All of Tsunayoshi's Comments + Replies

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)

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... (read more)

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.

8
Jeff Kaufman
1y
Especially when any proper response would need to be run by lawyers

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.

2
Vael Gates
1y
Thanks for the bug report, checking into it now. 

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.

1
Catherine F
1y
Hi Tsunayoshi, thanks for reading the post. Oh no! I just clicked them all and they worked for me... are they still not working for you? Let me know and I can investigate the problem further.

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... (read more)

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).

1
gergo
1y
Really sorry to hear about your experience! Yes, first encounters/experiences can leave a lasting mark. I hope you had more pleasant exchanges later, and that it didn't discourage you from contributing to the forum - generally, my impression is that people are friendly and open-minded, but this is of course not always the case.
2
NickLaing
1y
Thanks I resonate with this too. I had a go at my first part post, before realizing from the comments it had probably been discussed a lot before so wasn't very interesting. I did try to search the forums first but obviously missed something. Second time better haha

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

-1
LGS
1y
Please post the letter your local EA group received, then. I agree that if the norm is "everyone lies in grant commitment letters, that's normal", then it makes the story better. I do not actually believe there is such a norm (and of course, if there is one, it's a bad one). And if what you say is true, then the commitment letter is a lie, to be clear -- the letter specifically says the grant will be paid out promptly, as soon as SND registers as a non-profit. It clearly says this registration status is the only barrier left. When I was hired for a job, there was indeed a point at which I got an offer pending on a background check. But the offer letter was clear that this offer was conditional; this FLI letter is not like that.

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... (read more)

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.

2
zdgroff
1y
Yes, that seems right.

[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... (read more)

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... (read more)

We could pester Scott Alexander to do another, EA themed, adversarial collaboration contest.

2
pradyuprasad
1y
this seems like a very good idea!
Answer by TsunayoshiJan 19, 202313
17
4

We should encourage and possibly fund adversarial collaborations on controversial issues in EA.

5
Nathan Young
1y
I thought the sense was adversarial collab was a bit overrated.
1
Tsunayoshi
1y
We could pester Scott Alexander to do another, EA themed, adversarial collaboration contest.

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... (read more)

Answer by TsunayoshiJan 19, 202323
19
6

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.

5
Arepo
1y
I'm sceptical of this proposal, but to steelman it against your criticism, I think we would want to say that the focus should be diversity of a) non-malleable traits that b) correlate with different life experiences - a) because that ensures genuine diversity rather than (eg) quick opinion shifts to game the system, and b) because it gives you a better protection against unknown unknowns. There are experiences a cis white guy is just far more/less likely to have had than a gay black woman, and so when you hire the latter (into a group of otherwise cisish whiteish mannish people), you get a bunch of intangible benefits which, by their nature, the existing group are incapable of recognising.  The traits typically highlighted by proponents of diversity tend to score pretty well on both counts - ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are very hard to change and (perhaps in decreasing order these days) tend to go hand in hand with different life experiences. By comparison, say, a political viewpoint is fairly easy to change, and a neurodivergent person probably doesn't have that different a life experience than a regular nerd (assuming they've dealt with their divergence well enough to be a remotely plausible candidate for the job).

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.

Let's start with some points where you hit on something true:

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... (read more)

2
Wil Perkins
1y
You make some great points here. I’ll admit my arguments weren’t as charitable as they should’ve been, and more motivated from heat than light. I hope to find time to explore this in more detail and with more charity! Your point about genuine truth seeking is certainly something I love about EA, and don’t want to see go away. It’s definitely a risk if we can’t figure out how to screen for that sort of thing. Do you have any recommendations for screening based on epistemics?
1
Sharmake
1y
On factual questions, this is how it should be, and this matters. Putting it another way, it's not a problem for EAs to come to agree on factual questions, without more assumptions.
  1. It's very bad that the movement is focusing outreach on elite universities. Proximity to them should not be a criterion. We should invest in less elitist communities that can make the movement more diverse.

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... (read more)

5
Ivy Mazzola
2y
I'll take a stab at sharing some relevant info at least. Here is a recent forum post on differences in intellect from Ivy to nonIvy tier schools. And my comment discussing incentive structures in American higher education which mean we need to look at both public and private universities.

