5 ms·

The point of EA is to prioritize E for people who want to be E, and to help people in general to make informed decisions. If you think raising up your city or

The point of EA is to prioritize E for people who want to be E, and to help people in general to make informed decisions. If you think raising up your city or your country is unboundedly more important than raising up, say, Africa, then EA supports you making the best decision in that framework. But it's still silly that we expect everyone to independently evaluate charity choice in depth on, basically, the basis of their advertisement material. And people will usually either not care, or want to do the most good they can do, period. It's a rare case of a person who wants to do the most good they can for their country, but stops caring at the border. > So if leading EA initiatives are dissuading (say) giving to electrify Africa because of a lack of efficacy data or wealth of existing funding, they might event be having a quantitative negative impact on those particular causes. Well, yes, spending is zero sum. On the other hand, this creates an incentive to gather efficacy data, which I enormously welcome. The point isn't to maximize moneyflow to charity, the point is to maximize good things happening. > an already exceptionally well-funded AI research project their friends work for whose impact on Microsoft's share price is much easier to quantify than their impact on preventing Hypothetical Cyberpunk Future I don't understand what this means. At any rate, Microsoft share price is not generally seen as a negative. If a project that buys Microsoft compute nodes has positive value for the world, it would be stupid not to fund it just because doing so also happened to be good for Microsoft. edit: Oh yeah, inasmuch as AI safety as a cause is well-funded now it's because of Effective Altruism raising the alarm to begin with - and AI capability research still outstrips it a hundred times over. Frankly, what I'm seeing with EA is that ... like, Effective Altruism started out talking about maximizing the amount of good for the world, and the "weird AI people" were the ones who showed up. And it's not like it's a contradiction either, inasmuch as EA now focuses less on earning to give, it's because people like Bill Gates, once-leader of Microsoft, have Malaria handled. Focusing on tech people seems to have been very good for the Malaria cause. So to come in now, years later, and to say that EA shouldn't have focused on the weird AI thing because it might put off some other people who never gave a damn to begin with is almost insulting.

