Effective Altruism Forum
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All of haz's Comments + Replies

Please Take the 2020 EA Survey
haz3y4
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Right, that makes sense, thanks. To clarify, I don't actually think anyone will be put off taking the survey because of this. I will definitely be taking it anyway :)

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Please Take the 2020 EA Survey
haz3y20
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Regarding the $500 "prize":

I've seen this sort of prize for a few things recently. I don't really understand how it's supposed to incentivise me to complete the survey. The total money donated is $500 regardless of how many complete the survey, so unless I think that I'm at least as well informed than the average respondent about where this money should go (which I definitely don't!) then if anything, isn't it an incentive to not complete the survey?

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5
Larks
3y
Presumably part of the idea is that it is somewhat incentivising while also being very cheap: the money goes to places CEA would like to support anyway, and doesn't really motivate non-EAs to take the survey. A different concern is it is not clear to me how counterfactually valid the donation is.
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David_Moss
3y
I agree this won't be an incentive to many EAs. So long as it serves as an incentive to some respondents, it still seems likely to be net positive though. (Of course, it's theoretically possible that offering the prize might crowd out altruistic motivations (1) (2) (3), but we don't have an easy way to test this and my intuition is that the overall effect would still be net positive). I would hope that concerns about being less well placed to make the donation would not incentivise people to not take the EA Survey, just so that they don't risk winning the prize and making a sub-optimal donation. If the respondent doesn't feel comfortable just delegating the decision elsewhere, they could always decline the prize, in which case it could be given to another randomly selected respondent.
Anthony DiGiovanni3y15
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unless I think that I'm at least as well informed than the average respondent about where this money should go

This applies if your ethics are very aligned with the average respondent, but if not, it is a decent incentive. I'd be surprised if almost all of EAs' disagreement on cause prioritization were strictly empirical.

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Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term - Hilary Greaves
haz3y6
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I feel like you're probably too sceptical about the possibility of us ever knowing if longtermist interventions are positive. You say we can't get feedback on longtermist interventions, and that is certainly true, but presumably later generations will be able to evaluate our current long-termist efforts and determine if they were good or not. Or do you doubt this as well?

I've sometimes wondered about this, but I'm not sure how it gets past the objection to Response 1. In 1000 years' time, people will (at best!) be able to measure what the 1000-year effects were of our actions today. But aren't we still completely clueless as to what the long-term effects of those actions are?

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Jack Malde
3y
Not sure, maybe. The way I think about it is historians in a few thousand years could study say an institution we create now and try to judge if it reduced the probability of some lock-in event e.g. a great power conflict. If they judge it did then the institution was a pretty good intervention. Of course they will never be able to know for sure if the institution avoided such a conflict, but I don't think they would have to, they would just have to determine if the institution had a non-negligible effect on the probability of such a conflict. It doesn't seem impossible to me that they might have something to say about that. Of course there are some long-term effects we would remain clueless about e.g. "did creating the institution delay the conception of a person which lead to an evil person being conceived etc. etc." but this is the sort of cluelessness that Greaves (2016) argues we can ignore as these effects are 'symmetric across acts' i.e. it was just as likely to happen if we hadn't created the institution.