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I really hope this serves as an inflection point for the Effective Altruism crowd to pivot away from some of the weirder things they embraced in the past. I lo

I really hope this serves as an inflection point for the Effective Altruism crowd to pivot away from some of the weirder things they embraced in the past. I love the idea of Effective Altruism and what they're trying to accomplish, but in practice it frequently turns into funding for intellectuals to sit around and pontificate about AI risk and other things, as opposed to actually going out into the world and doing altruistic acts. Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter") The EA movement has become a bit of a joke in many circles after making too many moves like this, so hopefully this serves as a wake-up call for them to start getting more practical.

SilasX 4y ago
You’re saying that the existence of a book being freely available online means that it’s always pointless to give out physical copies? Do you make the same criticism of eg Dolly Parton’s program to give books to families for free, in cases where the copyright on the book has expired?
elil17 4y ago
Reading that convinced me that giving Harry Potter fanfic to Russian math champions is a decent idea, but if failed to explain why it would cost $30k.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  IIRC they quoted $43/book, and to me that sounds right in the ballpark of what I would expect it to cost for printing and shipping a low-quantity issue of a large book.
Shindi 4y ago
It seems that a lot of people here think that EA focus on AGI is overblown because they personally think that AI risk is overblown. It's certainly debatable if a human level or greater AI will be created in the next 50-100 years. However, if you believe that AGI will be created, then you have to admit that societal impacts will be tremendous, the same level as the advent of nukes. People are pointing out the problems in discrimination that we face with current sub human AI. Imagine AI systems smarter than 90% of humans or smarter than all humans. Wouldn't that make all current problems in AI minuscule if we couldn't control such a program?
ApeWithAnxiety 4y ago
I couldn't agree more. I used to love EA, but when it became a way to justify that a bunch of nerds (speaking as one) are _actually_ doing the most important work humanity ever saw by learning about AI... it just put a sour taste in my mouth. I wish they'd focus more on global health initiatives.
zozbot234 4y ago
It's amusing that people still complain about AI ethics and debiasing (aka "alignment") being an early focus of EA's long after it's become an increasingly relevant research field, even with controversy regularly making the tech news. If anything, that AI focus counts as a success story for effective altruism, as much as the similar case of pandemic preparedness.
- btrettel 4y ago
  One thing I've wondered is when Effective Altruists are going to stop calling AI ethics neglected. AI ethics as a field is now mainstream, in my view, yet people still keep calling it neglected. I personally think Effective Altruists should focus less on AI ethics now as it has gained mainstream attention and focus more on other currently neglected topics.
  - Shindi 4y ago
    > AI ethics as a field is now mainstream Let me guess, you work in tech and in a city? I personally believe that if a super intelligent AI were to be created, then it would have the same effect on society as the advent of nuclear weapons. So I respectfully disagree that it's not neglected, I don't think the common American thinks about how close we are to human level intelligence or what that would mean for society.
    - btrettel 4y ago
      When I say AI safety is not neglected, I do not mean AI safety is not important. I mean that it is not neglected in the sense that increasing the amount of money and people directed at the problem is not likely to help. That's a common definition among effective altruists. (And it's part of why 80,000 Hours says that nuclear security, the example you gave, is not particularly neglected.) I meant that AI safety is mainstream in the sense that it appears in popular journalism and has a large following, nothing more. I did not mean that most people would be aware of the problem. Also: I'm not a professional programmer, though programming has been one of my job responsibilities in the past, but never all of my job. And I live in a rural area at the moment. Not that any of these are relevant.
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chrischen 4y ago
> Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter") Is this how money is laundered in non profits?
- DrRobinson 4y ago
  They're not allowed to make money from this Harry Potter fan-fiction IIRC, which this is (one that teaches effective altruism concepts and rationality), so I don't see how this would be a way to launder money. It's also worth noting that this was 28k out of 923k USD, so not a too big part of it (~2%). Of course the money should be used for other things if it's estimated to be more effective though. The reasoning is in the post you linked which I think gives a pretty good explanation. They're given to 650 math medalists (so ~43 USD/person) which they deemed to have good target audience for this.
- deleted 4y ago
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Veedrac 4y ago
Apologies if this is curt, but if you think one of the most impactful altruism movements in the world with major focuses in global health and long term outcomes is a joke because they do outreach in odd (but clearly effective) ways, you have missed the point of effective altruism altogether. You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives. ...by distributing copies of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction? I agree that charities that save lives are doing good things. That's why I brought up the fact that some of their spending has historically been kind of ludicrously off base.
  - lucaparodi 4y ago
    So you're literally basing your entire argument to disqualify a movement with clear and public data about the positive impact that has created on a single $30k grant?
  - Veedrac 4y ago
    It sounds less stupid when you count the fraction of EA funding and activity that HPMOR was already in the causal chain of. It's not how I'd do outreach, but it's not like the choice was arbitrary.
