Just wanted to point out that Peter and you seem to mention two different classes of behaviors. While the behaviors you mention certainly create a more unwelcoming environment to women and shouldn't be welcome in EA environmens, I don't think they would meet the (legal ?) definition of sexual harassment and may not be the types of actions Peter had in mind.
IANAL, so I will just quote another government website, but I would be very surprised if accusation 1 holds any water. This was not difficult to find at all; also it seems a bit odd to first admit to not understanding what "legal authority" means but bringing the accusation forth anyway.
" A charity can pay a trustee for the supply of any goods or services over and above normal trustee duties. The decision to do this must be made by those trustees who will not benefit. [...].
Examples of goods or services that may be provided by a trustee in return for payme...
it would be trivial for one of the staff to say so.
It seems unreasonable to expect a reply from staff to a forum post within 3 hours, let alone to one that is fairly accusatory in tone. Also, many people will downvote and explain their reasoning later when they have more time in the evening.
I will also reiterate my earlier comment that we should establish norms of contacting organisations with such accusations before they are published, unless good reasons exist not do so.
I tried to comment on the page https://ai-risk-discussions.org/perspectives/test-before-deploying, but instead got an error message telling me to use the contact mail.
I really enjoyed this post. Small note: The links in the "If you found this post interesting, you might also like" section are not working.
I intensively skimmed the first suggested article "Technology is not Values Neutral. Ending the reign of nihilistic design", and found the analysis mostly lucid and free of political buzzwords. There's definitely a lot worth engaging with there. Similarly to what you write however, I got a sense of unjustified optimism in the proposed solution, which centers around analyzing second and third order effects of technology during their development. Unfortunately, the article does not appear to acknowledge that predicting such societal effects seems really hard...
To people who found themselves agreeing with this post, I encourage applying it in practice when you actually do encounter first posts (if they obey forum norms). Take this post which was a first post for the author and consider whether people could have been a little kinder with their downvotes. (To be frank, I am a little bitter about my similar experience, so I am a bit sensitive to expressed but not lived norms of welcoming new post writers).
This seems inaccurate. Yes, the original letter says that the grant has been approved. I am not too familiar with how these grants usually go, but the wording of the letter seems similar to what our local EA group received for our grant application, i.e. your grant has been approved, now fill out some due diligence forms please. I can imagine that people familiar with grantmaking are of the understanding that approving a grant does not entail an unconditional agreement that the grant will be paid out.
That is, SND was very likely aware that there was still ...
It would be helpful for tentative-grant approval letters to be clear about what the remaining conditions are. Unfortunately, this letter mentioned one specific condition and implied that payment would occur promptly after it was met, which could give the impression that other preconditions had been satisfied.
Like you, I have a hard time mustering any sympathy for the would-be grantee here. But I think it's easily foreseeable that an organization might show a letter like this to a third party in order to secure action by the third party. Indeed, that may be...
While Nathan's suggestion is certainly framed very positively, people might object that sometimes the only way to change a system where power is highly concentrated at the top is to use anger about current news as a coordination mechanism to demand immediate change. Once attention invariably fades away, it becomes more difficult to enact bottom up changes.
Or to put it differently: often slowing down discussions really is an attempt at shutting them down ("we will form a committee to look into your complaints"). That's why I think that even though I agreed with the decision to collect all Bostrom discussion in one post, it's important to honestly signal to people that their complaints are read and taken seriously.
It's definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems. I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there's loads of social conditioning going on. I don't think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because "that's just how things are" and nobody else was getting angry abo...
This argument seems to be fair to apply towards CEA's funding decisions as they influence the community, but I do not think I as a self described EA have more justification to decide over bed net distribution than the people of Kenya who are directly affected.
[epistemic status: my imprecise summaries of previous attempts]
Well, I guess it depends on what you want to get out of them. I think they can be useful as epistemic tools in the right situation: They tend to work better if they are focused on empirical questions, and they can be help by forcing the collaborators to narrow down broad statements like "democratic decision making is good/bad for organisations". It's probably unrealistic however to expect that the collaborators will change their minds completely and arrive at a shared conclusion.
They might also...
Would it be a good norm that people contact organizations they plan to criticise before publishing such posts? I can only think of this as beneficial when the post is based on not easily verifiable, private information. While it is legitimate to use such information as basis for criticism, there are usually two sides to a story.
