All of poppinfresh's Comments + Replies

• Cost-effectiveness estimates generally suggest that, for most reasonable assumptions about the moral weight and degree of suffering of animals, animal welfare interventions are most cost-effective
• Animal welfare is more neglected than global health, but not (again for reasonable assumptions about how much animal wellbeing matters) proportionally less important

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Thanks for this, really helpful! For what it's worth, I also think Leopold is far too dismissive of international cooperation.

You've written there that "my argument was that Aschenbrenner was 'dangerous'". I definitely agree that securitisation (and technology competition) often raises risks.^[1] I think we have to argue further, though, that securitisation is more dangerous on net than the alternative: a pursuit of international cooperation that may, or may not, be unstable. That, too, may raise some risks, e.g. proliferation and stable authoritariani... (read more)

One of the weaker parts of the Situational Awareness essay is Leopold's discussion of international AI governance.

He argues the notion of an international treaty on AI "fanciful", claiming that:

• It would be easy to "break out" of treaty restrictions
• There would be strong incentives to do so
• So the equilibrium is unstable

That's basically it - international cooperation gets about 140 words of analysis in the 160 page document.

I think this is seriously underargued. Right now it seems harmful to propagate a meme like "International AI cooperation is fanciful".&nb... (read more)

Vasco, how do your estimates account for model uncertainty? I don't understand how you can put some probability on something being possible (i.e. p(extinction|nuclear war) > 0), but end up with a number like 5.93e-12 (i.e. 1 in ~160 billion). That implies an extremely, extremely high level of confidence. Putting ~any weight on models that give higher probabilities would lead to much higher estimates.

Thanks for writing this, it's clearly valuable to advance a dialogue on these incredibly important issues. 

I feel an important shortcoming of this critique is that it frames the choice between national securitization vs. macrosecuritization in terms of a choice between narratives, without considering incentives. I think Leopold gives more consideration to alternatives than you give him credit for, but argues that macrosecuritization  is too unstable of an equilibrium:

Some hope for some sort of international treaty on safety. This seems fanciful t

This is beautiful, Teps. Thanks for sharing.

One of the most common lessons people said they learned from the FTX collapse is to pay more attention to the character of people with whom they're working or associating (e.g. Spencer Greenberg, Ben Todd, Leopold Aschenbrenner, etc.). I agree that some update in this direction makes sense. But it's easier to do this retrospectively than it is to think about how specifically it should affect your decisions going forward.

If you think this is an important update, too, then you might want to think more about how you're going to change your future behaviour (r... (read more)

I'm usually very against criticizing other people's charitable or philanthropic efforts. The first people to be criticized should be those who don't do anything, not those who try to do good.

But switching from beef to other meats (at least chicken, fish, or eggs, I'm less sure for other meats) is so common among socially- and environmentally-conscious people, and such a clear disaster on animal welfare grounds, that it's worth discussing.

Even if we assume the the reducitarian diet emits the same GHGs as a plant-based diet, you'll save about 0.4 tonnes of C... (read more)

Thanks for sharing this post again. Your feelings here are totally valid and I know others share them, as you say. You make great points about feeling neglected and reinforcing privileges.

I did my undergrad at McMaster University in Canada. A good school, but not an elite one (just below the University of Birmingham, and above the University of Warwick, according to THE rankings). Our most famous alumnus is known for starring as Barf the anthropomorphic dog in Spaceballs.

Sometimes I do feel jealous of people who went to fancy schools. But I also often feel... (read more)

You should probably also blank their job title (which would make it easy to work out who they are) and their phone number (!)

Your first job out of college is the hardest to get. Later on you'll be able to apply for jobs while working, which is less stressful, and you'll have a portfolio of successful projects you can point to. So hopefully it's some small comfort that applying for jobs will probably never suck as much as it does for you right now. I know how hard it can be though, and I'm sorry. A few years ago after graduating from my Master's, I submitted almost 30 applications before getting an offer and accepting one.

I do notice that the things you're applying to all seem ve... (read more)

Your steelman doesn't seem very different from "I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there."

Many organizations I respect are very risk-averse when hiring, and for good reasons. Making a bad hiring decision is extremely costly, as it means running another hiring round, paying for work that isn't useful, and diverting organisational time and resources towards trouble-shooting and away from other projects. This leads many organisations to scale very slowly.

However, there may be an imbalance between false positives (bad hires) and false negatives (passing over great candidates). In hiring as in many other fields, reducing false positives often means ... (read more)

Sam said he would un-paywall this episode, but it still seems paywalled for me here and on Spotify. Am I missing something? (The full thing is available on youtube)

CEA's elaborate adjustments confirm everyone's assertions: constantly evolving affiliations cause extreme antipathy. Can everyone agree, current entertainment aside, carefully examining acronyms could engender accuracy? 

Clearly, excellence awaits: collective enlightenment amid cost effectiveness analysis.

