Pro-pluralist, pro-bednet, anti-Bay EA. 🔸 10% Pledger.
I think this is, to a significant extent, definitionally impossible with longtermist interventions, because the 'long-term' part excludes having an empirical feedback loop quick enough to update our models of the world.
For example, if I'm curious about whether malaria net distribution or vitamin A supplementation is more 'cost-effective' than another, I can fund interventions and run RCTs, and then model the resulting impact according to some metric like the DALY. This isn't cast-iron secure evidence, but it is at least causally connected to the result I care about.
For interventions that target the long-run future of humanity, this is impossible. We can't run counterfactuals of the future or past, and I at least can't wait 1000 years to see the long-term impact of certain decisions on the civilizational trajectory of the world. Thus, any longtermist intervention cannot really get empirical feedback on the parameters of action, and mostly rely on subjective human judgement about them.
To their credit, the EA Long-Term Future Fund says as much on their own web page:
Unfortunately, there is no robust way of knowing whether succeeding on these proxy measures will cause an improvement to the long-term future.
For similar thoughts, see Laura Duffy's thread on empirical vs reason-driven EA
One potential weakness is that I'm curious if it promotes the more well-known charities due to the voting system. I'd assume that these are somewhat inversely correlated with the most neglected charities.
I guess this isn't necessarily a weakness if the more well-known charities are more effective? I can see the case that: a) they might not be neglected in EA circles, but may be very neglected globally compared to their impact and that b) there is often an inverse relationship between tractability/neglectedness and importance/impact of a cause area and charity. Not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily a problem.
Furthermore, my anecdotal take from the voting patterns as well as the comments on the discussion thread seem to indicate that neglectedness is often high on the mind of voters - though I admit that commenters on that thread are a biased sample of all those voting in the election.
It can be a bit underwhelming if an experiment to try to get the crowd's takes on charities winds up determining to, "just let the current few experts figure it out."
Is it underwhelming? I guess if you want the donation election to be about spurring lots of donations to small, spunky EA-startups working in weird-er cause areas, it might be, but I don't think that's what I understand the intention of the experiment to be (though I could be wrong).
My take is that the election is an experiment with EA democratisation, where we get to see what the community values when we do a roughly 1-person-1-ballot system instead of those-with-the-moeny decide system which is how things work right now. Those takeaways seem to be:
But you haven't provided any data 🤷
Like you could explain why you think so without de-anonymising yourself, e.g. sammy shouldn't put EA on his CV in US policy because:
Like I feel that would be interesting and useful to hear your perspective on, to the extend you can share information about it. Otherwise just jumping in with strong (and controversial?) opinions from anonymous accounts on the forum just serves to pollute the epistemic commons in my opinion.
Right but I don't know who you are, or what your position in the US Policy Sphere is, if you have one at all. I have no way to verify your potential background or the veracity of the information you share, which is one of the major problems with anonymous accounts.
You may be correct (though again that lack of explanation doesn't help give detail or a mechanism why or help sammy that much, as you said it depends on the section) but that isn't really the point, the only data point you provide is "intentionally anonymous person of the EAForum states opinion without supporting explanations" which is honestly pretty weak sauce
Yeah again I just think this depends on one's definition of EA, which is the point I was trying to make above.
Many people have turned away from EA, both the beliefs, institutions, and community in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. Even Ben Todd seems to not be an EA by some definitions any more, be that via association or identification. Who is to say Leopold is any different, or has not gone further? What then is the use of calling him EA, or using his views to represent the 'Third Wave' of EA?
I guess from my PoV what I'm saying is that I'm not sure there's much 'connective tissue' between Leopold and myself, so when people use phrases like "listen to us" or "How could we have done" I end up thinking "who the heck is we/us?"
I'm not sure to what extent the Situational Awareness Memo or Leopold himself are representatives of 'EA'
In the pro-side:
On the con-side:
This again comes down to the nebulousness of what 'being an EA' means.[3] I have no doubts at all that, given what Leopold thinks is the way to have the most impact he'll be very effective at achieving that.
Further, on your point, I think there's a reason to suspect that something like situational awareness went viral in a way that, say, Rethink Priorities Moral Weight project didn't - the promise many people see in powerful AI is power itself, and that's always going to be interesting for people to follow, so I'm not sure that situational awareness becoming influential makes it more likely that other 'EA' ideas will
Plenty of e/accs have these two beliefs as well, they just expect alignment by default, for instance
I view OpenAI as tending implicitly/explicitly anti-EA, though I don't think there was an explicit 'purge', I think the culture/vision of the company was changed such that card-carrying EAs didn't want to work there any more
The 3 big defintions I have (self-identification, beliefs, actions) could all easily point in different directions for Leopold
I sort-off bounced of this one Richard. I'm not a professor of moral philosophy, so some of what I say below may seem obviously wrong/stupid/incorrect - but I think that were I a philosophy professor I would be able to shape it into a stronger objection than it might appear on first glance.
Now, when people complain that EA quantifies things (like cross-species suffering) that allegedly “can’t be precisely quantified,” what they’re effectively doing is refusing to consider that thing at all.
I don't think this would pass an ideological Turing Test. I think what people who make this claim are saying is often that previous attempts to quantify the good precisely have ended up having morally bad consequences. Given this history, perhaps our takeaway shouldn't be "they weren't precise enough in their quantification" and should be more "perhaps precise quantification isn't the right way to go about ethics".
Because the realistic alternative to EA-style quantitative analysis is vibes-based analysis: just blindly going with what’s emotionally appealing at a gut level.
