NickLaing's Quick takes

100% agree with this!

It would be quite funny for my intern to be the highest-paid person at my org if they keep that salary 😭

Given your expertise is in global health, I do think it's likely that you're less well-calibrated on how reasonable your animal welfare comments are relative to your global health ones! So you may think it's a reasonable critique but someone who is a die-hard animal person may have already thought about your comment and know there is a common counterpoint that negates it (which you haven't heard yet). Obviously, the inverse could be true for global health comments.

But I agree that this shouldn't have been downvoted on karma grounds!

(Also, sometimes your comments do give me "I am sceptical of most things animal welfare" vibes, so people might be reacting to a real or perceived difference in values about how much animals matter).

haha I can confirm I did not karma knock you and I was kind of surprised you had gotten so downvoted! I actually upvoted when I saw that to counteract. 

One random thought I'll add is that since you are most experienced (afaict?) in ghd, I'd expect your arguments to be at their best in that context, so you getting upvoted on GHD and downvoted on AW is at least consistent with having more expertise in one than the other, so not necessarily evidence that AW folks are more sensitive. Although I'm not ruling that out!

The other thing I'm not sure I understand is how much weight a single individual's downvote can have - is there any chance that a few AW people have a ton of karma here, so that just a few people downvoting can take you negative in a way that wouldn't happen as much in GHD? 

As a (wild) animal welfare person, I am disappointed to see this. Your comment was thoughtful and well-intentioned.

It doesn't apply here, but in general I expect animal welfare people are more likely to disapprove of certain views, or take more of a combative attitude to public debates, because so much of normal discourse sneaks in speciesist assumptions and is actively harmful to animals. But I don't think that's the explanation here - I largely agree with your comment.

To respond to your original comment, I think with a bit of creativity you will be able to find politically tractable interventions. For example, people tend to view humane management of animals in cities quite positively. There's also a growing movement for compassionate conservation. It's more focused on doing no harm than actively helping wild animals, but at least it is a movement towards thinking about the welfare of wild animals. I do think that there will often be a tradeoff between effectiveness and political tractability though, and it may be worth pursuing sub-optimal interventions for a while in order to gain greater political momentum towards helping wild animals.

Just wanted to say, as someone from the animal side of things, that if this is indeed the case (no strong opinion either way), I'm sorry this happened to you and I appreciate that you're pointing this out. Separating agreement from post quality is something I deeply value in the discourse here, and we should police the correct use of voting.

I have no idea how much this kind of voting behaviour varies from discussions about one cause area to another, but I can confirm that this happens a lot in various discussions on multiple different topics. People seem keen to karma downvote/strongly downvote posts or comments they disagree with, regardless of quality. I surmise this is probably just people being mad and having a knee-jerk reaction, in a lot of cases.

I recently had an experience where someone was using a technical term incorrectly, and I left two comments trying to correct the use of this term. These comments didn't get responded to, but they did get strongly downvoted. It was enough that it triggered me getting rate limited from commenting on the forum! This just seems like a case where someone felt spiteful that I pointed out they made a mistake.

That's one example, but people do this all the time. Another recent example is here, where I didn't notice or complain about the downvoting, but someone else noticed it and complained about it on my behalf. 

People in this community are only human, and we're affected by the same impulses as anybody else. We have the same cognitive/psychological biases as anyone else and the same problems with emotional self-regulation as anyone else. It takes a certain amount of discipline for me to remain judicious about my downvotes (or, on rare occasions, quickly undo a downvote I made in a moment of irritation).

To the extent it's a real problem, it's a problem where it's not a one-off spar between two people (or a few), but where it's systemic around certain ideas or topics. I get the impression people sort of knee-jerk/undiscerningly upvote posts and comments that support the narrative that near-term AGI is likely, and downvote posts and comments that challenge this narrative, even when the actual content is narrow in scope, e.g. pointing out a mistake in something that promotes a near-term AGI narrative.

