Thanks! To be clear, I think you've made your case about EA branding well in this post and others. But I think the game makes explicit or implicit claims that don't hold up, which makes it an ineffective education / persuasion tool in my case.
To massively overanalyze my playthrough:
Redwood and MIRI have pretty distinctive colors. FAR AI, GovAI, and Apollo are all basically black. It seems like this is claiming that, if their branding were better in some way, I'd be able to tell those three apart from the shade of near-black.
The text says "deep breath — every one of these lines could’ve come from any of the five." But I don't think that's true! Only the Simon Institute is involved in "supporting policymakers" (which I can tell by the fact that it has "governance" in its name). Only one of the taglines includes the word "philanthropy." Only Founders Pledge focuses on "entrepreneurs," etc.
Kind of a repeat of 1, except I work in AI safety so I'm less familiar with these orgs to begin with, and have probably never seen at least two of these logos. A suggestion to make this type of question feel less "unfair" and more compelling: show us each of them in color beforehand, and then see if we can match them properly 10 seconds later.
I'm not sure why I should be able to match color palettes to cause areas, even if we had incredibly good branding across the field.
At this point I just submitted without moving any of the sliders to see the real answers. I don't really know what it means to pass each of these tests, or which organizations were included in the survey, so it's hard to take anything away from these numbers.
I think I'm reasonably close to your target audience for this, so hopefully this feedback is helpful!
Admittedly knowing nothing about branding or design, the game didn't land for me. The taglines were easy -- knowing anything about the orgs, e.g. that the name includes "philanthropy", is enough to correctly guess which is which. And the others felt like they didn't make the case for themselves. Am I supposed to be able to tell the blacks of Nike, Adidas, and Puma apart?
A more convincing version of the game might have examples of both good and bad branding: show me that, actually, I can distinguish brands I know from just their shade of blue, but can't similarly tell EA orgs apart.
Hank Green has done this on YouTube, and has a video discussing the economics (about $1000/month! although already having an audience presumably helped).
Emojis in display names feels like a Twitter-native phenomenon. I think it works on Twitter because of the distinction between a @username and a Twitter handle: the latter can change frequently and is often used for jokes or puns anyway.
So the orange diamond emoji fits in well on Twitter -- even "Jeff Kaufman 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎", while a little over the top, wouldn't strike me as too unusual. But in most other settings (EA Forum, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), where there's less or no distinction between real names, usernames, and display names, an emoji stands out more. (Although 🔸 is visually simpler and more professional-looking than 🛝, at least.)
A candidate rule of thumb: use the 🔸 in situations where you're fine with people using other emojis, and don't use it if it might start a slippery slope toward 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎 where that would be unwelcome. For me that means ... just Twitter, I think? And maybe the EA forum where it's already catching on and doesn't seem to be spurring other emoji-use.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, isn't this "just" an issue of computing Shapley values incorrectly? If kindling is important to the fire, it should be included in the calculation; if your modeling neglects to consider it, then the problem is with the modeling and not with the Shapley algorithm per se.
Of course, I say "just" in quotes because actually computing real Shapley values that take everything into account is completely intractable. (I think this is your main point here, in which case I mostly agree. Shapley values will almost always be pretty made-up in the best of circumstances, so they should be taken lightly.)
I still find the concept of Shapley values useful in addressing this part of the OP:
Impact does not seem to be a property that can sensibly be assigned to an individual. If an individual (or organisation) takes an action, there a number of reasons why I think that the subsequent consequences/impact can't solely be attributed to that one individual.
I read this as sort of conflating the claims that "impact can't be solely attributed to one person" and "impact can't be sensibly assigned to one person." Shapley values help with assigning values to individuals even when they're not solely responsible for outcomes, so it helps pull these apart conceptually.
Much more fuzzily, my experience of learning about Shapley values took me from thinking "impact attribution is basically impossible" (as in the quote above) to "huh, if you add a bit more complexity you can get something decent out." My takeaway is to be less easily convinced that problems of this type are fundamentally intractable.
I agree with just about everything in this comment :)
(Also re: Shapley values -- I don't actually have strong takes on these and you shouldn't take this as a strong endorsement of them. I haven't engaged with them beyond reading the post I linked. But they're a way to get some handle on cases where many people contribute to an outcome, which addresses one of the points in your post.)
Thanks for writing this! "EA is too focused on individual impact" is a common critique, but most versions of it fall flat for me. This is a very clear, thorough case for it, probably the best version of the argument I've read.
I agree most strongly with the dangers of internalizing the "heavy-tailed impact" perspective in the wrong way, e.g. thinking "the top people have the most impact -> I'm not sure I'm one of the top people -> I won't have any meaningful impact -> I might as well give up." (To be clear, steps 2, 3, and 4 are all errors: if there's a decent chance you're one of the top, that's still potentially worth going for. And even if not--most people aren't--that doesn't mean your impact is negligible, and certainly doesn't mean doing nothing is better!)
I mostly disagree with the post though, for some of the same reasons as other commenters. The empirical case for heavy-tailed impact is persuasive to me, and while measuring impact reliably seems practically very hard / intractable in most cases, I don't think it's in principle impossible (e.g. counterfactual reasoning and Shapley values).
