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I think there's a strong selection bias here on the arguments you're reading. It's pretty uncontroversial that vaccines and mosquito nets are generally good; al

I think there's a strong selection bias here on the arguments you're reading. It's pretty uncontroversial that vaccines and mosquito nets are generally good; although one could argue about exactly how good they are, there's not much room left for fruitful discussion about them. (Such discussion was done to death years ago.) What's left as the arena for discussion, where there may be new things to say, are the points which are hard to resolve. The fact that most talk is about controversial things does not mean most EA-affiliated people care about controversial things; it could simply mean that the uncontroversial things were fully decided years ago.

notahacker 4y ago
> It's pretty uncontroversial that vaccines and mosquito nets are generally good; although one could argue about exactly how good they are, there's not much room left for fruitful discussion about them. But one of the main focuses of EA is arguing about "exactly how good they are", and in particular the assumption that a cause whose general good was "fully decided years ago" shouldn't be seen as a good destination for philanthropic dollars without the organization focusing on providing metrics and RCTs to back up the idea that it's more beneficial than other definitely-has-some-positive-impact causes Applying more scrutiny to aid organizations is fine and some of their scepticism of (e.g) microfinance is completely justified, but saying "but you can't prove that this money is spent as efficiently as they could have been" to sending stuff to poor people in South Asia or "you can't prove this will ever work" to funding African entrepreneurs isn't particularly compatible with recommending money is sent to more opaque organisations paying expensive developers to pursue passion projects on because it's theoretically possible the organization will have a non-zero and non-negative impact on a possible future harm which might theoretically be big. Obviously not all EAs do this and many have very strong and consistent donation guidelines or are more interested in the maximise my personal potential to contribute side of EA than the demand more from aid agencies side, but it was the founder of GiveWell that recommended $30m of philanthropic cash was spent on buying a board seat at the non-profit subsidiary of extremly opaque and extremely well funded corporation OpenAI, which clashes quite hard with his earlier body of work. EAs who are interested in AI safety obviously aren't at all unusual in seeing moonshot research as a valid use of philanthropic dollars, but most people funding universities aren't simultaneously questioning the value of organizations for feeding people for not providing enough metrics to prove they're feeding the right people. (It cuts both ways too: the arguments for investing in "AI safety" - diversification in the face of uncertainty - are arguments against the EA principle of maximising the efficiency of philanthropic dollar based on rigorous analysis of different organizations' return)
- sanderjd 4y ago
  This argument is very well made. But I will say that this doesn't seem unusual to me; there seems to be a "missing middle" in many situations. For instance, in business, it's easy to get capital for things that are a sure thing - "for the past decade, every dollar we have put into this initiative has generated three dollars of revenue" will get funded every time - and also often pretty easy to get funding for high risk but high reward initiatives - "this is unlikely to work but if it does, every dollar invested will return one hundred dollars" - but it's pretty hard to get funding for medium risk / medium reward initiatives - "this will probably work, and if it does it will be a stable small business". I think the same thing is going on here, and maybe it even makes sense.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Oh I agree, there's definitely an overlap with the business world and it's not unusual for a business to pursue an expensive (and doomed) moonshot the exec hope will work on the one hand whilst obsessing over comparatively minor productivity differences and cost savings possible in the divisions that actually build and maintain and sell existing product, or for investors to rigorously audit growth metrics for a business that is actually groiwng and then chuck money at other founders despite their pitch because they have a hunch the founders are really good people (but didn't Reddit do well!). I just think it makes the whole thing a lot less "rational" and a lot more we have heuristics that select for people and organizations we like - like other forms of philanthropy - than claimed. And yeah, sometimes that works out just fine.

notahacker 4y ago

> It's pretty uncontroversial that vaccines and mosquito nets are generally good; although one could argue about exactly how good they are, there's not much room left for fruitful discussion about them. But one of the main focuses of EA is arguing about "exactly how good they are", and in particular the assumption that a cause whose general good was "fully decided years ago" shouldn't be seen as a good destination for philanthropic dollars without the organization focusing on providing metrics and RCTs to back up the idea that it's more beneficial than other definitely-has-some-positive-impact causes Applying more scrutiny to aid organizations is fine and some of their scepticism of (e.g) microfinance is completely justified, but saying "but you can't prove that this money is spent as efficiently as they could have been" to sending stuff to poor people in South Asia or "you can't prove this will ever work" to funding African entrepreneurs isn't particularly compatible with recommending money is sent to more opaque organisations paying expensive developers to pursue passion projects on because it's theoretically possible the organization will have a non-zero and non-negative impact on a possible future harm which might theoretically be big. Obviously not all EAs do this and many have very strong and consistent donation guidelines or are more interested in the maximise my personal potential to contribute side of EA than the demand more from aid agencies side, but it was the founder of GiveWell that recommended $30m of philanthropic cash was spent on buying a board seat at the non-profit subsidiary of extremly opaque and extremely well funded corporation OpenAI, which clashes quite hard with his earlier body of work. EAs who are interested in AI safety obviously aren't at all unusual in seeing moonshot research as a valid use of philanthropic dollars, but most people funding universities aren't simultaneously questioning the value of organizations for feeding people for not providing enough metrics to prove they're feeding the right people. (It cuts both ways too: the arguments for investing in "AI safety" - diversification in the face of uncertainty - are arguments against the EA principle of maximising the efficiency of philanthropic dollar based on rigorous analysis of different organizations' return)

sanderjd 4y ago
This argument is very well made. But I will say that this doesn't seem unusual to me; there seems to be a "missing middle" in many situations. For instance, in business, it's easy to get capital for things that are a sure thing - "for the past decade, every dollar we have put into this initiative has generated three dollars of revenue" will get funded every time - and also often pretty easy to get funding for high risk but high reward initiatives - "this is unlikely to work but if it does, every dollar invested will return one hundred dollars" - but it's pretty hard to get funding for medium risk / medium reward initiatives - "this will probably work, and if it does it will be a stable small business". I think the same thing is going on here, and maybe it even makes sense.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Oh I agree, there's definitely an overlap with the business world and it's not unusual for a business to pursue an expensive (and doomed) moonshot the exec hope will work on the one hand whilst obsessing over comparatively minor productivity differences and cost savings possible in the divisions that actually build and maintain and sell existing product, or for investors to rigorously audit growth metrics for a business that is actually groiwng and then chuck money at other founders despite their pitch because they have a hunch the founders are really good people (but didn't Reddit do well!). I just think it makes the whole thing a lot less "rational" and a lot more we have heuristics that select for people and organizations we like - like other forms of philanthropy - than claimed. And yeah, sometimes that works out just fine.