If you want to express mainstream North American liberal/progressive views on social justice-related topics, forget about it. The downvotes will fall like a cloud of daggers. (The Overton window of the EA Forum is a bit skewed in that regard — and it's extremely skewed for the LessWrong users who come over here — where some people will defend views they concede are or might be offensive and wrong, such as scientific racism or white nationalism, on the grounds of free speech or neutrality or intellectual freedom or whatever, but do not extend the same defense to the sort of bog standard social justice views that mainstream liberal or progressive politicians or academics generally affirm. I think Kamala Harris or Barack Obama might get downvoted on the EA Forum talking about systemic racism, sexism, or trans rights in the ways they already do in public appearances, and an authoritarian white nationalist like Curtis Yarvin — who many people on LessWrong seem to be a fan of — might get upvoted for some edgy take about Black-on-Black crime or race and IQ or something.)

I find the ways that I see people on the EA Forum circle the wagons around near-term AGI and social justice quite demented — sorry to be so blunt. Someone can make a post that says we should try to contact aliens to warn them about AGI and that gets +27 karma, but if you point out someone used a term from machine learning incorrectly that gets 0 or negative karma, and if you get into arguments about social justice you will get negative karma about the half the time, seemingly regardless of what you say (at least, I can't figure out the pattern, if there is one). It just seems like if you are willing to entertain really strange ideas like the aliens thing, you should also be willing to entertain mainstream ideas that many experts endorse — I mean specifically things that don't go against EA's core principles and haven't been discussed to death already, about which there isn't already a consensus within the community.

I guess it doesn't surprise me that people might knee-jerk downvote entirely reasonable comments about the limited market potential for humane insecticides or things of that nature, since that's similar. Maybe it's an example of in-group polarization, where people want to fiercely defend an opinion that's extreme relative to the general population or out-group. 

I also thought your comment didn't deserve to get downvoted :'(, even though I disagreed and thought it partly missed my point (I ofc didn't downvote it, tho). Even the number of upvotes of Mal's comment responding to yours feels a bit violent, actually. I think people should maybe hold off from upvoting when it's not necessary. They can just agree-vote.

I think Mal's, James', and Tristan's potential explanations for why this happened are pretty plausible.

But, also, as I suggest in response to Mal, it's probably just one single person, so :shrug:, I guess. :)

I broadly agree with this! 

At the same time, I'd flag that I'm not quite sure how to frame this.

If I were a donor to 80k, I'd see this action as less "80k did something nice for the EA community that they themselves didn't benefit from" and more "80k did something that was a good bet in terms of expected value." In some ways, this latter thing can be viewed as more noble, even though it might be seen as less warm.

Basically, I think that traditional understandings of "being thankful" sort of break down when organizations are making intentional investments that optimize for expected value.

I'm not at all saying that this means that these posts are less valuable or noble or whatever. Just that I'd hope we could argue that they make sense strictly through the lens of EV optimization, and thus don't need to rely as much on the language of appreciation.

(I've been thinking about this with other discussions) 

Change in strategic direction?

Dean Ball's commentary on this refamed the issue for me https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/clawed

The big difference, however, is that Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military. Think of the difference between “this fighter jet is not certified for flight above such-and-such an altitude, and if you fly above that altitude, you’ve breached your warranty,” and “you may not fly this jet above such-and-such an altitude”). It is probably the case that the military should not agree to terms like this, and private firms should not try to set them.

But the Biden Administration did agree to those terms, and so did the Trump Administration, until it changed its mind. That alone should make one thing clear: terms like this are not some ridiculous violation of the norms of defense contracting...

The contract was not illegal, just perhaps unwise, and even that probably only in retrospect. Note that this is true even if you agree with the underlying substance of the limitations. You can support restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, but disagree that a defense contract is the optimal vehicle to achieve that policy outcome. The way you achieve new policy outcomes, under the usual rules of our republic, is to pass a law...

I agree that there's something iffy/non-democratic in theory about putting that kind of constraint around the Pentagon, and that it would have been prudent for them to decline it in the first place. An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital "you're welcome to use our drug so long as you don't use it in any abortions," it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead). 

 Anyway this reframing put one sentence in particular by Dario into a new light: "To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI." In other words, because we know what the law should be and what it's probably going to be, we should implement that policy today. I think many of us can think of examples where we'd be uncomfortable with a billionaire tech CEO saying that. 

That is encouraging! Scott's post linking to various prediction markets for Antrhopic's implied valuations was also heartening.

