All of Katja_Grace's Comments + Replies
Thank you both for your past and future work on EV, and best wishes to both of you in your new roles. Really looking forward to seeing you more in the geographic vicinity of Open Phil!
Possible, but likely a smaller effect than you might think because: a) I was very ambiguous about the subject matter until they were taking the survey (e.g. did not mention AGI or risk or timelines) b) Last time (for the 2016 survey) we checked the demographics of respondents against those for a random subset of non-respondents, and they weren't very different.
Participants were also mostly offered substantial payment for taking the survey ($50 usually, for a ~15m survey), in part in the hope of making payment a larger motivator than desire to express some particular view, but I don't think payment actually made a large difference to the response rate, so probably failed have the desired effect on possible response bias.
>I would be very excited to see research by Giving Green into whether their approach of recommending charities which are, by their own analysis, much less cost effective than the best options is indeed justified.
Several confusions I have:
- When did they say these were much less cost-effective? I thought they just failed to analyze cost effectiveness? (Which is also troubling, but different from what you are saying, so I'm confused)
- What do you mean by it being justified? It looks like you mean 'does well on a comparison of immediate impact', but, supposing
Do you have quantitative views on the effectiveness of donating these organizations, that could be compared to other actions? (Or could you point me to any of the links go to something like that?) Sorry if I missed them.
It seems worth distinguishing 'effectiveness' in the sense of personal competence (as I guess is meant in the first case, e.g. 'reasonably sharp') and 'effectiveness' in the sense of trying to choose interventions by cost-effectiveness.
Also remember that selecting people to encourage in particular directions is a subset of selecting interventions. It may be that 'E not A' people are more likely to be helpful than 'A not E' people, but that chasing either group is less helpful than doing research on E that is helpful for whichever people already care about it. I think I have stronger feelings about E-improving interventions overall being good than about which people are more promising allies.
Yeah, and among common intuitions I think. But I thought EAs were mostly consequentialists, so the intended role of obligations is not obvious to me.
I'm curious about the implicit framework where some things are obligatory and some things are choices.
We evaluated all of the projects other than the three I specifically mentioned not evaluating. Sorry for not writing up the other evaluations - we just didn't have time. We bought the ones that gave us the most impact per dollar, according to our evaluations (and based on the prices people wanted for their work). So we didn't purchase Joao's work this round because we calculated that it was somewhat less cost-effective than the things we did purchase, given the price. We may still purchase it in a later round.
Changing one's values does not more effectively promote the values one has initially, so it seems one should be averse to it. I think the expanding circle case is more complicated - the advocates of a wider circle are trying to convince the others that those others are mistaken about their own existing values, and that by consistency they must care about some entities they think they don't care about. This is why the phenomenon looks like an expanding circle - points just outside a circle look a lot like points just inside it, so consistency pushes the circle outwards (this doesn't explain why the circle expands rather than contracting).
It seems there are some common states where this comes up, such as when one person is doing a thing which they think is good, given personal constraints which are hidden to their conversation partner, and worries that they are harshly judged because the constraints are hidden. Or where one person is trying out a thing, because they think it might be very good, however they don't already think it is very good (except for VOI), and worry that others think they are actually advocating for something suboptimal. Or where one person doesn't think what they are d...
the other is that the particular style in which the EA community pursues that idea (looking for interventions with robust academic evidence of efficacy, and then supporting organizations implementing those interventions that accountably have a high amount of intervention per marginal dollar) is novel, but mostly because the cultural background for it seeming possible as an option at all is new.
The kinds of evidence available for some EA interventions, e.g. existential risk ones, doesn't seem different in kind to the evidence probably available earlier i...
I agree that those I mentioned are probably not the only contentious claims, and that the one you mention in particular is probably another.
Interesting suggestions.
I'd expect the internet to make many minority causes and interests more successful by letting their rare supporters get together, and I think it has had this effect. However that doesn't seem to explain why they are minority causes to begin with.
Do you mean that before computer programming the philosophically minded just didn't have lucrative professions?
Have we recently passed some threshold in high quality evidence for what works in aid? I'd expect in future we think of 2014 level of evidence as low, and still say we only recently got good evidence.
The last four paragraphs of this post are repeated from earlier, and appear to be cutting out some of the original post.
Good point. I have wondered before whether something like anti-cosmopolitanism sometimes accounts for disagreement that is attributed to anti-effectiveness or anti-altruism. Cosmopolitanism seems like a much more plausible thing for a human to dislike than effectiveness, especially given the popularity of effectiveness in other areas of life.
Note that we didn't tell them the topic that specifically.
Tried sending them $100 last year and if anything it lowered the response rate.
If you are inclined to dismiss this based on your premise "many AI researchers just don’t seem too concerned ... (read more)
I understand that, and think this was the right call. But there seems to be consensus that in general, a response rate below ~70% introduces concerns of non-response bias, and when you're at 15%—with (imo) good reason to think there would be non-response bias—you really cannot rule this out. (Even basic stuff like: responders probably earn less money than non-responders, and are thus probably younger, work in academia rather than industry, etc.; responders are more likely to be familiar with the pri... (read more)