    - Recursing 4y ago
      Honestly curious, how would you do outreach?
      - Veedrac 4y ago
        I don't know, sorry.
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basedgod 4y ago
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- DrRobinson 4y ago
  > other than getting people to donate If that's the most effective way of helping people, why would they not do that? They do more than that though, they fund projects of many different kinds. They also coach people to go into fields where they can have a positive impact for example. > wasn't one of their initial proposals that deworming medications should be sent to rural Africa, for its disproportionate impact it could have? They have different funds: - Global Health and Development Fund [0] - Animal Welfare Fund [1] - Long-Term Future Fund[2] - Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund[3] Deworming would go under "Global health and development" (if it's estimated to be the most effective) and AI under "Long-term future fund". --- 0. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development 1. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare 2. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future 3. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community
  - Max_Limelihood 4y ago
    Yeah, and there’s also GiveWell. Probably 80% of EA money goes to development, with the rest evenly split between the other three cause areas. I’d be very shocked if AI research got more than 5% of EA funding.
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      Per GiveWell's website, around 3.7 million has gone to LTFF since 2020, 6.5 to the animal welfare fund, and 14ish to GH&D. So it's more like 15%, and the majority of the LTFF funding is what I'd describe as "self-dealing", in that it's almost all money to fund members of the EA/longtermist community for thinking about things. (I should note, I donate a decent sum to GiveWell each year, though only to the Global Development fund, and it deeply irks me that they don't put some of their effort into innovative ideas to combat climate change)
vorpalhex 4y ago
> despite the fact that it's freely available online. The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices. If a group of people is so poor that they don't have access to digital devices, maybe printing out rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction shouldn't be at the top of the priority list for a charity trying to spend money to improve their lives.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    I think teaching rationalism with approachable and interesting materials is fine and reasonable. I suppose we could be equally upset that Sesame street uses puppets?
- stonogo 4y ago
  In the US and most civilized nations they have public library access, which can easily be used to access Harry Potter fanfiction. It's not clear how they benefit from a printed copy of the Harry Potter fanfiction.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    And how do you get to the library?
    - unmole 4y ago
      How did they get to the IMO?
  - Max_Limelihood 4y ago
    The main benefit is that they’re probably more likely to actually read it. I dunno about you, but if someone gave me a book I’d probably actually read it. I definitely wouldn’t read a PDF someone emailed to me.
justinpombrio 4y ago
There are multiple EA groups, but I think the most common place to donate is GiveWell? Here's what its donation page looks like: https://secure.givewell.org/ https://secure.givewell.org/ Let GiveWell direct your donation GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund Support GiveWell's top charities Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program Against Malaria Foundation Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program SCI Foundation (Schistosomiasis Control Initiative) Sightsavers' deworming program New Incentives Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative END Fund's deworming program GiveDirectly The recent grants by their Maximum Impact Fund are listed here: https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund the largest of which was $7.8 million to "Sightsavers — Deworming in Nigeria and Cameroon (February 2022)" Please don't let the fact that some people are concerned about AI safety detract from EA's overarching goal of doing the most good per dollar donated.
- Shindi 4y ago
  When I bring up poverty alleviation at EA meetups I feel like the response I get is "yeah that's definitely super important, we all donate to effective charities, but it's not fun to talk about as AI risk which makes for fun debates". I feel like EAs see global poverty almost as a solved problem when there is a lot of work to be done still.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Right! My point is that there are good aspects to the Effective Altruism movement, but historically they've done a disservice by also embracing some fringe stuff under the Effective Altruism banner. Like I said in my comment, I'm hoping this blog post is a signal that they're going to start maturing the organization a bit more and hopefully distance themselves from some of the weirdness that tries to ride the coattails of the Effective Altruism movement. Go ahead and spin up all of the AI think tank and Harry Potter fan fiction distribution under a different name, but forcing it under the Effective Altruism banner only drives away donations from people who go into this expecting an organization focused on doing charitable acts in the real world, not funding additional think tanks.
ineptech 4y ago
You left out that they were distributing the book to participants in math and science competitions, and that their reasoning was that they think the book is effective at teaching scientific reasoning. Donating science books to promising students sounds a lot better than distributing fanfiction. You may disagree that HPMOR is effective at teaching science, but at least they did it openly. That page has a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this grant, including the possibility that it could cause "reputational risk" (i.e. people like you making fun of them for it). AFAICT they took that seriously, and decided to do it anyway because they really do believe that it's effective at teaching science.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Ah, but is it the most effective book? In the absence of very real countervailing evidence, choosing that book would be a pretty clear-cut case of systematic bias.