It's true that meat eating is closer to what we actually care about, but it's worth singling out causal pathways from saving lives and increasing incomes/wealth, as potential backfire effects. "Meat eating problem" seems likely to be understood too generally as the problem of animal consumption, without explanation. I'd prefer a more unique expression to isolate the specific causal pathways.

Some other ideas:

1. meat eating backfire (problem)
2. more meat backfire/problem
3. meat backfire (problem)
4. (more) animal product backfire (problem)

(Eggs and other animal products besides meat matter, too.)

When we were talking about this in 2012 we called it the "poor meat-eater problem", which I think is clearer.

I think 'meat-eating problem' > 'meat-eater problem' came in my comment and associated discussion here, but possibly somewhere else.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   (I still stand by the comment, and I don't think it's contradictory with my current vote placement on the debate week question)

I think it's totally fair name of the problem, as its "unfairness" comes from the problem statement, not its name. "I think its pretty unfair to lump the label of a serious philosophical problem on the poorest people on earth" here for example, it's meat eater problem being morally icky, not its name.

1. Accuracy: I don’t think the core problem actually the people who’s lives we are saving, its that they then eat meat and cause suffering. I think its important to separate the people from the core problem as this better helps us consider possible solutions

The main takeaway of the 'meat eater problem' (sorry!) is to reassess the cost-effectiveness of saving human lives, not necessarily to argue that we should focus on reducing animal consumption in lower-income countries. While reducing animal consumption is important, that’s not typically the central takeaway from this specific 'problem'.

In this sense, the saving lives aspect is more central to the problem than the meat consumption aspect, though both are pivotal. So, in a purely logical sense, the term 'meat eater problem' might actually be more accurate.

In ordinary language, I wouldn't generally consider something that gets 1% of resources to be a "priority." Applying your reasoning above, that would create a theoretical maximum of 100 "priorities" and a more realistic range of perhaps 10-40. As we move beyond the low teens, the idea of a "priority" gets pretty watered down in my book.

This is incredibly impressive for a first video on a new channel. Great work 80kh!

Thanks so much for reading, Nick.

It really is nearly impossible as an individual consumer to figure out which of the many products we interact with everyday are safe, and which might be contaminated, unfortunately... so hoping we can collectively make progress on these things at a systems level soon!

On a related topic, I'm curious whether you see any geophagia (soil consumption) among pregnant women, or other people, in Northern Uganda? It's fairly common in Kenya and Malawi and we've unfortunately seen that the soils (which are often compacted, so they look like small stones) frequently contain lead levels well above what you'd want to see in something that's being directly consumed.

-- Isabel Arjmand (cofounder)

The CE of redirecting money is simply (dollars raised per dollar spent) * (difference in CE between your use of the money vs counterfactual use). So if GD raises $10 from climate mitigation for every $1 it spent, and that money would have otherwise been neutral, then that's a cost-effectiveness of 10x in GiveWell units.

There's nothing complicated about estimating the value of leverage. The problem is actually doing leverage. Everyone is trying to leverage everyone else. When there is money to be had, there are a bunch of organizations trying to influence how it is spent. Melinda French Gates is likely deluged with organizations trying to pitch her for money. The CEAP shutdown post you mentioned puts it perfectly:

The core thesis of our charity fell prey to the 1% fallacy. Within any country, much of the development budget is fixed and difficult to move. For example, most countries will have made binding commitments spanning several years to fund various projects and institutions. Another large chunk is going to be spent on political priorities (funding Ukraine, taking in refugees, etc.) which is also difficult for an outsider to influence.

What is left is fought over by hundreds, if not thousands of NGOs all looking for funding. I can’t think of any other government budget with as many entities fighting over as small a budget. The NGOs which survive in this space, are those which were best at getting grants. Like other industries dependent on government subsidies, they fight tooth and nail to ensure those subsidies stay put.

This doesn't mean that leverage is impossible. It just means that leverage opportunities tend to be specific and limited. We have to take them on opportunistically, rather than making leverage a theory of impact.

On the subject of redirecting streams of money from less impactful causes to EA causes, I feel I need to beat my drum regarding the potential of Profit for Good businesses (businesses with charities in all or almost all of the shareholder position). In such cases, to the extent EA PFGs profits displace those of normal businesses, funds are diverted from the average shareholder to an effective charity. 

