All of Tom_Davidson's Comments + Replies

I agree that bottlenecks like the ones you mention will slow things down. I think that's compatible with this being a "jump in forward a century" thing though.

Let's consider the case of a cure for cancer. First of all, even if it takes "years to get it out due to the need for human trials and to actually build and distribute the thing" AGI could still bring the cure forward from 2200 to 2040 (assuming we get AGI in 2035).

Second, the excess top-quality labour from AGI could help us route-around the bottlenecks you mentioned:

• Human trials: AGI might develop u

It seems to me like you disagree with Carl because you write:

• The reason for an investor to make a bet, is that they believe they will profit later
• However, if they believe in near-term TAI, savvy investors won't value future profits (since they'll be dead or super rich anyways)
• Therefore, there is no way for them to win by betting on near-term TAI

So you're saying that investors can't win from betting on near-term TAI. But Carl thinks they can win.

Local cheap production makes for small supply chains that can regrow from disruption as industry becomes more like information goods.

Could you say more about what you mean by this?

Thanks for these great questions Ben!

To take them point by point:

1. The CES task-based model incorporates Baumol effects, in that after AI automates a task the output on that task increases significantly and so its importance to production decreases. The tasks with low output become the bottlenecks to progress. 
   1. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by technological deflation. But if AI automates therapy and increases the amount of therapists by 100X then my model won't imply that the real $ value of therapy industry increases 100X. The price of therapy fall

if they had explained why their views were not moved by the expert reviews OpenPhil has already solicited.

I included responses to each review, explaining  my reactions to it. What kind of additional explanation were you hoping for?

Davidson 2021 on semi-informative priors received three reviews.

By my judgment, all three made strong negative assessments, in the sense (among others) that if one agreed with the review, one would not use the report's reasoning to inform decision-making in the manner advocated by Karnofsky (and by Beckstead).

For Hajek... (read more)

Thanks for this!

I won't address all of your points right now, but I will say that I hadn't considered that "R&D is compensating for natural resources becoming harder to extract over time", which would increase the returns somewhat. However, my sense is that raw resource extraction is a small % of GDP, so I don't think this effect would be large.

Sorry for the slow reply!

I agree you can probably beat this average by aiming specifically at R&D for boosting economic growth.

I'd be surprised if you could spend $100s millions per year and consistently beat the average by a large amount (>5X) though:

• The $2 trillion number also excludes plenty of TFP-increasing research work done by firms that don't report R&D like Walmart and many services firms.
• The broad areas where this feels most plausible to me (R&D in computing or fundamental bio-tech) are also the areas that have the biggest poten

Great question!

I would read Appendix G as conditional on "~no civilizational collapse (from any cause)", but not conditional on "~no AI-triggered fundamental reshaping of society that unexpectedly prevents growth". I think the latter would be incorporated in "an unanticipated bottleneck prevents explosive growth".

I think the question of GDP measurement is a big deal here. GDP deflators determine what counts as "economic growth" compared to nominal price changes, but deflators don't really know what to do with new products that didn't exist. What was the "price" of an iPhone in 2000? Infinity? Could this help recover Roodman's model? If ideas being produced end up as new products that never existed before, could that mean that GDP deflators should be "pricing" these replacements as massively cheaper, thus increasing the resulting "real" growth rate?

This is an int... (read more)

Thank you for this comment! I'll make reply to different points in different comments.

But then the next point seems very clear: there's been tons of population growth since 1880 and yet growth rates are not 4x 1880 growth rates despite having 4x the population. The more people -> more ideas thing may or may not be true, but it hasn't translated to more growth.

So if AI is exciting because AIs could start expanding the number of "people" or agents coming up with ideas, why aren't we seeing huge growth spurts now?

The most plausible models have dimin... (read more)

Great suggestion - thanks! Have edited.

Hey - interesting question! 

This isn't something I looked into in depth, but I think that if AI drives explosive economic growth then you'd probably see large rises in both absolute energy use and in energy efficiency.

Energy use might grow via (e.g.) massively expanding solar power to the world's deserts (see this blog from Carl Shulman). Energy efficiency might grow via replacing human  workers with AIs (allowing services to be delivered with less energy input), rapid tech progress further increasing the energy efficiency of existing goods and s... (read more)

Thanks for these thoughts! You raise many interesting points.

 On footnote 16, you "For example, the application of Laplace’s law described below implies that there was a 50% chance of AGI being developed in the first year of effort". But historically, participants in the Dartmouth conference were gloriously optimistic

I'm not sure whether the participants at Dartmouth would have assigned 50% to creating AGI within a year and >90% within a decade, as implied by the Laplace prior. But either way I do think these probabilities would have been too ... (read more)

Agreed - the framework can be applied to things other than AGI.