For some related context: In the past GiveWell used to solicit external reviews by experts of their work, but has since discontinued the practice. Some of their reasons are (I can imagine similar reasons applying to other orgs):
"There is a question around who counts as a “qualified” individual for conducting such an evaluation, since we believe that there are no other organizations whose work is highly similar to GiveWell’s."
"Given the time investment these sorts of activities require on our part, we’re hesitant to go forward with one until we feel confide...
We should encourage and possibly fund adversarial collaborations on controversial issues in EA.
Thanks for the reply! I had not considered how easily game-able some selection criteria based on worldviews would be. Given that on some issues the worldview of EA orgs is fairly uniform, and the competition for those roles, it is very conceivable that some people would game the system!
I should however note that the correlation between opinions on different matters should apriori be stronger than the correlation between these opinions and e.g. gender. I.e. I would wager that the median religious EA differs more from the median EA in their worldview than th...
A study should be conducted that records and analyses the reactions and impressions of people when first encountering EA. Special attention should be paid to reactions of underrepresented groups such as groups based on demographics (age, race, gender, etc.), worldview (politics, religion, etc.) or background (socio economic status, major etc.).
I am hesitant to agree. Often proponents for this position emphasize the value of different outlooks in decision making as justification, but the actual implemented policies select based on diversity in a narrow subset of demographic characteristics, which is a different kind of diversity.
Hey Wil,
as someone who is likely in the "declining epistemics would be bad" camp, I will try to write this reply while mindfully attempting to be better at epistemics than I usually am.
However I think the way this topic is being discussed and leveraged in arguments is toxic to fostering trust in our community
I agree that talk about bad epistemics can come across as being unwelcoming to newcomers and considering them stupid. Coupled with the elitist vibe many people get from EA, this is not g...
Very bad is a strong statement. Do you mind elaborating on why you think diversity in itself is important, and what kind of diversity you refer to (e.g. diversity of viewpoints, diversity of ethnicity etc.)? FWIW, Harvard students' ethnic markup differs somewhat from the US population, but not very much so ( once you factor out non residents, the u...
But ultimately we're here to reduce existential risk or end global poverty or stop factory farming or other important work. Not primarily to make each other happy, especially during work hours
You raise many good points, but I would like to respond to (not necessarily contradict) this sentiment. Of course you are right, those are the goals of the EA community. But by calling this whole thing a community, we cannot help but create certain implicit expectations. Namely, that I will not only be treated simply as a means to an end. That means only being a...
Very good post! Some potential tips how people who have similar experiences to what you described can feel more included:
AFAIK there is one positive, randomized trial for a nasal spray containing Iota-Carrageenan (Carragelose): "The incidence of COVID-19 differs significantly between subjects receiving the nasal spray with I-C (2 of 196 [1.0%]) and those receiving placebo (10 of 198 [5.0%]). " It is available at least in Europe, and in the UK I think under the brand name Dual Defence. Why it has not received more attention is beyond me.
Interesting!
Does bullying increase with onset of adolescence? Schools alone cannot be the factor causing the decrease in life satisfaction, since it seems to occur after grade 5, but students have been in school before that already.
(Caveat: Due to space and time constraints, this comment aims to state my position and make it somewhat plausible, but not to defend it in depth. Also, I am unsure as to whether the goal of bioethicists is to come up with their own ethical positions, or to synthesize the ethics of the public in a coherent way)
For most of the post, I draw on decisions made by (bio)ethic committees that advise governments around the world. I believe those are a great basis for doing so, because they are generally staffed by researchers and independent. My cursory sear...
"Moreover, I observe that machine-learning or model-based or data-analysis solutions on forecasting weather, pandemics, supply chain, sales, etc. are happily adopted, and the startups that produce them reach quite high valuations. When trying to explain why prediction markets are not adopted, this makes me favor explanations based on high overhead, low performance and low applicability over Robin Hanson-style explanations based on covert and self-serving status moves."
I agree that the success of bespoke ml tools for forecasting negates some of the Ha...
Thanks for the writeup! This is surely a perspective that we are missing in EA.
I did not have time to read all of the post, so I am not sure whether you address this: The cost-effectiveness estimates of XR are ex-post, and of just one particular organization. To me it seems obvious, that there are some movements/organizations that achieve great impact through protest, it is more difficult to determine that beforehand.
So as far as you propose funding existing projects, do you believe that the impact and behaviour of a movement are stable?...
They did not have a placebo-receiving control group.