Considering how much mud was being slung around the FTX collapse, "clearing CEA's name" and proving that no one there knew about the fraud seems not just like PR to me, but pretty important for getting the org back to a place where it’s able to meaningfully do its work.

Plus, that investigation is not the only thing mentioned in the reflection reform paragraph. The very next sentence also says CEA has "reinvested in donor due diligence, updated our conflict-of-interest policies and reformed the governance of our organization, replacing leadership on the board and the staff."

I think you have a point with animals, but I don't think the balance of human experience means that non-existence would be better than the status quo.

Will talks about this quite a lot in ch. 9 of WWOTF ("Will the future be good or bad?"). He writes:

If we assume, following the small UK survey, that the neutral point on a life satisfaction scale is between 1 and 2, then 5 to 10 percent of the global population have lives of negative wellbeing. In the World Values Survey, 17 percent of respondents classed themselves as unhappy. In the smaller skipping study o

For anyone finding themselves in this random corner of the Forum: this study has now been published. Conclusion: "Our results do not support large effects of creatine on the selected measures of cognition. However, our study, in combination with the literature, implies that creatine might have a small beneficial effect."

Thanks Vasco! I'll come back to this to respond in a bit more depth next week (this is a busy week).

In the meantime, curious what you make of my point that setting a prior that gives only a 1 in 15 trillion chance of experiencing an extinction-level war in any given year seems wrong?

Thanks again for this post, Vasco, and for sharing it with me for discussion beforehand. I really appreciate your work on this question. It's super valuable to have more people thinking deeply about these issues and this post is a significant contribution.

The headline of my response is I think you're pointing in the right direction and the estimates I gave in my original post are too high. But I think you're overshooting and the probabilities you give here seem too low.

I have a couple of points to expand on; please do feel free to respond to each in indivi... (read more)

"I inferred for Stephen's results, the probability of a war causing human extinction conditional on it causing an annual population loss of at least 10 % has to be at least 14.8 %."

This is interesting! I hadn't thought about it that way and find this framing intuitively compelling. 

That does seem high to me, though perhaps not ludicrously high. Past events have probably killed at least 10% of the global population, WWII was within an order of magnitude of that, and we've increased out warmaking capacity since then. So I think it would be reasonable to... (read more)

Hm, yeah, I think you're right. I remember seeing some curve where the value of saving a life initially rises as a person ages, then falls, but it must be determined by the other factors mentioned by others rather than the mortality thing.

Super interesting list! I hadn't heard of most of these and have ordered a few of them to read. Thank you!

Hey Ben, thanks for this great post. Really interesting to read about your experience and decision not to continue in this space.

I'm wondering if you have any sense of how quickly returns to new projects in this space might diminish? Founding an AI policy research and advocacy org seems like a slam dunk, but I'm wondering how many more ideas nearly that promising are out there.

(I edited an earlier comment to include this, but it's a bit buried now, so I wanted to make a new comment.)

I've read most of the post and appendix (still not everything). To be a bit more constructive, I want to expand on how I think you could have responded better (and more quickly):

1. We were sad to hear that two of our former employees had such negative experiences working with us. We were aware of some of their complaints, but others took us by surprise.
2. We have a different perspective on many of the issues they raise. In particular, we dispute some of th

Thanks for this update, your leadership, and your hard work over the last year, Zach.

It's great to hear that Mintz's investigation has wrapped (and to hear they found no evidence of knowledge of fraud, though of course I'm not surprised by that). I'm wondering if it would be possible for them to issue an independent statement or comment confirming your summary?

If I'm understanding this right, you assume that if someone upvoted the post, it's because they changed their mind?

FWIW I reached out to someone involved in this at a high level a few months ago to see if there was a potential project here. They said the problem was "persuading WHO to accelerate a fairly logistically complex process". It didn't seem like there were many opportunities to turn money or time into impact so I didn't pursue anything further.

I can see where Ollie's coming from, frankly. You keep referring to these hundreds of pages of evidence, but it seems very likely you would have been better off just posting a few screenshots of the text messages that contradict some of the most egregious claims months ago. The hypothesising about "what went wrong", the photos, the retaliation section, the guilt-tripping about focusing on this, etc. - these all undermine the discussion about the actual facts by (1) diluting the relevant evidence and (2) making this entire post bizarre and unsettling.

Hi Vasco, thank you for this! I agree with you that just extrapolating the power law likely overestimates the chance of an enormous or extinction-level war by quite a bit. I'd mentioned this in my 80,000 Hours article but just as an intuition, so it's useful to have a mathematical argument, too. I'd be very interested to see you run the numbers, especially to see how they compare to the estimates from other strands of evidence I talk about in the 80K article.

Interesting, thanks for checking that!

What I had in mind were the data from this Pritchett paper. He sets out a range of estimates depending on what exactly you measure. For example he shows that the US wage for construction work is 10x the median of the poorest 30 countries (p. 5). The income gains for a low skill worker moving to the US vary depending on where they're coming from, but range from 2.4x (Thailand) to 16x (Nigeria) (p. 4).