  - Max_Limelihood 4y ago
    Why? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to think that distributing books about effective altruism would be a very effective use for $30,000 of donations. Most EAs give 10% of their income; if you assume the average EA will make $100,000 a year over a 40 year career (pretty reasonable for people at the IMO), this book only needs 1 of those people to become an EA for this to break even. (In fact, it doesn’t even need one — it just needs to be a 1% chance of producing a single EA!) My Fermi estimate is probably off, but it’s a pretty sensible argument to me.
    - yifanl 4y ago
      Does it make sense given that the book is freely available already?
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    It is a very fun way to learn about science. It was written with the goal to introduce science / rationality ideas through fiction and I would say it does a pretty good job of it. I think the snark comes from "30000$" being spent to distribute a "free" book. If you think about it in terms of spending 46$ per person to advertise to a very select group of 650 people it might not sound so stupid.
kvee 4y ago
For whatever it's worth, HPMOR introduced me to Effective Altruism and lesswrong, etc. Though I found it online and not from the $30K distributed, I have since as a result of being introduced to Effective Altruism there donated much more than $30K to highly effective charities and caused hundreds of other people to get into donating to highly effective charities too. I also started a company inspired by the EA concepts of working on "neglected problems" - https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definition-2 https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definitio... I might be wrong, but I suspect there's a decent chance there was at least 1 person like me of the people in that $30k distribution.
- Shindi 4y ago
  Anecdotally, a ton of my EA friends have gotten introduced to EA through HPMOR. It's not as wild as a marketing strategy as OP makes it out to be.
- Max_Limelihood 4y ago
  Yep, exactly — and the average EA donates way more than $30,000 over their lifetime. This is just a creative way to advertise, and I don’t see what’s wrong with charities trying to get their message out there.
  - mattcwilson 4y ago
    When you put it that way, sure. I think GGP may have been going for a different point though, which is - is EA getting an overly harmful outward reputation / giving the wrong impression to laypeople and others, in a way that inhibits the overall potential reach of the movement? Is the creative advertising causing more harm than good? At least, that’s the question I’m asking after reading these three posts. It seems like it’s a common theme among rationalist groups to take a strongly inside view of the situation, based on all the observable facts and known good being done, and totally ignore the bigger picture outside view.
casebash 4y ago
I guess the universe is allowed to be crazy. The universe is allowed to decide the Donald Trump will be president in 2016 despite all the reasons to think it was crazy that he would become president. The universe is allowed to decide that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be elected president of Ukraine on the basis of having starring as the president in a comedy. And I guess the universe is allowed to decide that a piece of fanfic that is desperately in need of an editor will be successful at recruiting talent for the rationalist or AI Safety communities. I expect you are probably skeptical of AI Safety, but then your criticism would be a criticism of the final objective, not the method (distribution of HPMoR) used to achieve the objective.
JamesBarney 4y ago
Philanthropists spend billions of dollar each year on the "arts", with some vague idea of enlightening people, but they're the crazy ones for buying 650 most likely high impact individuals a book explaining their thought processes?
heavyset_go 4y ago
My favorite grant from that link was the $20k one for someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI.
cm2012 4y ago
Spending 30k promoting hpmor sounds like a great investment if done well.
sullyj3 4y ago
I very much hope it doesn't EA has done a great job bringing attention and resources to causes that are clear wins - it's just obvious that global poverty interventions like Against Malaria and GiveDirectly are highly beneficial. But effectiveness doesn't always doing the most obviously effective thing. It means doing the highest expected value thing. Sometimes that means trying things with low expectation of success, but a high potential payoff. There's a trade off between exploring the space of potential interventions, and exploiting known good ones. EA needs to keep its healthy focus on exploration, or risk getting stuck in a local minimum. Suppose the X-risk people are right - if we get that wrong there won't be any more people left to help. Certainly EA was sounding the alarm about lack of pandemic preparedness ages ago, and while that wasn't existential, it was the right direction to be looking in. Imagine if we'd had a bit better foresight, been a bit better prepared, and been able to prevent 6 million people dying of COVID. Something sounding "weird" isn't sufficient reason to discard it. There needs to be an actual convincing argument. And let me tell you, the weird ideas have survived some pretty rigorous debate.
- brazzy 4y ago
  A problem is that the "expected value" can easily be inflated via hypothetical scenariosto turn your pet interest into THE ONLY THING ANYONE SHOULD EVER CARE ABOUT AT ALL!!! Among the "rationalist" crowd, this is commonly done for both AI alignment and longevity.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    These kinds of things have been pondered in EA circles, lest you think that's a unique gotcha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster And they're not because EA is tackling a diverse set of issues, not just AI alignment and longevity, as the top spot of donations is going to malaria nets in Africa.
  - sullyj3 4y ago
    I just don't think this is a problem in practice. Sure, some people advocate spending all your charitable dollars on X-risk, but I think most people find a happy medium of spreading their giving between the different causes they think are important.