Thanks for this Halstead - thoughtful article.

I have a one push-back, and one question about your preferred process for applying the ITN framework.

1. After explaining the 80K formalisation of ITN you say

Thus, once we have information on importance, tractability and neglectedness (thus defined), then we can produce an estimate of marginal cost-effectiveness.

The problem with this is: if we can do this, then why would we calculate these three terms separately in the first place?

I think the answer is that in some contexts it's easier to calculate each t... (read more)

Great podcasts!

I found Nakul's article v interesting too but am surprised at what it led you to conclude.

I didn't think the article was challenging the claim that doing paradigmatic EA activities was moral. I thought Nakul was suggesting that doing them wasn't obligatory, and that the consequentialist reasons for doing them could be overridden by an individual's projects, duties and passions. He was pushing against the idea that EA can demand that everyone support them.

It seems like your personal projects would lead to do EA activities. So I'm surprised you judge EA acti... (read more)

Yeah good point.

If people choose a job which they enjoy less then that's a huge sacrifice, and should be applauded.

But EA is about doing the most good that you can.

So anyone who is doing the most good that they could possibly do is being an amazing EA. Someone on £1million who donates £50K is not doing anywhere near as much good as they could do.

The rich especially should be encouraged to make big sacrifices, as they do have the power to do the most good.

I agree completely that talking with people about values is the right way to go. Also, I don't think we need to try and convince them to be utilitarians or nearly-utilitarian. Stressing that all people are equal and pointing to the terrible injustice of the current situation is already powerful, and those ideas aren't distinctively utilitarian.

There is no a priori reason to think that the efficacy of charitable giving should have any relation whatsoever to utilitarianism. Yet it occupies a huge part of the movement.

I think the argument is that, a priori, utilitarians think we should give effectively. Further, given the facts as they far (namely that effective donations can do an astronomical amount of good), there are incredibly strong moral reasons for utilitarians to promote effective giving and thus to participate in the EA movement.

I think that [the obsession with utilitarianism] is reg

Those seem really high flow through effects to me! £2000 saves one life, but you could easily see it doing as much good as saving 600!

How are you arriving at the figure? The argument that "if you value all times equally, the flow through effects are 99.99...% of the impact" would actually seem to show that they dominated the immediate effects much more than this. (I'm hoping there's a reason why this observation is very misleading.) So what informal argument are you using?

This is a nice idea but I worry it won't work.

Even with healthy moral uncertainty, I think we should attach very little weight to moral theories that give future people's utility negligible moral weight. For the kinds of reasons that suggest we can attach them less weight don't go any way to suggesting that we can ignore them. To do this they'd have to show that future people's moral weight was (more than!) inversely proportional to their temporal distance from us. But the reasons they give tend to show that we have special obligations to people in our gen... (read more)

Great post!

Out of interest, can you give an example of an "instrumentally rational technique that require irrationality"?

Why? What are the very long term effects of a murder?

Would you similarly doubt that, on expectation, someone murdering someone else had bad consequences overall? Someone slapping you very hard in the face?

This kind of reasoning seems to bring about a universal scepticism about whether we're doing Good. Even if you think you can pin down the long term effects, you have no idea about the very long term effects (and everything else is negligible compared to very long term effects).

In defence of WALYs, and in reply to your specific points:

1. I don't share your intuition here. Well-being is what we're talking about when we say "I'm not sure he's doing so well at the moment", or when we say "I want to help people as much as possible". It's a general term for how well someone is doing, overall. It's an advantage, in my eyes, that it's not committed to any specific account of well-being, for any such account might have its drawbacks.

2. I worry that, in adopting HALYs, EA would tie its aims to a narrow view of what huma

A small quibble

One conclusion EAs might make is that their personal diets are no big deal, easily swamped as it is by the consequences of donations.

I think it's flat out wrong to conclude our diets "are no big deal". Being vegetarian for a lifetime prevents over 1000 years of animal suffering. That's a huge, huge impact.

My more serious worry is that people will draw this conclusion and eat less ethically as a result, without donating more (they already knew donating was great). But this is just psychological speculation backed up by some anecdotal evidence.

Most people who go vegetarian find its very very little effort to be 90% vegetarian after a year or so. To me this warns against the view that people will give extra because "they haven't made the sacrifice of becoming veggie". Very soon the sacrifice becomes a habit and the claim that charitable donations are affected becomes even less plausible.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has given more money because of this thread. I know that i'm more willing to eat diary products and have read others saying it made them happier eating meat.