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... (read more)

Very good post! Some potential tips how people who have similar experiences to what you described can feel more included: 

  1. Replacing visits to the EA Forum with visits to more casual online places: various EA Facebook groups (e.g. EA Hangout, groups related to your cause area of interest), the EA Discord server, probablygood.org (thanks to another commenter mentioning the site).   
  2. Attending events hosted by local EA groups (if close by). These events are in my experience less elite and more communal. 
  3. If attending larger EA conferences, u
... (read more)
2
Olivia Addy
2y
Hey thanks for these really concrete steps! I appreciate you highlighting these other parts of the EA community as I really wasn’t aware of them before I posted this. And that’s a really great point about the conferences - think it’s key to be mindful that people might be trying to portray a certain image.

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. 

2
kirchner.jan
2y
I looked at this a little bit in my research and it seems that reports of bullying are actually most abundant in elementary school and then decrease steadily (in Japan, the U.S. in 2010, and possibly in China but the source is unavailable). This does not say anything about the severity of bullying though and I could imagine that's a strong factor ("it's wrong to think of little children as innocent, because not knowing isn't the same as not choosing. That children do little harms to each other with schoolyard fights, because they don't have the power to do great harm."). And I could also imagine that there is a kind of accumulative effect that comes from sustained bullying. Or perhaps stress from school and puberty are mediating factors? But yeah, prima facie the high amount of bullying in elementary school doesn't fit the picture very well.

(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... (read more)

3
Devin Kalish
2y
This is interesting, and I’m glad to see some pushback in the direction of the stronger thesis as well. Again, the evidence I have seen leans the other way and I have not seen evidence I consider as strong in the anti-bioethics direction, but each piece of my evidence is also fairly weak on its own. A first pass at these cases leaves me with the following reactions (the numbers don’t correspond to each of your numbered points, they’re just there for organization): 1. My evidence is, I think, pretty anglocentric, and may leave room for the situation to be different in for instance France and Austria. It is my (not very well researched) impression that countries with a history of Nazi occupation are more bioconservative on average for instance. I was also disappointed to learn when looking into this, that surrogacy is actually banned throughout a large part of continental Europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogacy_laws_by_country and even if those selected for these committees are sincere and not just bureaucrats, there may be a selection effect for them to have views closer to the government than the public. 2. As I said, my evidence isn’t overwhelming, but with the exception of the 1Day Sooner letter, I tried to make it fairly systematic. I would expect some of these decisions to get through regardless of whether they are on average the more common types of judgements, so I don’t want to assume too much based on them without a better understanding of how each example was chosen. Leon Kass for instance, mentioned earlier, is a parody of bioconservativism in many ways, but he was highly influential on the Bush administration’s recommendations, and that is in America, where my samples are most relevant. 3. On the point of recommending not paying for challenge trials, I think this is in part due to an unfortunate asymmetry. There are some bioethicists who are concerned about vague notions of “exploitation” and don’t think participants should be payed, and tho

"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... (read more)

2
NunoSempere
2y
The thing is, not really. Some of these ML companies offer predictions for employee retention or project timelines, which managers would in fact be expected to forecast.

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?... (read more)

1
James Özden
2y
Thank you for the kind comments! 1. I address it in some points but yes one of my assumptions is that the cost-effectiveness of the most impactful SMOs would be within one order of magnitude of XR. 2. Regarding identifying if social movement organisations will be promising beforehand, part of the research would be to try understand what internal and external factors are crucial to social movement success. For example, I think some internal factors that might determine social movement impact could be: clear governance structure, "sticky" branding and narrative, infrastructure that will allow growth of 1000x, etc. Externally it might be things like: public salience for an issue, elite support for this issue, history of activism in that country, and so on. 3. I think this is a great question which ties into my point about re good governance structures. There is definitely a degree that the focus of social movements can shift with growth so I think it's important that the demands/campaigns are predominately set in way that allows the most impactful campaigns to be focused on, rather than what everyone finds appealing. I'm not 100% sure if this was your question so feel free to clarify if not.