notahacker 6y ago
> I don't understand what this means GiveWell founder Holden Karnofsky spent $30m of philanthropic cash buying a board seat on the charitable subsidiary of OpenAI Inc, an extremely well funded organization drawing on research to produce high value closed source software, much of it now exclusively licensed to Microsoft (and theoretically stopping AGI armageddon). No evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been produced (but I don't doubt the commercial arm can sell lots of product). I'm fine with people donating money to OpenAI if they think it's a big deal and like supporting software projects (certainly nobody can argue that the organization hasn't produced some quality research) but if you're going to dedicate large parts of your life to putting "do not recommend" next to charities than don't do RCTs to prove that nutrition works to encourage people to donate to other causes instead, then it's not reasonable to apply completely different standards to diverting philanthropic cash to an entity your former roommate worked for. It also undermines a lot of Holden's own previous arguments on GiveWell (including a good piece questioning AI risk arguments!) > Frankly, what I'm seeing with EA is that ... like, Effective Altruism started out talking about maximizing the amount of good for the world, and the "weird AI people" were the only ones who showed up Isn't that mostly because "EA" is something which started in the "rationalist" community? Plenty of other people think about how they donate or or quantitatively assess charity performance without calling themselves Effective Altruists or hanging out on those forums. I'm also aware that many people considering themselves Effective Altruists are either uninterested in prioritising AI risk, or aren't demanding RCTs for everything else, and my arguments about inconsistency don't apply to them. > to say that EA shouldn't have focused on the weird AI thing because it might put off people who never gave a damn to begin with is almost insulting. This misses the point. I'm not saying "association with weird AI people puts people off donating". I'm saying that [i] writing extended "do not recommend; not rigorous enough and well funded enough already" reviews of charities puts people off donating [ii] promoting considerably less rigorous and better funded AI risk causes is inconsistent with this => worse funding allocation based on their own criteria for what constitutes an effective charity, and/or undermines the credibility of those criteria Either the EAs in question are wrong about where they're sending the funds or they're wrong about the importance of publicly-available evidence-based efficacy metrics (relative to "this seems really important to me", which is a perfectly fine reason to give all your money to something more speculative like AI risk research or a charity to promote African entrepreneurs which GiveWell is unimpressed by the evidence for).
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  > No evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been produced Of course, no evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been promised, nor could there be, since the best current estimate on the singularity is 40 years in the future. > GiveWell founder Holden Karnofsky spent $30m of philanthropic cash buying a board seat on the charitable subsidiary of OpenAI Inc OpenPhil and Givewell are not the same organization. OpenPhil's website explicitly lists AI Risk as a focus area; I don't think anyone would have donated to them without knowing what they were about. > [i] writing extended "do not recommend; not rigorous enough and well funded enough already" reviews of charities puts people off donating > [ii] promoting considerably less rigorous and better funded AI risk causes is inconsistent with this Okay, first of all, AI risk is better funded now. I remember when MIRI had to struggle to hit a million, when they were basically the only game in town that did anything about AI safety, and I still wouldn't call the field well funded. Certainly I'd like to see more AI safety competition that isn't think tanks and policy but basic research. That said, inasmuch as AI risk is funded well now, it's because the argument that it's enormously underfunded was successful. That said, I think there's a difference between an organization not providing evidence of efficacy because it's dedicated to shaping an event that lies decades in the future, and an organization not providing evidence of efficacy because it thinks it can get more donations by showing people photos of starving children. In a world like that, charities are competing on the ability to provoke pity, which is not the same as the ability to do the most good, or even necessarily related to this at all. I'm not saying that these people don't do good work, because if you go into that job you probably care at least somewhat about doing good for its own sake, I'm saying it would be better if incentives were aligned behind doing the most good rather than having the most photogenic victims. And inasmuch as I don't ask the same thing from AI Safety, it's because I recognize that while every cause that can should provide information about efficacy, the fact that a cause genuinely can't do that doesn't mean that it cannot also be vitally important, and it can show its importance in other ways, such as publications filled with arguments of its importance.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    OpenPhil and Givewell are not the same organization and don't support the same causes, but Holden definitely is the same person. If you spend your career arguing that charities need to be more open and evidence-based and focus on cost-effectiveness and metrics, then the fact you sit on the board of a nonprofit which is considerably more opaque than any of them is relevant to the merits of those arguments. (And OpenAI was unambiguously well funded and likely to become financially sustainable at the time as OPP acknowledged when they explained they put the money in for the board seat) Sure, you can't prove you've prevented the Singularity from happening in 40 years (not even if you're talking about the one predicted in the 80s!), but if it's reasonable for EAs to insist that charities distributing food or drugs already widely proven to work conduct RCTs or at least put cost benefit analysis on their website, I don't think we can look past the fact that the web page for a tax-deductible cause they're actually responsible for the governance of is a marketing page for NLP tools with absolutely nothing about how their donor dollars are spent... See, I can buy the argument that certain types of non-commercial AI research are going to be significant boons for humanity, but I can buy the argument that applies to lots of unproven development interventions too, and that directly undercuts the cost-effectiveness ethos