SilasX 4y ago

You’re saying that the existence of a book being freely available online means that it’s always pointless to give out physical copies? Do you make the same criticism of eg Dolly Parton’s program to give books to families for free, in cases where the copyright on the book has expired?

elil17 4y ago

Reading that convinced me that giving Harry Potter fanfic to Russian math champions is a decent idea, but if failed to explain why it would cost $30k.

PeterisP 4y ago
IIRC they quoted $43/book, and to me that sounds right in the ballpark of what I would expect it to cost for printing and shipping a low-quantity issue of a large book.

Shindi 4y ago

It seems that a lot of people here think that EA focus on AGI is overblown because they personally think that AI risk is overblown. It's certainly debatable if a human level or greater AI will be created in the next 50-100 years. However, if you believe that AGI will be created, then you have to admit that societal impacts will be tremendous, the same level as the advent of nukes. People are pointing out the problems in discrimination that we face with current sub human AI. Imagine AI systems smarter than 90% of humans or smarter than all humans. Wouldn't that make all current problems in AI minuscule if we couldn't control such a program?

ApeWithAnxiety 4y ago

I couldn't agree more. I used to love EA, but when it became a way to justify that a bunch of nerds (speaking as one) are _actually_ doing the most important work humanity ever saw by learning about AI... it just put a sour taste in my mouth. I wish they'd focus more on global health initiatives.

zozbot234 4y ago

It's amusing that people still complain about AI ethics and debiasing (aka "alignment") being an early focus of EA's long after it's become an increasingly relevant research field, even with controversy regularly making the tech news. If anything, that AI focus counts as a success story for effective altruism, as much as the similar case of pandemic preparedness.

