Find places to park a camper van in a city, near jobs, is tricky, and you lose lots of standard options for arranging your living space and having standard amenities - for example, how do you pay an ISP to wire a camper van for high speed internet? You also don't have a permanent address for your mail, so getting a job and doing thongs like registering to vote is harder.
I partly agree with these concerns, but think the solution should be very different. As I've argued for quite some time, EA should not be a community, but should be much larger. That is, EA needs to be a movement, not a question.
What would this look like? I think three central points capture most of this, with the latter two emerging from the first.
Effective Altruism as a community, or affiliation, or description, isn't a goal.
Giving effectively needs to be about giving effectively, not about identity.
Career choice needs to be about people and goals, not about movement building.
I think this incidentally addresses the problems with the growth funnel model; we're not trying to get people into groups, we're trying to get them to give effectively and pick careers that are impactful. This is directly in contrast with your claim that we should be aiming for engagement instead of trying to aim for concrete goals. In fact, promoting community is exactly where you'd expect Goodharting and self-promotion in place of concrete goals, and self-dealing and community building replace impact.
This also addresses selection effects - if we're not focused on community, we don't need to select on beliefs. Anyone donating to any cause they choose effectively is signing on. Any progress towards goals that improve the present and future is success, regardless of whether it comes from those affiliated with our community.
And according to this model, we're far more successful than CEA will ever be able to take credit for, because it's one organization, and is not what matters for whether EA succeeds.
So is the Gates Foundation EA? Not if we care about community and direct affiliation, but absolutely if we care about goals. Is Progress Studies EA? Not if we focus on affiliation, but yes if we care about effective career focuses and decision making. Are Vitalik Buterin, or Michael Bloomberg, or Eric Schmidt, or MacKenzie Scott (Bezos) effectively giving? Not if we care about which cause areas are being supported, but yes if we care about the ethos of picking causes, trying to figure out how to actually do good, and voting with dollars donated.
I think principles first stewardship is a partial answer to how to move forward, but I also want the idea of EA as a brand to die. As I have said in the past, I hope that EA does not meaningfully exist in the future, and that it's seen as a movement which succeeded; to the extent that the shell remains, it shouldn't matter. The fact that many younger people reject feminism or wokeness doesn't mean that the movements lost, it often means they were successful enough that it's hard to even question the things they started out to accomplish. And yes, the organizations left over from the successes of movements like feminism and civil rights keep pushing, but the principal successes are behind them. Their current work may be good, or damaging, or whatever, but it doesn't matter, because they won the fights they were built to have.
I want that for EA. I want a future where EA as a community doesn't matter, but effective giving and caring about impact are so commonplace people don't realize they were once unusual. And I think that's a path we're actually able to continue walking, and a goal we could reach - even without EA as a brand.
This matches my understanding, but I think the conclusion is too strong. That is, I would agree that in most conditions this won't materially affect transmission, but there are still reasons to think that in settings where people are properly masking, there should be a reasonably clear (or even large) effect on residual transmission. So I'll strongly agree that it's good further studies are underway, but I'm skeptical that they address the point I think i most likely to be relevant.
Does this matter in practice? Well, not when people are ignoring infection risks and can't be bothered to mask, so perhaps not - unless we see an actually worst case pandemic, in which case I expect for behaviors to change and for this to have some non-trivial impact. How much is very uncertain, but I could imagine that conditional on masking, it would decrease transmission rate by more than 10%, which matters greatly if we're talking about moving from, say, r=1.05 to r=0.95.
How likely is the case where it makes such a difference? It's unlikely, but it's exactly the class of case where making a difference matters; the infection rate is possible to reduce greatly, but not easy to actually reduce enough to stop spread using other interventions. (Also, as we saw during COVID, policy responses seem to get relaxed around r=1, and groups that want to push below that level will need something marginal to reduce transmission in their community.)
Given the above logic, clearly there are other methods we should prioritize more strongly, but I think it's premature to claim the intervention isn't going to work at all, even if we find trivially small or null impacts from newer studies. This mistake would be similar to, and related to, the mistake made during COVID, when many public health officials jumped from the observed and easy to notice fact that most transmission is via large droplets to the incorrect claim that there isn't aerosol transmission. And if we slow large droplet based transmission, i.e. if people can keep their damn masks on, the residual infections plausibly get much more important.
