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've seen very few discussions on "multiplayer perspective" in the community (besides value of coordination on 80k's website, and the forum post How can we best coordinate as a community?, both written by Benjamin Todd), and I fear that we might be neglecting impactful opportunities.
I wonder whether actively encouraging people to take a multiplayer perspective, particularly in donations, can account for additional impact that we're missing out on when we talk so often about the marginal impact an individual has. For instance, I wonder if donation advice should significantly change when given to a single person, compared to when it's given to people who are willing to group together and donate a large amount of money. What do you think?