All of Benjamin_Todd's Comments + Replies
More on what moderation might mean in practice here:
https://80000hours.org/2023/05/moderation-in-doing-good/
I really liked this post. I find the undergrad degree metaphor useful in some ways (focus on succeeding in your studies over 4 years, but give a bit of thought to how it sets you up for the next stage), but since the end game is only 3 years (rather than a normal 40 year career), overall it seems like your pacing and attitude could end up pretty different.
Maybe the analogy could be an undergrad where their only goal is to get the "best" graduate degree possible. Then high school = early game, undergrad = midgame, graduate degree = end game. Maybe you could...
Yes I agree that could be a good scenario to emerge from this – a very salient example of this kind of thinking going wrong is one of the most helpful things to convince people to stop doing it.
The 80k team are still discussing it internally and hope to say more at a later date.
Speaking personally, Holden's comments (e.g. in Vox) resonated with me. I wish I'd done more to investigate what happened at Alameda.
If you're tracking the annual change in wealth between two periods, you should try to make sure the start at the end point are either both market peaks or both market lows.
e.g. from 2017 to 2021, or 2019 to Nov 2022 would be valid periods for tracking crypto.
If you instead track from e.g. 2019 to 2021, then you're probably going to overestimate.
Another option would be to average over periods significantly longer than a typical market cycle (e.g. 10yr).
Thanks!
My social life is pretty much only people who aren't in the EA community at this point.
Small comment on this:
actively fighting against EA communities to become silos and for EA enterprises to have workers outside EA communities would be of great value
It depends on the org, but for smaller orgs that are focused on EA community building, I still think it could make sense for them to pretty much only people who are very interested in EA. I wouldn't say the same about e.g. most biorisk orgs though.
Yes, I'd basically agree – he didn't influence the thinking that much but he did impact what you could get paid to do (and that could also have long term impacts on the structure of the community).
Though, given income inequality, the latter problem seems very hard to solve.
That's useful - my 'naive optimizing' thing isn't supposed to be the same thing as naive utilitarianism, but I do find it hard to pin down the exact trait that's the issue here, and those are interesting points about confidence maybe not being the key thing.
Just a small clarification, I'm not saying we should abandon the practical project, but it could make sense to (relatively speaking) focus on more tractable areas / dial down ambitions / tilt more towards the intellectual project until we've established more operational competence.
I also agree dissociating has significant costs that need to be weighed against the other reasons.
I'd agree a high degree of confidence + strong willingness to act combined with many other ideologies leads to bad stuff.
Though I still think some ideologies encourage maximisation more than others.
Utilitarianism is much more explicit in its maximisation than most ideologies, plus it (at least superficially) actively undermines the normal safeguards against dangerous maximisation (virtues, the law, and moral rules) by pointing out these can be overridden for the greater good.
Like yes there are extreme environmentalists and that's bad, but normally when som...
I basically agree and try to emphasize personality much more than ideology in the post.
That said, it doesn't seem like a big leap to think that confidence in an ideology that says you need to maximise a single value to the exclusion of all else could lead to dangerously optimizing behaviour...
Having more concern for the wellbeing of others is not the problematic part. But utilitarianism is more than that.
Moreover it could still be true that confidence in utilitarianism is in practice correlated with these dangerous traits.
I expect it's the negative compone...
it doesn't seem like a big leap to think that confidence in an ideology that says you need to maximise a single value to the exclusion of all else could lead to dangerously optimizing behaviour.
I don't find this a persuasive reason to think that utilitarianism is more likely to lead to this sort of behavior than pretty much any other ideology. I think a huge number of (maybe all?) ideologies imply that maximizing the good as defined by that ideology is the best thing to do, and that considerations outside of that ideology have very little weight. You se...
Yes, something like that: he of course had an influence on what you could get paid for (which seems hard to avoid given some ppl have more money than others) but I don't think he had a big influence on people's thinking about cause pri.
I don’t think SBF impacted cause prioritization by promoting pet causes that weren’t already favored by parts of the EA community. But I do think SBF, through the FTX Future Fund, likely shifted how people prioritized across different EA causes.
My sense is that the easy availability of longetermist funding made people more likely to work in that space, as people were well aware of a dynamic where (in Peter Wildeford’s words): “it's clear that global poverty does get the most overall EA funding right now, but it's also clear that it's more easy for me...
Hmm that does seem worse than I expected.
I wonder if it's because gwwc has cut back outreach or is getting less promotion by other groups (whereas 80k continued it's marketing as before, plus a lot of 80k's reach is passive), or whether it points to outreach actually being harder now.