All the other points you mentioned seem very relevant, but I somewhat disagree with the importance of a placebo control group, when it comes to estimating counterfactual impact. If the control group is assigned to standard of care, they will know they are receiving no treatment and thus not experience any placebo effects (but unlike you write, regression-to-the-mean is still expected in that group), while the treatment group experiences placebo+"real effect from treatment". This makes it difficult t...
You’d also expect that class of people to be more risk-averse, since altruistic returns to money are near-linear on relevant scales at least according to some worldviews, while selfish returns are sharply diminishing (perhaps logarithmic?).
It's been a while since I have delved into the topic, so take this with a grain of salt:
Because of the heavy influence of VCs who follow a hits-based model, startup founders are often forced to aim for 1B+ companies because they lost control of the board, even if they themselves would prefer the higher ...
You mention "It’s probably the case that the biggest harms from immigration come from people irrationally panicking about immigration, but (surprise!) people are in fact irrational.".
From an EU-perspective, the effect seems pretty clear: After the refugee crisis 2015-2016 there have been numerous cases of populist right-wing parties gaining support or outright winning elections after running on anti-immigration platforms: to name just a few: the Lega Nord in Italy became part of the government, the FPÖ polled at their highest in 2016, and anti-...
I think it is fair to say that so far alignment research is not a standard research area in academic machine learning, unlike for example model interpretability. Do you think that would be desirable, and if so what would need to happen?
In particular, I had this toy idea of making progress legible to academic journals: Formulating problems and metrics that are "publishing-friendly"could, despite the problems that optimizing for flawed metrics bring, allow researchers at regular universities to conduct work in these areas.
Looking forward to the posts, and happy to postpone further discussion to when they are published, but to me the question and your alluded to answer has enormous implications for our ability to raise life satisfaction levels.
Namely: very rough estimates suggest that we are now 100x-1000x richer than in the past, and our lives are in the range [good-ok], but generally not pure bliss or anything close to it. If we extend reasonable estimations for the effect of material circumstances on wellbeing (i.e. doubling of wealth increases sat...
Namely: very rough estimates suggest that we are now 100x-1000x richer than in the past, and our lives are in the range [good-ok], but generally not pure bliss or anything close to it. If we extend reasonable estimations for the effect of material circumstances on wellbeing (i.e. doubling of wealth increases satisfaction by 1 point on a 10 point scale) , we should then expect past humans to have been miserable.
I don't think we should expect past humans to have been miserable. One of the key findings in the happiness literature is the so-called ...
This is a very comprehensive report, thanks for posting.
Given that education is seen as a strong predictor of populist attitudes, it is interesting that many interventions listed on the demand side seem to target highly educated people (e.g. Our World in Data, Factfullness, Journalism, Fact checking in general, BPB). The Youtube channel Kurzgesagt and some things Last week tonight comes up with (e.g. the wrestler John Cena warning against conspiracy theories) seem a bit better. You mention research how they m...
Chomsky publishing his new book, The Precipice, mere months after Long Story Short clearly indicates that he and Taylor must be closely working together. I look forward to the surely upcoming 80000 hours joint appearance of Taylor Swift and Noam Chomsky.
But shouldn't this update our priors towards mostly being on the happy timeline, in the West as well? Given that it took Sinovac/China one year from last March to this March to scale up, and that their vaccines are easier to manufacture than mRNA vaccines, and if we assume high investment from the start in China (so their timeline is close to optimal), it really starts to look like we could not have done much better on manufacturing (because the West does not differ strongly in available doses compared to China)?
I.e. we could have approved a fe...
I could not agree more with your sentiment, but the "We did ok" side has a point: If there was a much better policy or intervention, why was it done by no country, and no philanthropist? As a country, not much was stopping you a year ago to unilaterally prepurchase tons of vaccines and start manufacturing them. Getting 20 million doses manufactured early is much easier than 2 bn, you do not need to spend time coordinating with others etc., so what happened? From memory:
China only really started to vaccinate its citizens in March (but is doing i...
One last guess:
My ideology-of-all-public-officials guess is pretty weak compared to an obvious alternative: simple public-choice herding at the executive level. (200 units instead of a million.)
If governments were each minimising their own reputation loss by (correctly) predicting that they wouldn't be punished for doing what everyone was doing, this could be enough to prevent ~all innovation. As much as you want safety in numbers, you doubly don't want to be the first to risk and lose. No entrainment needed, let alone intentional coordination.
(What could ...
I am also very confused. The incentives for politicians to move as fast as they could were so vast.