I'm not trying to imply it, I'm trying to state it clearly. You dismiss the arguments made in the book as not being empirical. If you haven't read your post, here are some quotes indicating where you do this explicitly: "the chapter presents effectively zero empirical research" "one might expect Y&S to substantiate their case with empirical evidence" "lack of empirical evidence"
The insistence that only a certain form of evidence, in this case, empirical evidence, would count is for an argument is something Eliezer anticipated in the sequences, unsurprisingly.
I will ask to keep the discussion in one place, and not duplicate comments. I've responded to the original post, if any readers want to click the link below to see the reply.
That's a really good point, thanks! Though if they don't have short timelines, it seems like they are being quite irresponsible as board members not preventing Sam from making increasingly large bets on scaling. Of course, they might not be willing to cross him; the current board presumably learned the lesson from Ilya's ill-fated decision.
Also, you need what are currently considered almost implausibly long timelines to not think that them spending more quickly makes sense.
See the new Q&A item addressing the ned to build capacity; they could give to Givewell, Givedirectly, or via Coeff's funds specific to their goals. They could also give via Gates foundation, etc. They can do this while building up their internal capacity, so they really don't need to delay additional years.
They have incredibly short AGI timelines, so per their own views, they can't afford to move slowly. If they are giving less than 5% of assets after they already claim AGI, that's a huge failure. So in my view, your proposed 2028 target for giving so little that they are more than doubling assets yearly is insanely conservative, not at all "an aggressive, public ramp-up targets."
That said, yes, I already agreed that actually ambitious public ramp-up commitments could be sufficient; as I said in the post "if it’s done in the next two years, I will admit they are doing their jobs" - but they didn't announce any such plans, and as noted in the post, the total giving commitment is a cash total certainly worth less than 1/6th of their (current rapidly growing) funds; that's insanely low given that it is their total eventual commitment!
No, it would not. Per the frame that makes the argument more compelling, as I said; "Secondly, they may be even more successful in building significantly more powerful AI, transforming the world. Obviously, the nonprofit would become far wealthier, but given OpenAI’s mandate, it also becomes irrelevant."
But within the first option, if they are actually more than doubling their value yearly (as implied by 100x in 6 years, which matches their current revenue growth continuing at the current rate,) if they give away $20 billion per year, starting at their current valuation of $150 billion, they end up giving away only a small fraction of their eventual endowment - about 13%. And in that case, given that it's hard to spend 13% of $150b effectively, it's going to be far harder to spend any large percentage of their $15 trillion endowment in later years!
Find places to park a camper van in a city, near jobs, is tricky, and you lose lots of standard options for arranging your living space and having standard amenities - for example, how do you pay an ISP to wire a camper van for high speed internet? You also don't have a permanent address for your mail, so getting a job and doing thongs like registering to vote is harder.
I partly agree with these concerns, but think the solution should be very different. As I've argued for quite some time, EA should not be a community, but should be much larger. That is, EA needs to be a movement, not a question.
What would this look like? I think three central points capture most of this, with the latter two emerging from the first.
I think this incidentally addresses the problems with the growth funnel model; we're not trying to get people into groups, we're trying to get them to give effectively and pick careers that are impactful. This is directly in contrast with your claim that we should be aiming for engagement instead of trying to aim for concrete goals. In fact, promoting community is exactly where you'd expect Goodharting and self-promotion in place of concrete goals, and self-dealing and community building replace impact.
This also addresses selection effects - if we're not focused on community, we don't need to select on beliefs. Anyone donating to any cause they choose effectively is signing on. Any progress towards goals that improve the present and future is success, regardless of whether it comes from those affiliated with our community.
And according to this model, we're far more successful than CEA will ever be able to take credit for, because it's one organization, and is not what matters for whether EA succeeds.
So is the Gates Foundation EA? Not if we care about community and direct affiliation, but absolutely if we care about goals. Is Progress Studies EA? Not if we focus on affiliation, but yes if we care about effective career focuses and decision making. Are Vitalik Buterin, or Michael Bloomberg, or Eric Schmidt, or MacKenzie Scott (Bezos) effectively giving? Not if we care about which cause areas are being supported, but yes if we care about the ethos of picking causes, trying to figure out how to actually do good, and voting with dollars donated.
