Great post! Quick note: clicking on the carets takes me to that same section rather than the longer intervention descriptions under 'List of prioritized interventions'.
In my post I said there's an apparent symmetry between M and D, so I'm not arguing for choosing D but instead that we are confused and should be uncertain.
You're right, I misrepresented your point here. This doesn't affect the broader idea that the apparent symmetry only exists if you have strange ethical intuitions, which are left undefended.
Also, historically, people imagined all kinds of different utopias, based on their religions or ideologies. So I'm not sure we can derive strong conclusions about human values based on these imaginations anyway.
I stan...
I think most people would choose S because brain modification is weird and scary. This an intuition that's irrelevant to the purpose of the hypothetical but is strong enough to make the whole scenario less helpful. I'm very confident that ~0/100 people would choose D, which is what you're arguing for! Furthermore, if you added a weaker M that changed your emotions so that you simply care much more about random strangers than you currently do, I think many (if not most) people - especially among EAs - would choose that. Doubly so for idealized versions of t...
When I say “be consistent and care about individual strangers”, I mean shut up and multiply. There’s no contradiction. It’s caring about individual strangers taken to the extreme where you care about everyone equally. If you care about logical consistency that works as well as shut up and divide.
“Shut Up and Divide” boils down to “actually, you maybe shouldn’t care about individual strangers, because that’s more logically consistent (unless you multiply, in which case it’s equally consistent)”. But caring is a higher and more human virtue than being consistent, especially since there are two options here: be consistent and care about individual strangers, or just be consistent. You only get symmetry if the adoption of ‘can now ethically ignore suffering of strangers’ as a moral principle is considered a win for the divide side. That’s the argument...
I’m using ‘friend group’ as something like a relatively small community with tight social ties and large and diverse set of semi-reliable identifiers.
EA attracts people who want to do large amounts of good. Weighted by engagement, the EA community is made up of people for whom this initial interest in EA was reinforced socially or financially, often both. Many EAs believe that AI alignment is an extremely difficult technical problem, on the scale of questions motivating major research programs in math and physics. My claim is that such a problem won’t be d...
This type of piece is what the Criticism contest was designed for, and I hope it gets a lot of attention and discussion. EA should have the courage of its convictions; global poverty and AI alignment aren't going to be solved by a friend group, let alone the same friend group.
I think the wording of your options is a bit misleading. It's valuable to publish your criticism of any topic that's taking up non-trivial EA resources, regardless of its true worth as a topic - otherwise we might be wasting bednets money. The important question is whether or not infinite ethics fits this category (I'm unsure, but my best guess is no right now and maybe yes in a few years). Whether or not something is a "serious problem" or "deserves criticism", at least for me, seems to point to a substantively different claim. More like, "I agree/disagree with the people who think infinite ethics is a valuable research field". That's not the relevant question.
That makes sense! I was interpreting your post and comment as a bit more categorical than was probably intended. Looking forward to your post.
I agree that your (excellent) analysis shows that the welfare increase is dominated by lifting the bottom half of the income distribution. I agree that this welfare effect is what we want. Pritchett's argument is linked to yours because he claims the only (and therefore best) way to cause this effect is national development. He writes: "all plausible, general, measures of the basics of human material wellbeing [including headcount poverty] will have a strong, non-linear, empirically sufficient and empirically necessary relationship to GDPPC." (Here non-lin...
I'm confused how this squares with Lant Pritchett's observation that variation in headcount poverty rates across nations, regardless of where you set the poverty line, is completely accounted for by variation in the median of the distribution of consumption expenditures.
All ethical arguments are based on intuition, and here this one is doing a lot of work: "we tend to underestimate the quality of lives barely worth living". To me this is the important crux because the rest of the argument is well-trodden. Yes, moral philosophy is hard and there are no obvious unproblematic answers, and yes, small numbers add up. Tännsjö, Zapffe, Metzinger, and Benatar play this weird trick where they introspectively set an arbitrary line that separates net-negative and net-positive experience, extrapolate it to the rest of humanity, and b...
I didn't call for a ton more analysis, I pointed that the post largely relies on vibes. There's a difference.
