Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 220 posts

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#191

Post by mercutio2 »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #50
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #39

GiveWell’s CEO’s compensation is 200k: http://files.givewell.org/files/ClearFund/Meeting_2017_06_06... That, after working at a investment firm and having a BA in religion. Not sure that’s the skills and salary I would trust the use of the word « reason » and « science » with. Having a 200k salary in San Francisco definitely skews your vision of the world.

200k in SF is...not a lot. At all.

I get where you’re coming from, I think, but the way you phrased this I can’t agree with.

200k in SF is vastly less than a bunch of smart techies are making. But it is far, far more than the median SF income, and it is a very livable salary in the Bay Area.

We should remember that even though SF is expensive, and tech employees can make much more than 200k, that much money is, in fact, after taxes, a lot of money. Even in SF.

The spirit of what you’re saying is, I think, that talented people who have demonstrated organizational/management skills could easily make twice that much. I think that’s true, and I think the $200k salary is reasonable for the role in the organization.

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#192

Post by Veedrac »

jerf wrote: post #87
justinpombrio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, to consider artificial intelligence to be a potential global catastrophe at all, let alone the single one requiring extra funding, is mostly unfounded. As another commenter points out, EA is not a single unified group, but rather a disparate set of people who are united by the belief that we should put money where it has the largest effect. Some , but not all, of them are convinced by the arguments in favo…

AI risk has a profile that is very, very difficult to deal with rationally. By that I don't just mean "think about rationally rather than emotionally", but that it is difficult to even use rational tools to analyze it. It is what most people would consider a very, very small probability of what is arguably the worst possible outcome (i.e., considered from a strictly materialist perspectiv, there are outcomes worse th…

The precise distribution of outcomes is not actually all that important for just figuring out whether the research is valuable. Alignment research would be valuable if it moved a 1% probability mass from worst-possible-world to human-extinction, a 1% probability mass from human-extinction to human-survival, or a 1% probability mass from human-survival to human-flourishing. As long as you can convince yourself that there is a probability of things being far from optimal in some sense at some time in a way that funding research now could nontrivially affect, you have a justification.

Remember that people were created by evolution, and evolution is dumb. Nonetheless, the returns on moderate deltas in intelligence are very strongly selected for, and major changes have happened with small perturbations in evolutionary history. This gradient is so sharp that the same species that produces perfectly healthy 80 IQ individuals also produces Feynman and Euler, the latter so mathematically productive that the Wikipedia page listing things named after him says that "In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler."

Note that necessarily society develops as soon as intelligence reaches the point at which is is achievable, not with some evolutionarily significant delay, so you cannot judge the gradient by looking at the cap on intelligence of existing species; we are the necessarily the smartest, because we are first. Rather, you have to look at those behind us, and there it seems the gradient is extremely steep; our closest intellectual competitors can not so much as write a single coherent sentence.

The probable conclusion is that human intelligence is more than sufficient to build effective general intelligence, and improvements to intelligence are likely extremely steep on the slope to superintelligence, even ignoring the nine orders of magnitude improvement you get for free by merely running in silicon.

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#193

Post by the_af »

Veedrac wrote: post #190
the_af wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment is going to be unpopular, and I'll admit my bias upfront: I think Yudkowsky is a crank, and is neither a psychology nor an AI expert (he's a self-proclaimed expert, but he's not actually engaged in academic research on AI, because of reasons ). His "experiment" is hard to control or reproduce, its goals are ill-defined, its results are hidden (really, which sort of experiment hides its results and merely a…

I am aware of one reproduction of the experiment, the goals seem pretty darn explicit, and its results are public. He has stated the rules of engagement, and has said that he did it "the hard way". If nothing else, one should at least be confident that Yudkowsky is honest. His claim that "a transhuman mind will likely be able to convince a human mind" is what his experiment demonstrates , not what is assumes , and fr…

- What reproduction? What would you consider a successful reproduction, for that matter? If I told you I reenacted the experiment at home with a friend, would you consider this a reproduction? Someone saying they reproduced it on the internet would convince you? What are your standards of quality?

- What is the goal of the experiment? Is the goal "show that a transhuman AI can convince a human gatekeeper to set it free"? Or is it actually "show that a huthatman can talk another human into performing a task", or even "an internet (semi)celebrity can convince a like-minded person into saying they would perform a task of very low real-world stakes". How would you tell each of these goals apart?