Perhaps it doesn't even matter whether people hate effective altruism as a movement, if they are raising money for the global poor. I think the change in culture around giving has been enormous, and it's partially due to the movement to give money effectively and care about changing the world, even if the movement itself is, as the post claims, dying.
I think principles first stewardship is a partial answer to how to move forward, but I also want the idea of EA as a brand to die. As I have said in the past, I hope that EA does not meaningfully exist in the future, and that it's seen as a movement which succeeded; to the extent that the shell remains, it shouldn't matter. The fact that many younger people reject feminism or wokeness doesn't mean that the movements lost, it often means they were successful enough that it's hard to even question the things they started out to accomplish. And yes, the organizations left over from the successes of movements like feminism and civil rights keep pushing, but the principal successes are behind them. Their current work may be good, or damaging, or whatever, but it doesn't matter, because they won the fights they were built to have.
I want that for EA. I want a future where EA as a community doesn't matter, but effective giving and caring about impact are so commonplace people don't realize they were once unusual. And I think that's a path we're actually able to continue walking, and a goal we could reach - even without EA as a brand.
This matches my understanding, but I think the conclusion is too strong. That is, I would agree that in most conditions this won't materially affect transmission, but there are still reasons to think that in settings where people are properly masking, there should be a reasonably clear (or even large) effect on residual transmission. So I'll strongly agree that it's good further studies are underway, but I'm skeptical that they address the point I think i most likely to be relevant.
Does this matter in practice? Well, not when people are ignoring infection risks and can't be bothered to mask, so perhaps not - unless we see an actually worst case pandemic, in which case I expect for behaviors to change and for this to have some non-trivial impact. How much is very uncertain, but I could imagine that conditional on masking, it would decrease transmission rate by more than 10%, which matters greatly if we're talking about moving from, say, r=1.05 to r=0.95.
How likely is the case where it makes such a difference? It's unlikely, but it's exactly the class of case where making a difference matters; the infection rate is possible to reduce greatly, but not easy to actually reduce enough to stop spread using other interventions. (Also, as we saw during COVID, policy responses seem to get relaxed around r=1, and groups that want to push below that level will need something marginal to reduce transmission in their community.)
Given the above logic, clearly there are other methods we should prioritize more strongly, but I think it's premature to claim the intervention isn't going to work at all, even if we find trivially small or null impacts from newer studies. This mistake would be similar to, and related to, the mistake made during COVID, when many public health officials jumped from the observed and easy to notice fact that most transmission is via large droplets to the incorrect claim that there isn't aerosol transmission. And if we slow large droplet based transmission, i.e. if people can keep their damn masks on, the residual infections plausibly get much more important.
I'm not trying to imply it, I'm trying to state it clearly. You dismiss the arguments made in the book as not being empirical. If you haven't read your post, here are some quotes indicating where you do this explicitly:
"the chapter presents effectively zero empirical research"
"one might expect Y&S to substantiate their case with empirical evidence"
"lack of empirical evidence"
The insistence that only a certain form of evidence, in this case, empirical evidence, would count is for an argument is something Eliezer anticipated in the sequences, unsurprisingly.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/logical-rudeness
I will ask to keep the discussion in one place, and not duplicate comments. I've responded to the original post, if any readers want to click the link below to see the reply.
Strongly disagree.
Edit to add: Good to know that people react to other people's discomfort with jokes about mass murder of their family with downvotes.
That's a really good point, thanks! Though if they don't have short timelines, it seems like they are being quite irresponsible as board members not preventing Sam from making increasingly large bets on scaling. Of course, they might not be willing to cross him; the current board presumably learned the lesson from Ilya's ill-fated decision.
Also, you need what are currently considered almost implausibly long timelines to not think that them spending more quickly makes sense.
No, it would not. Per the frame that makes the argument more compelling, as I said; "Secondly, they may be even more successful in building significantly more powerful AI, transforming the world. Obviously, the nonprofit would become far wealthier, but given OpenAI’s mandate, it also becomes irrelevant."
But within the first option, if they are actually more than doubling their value yearly (as implied by 100x in 6 years, which matches their current revenue growth continuing at the current rate,) if they give away $20 billion per year, starting at their current valuation of $150 billion, they end up giving away only a small fraction of their eventual endowment - about 13%. And in that case, given that it's hard to spend 13% of $150b effectively, it's going to be far harder to spend any large percentage of their $15 trillion endowment in later years!