I don’t think asymmetric burden of proof applies when one side is making a positive claim against the current weight of evidence. But I fully agree that more research would be worthwhile.
This is a great post and the most passionate defense I've seen of something like 'improving institutional decision-making', but broader, being an underrated cause area. I'm sympathetic to your ideas on the importance of good leadership, and the lack of it (and of low-trust, low-coordination environments more generally) as a plausible root cause behind many of the problems EAs care about most. However, I don't think this post has the evidence to support your key conclusions, beyond the general intuition that leadership is important.
Some of your thoughts:
I think it’s usually okay for an issue-based analysis of the medium-term future to disregard relatively unlikely (though still relevant!) AI / x-risk scenarios. By relatively unlikely, I just mean significantly less likely than business-as-usual, within the particular time frame we're thinking about. As you said, If the world becomes unrecognizably different in this time frame, factory farming probably stops being a major issue and this analysis is less important. But if it doesn’t, or in the potentially very long time before it does, we won’t gain very mu...
That’s a good point, at my level thinking about the details of lifetime impact between two good paths might be almost completely intractable. I don’t remember where I first saw that specific idea, it seems like a pretty natural endpoint to the whole EA mindset. And I’ll check out that book, it’s been recommended to me before.
This is a great post and I think this type of thinking is useful for someone who’s specifically debating between working at / founding a small EA organization (that doesn’t have high status outside EA) vs a non-EA organization (or like, Open Phil) early in their career. Ultimately I don’t think it’s that relevant (though still valuable for other reasons) when making career decisions outside this scope, because I don’t think that conflating the EA mission and community is valid. The EA mission is just to do the most good possible; whether or not the communi...
That Wired article is fantastic. I see this threshold of 5 microns all over the place and it turns out to be completely false and based on a historical accident. It's crazy how once a couple authorities define the official knowledge (in this case, the first few scientists and public health bodies to look at Ward's paper), it can last for generations with zero critical engagement and cause maybe thousands of deaths.
I'm confused about the distinction between fomite and droplet transmission. Is droplet transmission a term reserved for all non-inhalation respi...
They contradict each other in the sense that your full theory, since it includes the particular consequence that vaporization is chill, is I think not something anyone but a small minority would be fine to live with. Quantum mechanics and atheism impose no such demands. It's not too strong a claim to call this idea fine to live with when you're just going about your daily life, ignoring the vaporization part. "Fine to live with" has to include every consequence, not just the ones that are indeed fine to live with. I interpreted the second quote as arguing ...
Great post. #9 is interesting because the inverse might also be true, making your idea even stronger: maybe a great thing you can do for the short term is to make the long term go well. X-risk interventions naturally overlap with maintaining societal stability, because 1) a rational global order founded in peace and mutual understanding, which relatively speaking we have today more than ever before, reduces the probability of global catastrophes; and less convincingly 2) a catastrophe that nevertheless doesn’t kill everyone would indefinitely set the remai...
If you vaporized me and created a copy of me somewhere else, that would just be totally fine. I would think of it as teleporting. It'd be chill.
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...If that's right, "constant replacement" could join a number of other ideas that feel so radically alien (for many) that they must be "impossible to live with," but actually are just fine to live with. (E.g., atheism; physicalism; weird things about physics. I think many proponents of these views would characterize them as having fairly normal day-to-day implications while handling some otherwise confusing
Yea, WBE risk seems relatively neglected, maybe because of the really high expectations for AI research in this community. The only article I know talking about it is this paper by Anders Sandberg from FHI. He makes the interesting point that similar incentives that allow animal testing in today's world could easily lead to WBE suffering. In terms of preventing suffering his main takeaway is:
Principle of assuming the most (PAM): Assume that any emulated system could have the same mental properties as the original system and treat it correspondingly.
T...
By the most recent World Bank and FAO data, as well as the 2017 FAO data you link to, Greece isn't close to being the largest producer of fish in the EU nor the 15th largest producer in the world. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think the correct claim is that Greece farms the greatest number of fish in the EU. Fish production statistics are generally by total weight rather than fish number, and I see how the latter is more relevant to welfare concerns. However I think your phrasing is a bit misleading, as Greece has a very unique fish industry for the EU. It f... (read more)