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...
Question for anyone who has interest/means/time to look into it: which topics on the EA forum are overrepresented/underrepresented? I would be interested in comparisons of (posts/views/karma/comments) per (person/dollar/survey interest) in various cause areas. Mostly interested in the situation now, but viewing changes over time would be great!
My hypothesis [DO NOT VIEW IF YOU INTEND TO INVESTIGATE]:
I expect longtermism to be WILDLY, like 20x, overrepresented. If this is the case I think it may be responsible for a lot of the recent angst about the relationship between longtermism and EA more broadly, and would point to some concrete actions to take.
There was a post on this recently.
Even a brief glance through posts indicates that there is relatively little discussion about global health issues like malaria nets, vitamin A deficiency, and parasitic worms, even though those are among the top EA priorities.