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... (read more)

4
peter_janicki
2y
Thx for commenting. I have to agree with you and disagree somewhat with my earlier comment. (#placebo). Actually placebo-effects are fine and if a placebo helps people: Great!  And yes, getting a specific treatment effect + the placebo-effect is better (and more like in real life), than getting no treatment at all. 

 

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 ... (read more)

2
Mathieu Putz
2y
Thanks for pointing this out! Hadn't known about this, though it totally makes sense in retrospect that markets would find some way of partially cancelling that inefficiency. I've added an edit to the post.

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-... (read more)

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.

4
Buck
2y
It seems definitely good on the margin if we had ways of harnessing academia to do useful work on alignment. Two reasons for this are that 1. perhaps non-x-risk-motivated researchers would produce valuable contributions, and 2. it would mean that x-risk-motivated researchers inside academia would be less constrained and so more able to do useful work. Three versions of this: * Somehow cause academia to intrinsically care about reducing x-risk, and also ensure that the power structures in academia have a good understanding of the problem, so that its own quality control mechanisms cause academics to do useful work. I feel pretty pessimistic about the viability of convincing large swathes of academia to care about the right thing for the right reasons. Historically, basically the only way that people have ended up thinking about alignment research in a way that I’m excited about is that they spent a really long time thinking about AI x-risk and talking about it with other interested people. And so I’m not very optimistic about the first of these. * Just get academics to do useful work on specific problems that seem relevant to x-risk. For example, I’m fairly excited about some work on interpretability and some techniques for adversarial robustness. On the other hand, my sense is that EA funders have on many occasions tried to get academics to do useful work on topics of EA interest, and have generally found it quite difficult; this makes me pessimistic about this. Perhaps an analogy here is: Suppose you’re Google, and there’s some problem you need solved, and there’s an academic field that has some relevant expertise. How hard should you try to get academics in that field excited about working on the problem? Seems plausible to me that you shouldn’t try that hard--you’d be better off trying to have a higher-touch relationship where you employ researchers or make specific grants, rather than trying to convince the field to care about the subproblem intrinsically (e

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

4
Hauke Hillebrandt
3y
Excellent point. I think there's a continuum going from highly educated to those that are most at risk of populism. I haven't researched this carefully but my hunch is there are actually lots of translation of civic education memes to people who are at risk of populism (not only from experts). It seems to me that on the margin,  high-quality, easily -accessible information for educated people is more neglected. related citation: IQ of the top 5% better at predicting GDP - does that suggest that increasing the epistemics of the TOP 5% is better than combating fake news? Cognitive Capitalism: The Effect of Cognitive Ability on Wealth, as Mediated Through Scientific Achievement and Economic Freedom Stefan Schubert also thinks about this this sometimes: https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/10/20/fake-news-fighting-can-harm-elite-debates  https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy    
2[comment deleted]3y

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... (read more)

5
Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
3y
Not mostly happy, I think. China apparently needed a new factory, but other places didn't (to the tune of 3bn wasteful doses or ~12bn real ones).  Also fast approval was only one prong of the fix, along with 2) an order of magnitude more investment, 3) invested much earlier, as pre-Phase I pre-purchases, 4) HCTs, and 5) pivoting away from 80%+ waste as soon as we realise we're doing that. (HCTs are still relevant here because some of the vaccines have a shelf life < 6 months, and HCTs could thus allow May-June 2020 production to dampen the second or third waves.) Half a trillion dollars should really make some dent in the known and unknown bottlenecks. Not sure how to shrink my estimate to account for the immovable remainder.

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... (read more)

6
ChristianKleineidam
3y
Because philantrophists like Stoecker got sued and fordidden from deploying better interventions.
2
Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
3y
August 28, 2020: "Production has started at a new plant in Beijing with an annual capacity of roughly 300 million doses. Sinovac has agreed to supply 40 million doses to Bio Farma, an Indonesian state-owned company, between November and March. Sinovac started building the factory in late March and finished the project in July." So this is in fact a little piece of the happy timeline.

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

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.

5
Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
3y
Ah right! Yes, I misspoke; pardon.

