If you or someone else wants to expand on this point, I'd be interested in understanding whether that's really the case or in which ways it got better or worse
Is the issue highly polarized/politicized in Germany? Say, do you expect some people to engage less with your work as a result of "choosing sides"?
In EA Israel we tend to take more politically neutral approaches when engaging publicly, including in relation to the current war or to the large "pro-democratic" public protests (wiki). I'm curious about your attitude to reputational risks and the potential problem of "painting EA with leftist colors".
Germany so far is probably less polarized than other countries (e.g. the US). Currently there is only one far right party with significant reach (AFD) currently polling around 19% nationally.
The main conservative party (CDU) and the conservative leaning economically liberal party (FDP) are currently clearly and credibly distancing themselves from the AFD. We even embedded an interview from one of the most prominent FDP members (Gerhart Baum) in one of our blog posts about how we think about defending democracy.
So while we still might risk our rep...
Two considerations:
1. does protecting democracy have to be "painting with leftist colors"?
2. even if it was, does the ROI justify it?
On the first, as noted in this EAGxVirtual lightning talk I gave on the US context, the design of the political system is a big upstream cause of authoritarian voter bases and to a larger extent authoritarian politicians. Many of the reforms to the US political system that would in the short to long term reduce the antidemocratic threat are "bi-populist," as I like to call it.
Left- and Right-wing populists are generally for c...
Usually we use purchase-parity adjustments when we look at the value of money, so there might be a subtle circular reasoning problem here. One issue for example is that there is no value in innovation (say, by designing a cheaper transportation service/product, people could end up paying less for the service so the revenue may decrease [while the profits could get higher]).
Another issue is that I don't think this could take into account counterfactual impact.
Didn't read through the whole thing yet, sorry if I missed how you addressed this issues! I love the idea of trying to find simpler ways of estimating impact!
How should we compare their (CCC's) cost-benefit estimates to GiveWell's (GW's) results?
I quickly spot two differences:
The main point is that access management is more natively associated with the structure of the model in software settings. Say, you are less likely to release a model without its prerequisites.
But I agree that this could also be messed up in software environments, and that it's mainly an issue of UI and culture. I guess I generally argue for a modeling environment that is "modeling-first" rather than something like "explainable-results-first".
I have a very rough draft based on work with @Michael Latowicki and Charity Entrepreneurship (@Filip_Murar and @weeatquince) where we tried various tools for modeling uncertainty for use in their CEAs. Due to personal issues, I'm not sure when I'll finish it, so here it is (very unpolished and not finished).
Mainly, we list various tools we found with some comments on them and discuss the pros and cons of spreadsheet vs software solutions. The latter is mostly coherent so I'll paste it here:
The tools we found for probabi...
[btw, this is a common problem when using spreadsheets rather than when modeling in a software development environment - the software space has a lot of experience in working in (partially-) open source settings]
Oh! I see that you've also posted Shrimp Neuroanatomy. Great, I'm looking forward future posts on this topic to inform the debate :)
I don't agree with your take, but many people in EA (and definitely outside it) feel similarly to you so I appreciate you writing this. It's also a good time to criticize invertebrate welfare, as more attention and funding are directed there.
That said, I found the tone of this post too confrontational to promote useful discussion so I've decided neither to upvote or downvote. I know it's a tough ask, but it would also be very useful to directly engage with works in this space (say, recent posts on invertebrate welfare or RP's sequence) and clearly outline ...
I like this as an example of a case where you wouldn't want to combine these two different forms of uncertainty
Yeah. If I understand correctly, everything is resampled rather than cached, so comparing results between two models is only done on aggregate rather than on a sample-by-sample basis
If I understand correctly, all the variables are simulated freshly for each model. In particular, that applies to some underlying assumptions that are logically shared or correlated between models (say, sentience probabilities or x-risks).
I think this may cause some issues when comparing between different causes. At the very least, it seems likely to understate the certainty by which one intervention may be better than another. I think it may also affect the ordering, particularly if we take some kind of risk aversion or other non-linear utility into accou...
I have a very limited understanding of this field, so the following is probably a bit wrong but hopefully leading in the right direction.
In the US (and maybe some other countries) there is a regulated energy demand & supply prediction market. This is set up at various points in the electric grid, which is connected to many different suppliers of both renewable and non-renwable sources of electricity.
The coal power plants are required to be able to deliver enough electricity so that there is a low chance of power outage. The bound on that chance is defi...
Thanks! Yeah, I totally agree - the topic is surprisingly delicate and nonintuitive, and my examples above are too technical.
By the way, I'd love it if other people would write posts that make the exact same point but better! (or for different audiences).
I think in this thread there are two ways of defining costs:
I think this is the major source of disagreement here, right?
