All of Robert_Wiblin's Comments + Replies

Exciting to see a post about this episode 5 hours after we put it out (!).

A few quick thoughts:

"Berkowitz never mentions that the median voter in most Republican primaries is currently "pro-Trump" so he leaves out the single sentence explanation."

No but I say that. IIRC one of his responses also takes this background explanation as a given.

"Japan and New Zealand have shown that sovereign parliamentary democracies do not manifest even nascent electoral movements."

In general I'm with you on thinking some systems of government are less conducive to populist m... (read more)

Great to see someone giving this a crack! Let me know how it works out. :)

"The 2.16% U.S. federal funds rate in 2019 is one of the most conservative interest rates possible."

The U.S. Federal Funds rate has been effectively 0% since April 2020 and was roughly 0% for six years from 2009 to 2015. The same is roughly true of the UK. Central banks in both countries are saying they'll keep rates low for years to come.

I can't immediately find a reputable business savings accounts in the UK/US that currently offers more than 1%.

Those that offer the highest rates (something approaching 1%) on comparison sites tend to have conditions (... (read more)

In addition to the issues raised by other commentators I would worry that someone trying to work on something they're a bad fit for can easily be harmful.

That especially goes for things related to existential risk.

And in addition to the obvious mechanisms, having most of the people in a field be ill-suited to what they're doing but persisting for 'astronomical waste' reasons will mean most participants struggle to make progress, get demoralized, and repel others from joining them.

He says he's going to write a response. If I recall Jason isn't a consequentialist so he may have a different take on what kinds of things we can have a duty to do.

Want to write a TLDR summary? I could find somewhere to stick it.

It seems like to figure out whether it's a good use of time for 300 people like you to vote, you still need to figure out if it's worth it for any single of them.

I'm actually more favourable to a smaller EA community, but I still think jargon is bad. Using jargon doesn't disproportionately appeal to the people we want.

The most capable folks are busy with other stuff and don't have time to waste trying to understanding us. They're also more secure and uninterested in any silly in-group signalling games.

Yes but grok also lacks that connotation to the ~97% of the population who don't know what it means or where it came from.

The EA community seems to have a lot of very successful people by normal social standards, pursuing earning to give, research, politics and more. They are often doing better by their own lights as a result of having learned things from other people interested in EA-ish topics. Typically they aren't yet at the top of their fields but that's unsurprising as most are 25-35.

The rationality community, inasmuch as it doesn't overlap with the EA community, also has plenty of people who are successful by their own lights, but their goals tend to be becoming thinke... (read more)

To better understand your view, what are some cases where you think it would be right to either

1. not invite someone to speak, or
2. cancel a talk you've already started organising,

but only just?

That is, cases where it's just slightly over the line of being justified.

For whatever reason people who place substantial intrinsic value on themselves seem to be more successful and have a larger social impact in the long term. It appears to be better for mental health, risk-taking, and confidence among other things.

You're also almost always better placed than anyone else to provide the things you need — e.g. sleep, recreation, fun, friends, healthy behaviours — so it's each person's comparative advantage to put extra effort into looking out for themselves. I don't know why, but doing that is more motivating if it feels like i... (read more)

Yep that sounds good, non-profits should aim to have fairly stable expenditure over the business cycle.

I think I was thrown off your true motivation by the name 'Keynesian altruism'. It might be wise to rename it 'countercyclical' so it doesn't carry the implication that you're looking for an economic multiplier.

The idea that charities should focus on spending money during recessions because of the extra benefit that provides seems wrong to me.

Using standard estimates of the fiscal multiplier during recessions — and ignoring any offsetting effects your actions have on fiscal or monetary policy — if a US charity spends an extra $1 during a recession it might raise US GDP by between $0 and $3.

If you're a charity spending $1, and just generally raising US GDP by $3 is a significant fraction of your total social impact, you must be a very ineffective organisation. I c... (read more)

Is there even 1 exclusively about people working at EA organisations?

If someone had taken a different job with the goal of having a big social impact, and we didn't think what they were doing was horribly misguided, I don't think we would count them as having 'dropped out of EA' in any of the 6 data sets.

"For example 80000 Hours have stopped cause prioritisation work to focus on their priority paths"

Hey Sam — being a small organisation 80,000 Hours has only ever had fairly limited staff time for cause priorities research.

But I wouldn't say we're doing less of it than before, and we haven't decided to cut it. For instance see Arden Koehler's recent posts about Ideas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths and Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities.

We aim to put ~10% of team time into underlying research, where one topic is trying

It seems like lots of active AI safety researchers, even a majority, are aware of Yudkowsky and Bostrom's views but only agree with parts of what they have to say (e.g. Russell, Amodei, Christiano, the teams at DeepMind, OpenAI, etc).

There may still not be enough intellectual diversity, but having the same perspective as Bostrom or Yudkowsky isn't a filter to involvement.

As Michael says, common sense would indicate I must have been referring to the initial peak, or the peak in interest/panic/policy response, or the peak in the UK/Europe, or peak where our readers are located, or — this being a brief comment on an unrelated topic — just speaking loosely and not putting much thought into my wording.

