The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by nisegami » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #457

seanc wrote: post #448

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.…

The solution is to tax the shit out of rich people and hand it over to the rest of society. I mean the maths has been done: whatever the rich give out in charity is always less than what they would pay in taxes. The whole effective altruism thing is an ego trip experience. Wow I get my name on a hospital wing!

Taxation creates its own set of perverse incentives, I suggest we use a money pit: https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-should-the-government-s...

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

#482

Post by danaris » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #352

jmull wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both those 1%s are very unlikely to be anywhere close to being true. The sci-fi version of AGI that people are imaging now will never exist. No one has any idea how to create AGI now, and therefore, no one knows what it might actually look like if it ever does. Any “solutions” people come up with now will have nothing to do with the problems a real AGI might pose. If people want to get together and talk about this st…

Well, opinions differ. I'd guess the probability of there being AGI as in computers able to think as well as a human in most ways by 2300 as close to 100%. Things we have now are getting closer eg Deepmind's Gato and GPT-3.

Absolutely none of the recent interesting machine-learning successes are even going in the right direction to ever become AGI.

There is as much similarity between GPT-3 and an AGI as there is between a human and one of those novelty fortune-telling machines with racist caricatures and names like Zardoz.

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

#483

Post by danaris » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #426

polygamous_bat wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The underlying logic of someone who made and gave away billions being overall ahead of other people morally is sound. Do you hear yourself, not even asking how they "made" their billions? This is what "EA is indulgence for billionaires" people are talking about exactly. If you make your billions unethically, no amount of charity will make you a good person.

> If you make your billions unethically, no amount of charity will make you a good person. I completely agree! I thought the context of the rest of my post made it clear that I assume they made it in an ethical way, but I guess it wasn't clear? I mean, if someone says they gave away billions to charity, my first question isn't immediately "but how did you make billions?". I just assume it's legit, because in most cas…

It is impossible to make billions of dollars in an ethical way (short of inheriting it from someone who made it in an unethical way).

First of all, just looking at empirical evidence, all the existing billionaires—every single one—made their billions through some form of exploitation.

Second of all, you can't make billions without going through millions for a good while—and once you have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life (which I'm not going to try to put an exact number on, but I think it's fair to say it's somewhere in the millions), it is unethical not to find ways to use the rest of it to improve the lives of the rest of the people on Earth.

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

#484

Post by yanderekko » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #258

yanderekko wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering) I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems…

The problem is the consequentialist ethics behind the position. Rigid consequentialism leads to all kinds of abhorrent views and is almost universally rejected among ethicists (with a few notable exceptions).

I don't think EA implies adherence to "rigid consequentialism". Like a lot of EA advocates are deeply into animal welfare for these reasons, but they offer advice to those that aren't. I think the weaker unifying argument is just that EA encourages more self-examination regarding whether one's charitable efforts are actually achieving one's values, and to provide advice to help achieve better alignment on this.

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

#485

Post by danaris » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #252

concordDance wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve had prominent EA folks tell me that Climate Change is not an existential risk Have you seen anything to indicate otherwise? The IPCC reports don't contain even a whiff in that direction. To the best of my knowledge zero people who know anything about climate change think its existential.

Is there an accepted unambiguous definition of "existential" here? Is it: 1. All life on the planet dies 2. All advanced life on the planet dies? 3. All humans die? 4. Advanced civilization is destroyed irretrievably? 5. Advanced civilization is destroyed for a long period of time? etc And I'm not sure the group "people who know anything about climate change" are neccesarily better equipped to answer this question -…

I'm not sure if this would actually count as "existential", but I think that it's well worth being very, very concerned about a consequence on the order of

"Millions to billions of people die; large percentages of the rest are displaced and/or have their lives made significantly shorter, harsher, and less certain as war, famine, disease, and natural disasters become vastly more common around the globe."

And there's really very little question that that's where climate change is leading if we don't get it under control soon.