- The results are most definitely not public. What is public is what Yudkowsky claims the results were, but since the transcripts are secret and there are no witnesses, how do we know they are true (or even not assuming dishonesty or advanced crankiness, how can we tell if they are flawed?). Would you believe me if I told you I have a raygun that miniaturizes people, that I have tested it at home and it works, and that I have a (very small) group of people who will tell you what I say is true? No, I cannot show you the raygun or the miniaturized people, but I can tell you it was a success!

- "A transhuman mind will likely be able to convince a human mind" is what is stated as truth in the fictional conversation at the top of the AI-box experiment web page. Yudkowsky has repeatedly provided "justifications", but these are unscientific and unreasonable.

Yudkowsky claims that because a person can convince another person of claiming they would perform a task (setting an hypothetical AI free), that then a "transhuman" mind is likely to convince a human gatekeeper. The logical disconnect is huge. First, that people can convince other people of things is no big revelation. Unfortunately, it doesn't follow that because some people can convince other people of some things in certain scenarios, then people can universally convince other people of arbitrary things in every context. Worse, we don't even know what a "transhuman" mind would be like; assuming it means "faster thoughts" (a random assumption), why would more thoughts per minute translate into higher convincing capacity? Is it true, for that matter, that higher intelligence translates into higher ability to convince others of stuff?

----

Another example of methodological flaws: in both runs of the experiment, the participants seem to be selected from a pool of people fascinated by this kind of questions and who would be open to suggestion that a "transhuman" mind can convince them of stuff. Let's look at them:

First participant: Nathan Russell. Introduces himself as

> "I'm a sophomore CS major, with a strong interest in transhumanism, and just found this list."

Then shows interests in a similar experiment and considers how it could be designed. Note that the list itself, SL4, is for people interested in the "Singularity". Enough said.

Second participant: David McFadzean. Correctly claims the first experiment is not proof of anything, and is willing to take part in a second experiment. Later Yudkowsky describes him like this:

> "David McFadzean has been an Extropian for considerably longer than I have - he maintains extropy.org's server, in fact - and currently works on Peter Voss's A2I2 project."

The mentioned website still exists and it has something to do with a Transhumanist Institute. I start to see a pattern here.

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#194

Post by emodendroket »

Vinnl wrote: post #188
emodendroket wrote: post #135

Well, measuring overhead isn't a great way to measure efficacy (trying to game this metric often leads to behaviors that are penny-wise and pound-foolish), but I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy and really find the idea of trying to quantify how much good a charity does kind of silly.

> I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy Could you expand on this some more? The primary argument against utilitarianism I recall is the hypothetical situation of there being that gets infinitely happy if you donate to it, so that the maximally useful thing would always be to donate to that being (or something like that, but you get the gist). But such a being does not exist, and if we accept that…

Here's a classic problem for utilitarianism:

You are a doctor. You have four patients. Three are young men in otherwise good health who need an organ or they will die very soon -- two of them need kidneys and one of them needs a heart. Your fourth patient is a homeless person who's broken his leg but is otherwise well. You know for a fact he has no friends or family who will notice he is gone, and that nobody will know it if you kill him. Under a strict utilitarian framework, it is not only permissible but actually mandatory that you kill this man and harvest his organs to maximize utility.

Another popular one is a variant on the trolley problem. Most people feel it is morally permissible to change the switch on the train tracks to go toward the side with fewer people, even though it will lead to some people dying. Most people do not feel it is permissible to push someone (say in a car) in front of the train in order that they may stop the train while being killed in the process.

There are others of this genre but you probably get the basic idea. Utilitarianism can lead to plainly monstrous conclusions. I'm suspicious of any "formula" to solve all ethical problems.

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#195

Post by dncrane »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #169
throwawayjava wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's absolutely morally repugnant to walk past them and not give them money, because instead you're paying people to sit around thinking about AI. This is not a new argument. Sister Mary Jucunda, a Zambian nun, wrote to a NASA scientist (Ernst Stuhlinger) in the early 70's with a similar critique of funding for space research. You can read Ernst's cogent reply here: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-…

Not remotely applicable. For one, so far everyone predicting doom about AI has been a layman a subject. Maybe you aren't aware, but this is a field that people do PhDs and get professorships in. Noone respected agrees with the doom-sayers.

> For one, so far everyone predicting doom about AI has been a layman a subject.

This is a myth. It was arguably true 5-10 years ago, but concern with AI safety is not a fringe position even among the highest levels of AI researchers now.

