Recent Discussion

(crossposted to Lesswrong here.)

Although I have not seen the argument made in any detail or in writing, I and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) have gathered the strong impression that parts of the effective altruism ecosystem are skeptical of the importance of the issue of autonomous weapons systems. This post explains why we think those interested in avoiding catastrophic and existential risk, especially risk stemming from emerging technologies, may want to have this issue higher on their list of concerns.

We will first define some terminology and do some disambiguation, as there are many cl... (Read more)

Thanks for writing this up!!

Although I have not seen the argument made in any detail or in writing, I and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) have gathered the strong impression that parts of the effective altruism ecosystem are skeptical of the importance of the issue of autonomous weapons systems.

I'm aware of two skeptical posts on EA Forum (by the same person). I just made a tag Autonomous Weapons where you'll find them.

(thanks to Claire Zabel, Damon Binder, and Carl Shulman for suggesting some of the main arguments here, obviously all flaws are my own; thanks also to Richard Ngo, Greg Lewis, Kevin Liu, and Sidney Hough for helpful conversation and comments.)

Will MacAskill has a post, Are we living at the most influential time in history?, about what he calls the “hinge of history hypothesis” (HoH), which he defines as the claim that “we are living at the most influential time ever.” Whether HoH is true matters a lot for how longtermists should allocate their effort. In his post, Will argues that we should be... (Read more)

8richard_ngo10hThis seems straightforwardly untrue, because you may be able to permanently reduce existential risk more cheaply in the future. I also think (but am not sure) that Will doesn't include solving the knowledge problem as part of "direct action", and so your first critique is not very relevant to the choice between patient philanthropy and direct action, because probably you'll want to gain knowledge in either case.

I agree with your criticism of my second argument. What I should have instead said is a bit different. There are actions whose value decreases over time. For instance, all else being equal it is better to implement a policy which reduces existential risk sooner rather than later. Patient philanthropy makes sense only if either (a) you expect the growth of your resources to outpace the value lost by failing to act now, or (b) you expect cheaper opportunities to arise in the future. I don't think there are great reasons to believe either of these is true (or... (read more)

8Gregory_Lewis18hFor my part, I'm more partial to 'blaming the reader', but (evidently) better people mete out better measure than I in turn. Insofar as it goes, I think the challenge (at least for me) is qualitative terms can cover multitudes (or orders of magnitudes) of precision. I'd take ~0.3% to be 'significant' credence for some values of significant. 'Strong' 'compelling' or 'good' arguments could be an LR of 2 (after all, RCT confirmation can be ~3) or 200. I also think quantitative articulation would help the reader (or at least this reader) better benchmark the considerations here. Taking the rough posterior of 0.1% and prior of 1 in 100 million, this implies a likelihood ratio of ~~100 000 - loosely, ultra-decisive evidence. If we partition out the risk-based considerations (which it discussion seems to set as 'less than decisive' so <100), the other considerations (perhaps mostly those in S5) give you a LR of > ~1000 - loosely, very decisive evidence. Yet the discussion of the considerations in S5 doesn't give the impression we should conclude they give us 'massive updates'. You note there are important caveats to these considerations, you say in summing up these arguments are 'far from watertight', and I also inferred the sort of criticisms given in S3 around our limited reasoning ability and scepticism of informal arguments would also apply here too. Hence my presumption these other considerations, although more persuasive than object level arguments around risks, would still end up below the LR ~ 100 for 'decisive' evidence, rather than much higher. Another way this would help would be illustrating the uncertainty. Given some indicative priors you note vary by ten orders of magnitude, the prior is not just astronomical but extremely uncertain. By my lights, the update doesn't greatly reduce our uncertainty (and could compound it, given challenges in calibrating around very high LRs). If the posterior odds could be 'out by 100 000x either way' the central estimate

Hi everyone,

I'm the Assistant Director at CHAI and as some of you may know, CHAI is currently accepting applications for our 2021 internship program.

Early deadline is 11/23 for applicants who require an earlier response from us. Our normal deadline is 12/13. 

You can find more information and the application itself here

Please e-mail me at chai-admin@berkeley.edu if you have any questions!

Part of a series for My Cause Selection 2016. For background, see my writings on cause selection for 2015 and my series on quantitative models.