Again, I don't think this is true. Would you say that before the publication of Famine, Affluence, and Morality that all moral philosophy was just "vibes-based analysis"? I think, instead, all of moral reasoning is in some sense 'vibes-based' and the quantification of EA is often trying to present arguments for the EA position.
To state it more clearly, what we care about is moral decision-making, not the quantification of moral decisions. And most decisions that have been made or have ever been made have been done so without quantification. What matters is the moral decisions we make, and the reasons we have for those decisions/values, not what quantitative value we place on said decisions/values.
the question that properly guides our philanthropic deliberations is not “How can I be sure to do some good?” but rather, “How can I (permissibly) do the most (expected) good?”
I guess I'm starting to bounce of this because I now view this as a big moral commitment which I think goes beyond simple beneficentrism. Another view, for example, would be a contractualism, where what 'doing good' means is substantially different from what you describe here, but perhaps that's a base metaethical debate.
It’s very conventional to think, “Prioritizing global health is epistemically safe; you really have to go out on a limb, and adopt some extreme views, in order to prioritize the other EA stuff.” This conventional thought is false. The truth is the opposite. You need to have some really extreme (near-zero) credence levels in order to prevent ultra-high-impact prospects from swamping more ordinary forms of do-gooding.
I think this is confusing two forms of 'extreme'. Like in one sense the default 'animals have little-to-no moral worth' view is extreme for setting the moral value of animals so low as to be near zero (and confidently so at that). But I think the 'extreme' in your first sentence refers to 'extreme from the point of view of society'.
Furthermore, if we argue that quantifying expected value in quantitative models is the right way to do moral reasoning (as opposed to sometimes being a tool), then you don't have to accept the "even a 1% chance is enough", I could just decline to find a tool that produces such dogmatism at 1% acceptable. You could counter with "your default/status-quo morality is dogmatic", which sure. But it doesn't convince me to accept strong longtermism any more, and I've already read a fair bit about it (though I accept probably not as much as you).
While you’re at it, take care to avoid the conventional dogmatism that regards ultra-high-impact as impossible.
One man's "conventional dogmatism" could be reframed as "the accurate observation that people with totalising philosophies promising ultra-high-impact have a very bad track record that have often caused harm and those with similar philosophies ought to be viewed with suspicion"
Sorry if the above was a bit jumbled. It just seemed this post was very unlike your recent Good Judgement with Numbers post, which I clicked with a lot more. This one seems to be you, instead of rejecting the ‘All or Nothing’ Assumption, actually going "all in" on quantitative reasoning. Perhaps it was the tone with which it was written, but it really didn't seem to actually engage with why people have an aversion to over-quantification of moral reasoning.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll respond in turn to what I think are the two main parts of it, since as you said this post seems to be a combination of suffering-focused ethics and complex cluelessness.
On Suffering-focused Ethics: To be honest, I've never seen the intuitive pull of suffering-focused theories, especially since my read of your paragraphs here seems to tend towards a lexical view where the amount of suffering is the only thing that matters for moral consideration.[1]
Such a moral view doesn't really make sense to me, to be honest, so I'm not particularly concerned by it, though of course everyone has different moral intuitions so YMMV.[2] Even if you're convinced of SFE though, the question is how best to reduce suffering which hits into the clueless considerations you point out.
On complex cluelessness: On this side, I think you're right about a lot of things, but that's a good thing not a bad one!
I'd argue that reckoning with the radical uncertainty should point towards moral humility and pluralism, but I would say that since that's the perspective in my wheelhouse! I also hinted at such considerations in my last post about a Gradient-Descent approach to doing good, which might be a more cluessness-friendly attitude to take.
You seem to be asking e.g. "will lowering existential risk increase the expected amount of future suffering" instead of "will lowering existential risk increase the amount of total preferences satisfied/non frustrated" for example.
To clairfy, this sentence specifically referred to lexical suffering views, not all forms of SFE that are less strong in their formulation
Sharing some planned Forum posts I'm considering, mostly as a commitment device, but welcome thoughts from others:
My focus for 2025 will be to work towards developing my position on AI Safety, and share that through a series of posts AI Safety sequence.[1] The concept of AGI went mainstream in 2024, and it does look like we will see significant technological and social disruption in the coming decades due to AI development. Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly skeptical of traditional narratives and arguments about what Alignment is, the likelihood of risk, and what ought to be done about it. Instead, I've come to view "Alignment" primarily as a political philosophy rather than a technical computer science. Nevertheless, I could very well be wrong on most-all of these ideas, and getting critical discussion from the community will I think be good both for myself and (I hope) the Forum readership.[2]
As such, I'm considering doing a deep-dive on the Apollo o1 report given the controversial reception it's had.[3] I think this is the most unlikely one though, as I'd want to research it as thoroughly as I could, and time is at a premium since Christmas is around the corner, so this is definitely a "stretch goal".
Finally, I don't expect to devote much more time[4] to adding to the "Criticism of EA Criticism" sequence. I often finish the posts well after the initial discourse has died down, and I'm not sure what effect they really have.[5] Furthermore, and I've started to notice my own views of a variety of topics start to diverge from "EA Orthodoxy", so I'm not really sure I'd make a good defender. This change may itself warrant a future post, though again I'm not committing to that yet.
Which I will rename
It possibly may be more helpful for those without technical backgrounds concerned about AI, but I'm not sure. I also think have a somewhat AGI-sceptical persepctive represented on the Forum might be useful for intellectual diversity purposes but I don't want to claim that. I'm very uncertain about the future of AI and could easily see myself being convinced to change my mind.
I'm slightly leaning towards the skeptical interpretation myself, as you might have guessed
if any at all, unless an absolutely egregious but widely-shared example comes up
Does Martin Sandbu read the EA Forum, for instance?