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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

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Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#441

Post by whywhywhywhy »

martopix wrote: post #390
tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

Please do not forget that you can disapprove of all the longtermism stuff and of the alleged cult-like structure, and still think it's important to pledge your money to charity. Please don't let the bad publicity around EA stop you from donating what you can, to charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy, whether from EA-related organization or other research. The original message still stands and…

> charities that you trust and have a proven record of efficacy

Yet to find one since I started googling their financials.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#442

Post by concordDance »

bioemerl wrote: post #394
coldtea wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...

I also hate I absurd this argument is, we already have a GI, it's you, it's me, it's the exponentially growing humanity that we all live around and contribute to every single day. Why are we so scared of an artificial brain when we have millions of living brains doing exactly what we are scared the artificial brains are going to do. We are growing exponentially, and it almost all certainty these AGI, if they even bec…

> And if it was easy to self-improve and artificial intelligence, we would have figured it out, we'd be artificially improving ourselves by now, but we haven't, because it's not that easy, and for the most part we are probably limited by the laws of physics

There are three big things that stand in the way of human improvement that do not for AI. The first is reproducibility, you can't make a few copies of a starting state of a human and run them with different parameters to observe the results. The second is ethics, you can't try out a bunch of genetic tweaks on babies because one might have bad side effects. The third is observability. People complain about how much of a black box modern AIs are but you can still see it working and figure out what layers do what.

> We're going to create AGI, and they're going to be different from us, they're going to be different from us in radical ways, but they're still going to have their own form of emotions, goals, desires, influences, and so on.

I am surprised this reassures you. A race of humans that have perfect memory and can copy themselves would be a terrifying thing.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#443

Post by TheMaskedCoder »

mtrycz2 wrote: post #257
armchairhacker wrote: post #10

Like most things: EA as a concept is fine. Finding the "maximal" way to improve the lives of others is great, and finding better ways to contribute than charity and volunteering is honorable. The issue is when people take it to the extreme (like someone who literally argued that a person doing mere charity or volunteer work is bad , because they are wasting time and effort that they could've spent making money and re…

The whole thing reminds me of "I, Robot", when the AI realizes that the greater good for humanity can't care for themselves, it is to be ruled by the AI for good. This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.

Why wait for AI to take over when you can have people run the same calculations and come to the same conclusions?

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#444

Post by bootsmann »

edanm wrote: post #389
simonh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about the movement, so can't comment on the earlier points. >If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. Ive seen this argument many times on many different issues and I think it's almost always bunk. The classic example in Fusion research, I had friends when I was a stu…

You might totally be right. The problem is, humanity is pretty bad at estimating when a new technology is about to be ready. Even the experts are pretty bad. See e.g. multiple people saying human flight is many years away, including some who were saying it unknowingly after it had been achieved! So I think the question is: when should we worry about ai safety? How early is too early? Plenty of experts think now is a…

> Plenty of experts think now is a good time to be spendning at least some resources on this. And we're not talking nuclear fusion level resources here; I don't know the numbers, but I imagine the amount of resources are actually fairly tiny compared to almost all other scientific spending. (And this was certainly true 10 years ago.)

The risk theses experts are talking about isn't existential. Its stuff like GPT3 being truncated to generate propaganda for dictatorships, deepfakes, algorithm-reinforced biases in all kinds of models (because the data used to train them was generated by humans). This is concerning to some degree and deserves funding and research (though all too often the results boil down to unusable advice and guidelines). This is entirely orthogonal to any existential risk a supposed AGI might create. One is a testable scientific hypothesis and the other is a futurist horror story which is untestable by definition.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#445

Post by JamesBarney »

zztop44 wrote: post #260
JamesBarney wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what else they should have picked? It seems like a fairly straightforward name for movement that focuses on charity effectiveness. I guess you could call it "effective giving" or something like that but caring about effectiveness is it core differentiating tenant and anything related to altruism/giving/charity is going to sound good.

I think the argument is that everyone else doing charity/altruism also (ostensibly) cares about effectiveness so it’s only a differentiating tenant if you somehow think your caring about effectiveness is somehow different to everyone else’s.

They care about effectiveness in the sense of if you asked if they cared about effectiveness they'd say yes.

They don't care about effectiveness in the sense that they are doing the math on how effective different outreach is, comparing that against other uses of the money, and sharing that with their donors.