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... (read more)

6
Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
3y
Here's my source, "based on dozens of interviews with diplomats, Commission officials, pharma industry representatives and national government aides". Here's another, and another. The EU's priorities are revealed in the result: 25% - 45% lower prices. They actually sort of brag about it:  It seems to have been a mix of understandable coordination, show of force, price haggling, and liability haggling (which is just a kind of price haggling with extra politics).  I hadn't seen those leaks, thanks. Note that they did plenty to fuel vaccine hesitancy elsewhere. No opinion about attribution to the EMA vs the Commission.
6
Joe Munson
3y
You mean not publishing the truth? No I think that's is bad, it's more difficult to counter vaccine skepticism when organizations are not public and transparent, at least I don't see any reason to think not.

"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

... (read more)
2
Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
3y
Sure. Challenge trials polled well in the West, but you're right that Wuhan could have been scarifying. Test of this: how did they poll in Lombardia? My contention is that (in the US and UK at least) bioethicists and policymakers overestimated the controversy, possibly projecting their own misgivings.

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.

7
EricHerboso
3y
There was good reason back then to believe that overpopulation was a real problem whose time would come relatively soon. If it wasn't for technological breakthroughs with dwarf wheat and IR8 rice variants, spearheaded by Norman Borlaug and others, our population would have seriously passed our ability to grow food by this point -- the so-called Malthusian trap. Using overpopulation as an example here would be akin to using something like global climate change as an example in the present, if it turns out that a technological breakthrough in the next 5-10 years completely obviates the need for us to be careful about greenhouse gas release in the future. Because of this, I don't think overpopulation as a cause area would make for the best example that you're trying to make here.
1
DavidZhang
3y
I guess one question I would have is whether the campaigners at the time were using good reason and evidence. It's possible that the information we have now was not available to them, and it's also possible that it's a legitimate cause area (i.e. overpopulation is a real concern) even if the means (sterilisation etc.) are clearly wrong. I'm not an expert on this at all but will read up on more recent literature on overpopulation!
2
DavidZhang
3y
Thanks so much - someone else suggested China's One Child Policy and I think this or a more general point on overpopulation might be where we end up! Really great suggestion. The sterilisation stories are harrowing and I think could really bring the point home.

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. 

1
DavidZhang
3y
Interesting. Without reading into it, I've always assumed that Western defences of colonialism (incl. White Man's Burden) were somewhat disingenuous, i.e. defending something they knew was wrong, or was at least controversial, and the motivations were not altruistic. The ideal case is one where people are being genuinely altruistic but completely miss the mark. 

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 ... (read more)

5
Pablo
3y
Thanks for the clarification.  I feel that this discussion is not framed correctly. Yes, successful eradication is superior to containment in health and economic outcomes. This is a pretty weak claim that lots of people can agree with who otherwise differ considerably in their policy proposals. But the original claim was that EAs and rationalists hadn't advocated for long lockdowns and border closures, and that this was relevant for retroactively assessing their performance. The plausibility of the latter claim must be evaluated by considering all the countries that implemented long lockdowns and border closures, and not just the tiny minority that were successful in attaining (near-)eradication by adopting those measures. I took a quick look at the study you shared. Their analysis compared covid deaths, GDP growth and lockdown stringency in two groups of OECD countries during the first twelve months of the pandemic, and offered this as their original contribution to the study's main thesis that countries which favored elimination had better health and economic outcomes than countries which favored mitigation (the rest of the study is a brief and unsystematic summary of some of the relevant literature). It turns out that the group which supposedly favored elimination consists of just five nations, four of which are islands and the fifth of which  (South Korea) shares borders with a single county  which has been completely isolated from the rest of the world for decades. Let's pause for a moment and consider how quickly this kind of evidence would have been dismissed if it had been presented in support of a politically inconvenient conclusion. Yet here it is offered, in the world's most prestigious medical journal, to establish that "elimination, not mitigation, creates best outcomes for health, the economy, and civil liberties". For what it's worth, I personally have no strong views on how the pandemic should have been handled. (My only strong meta-view is that

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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). 

1
James Smith
3y
Good point. This is similar to what I was trying to get at when talking about lack of willingness to engage in probabilistic reasoning. 
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