So when a business like Humanitix (PFG helping projects in the developing world, $4mil AUD to The Life You Can Save) displaces the marketshare of Ticketmaster, funds are diverted not from charities, but from the funds of the business's competitors. This method of diversion seems less difficult because the operative actors (consumers, employees, business partners) are not deciding between a strong non-EA charity often optimized for warm fuzzies and marketing, but rather choosing between products with similar value propositions, but where engaging with one - in addition to the other value proposition - implies helping fight malaria or something instead of enriching a random investor. 

If you're interested in learning more about Profit for Good, here is a reading list on the subject.

I'm also very keen to get more global health content! One thing people can do to help is suggest bloggers/ substackers etc... who write on global health topics relevant to EA. I can talk to them and offer them automated crossposting and support. 

Hoping to post some shallow takes on global health and development this year!

Yes it's quite exciting! One quick thought: I don't think SMA/Bregman would be very pleased if EAs regularly started using SMA's videos and ideas in their outreach (because they want to keep themselves quite separate). Maybe he's changed his view on that (they're organising an event with Singer and GWWC shortly), but it was certainly the case a year or so ago. If anyone's considering doing this on a significant scale, I'd suggest checking with them first. 

Worth noting: Peter Singer and Rutger Bregman’s School for Moral Ambition are co-hosting a Profit for Good conference in Amsterdam on 11 June—a concrete EA-adjacent collaboration that channels Bregman’s “moral ambition” into effective-charity business models. Another good touchpoint for anyone looking to ride this wave.

https://www.moralambition.org/profit-for-good-conference-live-stream

I think for most people applying to their fellowships would be the best way to collaborate with SMA to do good (as he mentions in the video)

"AIDS related deaths in the next five years will increase by 6.3 million" if funding is not restored, UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima said.

This is a quote from a BBC news article, mainly about US political and legal developments. We don't know what the actual statement from the ED said, but I don't think there's enough here to infer fault on her part. 

For all we know, the original quote could have been something like predicting that deaths will increase by 6.3 million if we can't get this work funded -- which sounds like a reasonable position to take. Space considerations being what they are, I could easily see a somewhat more nuanced quote being turned into something that sounded unaware of counterfactual considerations.

There's also an inherent limit to how much fidelity can be communicated through a one-sentence channel to a general audience. We can communicate somewhat more in a single sentence here on the Forum, but the ability to make assumptions about what the reader knows helps. For example, in the specific context here, I'd be concerned that many generalist readers would implicitly adjust for other funders picking up some of the slack, which could lead to double-counting of those effects. And in a world that often doesn't think counterfactually, other readers' points of comparison will be with counterfactually-unadjusted numbers. Finally, a fair assessment of counterfactual impact would require the reader to understand DALYs or something similar, because at least a fair portion of the mitigation is likely to come from pulling public-health resources away from conditions that do not kill so much as they disable.

So while I would disagree with a statement from UNAIDS that actually said if the U.S. doesn't fund PEPFAR, 6.3MM more will die, I think there would be significant drawbacks and/or limitations to other ways of quantifying the problem in this context, and think using the 6.3MM number in a public statement could be appropriate if the actual statement were worded appropriately. 

The only scenario where this could happen is if all of these people went completely untreated, which means that no local government would come in at any stage. This scenario is impossible

Can you elaborate why this is impossible, or at least unlikely?

Who is considering Altman and Hassabis thought leaders in AI safety? I wouldn't even consider Altman a thought leader in AI - his extraordinary skill seems mostly social and organizational. There's maybe an argument for Amodei, as Anthropic is currently the only one of the company whose commitment to safety over scaling is at least reasonably plausible.

I think thoughtleader sometimes means "has thoughts at the leading edge" and sometimes mean "leads the thoughts of the herd on a subject" and that there is sometimes a deliberate ambiguity between the two.

Does this mean you recently had a baby? If so, congratulations! 

This is huge. TRIP has a very wide listenership, particularly of UK Politics nerds, politicians, journalists, and policy workers.

I think it's fairest to compare HLI's charity analysis with other charity evaluators like Givewell, ACE, and Giving Green.