I had you in mind as a good utilitarian when writing :)
Good point that just saying 'naively optimizing' utilitarians is probably clearest most of the time. I was looking for other words that would denote high-confidence and willingness to act without qualms.
Thank you!
Yes I think if you make update A due to a single data point, then you realise you shouldn't have updated on a single data point, you should undo update A. Like your original reasoning was wrong.
That aside, in the general case I think it can sometimes be justified a lot to update on a single datapoint. E.g. if you think an event was very unlikely, and then that event happens, your new probability estimate for the event will normally go up a lot.
In other cases, if you already have lots of relevant points, then adding a single extra one won't have m...
Some of the ones I've seen:
80k's metrics seems unaffected so far, and it's one of the biggest drivers of community growth.
I've also heard that EAG(x) applications didn't seem affected.
GWWC pledgers were down, though a lot of that is due to them not doing a pledge drive in Dec. My guess is that if they do a pledge drive next Dec similar to previous ones, the results will be similar. The baseline of monthly pledges seems ~similar.
I would be surprised if the effect from the lack of a pledge drive would run on into February and March 2023 though. Comparison YoY here is 12 months before, Jan 2023 to 2022 etc.
Good point there are reasons why work could get more valuable the closer you are – I should have mentioned that.
Also interesting points about option value.
I agree with many of the points, especially that personal fit is a big deal and that doing a PhD is also in part useful research (rather than pure career capital), and what matters is time until the x-risk rather than random definitions of AGI, but I'm worried this bit understates the reasons for urgency quite a bit:
...you might then conclude that delaying your career by 6 years would cause it to have 41/91 = 45% of the value. If that’s the case, if the delay increased the impact you could have by a bit more than a factor of 2, the delay would be worth it.
&nb
First to clarify, yes most of the general public haven't heard of EA, and many haven't made the connection with FTX.
I think EA's brand has mainly been damaged among what you could call the chattering classes. But I think that is a significant cost.
It's also damaged in the sense that if you search for it online you find a lot more negative stuff now.
On the question about comparisons, unfortunately I don't have a comprehensive answer.
Part of my thinking is that early on I thought EA wasn't a good public facing brand. Then things went better than I expe...
I was trying to do that :) That's why I opened with naive optimizing as the problem. The point about gung-ho utilitarians was supposed to be an example of a potential implication.
Yeah, I think "proudly self-identified utilitarians" is not the same as "naively optimizing utilitarians", so would encourage you to still be welcoming to those in the former group who are not in the latter :-)
ETA: I did appreciate your emphasizing that "it’s quite possible to have radical inside views while being cautious in your actions."
Appendix: some other comments that didn't make it into the main post
I made some mistakes in tracking EA money
These aren’t updates but rather things I should have been able to figure out ex ante:
- Mark down private valuations of startups by a factor of ~2 (especially if the founders hold most of the equity)
- Measure growth from peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough rather than trough-to-peak – I knew crypto was in a huge bull market
- I maybe should have expected more correlation between Alameda and FTX, and a higher chance of going to zero, based on the outside
I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did
But 80k didn't just "affiliate" with SBF - they promoted him with untrue information. And I don't see this addressed in the above or anywhere else. Particularly, his podcast interview made a thing of him driving a Corolla and sleeping on a beanbag as part of promoting the frugal Messiah image, when it seems likely that at least some people high up in EA knew that this characterisation was false. Plus no mentioning of the stories of how he treated his Alameda co-founders. ...
It's a big topic, but the justification is supposed to be the part just before. I think we should be more worried about attracting naive optimizers, and I think people who are gung-ho utilitarians are one example of a group who are more likely to have this trait.
I think it's notable that SBF was a gung-ho utilitarian before he got into EA.
It's maybe worth clarifying that I'm most concerned about people who a combination of high-confidence in utilitarianism and a lack of qualms about putting it into practice.
There are lots of people who see utilitarianism a...
It's maybe worth clarifying that I'm most concerned about people who a combination of high-confidence in utilitarianism and a lack of qualms about putting it into practice.
Thank you, that makes more sense + I largely agree.
However, I also wonder if all this could be better gauged by watching out for key psychological traits/features instead of probing someone's ethical view. For instance, a person low in openness showing high-risk behavior who happens to be a deontologist could cause as much trouble as a naive utilitarian optimizer. In either case, it would be the high-risk behavior that would potentially cause problems rather than how they ethically make decisions.
Thank you - great to see work vetting & deepening the understanding of fundamental EA ideas like this.
