread of Covid through care and nursing homes? Would it have made any difference? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/across-the-world-figures-reveal-horrific-covid-19-toll-of-care-home-deaths
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Does anyone know or have a serious opinion / analysis on the European campaign to tax meat? I read some news at Le Monde, but nothing EA-level seriousness. I mean, it seems a pretty good idea, but I saw no data on possible impact, probability of adoption, possible ways to contribute, or even possible side-effects?
(not the best comparison, but worth noting: in Brazil a surge in meat prices caused an inflation peak in december and corroded the governement's support - yeah, people can tolerate politicians meddling with criminals and fascism, as long as they can have barbecue)
I was reading this recommended book and wondering how much of the late changes in our world is due to the demographic transitions - i.e., boomers. We know the population pyramid shape affects unemployment rates, wealth concentration (morever, think about how income predicts life expectancy, at least in very unequal countries - so one can expect a higher proportion of wealthier individuals in old age), and maybe even increasing health costs and votes - e.g., I just confirmed that, in Brazil, opinions about the government among young and old people are sym...
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Obelus seems to be the organizational name under which Asterisk is registered - both the asterisk and the obelus are punctuation symbols so I highly doubt that Obelus exists separately from Asterisk.
Charging readers is probably an attempt to be financially independent of EV, which is a worthy goal for all EA organizations and especially media organizations that may have good cause to criticize EV at some point.
The eggs and milk quip is just a quip about their new prices; I don't understand what's offensive about it.
The California issue is weird to me too.
[Conflict note: writing an article for Asterisk now]
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The eggs and milk quip might be offensive on animal welfare reasons. Eggs at least are one of the worst commonly consumed animal products according to various ameliatarian Fermi estimates.
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I see, fair enough.
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If you previously liked the magazine these seem like relatively weak reasons to cancel it.
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FWIW EV has been off-boarding its projects, so it isn't surprising that Asterisk is now nested under something else. I don't know anything about Obelus Inc.
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You should cancel if you think it's not worth the money. The other reasons seem worse.
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Like Karthik, I don’t really understand what is so terrible about this, but I agree that the California edition is at least strange. It’s interesting how many of the ideas central to EA originate from California. While exploring the origin stories of these ideas is intriguing, I would be much more interested in an issue that explores ideas from far outside that comfort zone and see what they can teach us.
However, I’m not an editor and don’t think I’d make a good one either 😅
Is Climate-sensitivity super-wrong?
Thomas Homer-Dixon on why James Hansen's latest climate findings matter
"The bottom line is startling: Hansen’s team argues that mainstream climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s reports, underestimates climate sensitivity to CO2 by about 50 percent. Their research suggests that the “short-term”—century time scale—equilibrium warming from a doubling of CO2e should be 4.5 degrees C, not the standard estimate of 3 degrees.
The reason for this error, in the view of Hansen and his team, is that conventional climate science, which is almost wholly wedded to climate models, has miscalculated the past impact of aerosols on warming trends. Now that shipping aerosols have declined dramatically across the north Pacific and Atlantic, that extra climate forcing is being revealed—ergo the acceleration. Paleoclimatic data, they argue, also support a substantially higher estimate of climate sensitivity."
https://chalkboard.cascadeinstitute.org/a-climate-science-wake-up-call-james-hansens-latest-research/