FWIW it looks like globally the rate of new cases hasn't peaked yet. I don't expect the UK or Europe will return to a situation as bad as the one they went through in late March and early April. Unfortunately the US and Latin America are already doing worse than it was then.

I think you know what I mean — the initial peak in the UK, the country where we are located, in late March/April.

There's often a few months between recording and release and we've had a handful of episodes that took a frustratingly long time to get out the door, but never a year.

The time between the first recording and release for this one was actually 9 months. The main reason was Howie and Ben wanted to go back and re-record a number of parts they didn't think they got right the first time around, and it took them a while to both be free and in the same place so they could do that.

A few episodes were also pushed back so we could get out COVID-19 interviews during the peak of the epidemic.

Thanks for doing this research, nice work.

Could you make your figure a little larger, it's hard to read on a desktop. It might also be easier for the reader if each of the five arguments had a one-word name to keep track of the gist of their actual content.

"As you can see, the winner in Phase 2 was Argument 9 by a nose. Argument 9 was also the winner by a nose in Phase 1, and thus the winner overall."

I don't think this is quite right. Arguments 5 and 12 are very much within the confidence interval for Argument 9. Eyeballing it I would guess we can only

Hi Tobias — thanks for the ideas!

Invertebrate welfare is wrapped into 'Wild animal welfare', and reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors is partially captured under 'S-risks'. We'll discuss the other two.

For future reference, next time you need to look up the page number for a citation, Library Genesis can quickly let you access a digital copy of almost any book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

I didn't mean to imply that the protests would fix the whole problem, obviously they won't.

As you say you'd need to multiply through by a distribution for 'likelihood of success' and 'how much of the problems solved'.

I think a crux for some protesters will be how much total damage they think bad policing is doing in the USA.

While police killings or murders draw the most attention, much more damage is probably done in other ways, such as through over-incarceration, petty harassment, framing innocent people, bankrupting folks through unnecessary fines, enforcing bad laws such a drug prohibition, assaults, and so on. And that total damage accumulates year after year.

On top of this we could add the burden of crime itself that results from poor policing practices, including

Hi PBS, I understand where you're coming from and expect many policy folks may well be having a bigger impact than front-line doctors, because in this case prevention is probably better than treatment.

At the same time I can see why we don't clap for them in that way, because they're not taking on a particularly high risk of death and injury in the same way the hospital staff are right now. I appreciate both, but on a personal level I'm more impressed by people who continue to accept a high risk of contracting COVID-19 in order to treat patients.

I've compiled 16 fun or important points from the book for the write-up of my interview with Toby, which might well be of interest people here. :)

Hi Khorton — yes as I responded to Denise, it appears the one year thing must have been specific to the (for-profit) bank I spoke with. They pay so many up-front costs for each new donor I think they want to ensure they get a lot of samples out of each one to be able to cover them.

And perhaps they were highballing the 30+ number, so they couldn't say they didn't tell you should the most extreme thing happen, even if it's improbable.

Hmmmm, this is all what I was told at one place. Maybe some of these rules — 30 kids max, donating for a year at a minimum, or the 99% figure — are specific to that company, rather than being UK-wide norms/regulations.

Or perhaps they were rounding up to 99% to just mean 'the vast majority'.

I'd forgotten about the ten family limit, thanks for the reminder.

Like you I have the impression that they're much less selective on eggs.

In some ways the UK sperm donation process is an even more serious commitment than egg donation.

From what I was told, the rejection rate is extremely high — close to 99% of applicants are filtered out for one reason or another. If you get through that process they'll want you to go in and donate once a week or more, for at least a year. Each time you want to donate, you can't ejaculate for 48 hours beforehand.

And the place I spoke to said they'd aim to sell enough sperm to create 30 kids in the UK, and even more overseas.

The ones born in the UK can find ou

I know 2 working in normal pandemic preparedness and 2-3 in EA GCBR stuff.

I can offer introductions though they are probably worked off their feet just now. DM me somewhere?

Thanks for the detailed feedback Adam. :)

Part of the issue might be the subheading "Space colonization will probably include animals".

If the heading had been 'might', then people would be less likely to object. Many things 'might' happen!

80% seems reasonable. It's hard to be confident about many things that far out, but:

i) We might be able to judge what things seem consistent with others. For example, it might be easier to say whether we'll bring pigs to Alpha Centauri if we go, than whether we'll ever go to Alpha Centauri.

ii) That we'll terraform other planets is itself fairly speculative, so it seems fair to meet speculation with other speculation. There's not much alternative.

iii) Inasmuch as we're focussing in on (what's in my opinion) a narrow part of the whole probability space — lik

I apologise if I'm missing something as I went over this very quickly.

I think a key objection for me is to the idea that wild animals will be included in space settlement in any significant numbers.

If we do settle space, I expect most of that, outside of this solar system, to be done by autonomous machines rather than human beings. Most easily habitable locations in the universe are not on planets, but rather freestanding in space, using resources from asteroids, and solar energy.