btrettel 4y ago
One thing I've wondered is when Effective Altruists are going to stop calling AI ethics neglected. AI ethics as a field is now mainstream, in my view, yet people still keep calling it neglected. I personally think Effective Altruists should focus less on AI ethics now as it has gained mainstream attention and focus more on other currently neglected topics.
- Shindi 4y ago
  > AI ethics as a field is now mainstream Let me guess, you work in tech and in a city? I personally believe that if a super intelligent AI were to be created, then it would have the same effect on society as the advent of nuclear weapons. So I respectfully disagree that it's not neglected, I don't think the common American thinks about how close we are to human level intelligence or what that would mean for society.
  - btrettel 4y ago
    When I say AI safety is not neglected, I do not mean AI safety is not important. I mean that it is not neglected in the sense that increasing the amount of money and people directed at the problem is not likely to help. That's a common definition among effective altruists. (And it's part of why 80,000 Hours says that nuclear security, the example you gave, is not particularly neglected.) I meant that AI safety is mainstream in the sense that it appears in popular journalism and has a large following, nothing more. I did not mean that most people would be aware of the problem. Also: I'm not a professional programmer, though programming has been one of my job responsibilities in the past, but never all of my job. And I live in a rural area at the moment. Not that any of these are relevant.

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chrischen 4y ago

> Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter") Is this how money is laundered in non profits?

DrRobinson 4y ago
They're not allowed to make money from this Harry Potter fan-fiction IIRC, which this is (one that teaches effective altruism concepts and rationality), so I don't see how this would be a way to launder money. It's also worth noting that this was 28k out of 923k USD, so not a too big part of it (~2%). Of course the money should be used for other things if it's estimated to be more effective though. The reasoning is in the post you linked which I think gives a pretty good explanation. They're given to 650 math medalists (so ~43 USD/person) which they deemed to have good target audience for this.
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Veedrac 4y ago

Apologies if this is curt, but if you think one of the most impactful altruism movements in the world with major focuses in global health and long term outcomes is a joke because they do outreach in odd (but clearly effective) ways, you have missed the point of effective altruism altogether. You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> You don't get brownie points for how steadfastly you stick to your Overton window. You get brownie points for saving lives. ...by distributing copies of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction? I agree that charities that save lives are doing good things. That's why I brought up the fact that some of their spending has historically been kind of ludicrously off base.
- lucaparodi 4y ago
  So you're literally basing your entire argument to disqualify a movement with clear and public data about the positive impact that has created on a single $30k grant?
- Veedrac 4y ago
  It sounds less stupid when you count the fraction of EA funding and activity that HPMOR was already in the causal chain of. It's not how I'd do outreach, but it's not like the choice was arbitrary.
  - Recursing 4y ago
    Honestly curious, how would you do outreach?
    - Veedrac 4y ago
      I don't know, sorry.
- 4y ago

basedgod 4y ago

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DrRobinson 4y ago
> other than getting people to donate If that's the most effective way of helping people, why would they not do that? They do more than that though, they fund projects of many different kinds. They also coach people to go into fields where they can have a positive impact for example. > wasn't one of their initial proposals that deworming medications should be sent to rural Africa, for its disproportionate impact it could have? They have different funds: - Global Health and Development Fund [0] - Animal Welfare Fund [1] - Long-Term Future Fund[2] - Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund[3] Deworming would go under "Global health and development" (if it's estimated to be the most effective) and AI under "Long-term future fund". --- 0. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development 1. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare 2. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future 3. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community
- Max_Limelihood 4y ago
  Yeah, and there’s also GiveWell. Probably 80% of EA money goes to development, with the rest evenly split between the other three cause areas. I’d be very shocked if AI research got more than 5% of EA funding.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    Per GiveWell's website, around 3.7 million has gone to LTFF since 2020, 6.5 to the animal welfare fund, and 14ish to GH&D. So it's more like 15%, and the majority of the LTFF funding is what I'd describe as "self-dealing", in that it's almost all money to fund members of the EA/longtermist community for thinking about things. (I should note, I donate a decent sum to GiveWell each year, though only to the Global Development fund, and it deeply irks me that they don't put some of their effort into innovative ideas to combat climate change)