That's pretty different than the paper you cite. I'm not sure what accounts for that right now. Hopefully we see more work in this area!

As an example of how powerful these demographic shifts will be, this recent paper claims that ~all of Japan's poor economic performance relative to other developed nations since the '90s can be explained by its demographic shift (specifically the decline in the population share of working age adults). Think about how much consternation there has been about Japan's slow growth. We're all headed that way.

Interestingly, AFAIK Japan has not drastically liberalized its immigration much in response to its slow growth. The proportion of foreign-born residents has... (read more)

1. I think both of these trends can occur simultaneously
2. I'm not sure it's very helpful to think of this as "jobs moving from one country to another". It makes it seem zero-sum, whereas it is actually a positive-sum efficiency gain
3. Migrants to higher-income countries benefit from public goods like better services and public safety in addition to higher incomes
4. As Lant has pointed out, the higher income someone gains from moving from a low- to high-income country is enormous. IIRC it can be something like a 10x increase in consumption even if they're working the

Great post, Tom, thanks for writing!

One thought is that a GCR framing isn't the only alternative to longtermism. We could also talk about caring for future generations. 

This has fewer of the problems you point out (e.g. differentiates between recoverable global catastrophes and existential catastrophes). To me, it has warm, positive associations. And it's pluralistic, connected to indigenous worldviews and environmentalist rhetoric.

I loved Chris Miller's Chip War.

If you're looking for something less directly related to things like AI, I like Siddhartha Mukerjee's books (The Emperor of all Maladies, The Gene), Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, and Andrew Roberts' Napoleon the Great

What a sweet post 💙

Thank you also to you for setting up Vida Plena! By putting so much work into setting up a new organization you've helped a lot of people.

Ranil Dissanayake actually just published an article in Asterisk about the history of the poverty line concept. The dollar-a-day (now $1.25 a day or something) line was kind of arbitrary and kind of not:

rather than make their own judgment on what constituted sufficient living, they could instead rely on the judgment of poor countries themselves. They would simply take an average of the poorest countries in the world and declare this to be the global minimum of human sufficiency

noting further in a footnote that

Of course, things are never quite so pure: The

Great comment, I appreciate this perspective and have definitely updated towards thinking the 10x gap is more explainable than I thought.

I do note that some of the examples you gave still leave me wondering if the families would rather just have the cash. Sure, perhaps it would be spent on high-priority and perhaps social signal-y things like weddings. But if they can't currently afford to send all their kids to school or other medical treatment, I wonder if they'd sensibly rather have the cash to spend on those things than a bednet.

(Also, my understanding... (read more)

Sorry, yep, I meant to add an "annually" there!

I'm somewhat sympathetic to something like GiveDirectly's take. If bednets are something like 10x more valuable than the cash used to purchase them, I find it a bit weird that people don't usually buy them when given a cash transfer. 

I've previously written a short comment about mechanisms that could explain this and do think there are important factors that can explain part of the gap (e.g. coordination problems). But I'm still a bit skeptical that the "real" value is 10x different.

I suppose we could straightforwardly just transfer enough cash to everyone below a certain poverty line until their annual income is above it. The Longview team has estimated this would cost about $258 billion [edit: annually] (pp. 8-10 here).

a lot of my confidence in the above comes from farmed animal welfare strictly dominating GiveWell in terms of any plausibly relevant criteria save for maybe PR

Well some people might have ethical views or moral weights that are extremely favourable to people-focused interventions.

Or people could really value certainty of impact, and the evidence base could lead them to be much more confident that marginal donations to GiveWell charities have a counterfactual impact than marginal donations to animal welfare advocacy orgs.

FWIW I'm more likely to donate to ani... (read more)

Asssume "Philanthropy to the Right-of-Boom" is a roaring success (say, a 95th-percentile good outcome for that report). In a few years, how does the world look different? (Pick any number of years you'd like!)

I first got interested in civilizational collapse and global catastrophic risks by working on a Maya archaeological excavation in Guatemala.

I didn't know this, and it's awesome.

What did your work on the Mayans teach you about civilizational collapse?

I'm curious who you've seen recommending starting with Mearsheimer? That seems like an unbalanced starting point to me.

I'd personally recommend a textbook, like an older edition of World Politics.

Thanks for writing this. I think a lot of it is pointing at something important. I broadly agree that (1) much of the current AI governance and safety chat too swiftly assumes an us-v-them framing, and that (2) talking about countries as actors obscures a huge amount of complexity and internal debate.

On (2), I think this tendency leads to analysis that assumes  more coordination among governments, companies, and individuals in other countries than is warranted. When people talk about "the US" taking some action, readers of this Forum are much more lik... (read more)

I disagree fwiw. The benefits of transparency seem real but ultimately relatively small to me, whereas there could be strong personal reasons for some people to decline to publicise their participation.