Autonomous intelligent machines will be at a great advantage over animals fro

Howie and I just recorded a 1h15m conversation going through what we do and don't know about nCoV for the 80,000 Hours Podcast.

We've also compiled a bunch of links to the best resources on the topic that we're aware of which you can get on this page.

I've guessed this is the case on 'back of the envelope' grounds for a while, so nice to see someone put more time into evaluating it.

It's not true to say EAs have been blindly on board with RCTs — I've been saying economic policy is probably the top priority for years and plenty of people have agreed that's likely the case. But I don't work on poverty so unfortunately wasn't able to take it further than that.

Will's book, 'Moral Uncertainty', is coming out next month for those who are interested in the topic: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moral-Uncertainty-William-MacAskill/dp/0198722273

I Jessica, IIRC the main problem you'll likely encounter is that some naïve cost-effectiveness estimates will give you a really low figure, like donating $1 to corporate campaigns is as effective as being vegan a whole year. (Not exactly, but that order of magnitude.)

Given that I'm inclined to just make it the lowest amount that feels substantial and like it would actually plausibly be enough to make someone else veg*n for a year — for me that means about $100 a year.

Yes it needs to go in an explanation of how we score scale/importance in the problem framework! It's on the list. :)

Alternatively I've been wondering if we need a standalone article explaining how we can influence the long term, and what are signs that something might be highly leveraged for doing that.

As a first pass the rate of improvement should asymptote towards zero so long as there's a theoretical optimum and declining returns to further research before the heat death of the universe, which seems like pretty mild assumptions.

As an analogy, there's an impossibly wide range of configurations of matter you could in theory use to create a glass from which we can drink water. But we've already gotten most of the way towards the best glass for humans, I would contend. I don't think we could keep improving glasses in any meaningful way using a galaxy's re

Having settled most of the accessible universe we'll have hundreds of billions or even trillions of years to try to keep improving how we're using the matter and energy at our disposal.

Doesn't it seems almost certain that over such a long time period our annual rate if improvement in the value generated by the best configuration would eventually asymptote towards zero? I think that's all that's necessary for safety to be substantially more attractive than speed-ups.

(BTW safety is never 'infinitely' preferred because even on a strict plateau view the accessible universe is still shrinking by about a billionth a year.)

"changes outlook towards life, makes married life less unequal for women, increases self-respect, self-confidence, allows for better participation in society"

I agree these are all benefits, but I class them as instrumental benefits, and imagine most others here do as well.

They are benefits inasmuch as they go on to improve people's well-being.

"the human development index, it includes education as an outcome, valuable for its own sake"

The HDI also includes GDP which presumably nobody thinks is valuable for its own sake (i.e. widgets are only useful inasmuch

You quote GiveWell as saying:

"We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores"

But you cut off the quote in a very misleading way indeed:

We do not place much intrinsic value on increasing time in school or test scores, although we think that such improvements may have instrumental value.

Unless you think spending time in school is very useful even if it has no other benefits to kids (i.e. they don't learn anything they use later in life), GiveWell is surely right here that the benefits are mostly instrumental.

It is wr

"If growth leads to education, then why is South Africa behind Jamaica and India, how about Bangladesh > Pakistan? Sri Lanka > Brazil"

Because it's not the only factor?

"Its very strange EA says education has no value"

'EA' does not say this, and I don't know anyone involved in EA who holds such a strong view.

Hi bfinn, maybe have a listen to this episode of the Freakonomics podcast: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-suicide-paradox/

It's one of the things that shaped my view that cross-country differences in suicide are best explained by culture rather than underlying happiness.

I also don't trust mental health time series to show whether conditions are becoming more common, because it's equally or more likely that more people are coming forward as having, e.g. depression, as it becomes very acceptable to talk about it.

But suicide rates are hugely influenced by the social acceptability of suicide specifically, and easy access to suicide methods that allow you to successfully kill yourself on impulse (e.g. guns, which have become less accessible to people over time). So unfortunately I don't think suicide rates are a reliable way to track mental health problems over time either.

Thanks for rewriting and republishing this. All very interesting.

On this new revised version, something that stood out to me was the truly extreme range between the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios you describe.

I think the relative cost-effectiveness range you've given spans fully ten orders of magnitude, or a range of 10,000,000,000x. Even by our standards that's a lot. If we're really this uncertain it seems we can say almost nothing. But I don't think we are that uncertain.

By choosing a value out in the tail for 4 different input variables all at on

Hi mchr3k — thanks for writing this. I'm completely slammed with other work at 80,000 Hours just now (I'm recording 7 podcast interviews this month), so I won't be able to respond right away.

For what it's worth I agree with just posting this and emailing it to us, rather than letting us hold you up. Many people are going to be interested in what you're saying here and might have useful comments to add, not just 80,000 Hours. It's also an area where reasonable people can disagree so it's useful to have a range of views represented publicly.

Possibly letting us comment on a Google Doc first might have been helpful but I don't think people should treat it as a necessary step!