notahacker 6y ago

> I don't understand what this means GiveWell founder Holden Karnofsky spent $30m of philanthropic cash buying a board seat on the charitable subsidiary of OpenAI Inc, an extremely well funded organization drawing on research to produce high value closed source software, much of it now exclusively licensed to Microsoft (and theoretically stopping AGI armageddon). No evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been produced (but I don't doubt the commercial arm can sell lots of product). I'm fine with people donating money to OpenAI if they think it's a big deal and like supporting software projects (certainly nobody can argue that the organization hasn't produced some quality research) but if you're going to dedicate large parts of your life to putting "do not recommend" next to charities than don't do RCTs to prove that nutrition works to encourage people to donate to other causes instead, then it's not reasonable to apply completely different standards to diverting philanthropic cash to an entity your former roommate worked for. It also undermines a lot of Holden's own previous arguments on GiveWell (including a good piece questioning AI risk arguments!) > Frankly, what I'm seeing with EA is that ... like, Effective Altruism started out talking about maximizing the amount of good for the world, and the "weird AI people" were the only ones who showed up Isn't that mostly because "EA" is something which started in the "rationalist" community? Plenty of other people think about how they donate or or quantitatively assess charity performance without calling themselves Effective Altruists or hanging out on those forums. I'm also aware that many people considering themselves Effective Altruists are either uninterested in prioritising AI risk, or aren't demanding RCTs for everything else, and my arguments about inconsistency don't apply to them. > to say that EA shouldn't have focused on the weird AI thing because it might put off people who never gave a damn to begin with is almost insulting. This misses the point. I'm not saying "association with weird AI people puts people off donating". I'm saying that [i] writing extended "do not recommend; not rigorous enough and well funded enough already" reviews of charities puts people off donating [ii] promoting considerably less rigorous and better funded AI risk causes is inconsistent with this => worse funding allocation based on their own criteria for what constitutes an effective charity, and/or undermines the credibility of those criteria Either the EAs in question are wrong about where they're sending the funds or they're wrong about the importance of publicly-available evidence-based efficacy metrics (relative to "this seems really important to me", which is a perfectly fine reason to give all your money to something more speculative like AI risk research or a charity to promote African entrepreneurs which GiveWell is unimpressed by the evidence for).

FeepingCreature 6y ago
> No evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been produced Of course, no evidence of any AI risks mitigated has ever been promised, nor could there be, since the best current estimate on the singularity is 40 years in the future. > GiveWell founder Holden Karnofsky spent $30m of philanthropic cash buying a board seat on the charitable subsidiary of OpenAI Inc OpenPhil and Givewell are not the same organization. OpenPhil's website explicitly lists AI Risk as a focus area; I don't think anyone would have donated to them without knowing what they were about. > [i] writing extended "do not recommend; not rigorous enough and well funded enough already" reviews of charities puts people off donating > [ii] promoting considerably less rigorous and better funded AI risk causes is inconsistent with this Okay, first of all, AI risk is better funded now. I remember when MIRI had to struggle to hit a million, when they were basically the only game in town that did anything about AI safety, and I still wouldn't call the field well funded. Certainly I'd like to see more AI safety competition that isn't think tanks and policy but basic research. That said, inasmuch as AI risk is funded well now, it's because the argument that it's enormously underfunded was successful. That said, I think there's a difference between an organization not providing evidence of efficacy because it's dedicated to shaping an event that lies decades in the future, and an organization not providing evidence of efficacy because it thinks it can get more donations by showing people photos of starving children. In a world like that, charities are competing on the ability to provoke pity, which is not the same as the ability to do the most good, or even necessarily related to this at all. I'm not saying that these people don't do good work, because if you go into that job you probably care at least somewhat about doing good for its own sake, I'm saying it would be better if incentives were aligned behind doing the most good rather than having the most photogenic victims. And inasmuch as I don't ask the same thing from AI Safety, it's because I recognize that while every cause that can should provide information about efficacy, the fact that a cause genuinely can't do that doesn't mean that it cannot also be vitally important, and it can show its importance in other ways, such as publications filled with arguments of its importance.
- notahacker 6y ago
  OpenPhil and Givewell are not the same organization and don't support the same causes, but Holden definitely is the same person. If you spend your career arguing that charities need to be more open and evidence-based and focus on cost-effectiveness and metrics, then the fact you sit on the board of a nonprofit which is considerably more opaque than any of them is relevant to the merits of those arguments. (And OpenAI was unambiguously well funded and likely to become financially sustainable at the time as OPP acknowledged when they explained they put the money in for the board seat) Sure, you can't prove you've prevented the Singularity from happening in 40 years (not even if you're talking about the one predicted in the 80s!), but if it's reasonable for EAs to insist that charities distributing food or drugs already widely proven to work conduct RCTs or at least put cost benefit analysis on their website, I don't think we can look past the fact that the web page for a tax-deductible cause they're actually responsible for the governance of is a marketing page for NLP tools with absolutely nothing about how their donor dollars are spent... See, I can buy the argument that certain types of non-commercial AI research are going to be significant boons for humanity, but I can buy the argument that applies to lots of unproven development interventions too, and that directly undercuts the cost-effectiveness ethos