I've been to 9-10 charity events and none of them talked about effectiveness in a dollar and cents way like the way givewell does. It's a real change from the status quo.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#446

Post by maximus-decimus »

davisoneee wrote: post #184
asimpletune wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but now I’m kind of lost. I genuinely don’t know anything about EA, so this is an honest question. If EA is improving the world according to your values, is it really distinct as a concept? Like, to me, the reason why I think almost anything is because it improves the world according to my values. Another way to put it is that to me it kind of sounds like someone is saying, “we believe in doing the best thing”, bu…

Effective altruism is about the _effective_ part. Don't just donate to the charity or cause that _sounds_ good; look for where your money would provide the biggest impact. If you want to save lives in general, look for the most _effective_ charity like that, which may be something like mosquito nets rather than a cancer research foundation. Don't just donate money to whatever is the most obvious charity advertised on…

cancer research will give benefits forever once a solution is found whereas mosquito nets will get worn out and so are only a temporary fix. Cancer cure also scales to more people eventually. Worse, how much is your donation contributing to cancer research? You just can't quantify that.

The whole concept just seems to assume you know everything, present and future, and have infinite calculation power.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#447

Post by UncleMeat »

PebblesRox wrote: post #434
tptacek wrote: post #137

My "Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" t-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. I've dug into this stuff over the last couple days, because I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be something akin to like a pledge drive for Charity Navigator's best-reviewed charities or something, and it turns out it's nothing of the sort. In fact, if you read some of the commentary from EA insi…

"Maybe it's some kind of horrible drug interaction with Rationalism, or maybe EA is fundamentally Rationalist?" I have always associated EA with the rationalist movement, since I came across it via reading rationalist stuff. If you define EA as "figuring out how to deploy a given set of resources so as to do the most good," your conclusions are going to depend on your value system: how do you define and measure good?…

One of the problems I observe in forum posts from these communities is that it is fun and cool to think differently than others. "What if fighting poverty now is actually bad and preventing the AI apocalypse later is actually better?" Then you get to feel superior to everybody, even those goody-two-shoes people down the street that donate a lot to the food bank. You know the secrets. It is the same kind of thinking that makes people think that Roko's Basilisk is cool or frightening or meaningful. It makes you feel like you have secret knowledge that others do not.

But... because we tend to interrogate our second option less than our first option people end up throwing their EA money at fucking ridiculous things while there are people out there dying in childbirth because their local hospital doesn't have consistent electricity.

"Yeah, I just have a different value function than everybody else" does not absolve people from the criticism that their value function is stupid.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#448

Post by seanc »

Humans have devised many, many institutions and philosophies for helping each other grow into powerful moral people. Uncountable religions, self help movements, mind-body wellness systems, the list goes on and on.

Every single one, without exception, has examples of people at the top of the institution, widely regarded as masters of the system, who are miserable destructive human beings.

This makes me profoundly sad. I could understand if every single group of people had members who are toxic, but the fact that the selection systems for progression are so predictably bad...

IME, the best you can do is to find a small local scene that practices the system in a way that is healthy and nurturing for the members and live with the cognitive dissonance caused by the rot at the top. Whether it's your small neighborhood church, a martial arts dojo or your toastmasters club, these things can be great in the small even if they're awful in the large.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#449

Post by AlexandrB »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #402
aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All modern moral systems have extremely serious defects where they can be gamed. Repugnant conclusion, the entire concept of deontology, etc. Virtue Ethics is ungameable.

Virtue ethics is gameable if you can make virtues conflict.

Which is trivial: pro-life vs. pro-choice, free-speech vs. anti-harassment, etc. I don't think there's anyone on any part of the political spectrum who thinks their ideas are not virtuous.

Re: The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

#450

Post by cscurmudgeon »

concordDance wrote: post #242
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, it is not a "fine" concept. It is just utilitarianism with modern marketing and pure utilitarianism has problems. See one example below where utilitarianism's suggestion goes against what almost everyone considers ethical: You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients who would otherwise die. EA effectively sanctions robbing a mill…

That example is a bad one. There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc > EA effectively sanctions robbing a million people to help a million people + 1 Yes, EA people often think taxes…

> That example is a bad one.

No, just saying that it is a bad example doesn't make it.

I wish EA folks looked at the literature that discusses this very example.

> There are many serious risks in trying to do that in practice, which is why our intuitions are against it. E.g. you might be found out and people might mistrust doctors, you might be wrong about the person having to connections, those patients might not live long anyway, etc etc

Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature.

To answer, you can always have the person confirm they are ok with it (e.g. Switzerland allows physician-assisted suicide in some case).

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