Introduction

In my previous essay, I explained why I am prioritizing animal advocacy as a cause area. In this essay, I decide where to donate. I share some general considerations, briefly discuss some promising organizations I did not prioritize, and then list my top candidates for donation and explain why I considered them. I conclude with a final decision about where to donate.

This year, I plan on donating $20,000 to the Good Food Institute (GFI), wh

... (Read more)

Supermeat (cultured chicken producer) in Israel now has a test kitchen open to the public, but they have not started charging yet and it appears that they may need to scale up production somewhat before regularly serving cultured animal tissue.

I now think it's more likely than not that you'll win the bet, but it looks like it'll be fairly close. 

Wave is a startup building mobile money—a way for people in developing countries to access financial services like savings and money transfer if they can't afford, or live too far away from, traditional banks. Lincoln is co-founder and head of product; Ben is an early engineer and CTO. We've both been part of the EA community since ~2011 (in fact, we met through NYC EA), and work on Wave for EA reasons.

EDIT: this originally said we'd start answering on Friday, but we're getting nerd sniped by the questions so will probably get to them sooner :)

About Wave

Wave is a spinoff of Sendwave, an app fo... (Read more)

Thanks Ben. I like this answer, but I feel like every time I have seen people attempt to implement it they still end up facing a trade-off.  

Consider moving someone from role r1 to role r2. I think you are saying that the person you choose for r2 should be the person you expect to be best at it, which will often be people who aren't particularly good at r1.

This seems fine, except that r2 might be more desirable than r1. So now a) the people who are good at r1 feel upset that someone who was objectively performing worse than them got a more desirable p... (read more)

We’re excited to announce the launch of Probably Good, a new organization that provides career guidance intended to help people do as much good as possible.

Context

For a while, we have felt that there was a need for a more generalist careers organization than 80,000 Hours — one which is more agnostic regarding different cause areas and might provide a different entry point into the community to people who aren’t a good fit for 80K’s priority areas. Following 80,000 Hours’ post about what they view as gaps in the careers space, we contacted them about how a new organization could effectively fil... (Read more)

I can imagine you stopping yourself from doing too much coaching, but the people who apply for coaching don't know what happened or why you didn't get in touch. Does that make sense?

Something as simple as having an automatic reply to email enquiries saying "unfortunately we can't respond to every request for coaching" could be helpful.

2Manuel_Allgaier10hFWIW: 75 upvotes (as of now) for Michael's post seem strong evidence that at least a significant fraction of forum readers find the name "weird" or "off-putting" at first glance, and often, that might be enough for people not to look into it more (e.g. if it's one of hundreds of posts on their Facebook timeline). Even if the other half of people find the name great, I think I'd rather go for a less controversial name and that no-one finds weird (even if fewer people find it great). Finding a good name is difficult - all the best and let us know if we can help! You could e.g. solicit ideas here on in a Facebook group and run polls in the "EA polls" group to get better quantitative feedback.
8Manuel_Allgaier10hThe case for limiting scope to certain cause areas, fields and/or locations > What cause areas and career paths do we want to focus on? Do we want to start with specific fields and slowly grow, or do we want to provide shallow introductions more broadly and slowly deepen our content? (from your open questions) I have supported some 30 people with their career planning, and in my experience, good career advice is both really valuable and quite difficult to give. High impact career paths are complex, difficult to evaluate and change often. If you try to cover all cause areas globally, you might not be able to give good advice, so I would argue for narrowing down the scope now already. For instance, 80,000 Hours has narrowed its scope to its "priority cause areas" (longtermist causes) and effectively also to jobs in the UK & the US, partly as some of the best opportunities might be in those countries and partly because they know these countries best. Also, they partner with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content. Possible ways to narrow scope: - location: focus on general career coaching for people in Israel who are not yet set on a certain cause area - cause area (such as Animal Advocacy Careers) - field (e.g. careers in politics & policy such as HIPE [https://hipe.org.uk/]) I'd also consider what fields you know well personally. If you receive good feedback on that and have the capacity, you could still expand to more cause areas and locations, but it seems easier to grow this way around rather than start broadly and then narrow down. Generally, I do think that good career advice is one of the main bottlenecks of the EA community (and probably also altruistic people in general), and I'm excited to see what might come from this!

"There is a common tendency among effective altruists to think of animal advocacy as having little value for improving the long-term future. Similarly, animal advocates often assume that longtermism has little relevance to their work. Yet this seems misguided: sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future will go.