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

#486

Post by FormerBandmate » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #460

PebblesRox wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?…

"How can we be most effective with our giving" is a good thought. It's what I thought EA was, like, two weeks ago. "The movement can literally compute the optimal pattern of giving, such that to be most effective with our giving means donating money to people to ride around on bicycles thinking about how to prevent future AGIs from killing us" is not a good thought, but it turns out to be a description of what EA is…

Rationalists brought us Roko’s Basilisk after all. A lot of the leaders don’t seem to have basic sanity checks in their brains that stop their ideas from getting wildly out of control, which can lead to stupid shit like the Basilisk on a small scale but end up justifying fraud on a much larger scale. It’s like fundamentalist religion

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

#487

Post by yanderekko » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #317

yanderekko wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 recruiting to contribute more charity and volunteering) I mean, the concern here is that coming off as an asshole can be self-defeating, not that these views are actually incorrect, right? Seems…

The problem is they can't possibly know if they are correct or not, we just don't have enough information about the actual future and what effect actions now might have on it. Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually r…

>Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible.

If curing cancer is a top priority, the EA advice is not that you should quit your job and try to cure cancer. It's probably to keep your job (which you likely have developed a comparative advantage in) and do serious research into which organizations will actually make progress towards curing cancer, and EA orgs will often try to provide advice on this latter front.

Yes, there is a big emphasis in these communities on various sorts of existential risks, but it doesn't imply that you can't be an EA if you have different beliefs on these risks, so long as those beliefs are informed by open-minded criticism and not "only privileged techbros could possibly care about this"-style sneers

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

#488

Post by danaris » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #326

froggychairs wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I do work in reducing harms of deployed AI systems at a big tech company When most EA/Rationalist folks discuss AI Safety. They’re talking about AGI, a hypothetical construct that we have no way of proving is even possible Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with funding research of that sort. The problem comes is that many EA/Rationalist folks begin downplaying legitimate tangible risks on the horizon (…

The atom bomb was once a hypothetical construct. The Einstein-Szilard letter was talking about a danger that they had no way of proving was even possible. Proof is irrelevant outside of mathematics; the only relevant question is cost to expected benefit - or expected harm. With dangerous research, when a conclusive demonstration of possibility is achieved, it is usually too late to do much in the way of prevention. T…

Part of the problem with this is that conclusive demonstration that AGI is possible is not even in the same ballpark as a conclusive demonstration that it would have consequences like the EA folks seem to believe.

From everything I've read about their views, they seem to believe that either the moment an AGI is created or very, very soon thereafter, it will achieve the Singularity and "ascend" to something near godhood from our perspective, and it will perceive humanity as a threat to it and immediately seek our destruction—which, because of its near-godhood, it will be able to achieve far faster than we have the ability to respond to. Thus, what we have to do is either prevent AGI from ever coming to pass (because as soon as it exists, it's effectively too late), or make absolutely certain that by the time it does, we have strong measures in place to either fight back against it, or get humanity the hell out of Dodge.

This is built on such a foundation of shaky assumptions that giving it credibility is ludicrous.

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

#489

Post by FormerBandmate » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

1ncorrect wrote: post #438

martopix wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see billionaire individuals and organised charities as polar extremes of the same policy failure. Neither should exist, and when they do it should be as an ephemeral anomaly. Any charity which fails to prioritise putting itself out of business is functionally a grift. If society truly valued what charities do, their activities would be intrinsically valuable, and not require a special economic status to be conjured…

People have this idea that you can just solve problems like world hunger by waving a magic wand, but you can’t. There are probably South Sentinelese starving right now, we can’t do anything about that because they won’t let us. The little world hunger that is left today after the advancements of the 20th century is almost entirely in war-torn messes, and you can’t eliminate war unless you eliminate human free will

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

#490

Post by FormerBandmate » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

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.

Incidentally, literally every dictator to ever live also has come to that conclusion