vorpalhex 4y ago

> despite the fact that it's freely available online. The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> The poor frequently do not have printers or significant access to consistently functional digital devices. If a group of people is so poor that they don't have access to digital devices, maybe printing out rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction shouldn't be at the top of the priority list for a charity trying to spend money to improve their lives.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I think teaching rationalism with approachable and interesting materials is fine and reasonable. I suppose we could be equally upset that Sesame street uses puppets?
stonogo 4y ago
In the US and most civilized nations they have public library access, which can easily be used to access Harry Potter fanfiction. It's not clear how they benefit from a printed copy of the Harry Potter fanfiction.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  And how do you get to the library?
  - unmole 4y ago
    How did they get to the IMO?
- Max_Limelihood 4y ago
  The main benefit is that they’re probably more likely to actually read it. I dunno about you, but if someone gave me a book I’d probably actually read it. I definitely wouldn’t read a PDF someone emailed to me.

justinpombrio 4y ago

There are multiple EA groups, but I think the most common place to donate is GiveWell? Here's what its donation page looks like: https://secure.givewell.org/ https://secure.givewell.org/ Let GiveWell direct your donation GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund Support GiveWell's top charities Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program Against Malaria Foundation Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program SCI Foundation (Schistosomiasis Control Initiative) Sightsavers' deworming program New Incentives Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative END Fund's deworming program GiveDirectly The recent grants by their Maximum Impact Fund are listed here: https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund the largest of which was $7.8 million to "Sightsavers — Deworming in Nigeria and Cameroon (February 2022)" Please don't let the fact that some people are concerned about AI safety detract from EA's overarching goal of doing the most good per dollar donated.

Shindi 4y ago
When I bring up poverty alleviation at EA meetups I feel like the response I get is "yeah that's definitely super important, we all donate to effective charities, but it's not fun to talk about as AI risk which makes for fun debates". I feel like EAs see global poverty almost as a solved problem when there is a lot of work to be done still.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Right! My point is that there are good aspects to the Effective Altruism movement, but historically they've done a disservice by also embracing some fringe stuff under the Effective Altruism banner. Like I said in my comment, I'm hoping this blog post is a signal that they're going to start maturing the organization a bit more and hopefully distance themselves from some of the weirdness that tries to ride the coattails of the Effective Altruism movement. Go ahead and spin up all of the AI think tank and Harry Potter fan fiction distribution under a different name, but forcing it under the Effective Altruism banner only drives away donations from people who go into this expecting an organization focused on doing charitable acts in the real world, not funding additional think tanks.

ineptech 4y ago

You left out that they were distributing the book to participants in math and science competitions, and that their reasoning was that they think the book is effective at teaching scientific reasoning. Donating science books to promising students sounds a lot better than distributing fanfiction. You may disagree that HPMOR is effective at teaching science, but at least they did it openly. That page has a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this grant, including the possibility that it could cause "reputational risk" (i.e. people like you making fun of them for it). AFAICT they took that seriously, and decided to do it anyway because they really do believe that it's effective at teaching science.

zozbot234 4y ago
Ah, but is it the most effective book? In the absence of very real countervailing evidence, choosing that book would be a pretty clear-cut case of systematic bias.
- Max_Limelihood 4y ago
  Why? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to think that distributing books about effective altruism would be a very effective use for $30,000 of donations. Most EAs give 10% of their income; if you assume the average EA will make $100,000 a year over a 40 year career (pretty reasonable for people at the IMO), this book only needs 1 of those people to become an EA for this to break even. (In fact, it doesn’t even need one — it just needs to be a 1% chance of producing a single EA!) My Fermi estimate is probably off, but it’s a pretty sensible argument to me.
  - yifanl 4y ago
    Does it make sense given that the book is freely available already?
- jack_pp 4y ago
  It is a very fun way to learn about science. It was written with the goal to introduce science / rationality ideas through fiction and I would say it does a pretty good job of it. I think the snark comes from "30000$" being spent to distribute a "free" book. If you think about it in terms of spending 46$ per person to advertise to a very select group of 650 people it might not sound so stupid.

kvee 4y ago

For whatever it's worth, HPMOR introduced me to Effective Altruism and lesswrong, etc. Though I found it online and not from the $30K distributed, I have since as a result of being introduced to Effective Altruism there donated much more than $30K to highly effective charities and caused hundreds of other people to get into donating to highly effective charities too. I also started a company inspired by the EA concepts of working on "neglected problems" - https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definition-2 https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/#definitio... I might be wrong, but I suspect there's a decent chance there was at least 1 person like me of the people in that $30k distribution.