I'm also wary of arguments that have the form "even if X is true, believing / saying it has bad consequences, so we shouldn't believe / say X." I think there are usually ways to incorporate X while mitigating the downsides that might be associated with believing it; some of the links you included (e.g. Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians, Naive vs Prudent Utilitarianism) provide examples of this. Heavy-tailed impact is (if true) a very important fact about the world. So it's worth putting in the effort to incorporate it into our beliefs effectively, doing our best to avoid the downsides you point out.
The FTX collapse took place in November 2022. Among other things, this resulted in a lot of negative media attention on EA.
It's also worth noting that this immediately followed a large (very positive, on the whole) media campaign around Will MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future in summer 2022, which I imagine caused much of the growth earlier that year.
Thanks! To be clear, I think you've made your case about EA branding well in this post and others. But I think the game makes explicit or implicit claims that don't hold up, which makes it an ineffective education / persuasion tool in my case.
To massively overanalyze my playthrough:
I think I'm reasonably close to your target audience for this, so hopefully this feedback is helpful!
Admittedly knowing nothing about branding or design, the game didn't land for me. The taglines were easy -- knowing anything about the orgs, e.g. that the name includes "philanthropy", is enough to correctly guess which is which. And the others felt like they didn't make the case for themselves. Am I supposed to be able to tell the blacks of Nike, Adidas, and Puma apart?
A more convincing version of the game might have examples of both good and bad branding: show me that, actually, I can distinguish brands I know from just their shade of blue, but can't similarly tell EA orgs apart.
Hank Green has done this on YouTube, and has a video discussing the economics (about $1000/month! although already having an audience presumably helped).
This year I donated to (in decreasing order of amount given):
Emojis in display names feels like a Twitter-native phenomenon. I think it works on Twitter because of the distinction between a @username and a Twitter handle: the latter can change frequently and is often used for jokes or puns anyway.
So the orange diamond emoji fits in well on Twitter -- even "Jeff Kaufman 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎", while a little over the top, wouldn't strike me as too unusual. But in most other settings (EA Forum, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), where there's less or no distinction between real names, usernames, and display names, an emoji stands out more. (Although 🔸 is visually simpler and more professional-looking than 🛝, at least.)
A candidate rule of thumb: use the 🔸 in situations where you're fine with people using other emojis, and don't use it if it might start a slippery slope toward 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎 where that would be unwelcome. For me that means ... just Twitter, I think? And maybe the EA forum where it's already catching on and doesn't seem to be spurring other emoji-use.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, isn't this "just" an issue of computing Shapley values incorrectly? If kindling is important to the fire, it should be included in the calculation; if your modeling neglects to consider it, then the problem is with the modeling and not with the Shapley algorithm per se.
Of course, I say "just" in quotes because actually computing real Shapley values that take everything into account is completely intractable. (I think this is your main point here, in which case I mostly agree. Shapley values will almost always be pretty made-up in the best of circumstances, so they should be taken lightly.)
I still find the concept of Shapley values useful in addressing this part of the OP:
I read this as sort of conflating the claims that "impact can't be solely attributed to one person" and "impact can't be sensibly assigned to one person." Shapley values help with assigning values to individuals even when they're not solely responsible for outcomes, so it helps pull these apart conceptually.
Much more fuzzily, my experience of learning about Shapley values took me from thinking "impact attribution is basically impossible" (as in the quote above) to "huh, if you add a bit more complexity you can get something decent out." My takeaway is to be less easily convinced that problems of this type are fundamentally intractable.
I agree with just about everything in this comment :)
(Also re: Shapley values -- I don't actually have strong takes on these and you shouldn't take this as a strong endorsement of them. I haven't engaged with them beyond reading the post I linked. But they're a way to get some handle on cases where many people contribute to an outcome, which addresses one of the points in your post.)
Thanks for writing this! "EA is too focused on individual impact" is a common critique, but most versions of it fall flat for me. This is a very clear, thorough case for it, probably the best version of the argument I've read.
I agree most strongly with the dangers of internalizing the "heavy-tailed impact" perspective in the wrong way, e.g. thinking "the top people have the most impact -> I'm not sure I'm one of the top people -> I won't have any meaningful impact -> I might as well give up." (To be clear, steps 2, 3, and 4 are all errors: if there's a decent chance you're one of the top, that's still potentially worth going for. And even if not--most people aren't--that doesn't mean your impact is negligible, and certainly doesn't mean doing nothing is better!)
I mostly disagree with the post though, for some of the same reasons as other commenters. The empirical case for heavy-tailed impact is persuasive to me, and while measuring impact reliably seems practically very hard / intractable in most cases, I don't think it's in principle impossible (e.g. counterfactual reasoning and Shapley values).
I'm also wary of arguments that have the form "even if X is true, believing / saying it has bad consequences, so we shouldn't believe / say X." I think there are usually ways to incorporate X while mitigating the downsides that might be associated with believing it; some of the links you included (e.g. Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians, Naive vs Prudent Utilitarianism) provide examples of this. Heavy-tailed impact is (if true) a very important fact about the world. So it's worth putting in the effort to incorporate it into our beliefs effectively, doing our best to avoid the downsides you point out.
The FTX collapse took place in November 2022. Among other things, this resulted in a lot of negative media attention on EA.
It's also worth noting that this immediately followed a large (very positive, on the whole) media campaign around Will MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future in summer 2022, which I imagine caused much of the growth earlier that year.
Many of the songs associated with Secular Solstice[1] have strong EA themes, or were explicitly written with EA in mind.
A few of the more directly EA songs that I like:
Lots of resources at that link, also an overlapping list of solstice songs here.