This discussion resembles the observation that the cost-effectiveness ratio should mostly be used in the margin. That is, in the end we care about something like and when we decide where to spend the next dollar we should compute the derivatives with ...
Things to add:
I like the distinction of the various kinds of risk aversions :) Economists seem too often to conflate various types of risk aversion with concave utility.
I feel a bit uneasy with REV as a decision model for risk aversion about outcomes. Mainly, it seems awkward to adjust the probabilities instead of the values, if we care more about some kinds of outcomes. It doesn't feel like it should be dependent on the probability for these possible outcomes.
Why use that instead of applying some function to the outcome's value?
Hi Edo,
There are indeed some problems that arise from adding risk weighting as a function of probabilities. Check out Bottomley and Williamson (2023) for an alternative model that introduces risk as a function of value, as you suggest. We discuss the contrast between REV and WLU a bit more here. I went with REV here in part because it's better established, and we're still figuring out how to work out some of the kinks when applying WLU.
I like the new linkpost design! It makes me think of the potential of linkposts on the forum.
One possible vision would be to have the forum be a centralized place to discuss any source on the web. Some suggestions to that end:
Do you mind sharing your main consideration against releasing it? Not trying to push back, but rather to understand this as I'm considering working on related topics
Maybe. We're a little unsure about this right now. The code base for this is part of the bigger Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model which we haven't made a final determination on whether we will release it.
Value monism is the thesis that there is only one intrinsically valuable property.
(I didn't know this term)
Maybe controversial is too strong a word. I think EAs tend to think on the margin and are also less concerned with inequality or with non-existential risks from advanced tech.
I find Jaron Lanier's thoughts on the impacts of tech development interesting and probably controversial in EA circles.
Daron Acemoglu is a known growth economist, and he has recently published a new book and had an interesting episode with Rhys Lindmark.
I also remember following Vinay Gupta a while back, and that he had interesting opinions on civilizational resilience (say, here). He was also involved with Ethereum, and is doing blockchain stuff, not sure what.
Generally, I'm interested in more discussion with people in communities or ide...
Thank you for sharing this!
My answer to the survey's question "Given the growing salience of AI safety, how would you like EA to evolve?":
I think EA is in a great place to influence the direction of AI progress and many orgs and people should be involved with this project. However, I think that many people in this forum think that the most important outcome of the EA community is by influencing this technology, and I think this is mistaken and misleading.
The alternative would be to continue supporting initiatives in this space, including AI safety-specific...
Some ideas held by many EAs - whether right or wrong, and implied by EA philosophy or not - encourage risky behaviour. We could call these ideas risky beneficentrism (RB), and they include:
i. High risk appetite.
ii. Scope sensitivity
iii. Unilateralism
iv. Permission to violate societal norms. Violating or reshaping an inherited morality or other “received wisdom” for the greater good.
iv. Other naive consequentialism. Disregard of other second-order effects
Is the game something like "EA online discussion norms" and the strategy that you are proposing something like "make your writings independent of the EA forum, and allow for competing discussion spaces on your posts"?
I know the author personally, and I want to signal that Michelle is genuinely interested in doing good, that the proposed technology does seem highly promising, and that an informed take on this question would help her make a better decision.
Thanks for anyone experienced with the subject matter who is willing to help here!
Sure! Looking into GiveWell's main CEA, and their analysis of AMF (link), the location granularity is by country. However, AMF prioritizes their distribution location based on malaria prevalence rates and operational partners, so the results might be much better than the country's average.
Regarding the first question, I just briefly looked again at the report and indeed I don't see that explicitly taken into account. I only vaguely remember thinking about that, and I'm not sure how that was resolved.
I think the main causal pathway they used in their report is QALY gains from people quitting smoking, so that sounds like it wouldn't change drastically if the intervention was delayed by, say, a couple of years. So I agree that this is a good question to look into further, and I expect that could indeed reduce the cost effectiveness by 3x-10x. Great catch David!
I think cost-effectiveness analyses may generally be under-evaluating interventions due to the possibility of optimizing some parameters of the intervention. Such optimization could be accounted for in prospective quantitative CEAs by running some optimization algorithm, but I'm not sure how useful/accurate the result of that would be.
FEM developed a new technology to evaluate our impact: a transmitter that identifies when FEM’s content is on air, and replaces it with music. This means the region surrounding the transmitter is temporarily not exposed to our programmes.
This is SO COOL!
Really amazing progress all around 👏
That's cool. I had the thought of developing a "personal manager" for myself of some form for roughly similar purposes
It's funny, I think you'd definitely be in the list of people I respect and care about their opinion of me. I think it's just imposter syndrome all the way up.
Personally, one thing that seemed to work a bit for me is to find peers which I highly appreciate and respect and schedule weekly calls with them to help me prioritize and focus, and give me feedback.
Exactly!