Shindi 4y ago
Anecdotally, a ton of my EA friends have gotten introduced to EA through HPMOR. It's not as wild as a marketing strategy as OP makes it out to be.
Max_Limelihood 4y ago
Yep, exactly — and the average EA donates way more than $30,000 over their lifetime. This is just a creative way to advertise, and I don’t see what’s wrong with charities trying to get their message out there.
- mattcwilson 4y ago
  When you put it that way, sure. I think GGP may have been going for a different point though, which is - is EA getting an overly harmful outward reputation / giving the wrong impression to laypeople and others, in a way that inhibits the overall potential reach of the movement? Is the creative advertising causing more harm than good? At least, that’s the question I’m asking after reading these three posts. It seems like it’s a common theme among rationalist groups to take a strongly inside view of the situation, based on all the observable facts and known good being done, and totally ignore the bigger picture outside view.

casebash 4y ago

I guess the universe is allowed to be crazy. The universe is allowed to decide the Donald Trump will be president in 2016 despite all the reasons to think it was crazy that he would become president. The universe is allowed to decide that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be elected president of Ukraine on the basis of having starring as the president in a comedy. And I guess the universe is allowed to decide that a piece of fanfic that is desperately in need of an editor will be successful at recruiting talent for the rationalist or AI Safety communities. I expect you are probably skeptical of AI Safety, but then your criticism would be a criticism of the final objective, not the method (distribution of HPMoR) used to achieve the objective.

JamesBarney 4y ago

Philanthropists spend billions of dollar each year on the "arts", with some vague idea of enlightening people, but they're the crazy ones for buying 650 most likely high impact individuals a book explaining their thought processes?

heavyset_go 4y ago

My favorite grant from that link was the $20k one for someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI.

cm2012 4y ago

Spending 30k promoting hpmor sounds like a great investment if done well.

sullyj3 4y ago

I very much hope it doesn't EA has done a great job bringing attention and resources to causes that are clear wins - it's just obvious that global poverty interventions like Against Malaria and GiveDirectly are highly beneficial. But effectiveness doesn't always doing the most obviously effective thing. It means doing the highest expected value thing. Sometimes that means trying things with low expectation of success, but a high potential payoff. There's a trade off between exploring the space of potential interventions, and exploiting known good ones. EA needs to keep its healthy focus on exploration, or risk getting stuck in a local minimum. Suppose the X-risk people are right - if we get that wrong there won't be any more people left to help. Certainly EA was sounding the alarm about lack of pandemic preparedness ages ago, and while that wasn't existential, it was the right direction to be looking in. Imagine if we'd had a bit better foresight, been a bit better prepared, and been able to prevent 6 million people dying of COVID. Something sounding "weird" isn't sufficient reason to discard it. There needs to be an actual convincing argument. And let me tell you, the weird ideas have survived some pretty rigorous debate.

brazzy 4y ago
A problem is that the "expected value" can easily be inflated via hypothetical scenariosto turn your pet interest into THE ONLY THING ANYONE SHOULD EVER CARE ABOUT AT ALL!!! Among the "rationalist" crowd, this is commonly done for both AI alignment and longevity.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  These kinds of things have been pondered in EA circles, lest you think that's a unique gotcha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster And they're not because EA is tackling a diverse set of issues, not just AI alignment and longevity, as the top spot of donations is going to malaria nets in Africa.
- sullyj3 4y ago
  I just don't think this is a problem in practice. Sure, some people advocate spending all your charitable dollars on X-risk, but I think most people find a happy medium of spreading their giving between the different causes they think are important.