In this post, I will discuss whether animal advocacy – or, more generally, expanding the moral circle – should be a priority for longtermists, and outline implications of a longtermist perspective on animal advocacy. My starting p... (Read more)

In this talk, Jamie Harris, a co-founder of Animal Advocacy Careers and a researcher at the Sentience Institute, introduces some key concepts involved in planning your career so that you can maximize your impact for animals.

We’ve lightly edited Jamie’s talk for clarity. You can also watch it on YouTube and read it on effectivealtruism.org.

The Talk

Hello, and welcome to this effective animal advocacy careers workshop. Thank you very much for joining me, and thank you to the Centre for Effective Altruism and everybody involved with EAGx Virtual for inviting me to talk.

My name is Jamie Harris. I'm... (Read more)

Preamble

Differences in the intensity of valenced experience across species may affect the proportion of resources we ought to allocate to helping different types of animals. I recently wrote a long report on this topic. (You can view a PDF of the report here.[1]) In this summary, I attempt to more succinctly convey my main conclusions.

Main Text

We all know that some experiences feel good, while other experiences feel bad. In the jargon, we can say that experiences often take on a valence: an overall positive or negative flavor. We also know that some good experiences feel better than others,... (Read more)

This post outlines some incentive problems with forecasting tournaments, such as Good Judgement Open, CSET, or Metaculus. These incentive problems may be problematic not only because unhinged actors might exploit them, but also because of mechanisms such as those outlined in Unconscious Economics. For a similar post about PredictIt, a prediction market in the US, see here. This post was written in collaboration with Nuño Sempere, who should be added as a coauthor soon. This is a crosspost from LessWrong.

Problems

Discrete prizes distort forecasts

If a forecasting tournament offers a prize to the ... (Read more)

7Davidmanheim16hThis is great, and it deals with a few points I didn't, but here's my tweetstorm from the beginning of last year about the distortion of scoring rules alone: https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1080458380806893568 [https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1080458380806893568] If you're interested in probability scoring rules, here's a somewhat technical and nit-picking tweetstorm about why proper scoring for predictions and supposedly "incentive compatible" scoring systems often aren't actually a good idea. First, some background. Scoring rules are how we "score" predictions - decide how good they are. Proper scoring rules are ones where a predictor's score is maximized when it give it's true best guess. Wikipedia explains; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_r… A typical improper scoring rule is the "better side of even" rule, where every time your highest probability is assigned to the actual outcome, you get credit. In that case, people have no reason to report probabilities correctly - just pick a most likely outcome and say 100%. There are many proper scoring rules. Examples include logarithmic scoring, where your score is the log of the probability assigned to the correct answer, and Brier score, which is the mean squared error. de Finetti et al. lays out the details here; link.springer.com/chapter/10.100… These scoring rules are all fine as long as people's ONLY incentive is to get a good score. In fact, in situations where we use quantitative rules, this is rarely the case. Simple scoring rules don't account for this problem. So what kind of misaligned incentives exist? Bad places to use proper scoring rules #1 - In many forecasting applications, like tournaments, there is a prestige factor in doing well without a corresponding penalty for doing badly. In that case, proper scoring rules incentivise "risk taking" in predictions, not honesty. Bad places to use proper scoring rules #2 - In machine learning, scoring rules are used for training models that

I enjoyed this tweetstorm when you mentioned it to me and should have highlighted it in the article as useful further reading, thanks for posting it!

4NunoSempere1dIn the particular example you propose, forecaster A assigns higher probability to X and Y and Z (0.7*0.7*0.7 = .343) than forecaster B (0.8*0.8*0.5 = 0.320). This seems intuitively correct. Also, note that the squares are necessary to keep the scoring rule proper [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_rules] (the highest expected reward is obtained by reporting the true probability distribution), and this is in principle a crucial property (otherwise people could lie about what they think their probabilities are and get a better score). In particular, if you take out the square, then the "probability" which maximizes your expected score is either 0% or 100% (i.e., imagine that your probability was 60%, and just calculate the expected value of writing 60% vs 100% down). An alternative to the Brier score which might interest you (or which you may have had in mind) is the logarithmic scoring rule [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Logarithmic_scoring_rule], which in a sense tries to quantify how much information you add or substract from the aggregate. But it has other downsides, like being very harsh on mistakes. And it would also assign a worse score to forecaster B.

