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Excessive political polarisation, especially party polarisation in the US, makes it harder to reach consensus or a fair compromise, and undermines trust in public institutions. Efforts to avoid harmful long-term dynamics, and to strengthen democratic governance, are therefore of interest to effective altruists.

One concrete lever is electoral reform. By changing to a better voting system, we could (so the argument goes) elect officials that better represent the electorate, resulting in a more functional political process.

Within effective altruism, approval voting is the most prominent proposa... (Read more)

Matt_Lerner1h1

I agree that EAs should continue investigating and possibly advocating different voting methods, and I strongly agree that electoral reform writ large should be part of the "EA portfolio."

I don't think EAs (qua EAs, as opposed to as individuals concerned as a matter of principle with having their electoral preferences correctly represented) should advocate for different voting methods in isolation, even though essentially all options are conceptually superior to FPTP/plurality voting.

This is because A democratic system is not the same as a u... (read more)

3Mathieu Putz3hHello, I think you make a good point, about the necessity to carefully weigh the up- and downsides of each system. I do not have a strong view on which alternative voting system is best, since I haven't looked into it deeply enough. Still I want to address this proposition: I mostly agree with this position, especially in scenarios where no other option is realistically on the table. However, I do want to point out, that adopting a sub-optimal system can have a considerable cost and that it is not entirely obvious that this cost is irrelevant relative to the gains obtained from switching away from the status quo; in particular, if one believes that the difference in outcomes between two alternative voting systems is big. For instance, one might assume alternative voting system B to lead to much better results than system A. If this were the case, then switching to A (the weaker system), though (probably) better than the status quo in itself, could still lead to outcomes that are worse than if the switch had not happened. This is for 2 main reasons: First, as Tobias points out, countries do not change their voting system frequently. Hence this sub-optimal system A might potentially stick around for a century to come, before maybe being changed to the better alternative B. It might be preferable to postpone the switch by a few years, hopefully increasing the odds of switching to B instead of A. Secondly, this new system A will inevitably be questioned by the electorate and the media. If system A then yields controversial results that are not obviously better than the results one would have got with the status quo system, the whole switch might be viewed as a mistake by the general population. This might even lead to less trust in the political system, though probably only in the short run. Still, a negative experience of this kind, may not only have short-term bad consequences for the country itself in the form of further erosion of trust, but could also discour

3Pablo_Stafforini4hThanks to your comment, I can now endorse what you said as a more accurate and nuanced version of the position my previous comment expressed. Agreed 100%.

Harsanyi's simple “proof” of utilitarianism

Ben_West

7h4 min readShow Highlight

In 1955, John Harsanyi published a paper demonstrating that anyone who follows certain reasonable assumptions must be a total utilitarian. The paper is somewhat technical, but the result is relatively easy to understand. I’ve been unable to find a non-technical summary of this result and so, because it is one of the more compelling arguments for utilitarianism, I decided to write one up.

Background

Suppose a group of friends are deciding where to eat. Each individual person has some preference (say, one person most prefers Chinese, then Italian, then Japanese; another prefers Italian, then Chi

... (Read more)

MichaelStJules1h1

Why should morality be based on group decision-making principles? Why should I care about VNM rationality of the group?

I've retracted my previous reply. The original 2nd condition is different from ex ante Pareto; it's just vNM rationality with respect to outcomes for social/ethical preferences/views and it says nothing about the relationship between individual preferences and social/ethical ones. It's condition 3 that connects individual vNM utility and social/ethical vNM utility.

1MichaelStJules1hI think this last point essentially denies the third axiom above, which is what connects individual vNM utility and social/ethical preferences. (The original statement of the second axiom is just vNM rationality for social/ethical preferences, and has no relationship with the individuals' preferences.)

3Ben_West2hThanks! Well, average utilitarianism is consistent with the result because it gives the same answer as total utilitarianism (for a fixed population size). The vast majority of utility functions one can imagine (including ones also based on the original position like maximin) are ruled out by the result. I agree that the technical result is "anything isomorphic to total utilitarianism" though. I had not seen that, thanks!

COVID-19 Risk Assessment App Idea for Vetting and Discussion

tina

17h11 min readShow Highlight

Please note: These opinions are my own. I'm not an expert, but I have a Q&A below with Sukrit Silas, an expert on infectious disease who supports these ideas and thinks they merit further discussion.