Stuart Russel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell) is the co-author of one of the most popular AI textbooks in the world and he has repeatedly said that he thinks the alignment problem is important and that AI presents an existential risk: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602776/yes-we-are-worried... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvmeTaFc_Qw

Marcus Hutter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutter) is another respected AI researcher who, along with, Tom Everitt (http://www.tomeveritt.se/) (a researcher at DeepMind, one of the most advanced AI companies in the world), is also working on the alignment problem: http://www.tomeveritt.se/papers/alignment.pdf

You can read through list of grants granted by the Future of Life institute for AI Safety research, almost all of which are to researchers associated with respected universities, not laymen, here: https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-research/

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#196

Post by emodendroket »

gowld wrote: post #157
emodendroket wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I really need an app to give beggars money or buy the Spare Change News from someone.

I don't need an app to send email or shop on Amazon either, yet here we are.

The value proposition for the homelessness app is less clear to me.

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#197

Post by perl4ever »

emodendroket wrote: post #194
Vinnl wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy Could you expand on this some more? The primary argument against utilitarianism I recall is the hypothetical situation of there being that gets infinitely happy if you donate to it, so that the maximally useful thing would always be to donate to that being (or something like that, but you get the gist). But such a being does not exist, and if we accept that…

Here's a classic problem for utilitarianism: You are a doctor. You have four patients. Three are young men in otherwise good health who need an organ or they will die very soon -- two of them need kidneys and one of them needs a heart. Your fourth patient is a homeless person who's broken his leg but is otherwise well. You know for a fact he has no friends or family who will notice he is gone, and that nobody will kn…

I don't think "utilitarianism" incorporates any principle that homeless people are worthless. Really, depending on how you define utility, it can be molded into anything. Note that harvesting organs means he will definitely die, but the organ transplants may fail, or may only work for a limited time. It could be rather than assuming "two lives saved minus one life lost" you should use "probability/quality adjusted years of life gained". And incorporate uncertainty.

Also, in your example of pushing someone in front of the train, wouldn't your moral intuition depend on the stakes? Suppose that the train not being stopped was going to set off a chain reaction that would kill all life on earth?

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#198

Post by Vinnl »

emodendroket wrote: post #194
Vinnl wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find utilitarianism a compelling moral philosophy Could you expand on this some more? The primary argument against utilitarianism I recall is the hypothetical situation of there being that gets infinitely happy if you donate to it, so that the maximally useful thing would always be to donate to that being (or something like that, but you get the gist). But such a being does not exist, and if we accept that…

Here's a classic problem for utilitarianism: You are a doctor. You have four patients. Three are young men in otherwise good health who need an organ or they will die very soon -- two of them need kidneys and one of them needs a heart. Your fourth patient is a homeless person who's broken his leg but is otherwise well. You know for a fact he has no friends or family who will notice he is gone, and that nobody will kn…

> I'm suspicious of any "formula" to solve all ethical problems.

Right, I think that's what I'm mostly interested in - what if you treat utilitarianism as a guideline? If you only apply it in cases where you think most people would agree on what is "most useful", would that not lead to better decisions on average, without influencing potential hypothetical edge cases?

(I also happen to think that the most useful thing in your situations is to respect the law, and have the law say that you're not allowed to exploit the homeless person, since that also influences the amount of trust we have in other people and hence the quality of life, but that's probably less relevant for what I'm interested in now.)

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#199

Post by ggm »

abvdasker wrote: post #183
ggm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best points the book makes is the surprisingly cynical views towards altruism which prevail in the US. This comment echoes something I have felt for some time. I feel that aspects of the US economic development which root in 'self reliance' have encouraged this. Ayn Randian world views?

The book talks about Ayn Rand a bit, but spends more time discussing the damage done to altruistic ideals by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and much of Freud's work. Freud considered altruism and philanthropy a form of masochistic pathology.

Freud/fraud

Re: Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

#200

Post by jopsen »

emodendroket wrote: post #181
jopsen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, it's impossible to capture all the variables, but in quantifying the good we do, we value all lives the same, and strive to maximize the good we do. If the EA movement forces big charities to focus a bit more on bang for buck, then that's a win. Perfect efficiency will never be possible anyways.

I have some experience in the nonprofit sector. While you obviously don't want to see people being cavalier with donor dollars, nonprofits that are obsessed with cost cutting are more effective at scolding people for wanting a chair that isn't falling apart or making a few too many photocopies than they are at their missions.

Looking at givewells analysis, they don't seem too focused on office supplies, but rather whether the charity did any follow-up studies, how far it scales and what it costs.

But the follow-up studies seem far more important, than the per unit cost of mosquito nets.

Post reply on HN