Isn't the point of EA that we are responsive to new arguments? So, unlike Extinction Rebellion where belief that climate change is a real and imminent risk is essential, our "belief system" is rather more about openness and willingness to update in response to 1) evidence, and 2) reasonable arguments about other world views?
Yes - but the issue plays itself out one level up.
For instance, most people aren't very scope sensitive – firstly in their intuitions, and especially when it comes to acting on them.
I think scope sensitivity is a key part of effec...
A third question is:
3. What values should one morally advocate for?
The answers to this could be different yet again.
Much past longtermist advocacy arguably fits into the framework of trying to get people to increase their altruistic willingness to pay to help future generations, and I think make sense on those grounds. Though again perhaps could be clearer that the question of what governments should do all-considered given people's current willingnesses to pay is a different question.
The message I take is that there's potentially a big difference between these two questions:
- Which government policies should one advocate for?
- For an impartial individual, what are the best causes and interventions to work on?
Most of effective altruism, including 80,000 Hours, has focused on the second question.
This paper makes a good case for an answer to the first, but doesn't tell us much about the second.
If you only value the lives of the present generation, it's not-at-all obvious that marginal investment in reducing catastrophic risk beats funding Giv...
A third question is:
3. What values should one morally advocate for?
The answers to this could be different yet again.
Much past longtermist advocacy arguably fits into the framework of trying to get people to increase their altruistic willingness to pay to help future generations, and I think make sense on those grounds. Though again perhaps could be clearer that the question of what governments should do all-considered given people's current willingnesses to pay is a different question.
It's things like a house in a slum made from corrugated iron or mud, with no electricity and a shared latrine pit instead of plumbing, which gets periodically flooded. The rent for something like this in the US would be very cheap, but this option doesn't exist since there's so few people who are poor enough to pay for it (and it's illegal too).
Likewise cheaper foods like cassava dough that you couldn't find in stores in the US, dentistry from a random person without training, water that isn't clean etc.
I agree that there's a broader circle of people who get the ideas but aren't "card carrying" community members, and having some of those on the board is good. A board definitely doesn't need to be 100% self-identified EAs.
Another clarification is that what I care about is whether they deeply grok and are willing to act on the principles – not that they're part of the community, or self-identify as EA. Those things are at best rough heuristics for the first thing.
This said, I think there are surprisingly few people out there like that. And due to the ...
Sorry that's what I meant. I was saying there are 5,000 community members. If you want the board to be controlled by people who are actually into EA, then you need 2/3 to come from something like that pool. Another 1/3 could come from outside (though not without risk). I wasn't talking about what fraction of the board should have specific expertise.
Another clarification, what I care about is whether they deeply grok and are willing to act on the principles – not that they're part of the community, or self-identify as EA. Those things are at best rough heur...
I agree Will's made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community leadership stuff, media, talk to VIPs etc. He often seems to do it out of a sense of duty (i.e. belief that it's the most impactful thing). His ideal lifestyle would be more like being an academic.
Maybe there's some kind of internal conflict going on, but it seems more complicated than this makes out.
My hot take is that a b...
I agree Will's made a bunch of mistakes (like yes CEA was messed up), but I find it hard to sign up to a narrative where status seeking is the key reason.
My guess is you know Will better, so I would trust your judgement here a decent amount, though I have talked to other people who have worked with Will a decent amount who thought that status-seeking was pretty core to what was going on (for the sake of EA, of course, though it's hard to disentangle these kinds of things).
...My impression is that Will often finds it stressful and unpleasant to do community le
Non-profit boards have 100% legal control of the organisation– they can do anything they want with it.
If you give people who aren't very dedicated to EA values legal control over EA organisations, they won't be EA organisations for very long.
There are under 5,000 EA community members in the world – most of them have no management experience.
Sure, you could give up 1/3 of the control to people outside of the community, but this doesn't solve the problem (it only reduces the need for board members by 1/3).
Ultimately, if you think there is enough value within EA arguments about how to do good, you should be able to find smart people from other walks of life who have: 1) enough overlap with EA thinking (because EA isn't 100% original after all) to have a reasonable starting point along with 2) more relevant leadership experience and demonstrably good judgement, and linked to the two previous 3) mature enough in their opinions and / or achievements to be less susceptible to herding.
If you think that EA orgs won't remain EA orgs if you don't appoint "value alig...
The assumption that this 1/3 would come from outside the community seems to rely on an assumption that there are no lawyers/accountants/governance experts/etc. in the community. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that the 1/3 would come from outside what Jack called "high status core EAs."