Below I discuss some worst-case scenarios for COVID-19, and my preliminary ideas for an app that could help slow its spread. Like anyone, I don't know how bad things will get; we just have to wait and see. But obviously, if you want to be ready for a deadly pandemic, however unlikely, you have to start well in advance. This is particularly true for developing an app, which requires t... (Read more)

2Tsunayoshi8hYour sections on incentive design is very persuasive, and seems like a great starting point. And before I start with my concerns, Western governments are already kind of doing a similar thing: They identify contacts of infected people, including people who dined at the same restaurant at a similar time, in order to test them. However, some concerns/questions that were partly raised in the fb group already: 0)Even basic questions about the virus and how it spreads are still unanswered, like how infectious one is during the incubation period. This makes more advanced questions regarding a risk score difficult to answer. 1) How likely are you to catch the virus at all just by being in the same area/frequenting the same shops as somebody infected? My impression from the Western cases so far was that it infections occurred generally with close contacts; this risk changes obviously when more infected people are around, but still should be estimated to decide whether such an app would be worth it. 2) Regarding the computation of the risk score: If you only use confirmed cases with voluntary sign up, you might not get enough data; if you use suspected cases by symptoms, you will get a lot of false positives due to worried people with the flu. In the absence of data on how to properly account for that, this is a very difficult problem. 3) You mention that Google traffic data is still useful, even when few people use it. I am not familiar with that part of the app, but if it involves some form of prediction, it is important to note that Google has had years to get this right. With a pandemic, you have at best months(!), and on top of that the situation changes constantly. Given what I assume is a dearth of good historical data on every aspect of this , I think that calculating both an accurate risk score AND communicating it without doing more harm than good, is a very tough problem. A dumbed down (but maybe not useful anymore) version of the app could just do w

1tina2hThis is called contact tracing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_tracing]. In the Introduction, I refer to contact tracing, but I think I missed an opportunity to define what it is, so thank you for pointing this out. What I'm proposing, like you say, is similar. It's like an automatic, probabilistic form of contact tracing aided by a lot of GPS data.

Tsunayoshi2h2

Just to be clear, to me the fact that Western government are already doing it is a positive point in favor of your proposal, since it is evidence for utility of contact tracing in containing the virus.

MichaelA's Shortform

MichaelA

2moShow Highlight

MichaelA3h1

Some concepts/posts/papers I find myself often wanting to direct people to

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oMYeJrQmCeoY5sEzg/hedge-drift-and-advanced-motte-and-bailey

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/voDm6e6y4KHAPJeJX/act-utilitarianism-criterion-of-rightness-vs-decision

http://gcrinstitute.org/papers/trajectories.pdf

(Will likely be expanded as I find and remember more)

[Question]Help in choosing good charities in specific domains

Conundrum

3h1 min readShow Highlight

I'm wondering if you could help me with providing some source or a way to choose some charities to donate to.

I've watched Peter Singer's lecture on effective altruism the other day. I did some thinking and some research. Still, it's not so easy to find the charities that focus on specific issues I care about and at the same time are measurably effective.

The 3 main areas I'd like to focus at the start are:

1. Increasing access to birth control and contraception.
2. Work on sex education, health education, and general education, mostly for women.
3. Animal welfare.

I alr... (Read more)

Answer by ishaanFeb 20, 20202

Charity Entrepreneurship is incubating new family planning and animal welfare organizations, which will aim to operate via principles of effective altruism - potentially relevant to your interests.

My personal cruxes for working on AI safety

Buck

8d43 min readShow Highlight

The following is a heavily edited transcript of a talk I gave for the Stanford Effective Altruism club on 19 Jan 2020. I had rev.com transcribe it, and then Linchuan Zhang, Rob Bensinger and I edited it for style and clarity, and also to occasionally have me say smarter things than I actually said. Linch and I both added a few notes throughout. Thanks also to Bill Zito, Ben Weinstein-Raun, and Howie Lempel for comments.

I feel slightly weird about posting something so long, but this is the natural place to put it.

Over the last year my beliefs about AI risk have shifted moderately; I expect tha... (Read more)

4Buck5hThis is a good point. I feel pretty unsure on this point; for a contradictory perspective you might enjoy this article [http://Whereas you could argue that without pure mathematics, almost all the positive technological progress we have now (from quantum mechanics to computer science) would not exist.].

adamShimi5h3

I'm curious about the article, but the link points to nothing. ^^

[Question]What are the best arguments that AGI is on the horizon?

gabcoh

5d1 min readShow Highlight

Artificial intelligence alignment is believed by many to be one of the most important challenges we face right now. I understand the argument that once AGI is developed it's game over unless we have solved alignment, and I am completely convinced by this. However, I have never seen anyone explain the reasoning that leads experts in the field to believe that AGI could be here in the near future. Claims that there is an X% chance of AGI in the next Y years (where X is fairly large and Y fairly small) are rarely supported by an actual argument.