The following is a condensed version of Faunalytics’ original study, which can be read in full (including a summary and key takeaways) here

Introduction

Animals used for food generally receive significantly less attention and funding than companion animals (Faunalytics, 2019). Small-bodied animals like chickens and fish are killed in particularly massive numbers—there are over 12 times more chickens killed each year than cows, and over 3,000 times more fish killed than cows (Faunalytics, 2020; Sentient Media, 2018; The Economist, 2011).

The current study was created to help answer importan... (Read more)

The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey is now live at the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAS2020Forum

If you would like to share the EA Survey with others, please share this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAS2020Share

The survey will close on the 10th of December at midnight GMT.

-

What is the EA Survey?

The EA Survey provides valuable information about the demographics of the EA community, how people get involved, how they donate, what causes they prioritise, their experiences of EA, and more.

The estimated average completion time for the main section of this year’s survey is 20 m... (Read more)

I am trying to decide where to donate this year. I am mostly interested in funding cause prioritisation research. I am not sure how best to evaluate the EA research organisations that are out there. As someone who is at the frontline of trying to turn EA ideas into policy change I have my own thoughts on what research I have found most useful (will share in the answers section below). And so I thought it might be useful to ask others for their views on which research is most used. 

So curious to know:

Which EA organisations' research has been useful to you?

 

Note: For the sake of simpli... (Read more)

What I use research for: I advocate for Future Generations policy within the UK Parliament. This involves using cause priotisation research to decide where to focus my time and attention and using research on policy and governance to decide what to advocate for.

 

Most useful:

... (read more)

Cause area: Animal Welfare 
Primary author: Vicky Cox
Review: Karolina Sarek & Erik Hausen
Research period: 2020 
Download PDF

If you are interested in founding a charity based on this idea, contact us at: karolina@charityscience.com

Research Process

Before opening the report, we think it is important to introduce our research process. Knowing the principles of the process helps readers understand how we formed our conclusions and enables greater reasoning transparency. It will also clarify the structure of the report.

Our research process incorporates elements that are well established ... (Read more)

As an outsider to the field, is there a quick 3-sentence pitch as to why farmed shrimp welfare is specifically important (as opposed to any other farmed animal?) I skimmed through the report for this info but may well have missed it.

My quick read of welfare points is that it's a per-animal metric - did I get that right? If so I'm somewhat hesitant to equate the wellbeing of one eg cow to one shrimp.

9Marcus_A_Davis1dHey I'm happy to see this on the forum! I think farmed shrimp interventions are a promising area and this report highlights some important considerations. I should note that Rethink Priorities has also been researching this topic for a while and I won't go into detail as I'm not leading up this work and the person who is currently is on leave, but I think we've tentatively come to some different conclusions about the most promising next steps in this domain. In the future, if anyone reading this is inclined to work on farmed shrimp, in addition to reviewing this report I'd hope you'd read over our forthcoming work and/or reach out to us about this area.
7KarolinaSarek1dThanks for adding this, Marcus! Indeed, Vicky - primary author - worked with Daniela Waldhorn from Rethink Priorities while researching this topic. We both cannot wait to read the final report and see your tentative conclusions. Once your report is published, I will link it in this post to ensure that people can read more from a different angle and see where our research differs. One thing to note is that CE plans to follow up our shrimp welfare report with an implementation report that looks more at the practicalities, which may lead to some changes in next steps.

I’m a non-profit entrepreneur in effective altruism. Over four years, I collaborated with charity staff and local organisers to offer services in niches that help us do more good.

Grantmakers made six grants to services I ran. Six EAs kindly transferred one-off donations for me to meet my rent. They gave me the opportunity to form community-building teams in effective altruism and AI safety, organise productive conferences and research retreats, and develop online tools and guides (see below).

Funders hesitated though to cover more than basic operational costs at the start of a new service; or a... (Read more)

1remmelt17hThis sounds reasonable to me actually. The rest of the post was about making a specific case for funding my entrepreneurial work, rather than expounding on widespread bottlenecks entrepreneurs seem to face to get funded for doing good work and developing it further. I started writing a 10-page draft to try to more detachedly analyse work by and interactions between entrepreneurs and funders.
1remmelt17hThis does resonate with me. There are quite some projects that I worked on making happen behind the scenes that I wouldn't want to stamp my name on. I've talked with others who mentioned similar bottlenecks (e.g. GoodGrowth people in 2019). Thank you for your good wishes, JJ!