That only seems to show that emissions do harm. Not that the harm is so finely individuated. fwiw there are reasons to doubt the butterfly effect works in the same way given quantum mechanics

When you emit carbon dioxide those emissions will go on to harm particular people. When you buy offsets that will avert emissions that would have harmed different people.

What's this claim based on?

This is a really good article, and I do find the perspective advocated compelling. However, I would like to voice some worries.

1. Anyone not committed to an consequentialist mindset is likely to take serious issue with someone who eats meat but donates to charities that encourage other people to give up meat. In general, advocating that someone else make a sacrifice that you aren't willing to make is seen as hypocritical and lacking in integrity. People will criticise you and perhaps, by association, effective altruism.

2. I'm sceptical, psychologically, th

I agree with this. Let me make explain why I stand by the point that you quote me on. Tl;dr: by "negative effects" I wasn't talking about the hurt feelings of potential EAs.

My point wasn't the following: "It's unfair on relatively poor potential EAs, therefore it's bad, therefore let's change the movement" As you stress, this consideration is outweighed by the considerations of those the movement is trying to help. I accept explicitly in the article that such considerations might justify us making EA elitist.

My point was rather that pe... (read more)

Thanks for that.

My basic worries are: -Academics must gain something from spending ages thinking and studying ethics, be it understanding of the arguments, knowledge of more arguments or something else. I think this puts them in a better position than others and should make others tentative in saying that they're wrong.

-Your explanation for disagreeing with certain academics is that they have different starting intuitions. But does this account for the fact that academics can revise/abandon intuitions because of broader considerations. Even if you're right... (read more)

Why, do you believe we should redistribute moral virtue?

No, but it's unfair that it's harder for the poor to attain the status. That has negative effects which I talked about in the article.

Thanks so much for this! Really good and persuasive points.

One important thing to say is that the Pledge should absolutely not be used to distinguish ‘good people’.

My worry is this isn't realistic, even if ideally it we wouldn't distinguish people like this. For example, having taken the pledge myself and told people about it I was congratulated (especially by other EAs). This simple and unavoidable kind of interaction rewards pledgers and shows that their moral status in the eyes of others has gone up. To me, it seems a real problem that this kind of... (read more)

Thanks for a thoughtful response.

But what do you mean by "Refrain from posting things that assume that consequentialism is true"? That its best to refrain from posting things that assume that values like e.g. justice aren't ends-in-themselves, or refrain from posting things that assume that consequences and their quantity are important?

Definitely the former. I find it hard to get my head round people who deny the latter. I suspect only people committed to a weird philosophical theories would do it. I thought modern Kantians were more moderate... (read more)

I agree with you on technical language - we have to judge cases on an individual basis and be reasonable.

Less sure about the consequentialism, unless you know your talking to a consequentialist! If you want to evaluate an action from a narrow consequentialist perspective, can't you just say so at the start?

I don't think the existence of another pledge does much to negate the harm done by the GWWC pledge being classist.

I agree there's value in simplicity. But we already have an exception to the rule: students only pay 1%. There's two points here. Firstly, it doesn't seem to harm our placard-credentials. We still advertise as "give 10%", but on further investigation there's a sensible exception. I think something similar could accommodate low-earners. Secondly, even if you want to keep it at one exception, students are in a much better position to g... (read more)

Thanks a lot, this cleared up a lot of things.

I think we're talking past each other a little bit. I'm all for EtG and didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I think we should absolutely keep evaluating career impacts; Matt Wage made the right choice. When I said we should stop glorifying high earners I was referring to the way that they're hero-worshipped, not our recommending EtG as a career path.

Most of my suggested changes are about the way we relate to other EAs and to outsiders, though I had a couple of more concrete suggestions about the pledge and the ca... (read more)

Thanks for the reply! I would like to pick you up on a few points though...

"On the one hand, you say you "want EA to change the attitudes of society as a whole". But you seem willing to backpedal on the goal of changing societal attitudes as soon as you encounter any resistance... If EA is watered down to the point where everyone can agree with it, it won't mean anything anymore."

I think all the changes I suggested can be made without the movement losing the things that currently makes it distinctive and challenging in a good way. W... (read more)

Hi, I've recently written an article about what I think are some image problems that effective altruism have and how we can combat them. I'd love to post on this website here so that I get feedback and stimulate discussion but don't have enough Karma points to do so. Please like this post so that I can post it!

If you're worried about the material you can see an earlier draft of the article on the Effective Altruism fb group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/) or the EA Hangout fb group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/eahangout/?fref=ts).