Besides just vaguely accusing them of lacking courage: Another possibility is a profound entrainment of world elite opinion. One globalised and very narrow Overton window for public professionals. University is the obvious place for this to propagate, but I don't really know. What is its content? "Don't be hasty"? Could a philosophical accommodation really prevent every defection?
(There were some - Hungary vs EU on vaccines, Israel. I actually just trie...
Oh, there is not a shred of doubt that the EU delayed buying the vaccines in order to lower the price, and I agree that this was a disastrous decision that led to supply delays. This is however a separate question from approving the vaccine, which is what my objection was about.
Well whatever one may think of it, the EMA had legitimate concerns, and was not merely dragging its feet for negotiation reasons as the OP implied.
"The EU's sluggishness, bullying, pandering to risk aversion, and total lack of (short-term) accountability for its own decisions. AZ approval came three months after UK approval, Pfizer three weeks after. Supposedly this was mostly taken up with haggling prices down from crazy low to crazy low."
The last sentence is uncharitable and wildly inaccurate. Do you have any evidence for this? Prior to approval, the contracts had already been finalized, and anyway, it's not the EMA (Europe's FDA equivalent) that is doing the haggling. AZ approval was delayed...
"I am extremely puzzled why China or one of the other ahem non-individualist governments didn't do these."
Even in China, politicians and scientists fear public backlash, especially considering how to Chinese eyes the virus seems much more dangerous/lethal than to Europeans, given what happened in Wuhan:
...In mainland China, scientists are intrigued by the idea, but they said it would be difficult for the public to accept.
“It is difficult to do it in China. Recently there were some articles [online about HCT] and they drew a lot of criticisms,” said Zhu
I like the example of the anti-overpopulation movement of the 1960s and 70s. It involved good intentions, but its predictions and fears (e.g. widespread famines) were completely unfounded from today's perspective. It also produced some very unfortunate policies in developing countries:
"Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh." This article seems like a good starting point.
Not sure if it fits what you are looking for, but colonialism? A somewhat underappreciated aspect of it was that the belief that spreading Western civilization would make indigenous people better off, see e.g. White man's burden. Also, the Western powers were obviously very effective at colonizing. On the other hand, it somewhat lacks the part of the "play pump" example where everybody agrees that the responsible people had good intentions. Maybe it could be adapted to tales of Christian proselytizing in Africa, which would be relevant for your audience.
weeatquince's is sharing a widely held view, i.e. that eradication is superior to containment in health and economic outcomes, see e.g. this analysis. The idea itself is plausible, since a successful lockdown allows complete reopening of the internal economy afterwards.
Sample size is however small, especially when it comes to non-island countries. I only know of two non-island countries that seriously went for eradication coupled with border closures, namely Vietnam and Israel. Israel gave up at one point when cases started to rise (which is ...
Thank you for this great post. In the past I have looked for such platforms and concepts, but was unaware of the term 'inducement prize' and did not find much.
Two extensions to the concept you presented could make it even more interesting, especially for the EA community. Firstly, rather than just requests being supplied to such a platform, offers to conduct e.g. research could be posted first by qualified researchers in order to gauge interest. Secondly, there is no reason why there couldn't be several parties/individuals who pay t...
For posterity, I was wrong here because I was unaware of the dispersion parameter k that is substantially higher for SARS than for Covid-19.
Truly excellent post!
My intuition is that research abouts NPIs on behavioural change might be more tractable and therefore impactful than research where the endpoint is infection. If the endpoint is infection, any study that enrolls the general population will need to have very large sample sizes, as the examples you listed illustrate. I am sure these problems can be overcome, but I assume that one reason we have not seen more of these studies is that it is infeasible to do so without larger coordination.
While it is unfortunate and ...
There's an additional factor: Marketing and public persuasion. It is one thing to say: Based on a theoretical model, air filters work, and a totally different thing to say: We saw that air filters cut transmission by X% . My hope would be that the certainty and the effect estimate could serve to overcome the collective inaction we saw in the pandemic (in that many people agree that e.g. air filters would probably help, but barely nobody installed them in schools).
In general, there is no reason to expect the Atlas' founders to spend money needlessly. Nobody is suspecting that they are spending it on themselves (excepting the alleged expensive table), and just like enterprises I expect them to be at least trying to use their resources in the most efficient way possible.
You raise imho valid arguments. To address some of your points:
I guess the Atlas Foundation is going off a model where impact is heavy tailed, in which it makes sense to spend what seems disproportionate resources on attracting the most talented. In su... (read more)