My research team and I are working on a research project designed to promote effective giving. 

We hypothesize that participants will be more likely to engage in effective giving (e.g., donate to GiveWell-endorsed charities) if they reflect on the ways in which effective giving is congruent with their values & beliefs.

As part of this project, we are trying to identify EA-related beliefs that are widely held. We’re going to be targeting university students and online workers (the vast majority of whom have never heard of EA).

We’re looking for advice

I’m including a few of the statements ... (Read more)

Some of the items about it being generally good/productive to help people felt redundant -- not sure whether that's an issue for your research.

  • I think everyone deserves equal access to opportunity
  • Fairness is very important to me
  • I think everyone should have access to basic necessities, like food and water

This cluster of items could be seen as somewhat political (especially "equal access to opportunity"). I think they may not be as universal as you'd think (though when presented in a non-political situation, they might not bother even people who nominally di... (read more)

I'm looking at different career choices and in particular, academic research projects. I've tried to compare their impact by using some Fermi calculations, including working out:

  • the magnitude of the problem the research will attempt to solve
  • the likely value of the research if it is successful
  • the likelihood it will be successful
  • my marginal contribution to the research if I get involved with it

My calculations seem like they could be easily out by a couple of orders of magnitude. And it makes a difference--one less order of magnitude and the project is not more than the value of my marginal caree... (Read more)

This makes me think of the contrast between systems analysis and net assessment/strategy.  Yes, Fermi calculations are a valuable input into the discussion, but the nature of the problem is likely too complex to give sole weight to that calculation (in most circumstances - I think your example of comparing different research papers is a relatively simple/constrained environment).  

In net assessment/strategy, the nature of the choice and your assessment of that nature determine the best methods of analysis.   In systems analysis, a one-size-f... (read more)

For my birthday earlier this year, I spent a fair amount of time writing an EA-themed birthday post (reproduced at the bottom of this write-up). I think that this post did fairly well - 5 messages and subsequent calls about career plan changes (!), and 170 reactions on Facebook. As such, I'd be excited for more EAs to make similar posts, especially other highly involved university organizers with experience communicating about EA. In this post I share my thought-process for making this birthday post, what I could’ve done differently, some considerations for other EAs interested in doing the sa... (Read more)

Haven't thought about this enough to leave a helpful note but funnily enough, my birthday is this week & I will definitely be imitating you! What a great idea; I really need to start using social media more as a platform for EA.

I wanted to share this article about an independent research effort led by my IGDORE colleague Michelle King-Okoye, who is aiming to improve healthcare outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) population COVID patients in developed countries. While I wouldn't say that the project ranks highly against other EA-aligned healthcare work, the qualitative assessment of BAME COVID patient treatment outcomes does seem at least seem neglected when compared to the rest of the COVID response in developed countries.

I'm also quite impressed this has gotten so far as a grass-roots res... (Read more)

A new update on this project - it has now grown into the Ethnicity and COVID-19 Research Consortium (ECRC). They have started to publish some work, which is available here, and Michelle and her colleagues are still looking for BAME people who have been affected to participate in their study here

The consortia will also be presenting some initial results of their work in an online mini-conference on November 27th (7PM GMT). Please register here to attend.

It seems like this issue is now receiving more attention as well, as the Biden-Harris COVID-19 res... (read more)

If you have something to share that doesn't feel like a full post, add it here! 

(You can also create a Shortform post.)

If you're new to the EA Forum, you can use this thread to introduce yourself! You could talk about how you found effective altruism, what causes you work on and care about, or personal details that aren't EA-related at all. 

(You can also put this info into your Forum bio.)

If you're new to effective altruism, consider checking out the Motivation Series (a collection of classic articles on EA). You can also learn more about how the Forum works on this page.

Welcome! I'm the lead moderator of the Forum and work on content for the Centre for Effective Altruism. I'm pretty familiar with EA literature in a lot of areas; if there's anything specific you'd like to read more about, feel free to ask.

3Aaron Gertler1dHello, Jochem! Don't be alarmed by resumes; the more people of all stripes participate in conversations here, the more we'll all learn. Also, I'm a copyeditor and semi-professional Twitch streamer by trade; if I can participate on the site, research engineers should do just fine :-) (Though of course, just hanging out and reading is also a totally valid way to use the Forum!)
2BenStewart2dHey there! Nice to meet you. Send me a message if you want to chat more
Load More