Giving Green has been criticised regularly and robustly (just look up any of their posts). Givewell publish their analysis and engage with criticism; HLI themselves have actually criticised them pretty robustly! I don't know about ACE because I don't stay up to date on animals but I bet it's similar there.

The dynamics are quite different for example in charitable foundations where they don't need to convince anyone to donate differently, or charities that deliver a service who only need to convince their funders to continue donating.

HLI fucked up their analysis, but because it was public we found out about it. Most EAs are too fearful to expose their work to scrutiny. Compare them to others who work on mental health within EA...

Most coaches and therapists in EA don't do any rigorous testing of whether what they are doing actually works. They don't even allow you to leave public reviews for them. I think we're the only organisation to even have a TrustPilot!!!

I don't think the problem is that HLI got too much hate for fucking up, it's that everyone else gets too little hate for being opaque.

Now HLI have been dragged through the mud, you can bet your ass they won't be making the same mistakes again. So long as they keep being transparent, they'll keep learning and growing as an org. Others will keep making the same mistakes indefinitely, only we'll never know about it and will continue blindly trusting them.

Although I agree with much of the criticism against them, the hammering they took felt at best rough and perhaps even unfair.

One general problem with online discourse is that even if each individual makes a fair critique, the net effect of a lot of people doing this can be disproportionate, since there's a coordination problem. That said, a few things make me think the level of criticism leveled at HLI was reasonable, namely:

1. HLI was asking for a lot of money ($200k-$1 million).
2. The critiques people were making seemed (generally) unique, specific, and fair.
3. The critiques came after some initial positive responses to the post, including responses to the effect of "I'm persuaded by this; how can I donate?"

Does there need to be a "scrutiny rebalancing" of sorts. I would rather other orgs got more scrutiny, rather than development orgs getting less.

I agree with you that GHD organizations tend to be scrutinized more closely, in large part because there is more data to scrutinize. But there is also some logic to balancing scrutiny levels within cause areas. When HLI solicits donations via Forum post, it seems reasonable to assume that donations they receive more likely come out of GiveWell's coffers than MIRI's. This seems like an argument for holding HLI to the GiveWell standard of scrutiny, rather than the MIRI standard (at least in this case).

That said, I do think it would be good to apply stricter standards of scrutiny to other EA organizations, without those organizations explicitly opening themselves up to evaluation by posting on the Forum. I wonder if there might be some way to incentivize this kind of review.

My read is it wasn't the statistics they got hammered on misrepresenting other people's views of them as endorsements e.g. James Snowden's views. I will also say the AI side does get this criticism but not on cost-effectiveness but on things like culture war (AI Ethics vs. AI Safety) and dooming about techniques (e.g. working in a big company vs. more EA aligned research group and RLHF discourse). 

"Fair" and "unfair" are tricky words to nail down.

I think there are a wide range of factors that explain why HLI has been treated differently than other orgs --  some "fair" under most definitions of the word, some less so. Some of those reasons are adjacent to questions of funding and influence, but I'm not sure they provide much room to criticize HLI's critics.

