OscarD

743 karmaJoined Apr 2021Working (0-5 years)Brisbane QLD, Australia

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Answer by OscarDMar 28, 20242
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My understanding is you are unsupportive of earning-to-give. I agree the trappings of expensive personal luxuries are both substantively bad (often) and poor optics. But the core idea that some people are very lucky and have the opportunity to earn huge amounts of money which they can (and should) then donate, and that this can be very morally valuable, seems right to me. My guess is that regardless of your critiques of specific charities (bednets, deworming, CATF) you still think there are morally important things to do with money. So what do you think of ETG - why is the central idea wrong (if you indeed think that)?

I was disappointed GiveDirectly wasn't mentioned given that seems to be more what he would favour. The closing anecdote about the surfer-philosopher donating money to Bali seems like a proto-GiveDirectly approach but presumably a lot less efficient without the infrastructure to do it at scale.

Thanks for sharing, it sucks that you went through this (and sucks that the moths went through this :( ). As uncomfortable as thinking about these topics is, I am glad to be part of a community of people who take ethics seriously and try to act with compassion and consideration. Let's hope market forces take effect and enough people inquiring about low-suffering ways to kill insects creates a market for companies to offer this :)

Nice!

I think this makes good sense as a toy theoretical model, and updates me some way towards these conclusions, but not very far because this sort of armchair theorising (while valuable and fun) is hard to get accurate for something as messy and empirical as this, as you note. So I think if someone were to investigate this further the key steps would be to:

  • look at empirical literature, or conduct primary research, on pleasure/pain symmetry and whether this holds (maybe this would be intractable though)
  • do some more involved population dynamics modelling, e.g. with a system of ODEs for food, prey juveniles, prey adults, predator juveniles and predator adults (I think this would be very tractable, but less crux-y)

That said, I think contraception as an intervention mode stands on its own without these more speculative theoretical arguments (unless wild animals have quite positive lives on average, such that preventing them from coming into existence is bad, but this seems unlikely).

Thanks for writing this! I agree that bioanchors is still worth engaging with and revisiting given how important it has been and is.

I like the overall approach of trying to quantify how much different criticism would update the 1e41 estimate. I don't feel well-placed to comment on the thermodynamic approach part, but if it works roughly as you outline this seems like an important robustness check for the evolution anchor.

I left a bunch of more minor comments in the report.

I think this is a good framing! And I think I am happy to bite this bullet and say that for the purposes of deciding what to do it matters relatively little whether my action being effective relies on systems of humans acting predictably (like polio vaccine deliverers getting paid to do their job) or natural forces (atmospheric physics for a climate geoengineering intervention). Whereas regarding what is a virtuous attitude to have, yes probably it is good to foreground the many (sometimes small) contributions of other humans that help our actions have their desired impacts.

Yes I think that makes sense. I think for me the area where I am most sympathetic to your collective rationality approach is voting, where as you noted elsewhere the 80K narrow consequentialist approach is pretty convoluted. Conversely, the Categorical Imperative, universalisability perspective is very clear that voting is good, and thinking in terms of larger groups and being part of something is perhaps helpful here. So yes while I still generally prefer the counterfactual perspective, I am probably not fully settled there.

I suppose in theory being part of a loose collective like EA focused on impact could mean that individual donation choices matter less if my $X to org Y means someone else will notice Y is better funded and give to a similarly-impressive org Z. I think in practice there is enough heterogeneity incause prioritization this may not be that large an effect? Perhaps within e.g. global health though it could work, where donating directly to any GiveWell top charity is similar to any other as GiveWell might make up the difference.

Yes, I think this issue of how many people you need to get on board with the vision/goals to make some change happen is key (and perhaps a crux). I agree the number of people needed to implement a change might be huge (all the farm workers making changes for various animal welfare things) but think we probably don't need to get all of them to care a lot more about nonhumans to get the job done. So in my view often a small-ish set of people advocate for/research/fund/plan some big change, and then lots of people implement it because they are told to/paid to.

Makes sense, I think I don't know enough to continue this line of reasoning that sensibly!

On 2, I like this point about the distribution being shaped by the choices of others, I think it is quite true that if more people cared about impact it would be a lot harder to counterfatually achieve very high impact actions (because there would be so much 'competition' with other impact seekers). Reminiscent of how financial markets are pretty efficient because so many people are seeking to make money trading - I think if a similar number of people were looking to succeed in the 'impact market' there wouldn't be these super cost-effective low-hanging fruit left (lead elimination and the like).

I think this then relates to point 1, as if there was an efficient impact market, it would be quite surprising for impact to be heavy-tailed. But as long as most people are focused on things other than impact I think my default assumption is it won't be too hard to find things that are a lot higher impact than the average. But I agree that this is not definitive and in areas like longtermist interventions where measurement is so hard we don't have empirical evidence of this.

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