I think it's mostly because these estimates aren't properly adjusted for regression to the mean – there's a ton of sources of model error, and properly factoring these in will greatly reduce the top interventions. There are also other factors like the top interventions quickly running out of capacity. I discuss this in the article. I put a lot more trust in GiveWell's figures as an estimate of the real marginal cost-effectiveness. Though I agree there could be some interventions accessible to policy-makers that aren't accessible to GiveWell.
Thank, that's very helpful!
(I'm not surprised satisfaction was higher in 2022 than 2020 before FTX.)
Is it possible to compare overall satisfaction to previous EA surveys? As you say, all the methods for extracting the impact of FTX from this data seem a bit suspect. Satisfaction now vs. satisfaction 1-2 years ago is simpler and arguably more decision-relevant.
Is it possible to compare overall satisfaction to previous EA surveys?
It certainly is! (That said, I don't think comparing 2020 to 2022 is necessarily simpler. If we want to know where we are now, we presumably want to distinguish pre-FTX and post-FTX responses. And, if we want to know the effect of FTX, we may want to control for engagement, like in our other analyses, to account for differences between groups).
This plot shows the raw mean satisfaction for EAS 2020, EAS 2022, and for EAS 2022 (but only post-FTX).
However, if we control for enga...
I'd expect this to look significantly worse if done in March rather than Dec :(
Might it be possible to re-survey a subset of people just about overall satisfaction, to see if it's moved?
Yes, we are planning a followup survey (most likely in 2-3 months). We have consent to send approximately 1600 respondents a followup survey (and may do additional parallel recruiting).
I agree different comparisons are relevant in different situations.
A comparison with the median is also helpful, since it e.g. tells us the gain that the people currently doing the bottom 50% of interventions could get if they switched.
Though I think the comparison to the mean is very relevant (and hasn't had enough attention) since it's the effectiveness of what the average person donates to, supposing we don't know anything about them. Or alternatively it's the effectiveness you end up with if you pick without using data.
...I think you'd need to show
One small extra data point that might be useful: I made a rough estimate for smallpox eradication in the post, finding it fell in the top 0.1% of the distribution for global health, so it seemed consistent.
I'd also add it would be great if there was more work to empirically analyse ex ante and ex post spread among hits based interventions with multiple outcomes. I could imagine it leading to a somewhat different picture, though I think the general thrust will still hold, and I still thinking looking at spread among measurable interventions can help to inform intuitions about the hits based case.
One example of work in this area is this piece by OP, where they say they believe they found some 100x and a few 1000x multipliers on cash transfers to US citizens by...
Hey, thanks for the comments. Here are some points that might help us get on the same page:
1) I agree this data is missing difficult-to-measure hits based interventions, like research and advocacy, which means it'll understate the degree of spread.
I discuss that along with other ways it could understate the differences here:
2) Aside: I'm not sure conjunction of multipliers is the best...
Hey Ben, thanks for the replies -- adding some more to get closer to the same page 🙂
Re your 1), my criticism here is more one of emphasis and of the top-line messaging, as you indeed mention these cases of advocacy and research.
I just think that these cases are rather fundamental and affecting the conclusions very significantly -- because we are almost never in the situation that all we can choose from are direct interventions so the solution space (and with it, the likely variance) will almost always look quite different than what is discussed as primary...
A couple of comments that might help readers of the thread separate problems and solutions:
1) If you're aiming to do good in the short-term, I think this framework is useful:
expected impact = problem effectiveness x solution effectiveness x personal fit
I think problem effectiveness varies more than solution effectiveness, and is also far less commonly discussed in normal doing good discourse, so it makes sense for EA to emphasise it a lot.
However, solution effectiveness also matters a lot too. It seems plausible that EAs neglect it too much.
80k covers both...
This is very helpful.
Might you have a rough estimate for how much the bar has gone up in expected value?
E.g. is the marginal grant now 2x, 3x etc. higher impact than before?
Hey, I missed the lottery this year. Do you know when the next one will be?
Is this also the only one running in EA right now? Does it replace the one run by the EA Funds in the past?
That makes sense. It just means you should decrease your exposure to bonds, and not necc buy more equities.
I'm skeptical you'd end up with a big bond short though - due to my other comment. (Unless you think timelines are significantly shorter or the market will re-rate very soon.)
I think the standard asset pricing logic would be: there is one optimal portfolio, and you want to lever that up or down depending on your risk tolerance and how risky that portfolio is.
In the merton's share, your exposure depends on (i) expected returns of the optimal portfolio ...
This is great. I'm so glad this analysis has finally been done!
One quick idea: should 'speed-ups' be renamed 'accelerations'? I think I'd find that clearer personally, and would help to disambiguate it from earlier uses of 'speed-up' (e.g. in Nick's thesis).