1. HLI is running in a lane -- global health/development/wellbeing -- where the evidentiary standards are much higher than in longtermist areas. Part of this is the nature of the work; asking a biosecurity program how many pandemics it has prevented is not workable. Part of it is that there is a very well-funded organization that has been doing CEAs that conensus views as high-quality. Yet another aspect is that GHDW work has been much more limited by funding constraints, which has incentivized GHDW funders to adopt higher standards.
   1. I think people generally need to be kinder to smaller-scale, early-stage efforts . . . but see point 3 below.
2. HLI is a charity recommender, a significant portion of whose focus currently involves making recommendations to ordinary people (not megadonors, foundations, etc.) I do think the level of scrutiny should ordinarily be higher for charity recommenders, especially those making recommendations to the general public. The purpose of a charity recommender is to evaluate the relative merits of various charities, and for ordinary donors their recommendations may be seen as near-authoritative. A sense that the community needs to carefully scrutinize the recommender's work destroys much of a recommender's value proposition in the first place. And while it's not very utilitarian of me, I do feel more protective of small donors who don't have an in-house staff to pick up on a recommender's mistakes.
3. I think an overconfident marketing campaign in 2022 did play a major role in how much grace people are willing to extend on the CEA. I haven't been around that long, but this does seem to significantly distinguish HLI from other orgs. I believe that HLI has expressed regret for certain statements, but a framework that compares statements made at that time (that have not been clearly and explicitly retracted) to what the data actually support strikes me as on the "fair" side of the ledger.
4. This was HLI's first major recommendation; people would be less prone to draw negative inferences about (e.g.) an org whose first four analyses/recommendations were fine but whose fifth had some significant issues. 
5. StrongMinds spends (and could potentially fundraise) enough money to make a significant dive into its cost-effectiveness worthwhile for critics, but probably not so much as to justify an airtight multi-million dollar workup (including by commissioning our own studies to fill any major holes in the data that would have a big effect on the CEA). So it's an awkward-size program to evaluate.
6. Pretty much all skeptical analysis is done by volunteers on their own time, and so the volume/quality of that work will heavily depend on who is interested in and available to doing it. It's plausible to me that having a controversial and/or novel framework could motivate more critics to volunteer for duty. 
7. There could also be a snowball effect; the detection of one significant weakness in a CEA may motivate others to start looking.
8. HLI asked Forum users to contribute money. Although I take a wide stance on "standing" to criticize organizations, one could reasonably characterize asking users for action as opening the door to some extent. Having an active fundraising ask may also provide a more concrete payoff/impact for criticism, by preventing users from taking an action the critic found undesirable.
9. HLI has been unusually transparent with data and responsive to criticism, which has made such criticism easier and kept it up longer. I think you're right to be concerned about the ferocity of criticism disincentivizing trransparency and opennness on the margin. 
10. The barriers to criticizing HLI are much lower. Because HLI has little power, no one is concerned about blowback. Compare that to the recent Omega criticisms of AI labs, which were posted psuedonymously and which had to rely on undisclosed data. Criticism from established community members who sign their work and can show their work carries more weight, and there's a disincentive to writing anonymous criticism (you'll never get any credit for it).

Several of these points are at least adjacent to questions of funding and power, and they cumulatively make me feel at least somewhat uncomfortable, e.g.:

• It's unlikely an organization with more secure funding would have made a fundraising appeal at this time. Rather, it likely would have laid low until it had produced a new CEA for SM and until more time had passed since the prior harsh posts.
• HLI may have felt pressure to be particularly transparent and responsive than a more established org. It's unlikely HLI would have been taken seriously if it didn't show its receipts, and it doesn't have the power/prestige needed for a "no real comment" approach to criticism to have a good shot at working. 

That being said, I find it challenging to assign much fault for those factors to the Forum user community on those. For example, in point 10, the unfairness is not that HLI is being criticized by named users who have built up a reputation, but that the criticism of other orgs is disincentivized and psuedonymous. 

I think you're right that the response to HLI may discourage transparency and responsiveness on the margin, and that this is a problem. As a practical matter, I think there are two factors that mitigate this to some extent. One is that I think the criticism of HLI reflects a convergence of a number of factors as listed above, and I'm not sure how much marginal effect comes from their good transparency and responsiveness. Second, I think any startup org trying to pursue HLI-like goals has to be transparent and responsive to get a hearing from the community, so I think it less likely that knowledge of current events will change another org's stance to a materially less open and responsive one.

I'm undecided on the net effect of all of this. My hope is that it will ultimately result in adoption of better epistemic safeguards and communications management -- both at HLI and elsewhere in the ecosystem. (Cf. my recent post on the HLI thread). That would be a good result, although I'd still wish we had gotten there with a lot less rancor.

Quite right. Far too much scrutiny was applied to HLI. Five thousand words autistic debunkings, though highly entertaining to read and no doubt equally entertaining to their authors, should not have been necessary. Any reasonable model of how the world works would not perhaps not quite rule the idea of group therapy in poor countries out of court, but require an incredibly high standard of evidence to even begin discussing it somewhat politely. 

On the subject of scrutinizing other orgs, I note that some hardworking but anonymous EAs have done their best to scrutizine EA's various AI research orgs, but of course this is much more specialized endeavour requiring deeper expertise and is also entirely pointless because OpenPhil will probably fund them anyway.