I realize that for the EA community to dedicate... (Read more)

rohinmshah5h3

Just wanted to note that while I am quoted as being optimistic, I am still working on it specifically to cover the x-risk case and not the value lock-in case. (But certainly some people are working on the value lock-in case.)

(Also I think several people would disagree that I am optimistic, and would instead think I'm too pessimistic, e.g. I get the sense that I would be on the pessimistic side at FHI.)

[Question]How much will local/university groups benefit from targeted EA content creation?

Linch

5d1 min readShow Highlight

When I reflect back on my experiences at South Bay EA, the one thing that would save us so much time (that we can then use for non-scalable activities like 1:1s) is if we had high quality pre-made discussion sheets.

(To be clear, this is still an ongoing problem).

It takes us ~3-12 hours to make a typical discussion sheet for one meetup.

Naively, it would be really helpful if CEA or a crowdsourced group (eg, this forum) worked on creating high-quality discussion sheets that would save us 90% of the effort.

I could imagine other content being helpful as well, for example ("intro to EA" ... (Read more)

3vaidehi_agarwalla8hI think people usually do ask what resources exist, they tend to use the Group Organisers Facebook or Slack to ask those questions. I think it makes sense so that only interested people see those questions, but that information is not easily available to organisers who aren't in those groups. We are working on an FAQ series for EA Hub resources, which will include information on how to start a group, run events, find key content, contact people, graphics and more. The aim is that all basic questions about group resources can by a quick search and reduce community time asking/answering questions. (of course, people can always comment and ask more detailed questions!)

3DavidNash12hWould that distinguish between people who knew about all the current resources and still wanted more versus those who hadn't been connected to what is currently available?

vaidehi_agarwalla8h1

I don't think there was an exact question on this (unless I'm mistaken), but as a proxy I'd be curious to see a breakdown of this question for new vs. older groups and more vs. less experienced group organisers. It wouldn't be a perfect proxy, since older groups may still not know about resources but also not need them, but might be worth considering.

EA Hub’s new features

Michal_Trzesimiech, cafelow

2mo1 min readShow Highlight

The EA Hub was relaunched in April and is now home to over 700 profiles of Effective Altruists and over 200 local groups in more than 50 countries all over the world. We await around 2000 more of our former users to reactivate their accounts by changing their password (you can do this here), and welcome new users to create a profile here.

Connecting ideas with talent, resources, and support is one of the biggest bottlenecks of high potential individuals and a cause of promising ideas not reaching fruition.

The vision for the Hub is to enable and inspire collaboration between EAs by making it e... (Read more)

Michal_Trzesimiech9h1

Hi Aaron, I've just sent the data again. I used the email address associated with your eahub.org account. Please, write us at contact@eahub.org in case you did not receive it by now.

Candidate Scoring System recommendations for the Democratic presidential primaries

kbog

20d3 min readShow Highlight

Voting is a pretty impactful activity in expectation, so I and some other contributors have spent a good deal of time on the Candidate Scoring System for Democratic presidential candidates. The latest version of the report is available here: http://bit.ly/ea-css

As primaries for the first states begin within a week, here are the latest recommendations. They depend upon your state of residence. For voters in the first three states - Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada - the recommendation is to vote for Pete Buttigieg (unless he fails in Iowa and is no longer a serious candidate). For voters in subs... (Read more)

MichaelStJules13h1

Might not really matter now given her chances, but she did an interview with VegNews:

For me, deciding to be vegetarian is rooted in a very strong spiritual foundation as a practicing Hindu—and an awareness and a care and compassion for all living beings. So, more recently, in the last few years—just as I became more aware of the unethical treatment of animals in the dairy industry especially—it caused me to really think about some of the changes I could make to lessen that negative impact on animals as well as the environment.

VN: Switc

ColinBested

1d22 min readShow Highlight

Summary

EATO has continued to grow throughout 2019 with a core strategy that focused on one-on-one meetings, community member projects, and project events
EATO’s event focus has switched from weekly Wednesday project events to monthly socials, monthly concept workshops, and quarterly immersive transformative events, while keeping the door open for member-driven events
Colin is finishing up his 2nd CEA community building grant and plans to apply for another one that will last another year, until February 25th, 2021, if successful
EATO plans to register as a not-for-profit in 2020 and, afterw

Sanjay

1d12 min readShow Highlight

Summary

This was a short, shallow review conducted by SoGive. SoGive is an organisation which provides services to donors to help them to achieve high impact donations.

In this piece we set out the following:

The existing EA view on microfinance
Some updates to this based on more recent evidence
Further considerations relating to business coaching/mentoring/support
How should this work be funded?

A summary of the conclusions is as follows:

The existing EA view on microfinance was lukewarm/negative, but this was several years ago.
More up to date evidence does not seem to materially change this (looking

... (Read more)