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The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

economist.com

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

#541

Post by didibus »

concordDance wrote: post #324
didibus wrote: post #21

I've always found EA to be the most capitalist way of trying to do good. Instead of like being humble, not accumulating wealth for yourself, not thinking of yourself as better, etc. EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue. That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone. This also always felt very American. I'll get rich by paying workers poorly, finding any advantageous lo…

> EA is pushing for this weird self-centered egotistical philanthropic avenue. That's literally the least efficient way to help anyone. What. The stereotypical EA person is a banker who makes $150k/year after tax and donates $100k/year to the against malaria foundation. As opposed to the lawyer who quits working for corporate and becomes a gardner, which seems to be what you're advocating. The former seems to do far…

> The former seems to do far more good in the world, saving hundreds of young lives

I guess the example is incomplete, the banker also contributes to some system in a way, is the work harmful to others?

And if the work is beneficial, they're still part of a system where, why are they taking such a large salary in the first place?

Now, I'm actually not opposed to this form of EA. Like the other commenter said, donating money is fine, it's choosing to become a banker and trying to become the highest paid banker in history, so that you can then go and donate a larger sum of that income that I find problematic.

The latter form of EA seems wrong to me, because the idea that you'll take more money from people, to then personally decide who else you'll give it back too and how much of it you'll keep for yourself or not, that does not seem altruistic.

Instead I wish that people adopted a moral where making excessively more than others, or owning excessively more things than others was just seen as wrong to begin with. If you don't need more than 100k, then just charge less for your services, or pay your employees and staff more, or heck accept higher tax brackets and give more back to fund social institutions and infrastructure.

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

#542

Post by cscurmudgeon »

_yb2s wrote: post #535
giraffe_lady wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has very noticeably begun falling into the same traps long discovered and recognized by utilitarianism. EA now has a significant contingent that is most focused on very unlikely far future outcomes because they would be incredibly bad for an unimaginably vast number of people if they did occur eg unbounded utility. That's pascal's mugging! The movement is based on the same ideas and values and it's running int…

I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap. With all of these examples, and pascal's mugging itself, there is an obvious error: there should be a practical upper bound on the adverse outcome you're concerned about, at which all higher values ar…

> I am very confused about why the rationalists, who first identified the concept of pascal's mugging seem to have a huge number of initiatives which seem to be examples of falling directly into the pascal's mugging trap.

The original rationalists were true rationalist. And the recent ones? I am not so sure.

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

#543

Post by Chilko »

concordDance wrote: post #225
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…

> 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. As someone with multiple EA friends: this is precisely what it is. > they have their own weird language, there's a hierarchy, and people on the inside operate und…

Did you read the article linked by OP? It addresses these points quite directly and highlights the issues with them.

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

#544

Post by Slava_Propanei »

civilized wrote: post #14
losteric wrote: post #5

The title is unfairly conflating the idea with one organization. Plenty of people quietly donate some fraction of income to effective charities (effective altruism), without engaging with the Effective Altruism institution. Though, yeah wow, I didn't realize how cliquey Effective Altruism had become.

It is sad! Distributing mosquito nets in malaria-afflicted areas saves lives on the cheap and is universally acclaimed. How better to describe this than "effective altruism"? Why do perfectly nice general descriptive terms so often become tightly bound with one small group and their whole very particular worldview?

No post body was provided.

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

#545

Post by dekhn »

dang wrote: post #540
codefreeordie wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If I tell you that repetitive railing against Marxism is tedious and off-topic, does that make me a Marxist? what if I tell you that repetitive railing against capitalism is just as tedious and off-topic? Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). This you're-just-moderating-me-because-you-don't-like-my-opinion percept…

If you're bored, tired, and profoundly don't care, you should stop doing this job.

We don't need the moderation on HN any more.

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

#546

Post by danaris »

naasking wrote: post #502
polygamous_bat wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole thread is very stereotypically EA to me -- and why I see it as a sham. Starts off at the top saying how it's all about donating to reasonable charities, but soon devolved into "what about muh AGI". I am literally doing my Ph.D. in robot learning and I can tell you that every single "longtermist" effective altruist I have talked to has been more interested in getting high on their own stash of Sci Fi fantas…

> rather than interacting with the actual practitioners of the field and understanding what is happening, what are the very real limitations of it, and why their assumptions range from willfully ignorant to often simply maliciously stupid. On the other hand, I've found that "practitioners in the field" often consistently overestimate how complex and different the human mind is from our computers. Take the recent "LaM…

You don't need to have a deep and complex understanding of human sentience to be able to put some lower bounds on what it means to be sentient.

I don't know about sentience, as such; however, I believe there are at least two bare-bones prerequisites to an AI being conscious as we understand the term:

1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.

2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.

Now, these are probably not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be. And I believe that consciousness is a prerequisite for sentience.

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

#547

Post by danaris »

naasking wrote: post #527
coldtea wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it can, because humans have already done this. What do you think language, writing, books, school, science and computers are? Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ. Genetics and nutrition, on the other hand, did. > However, money is a power too, and all of our money is digitized these days, and a digital superintelligence might arguably have an advantage in this…

> Language, writing, books, school, science and computers never raised anybody's IQ. Whether IQ took us to the moon is still a topic of debate, as is whether IQ is equal to or only part of intelligence. But it's clear that language, books, school, science and computers absolutely did take us to the moon. Clearly all of these things improved our intellectual effectiveness , and that's what matters, regardless of wheth…

> Cryptocurrency makes this trivial. All computer systems likely also have vulnerabilities, including financial systems. An AI can probe these systems around the clock, or can subtly introduce vulnerabilities into our vulnerable software supply chains. These are only two among many options that are entirely within the realm of plausibility.

And there it is: the assumption that AGI will, necessarily, be capable of hacking effectively any computer system, no matter how well-secured.

This belongs in Hollywood, not on HN.

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

#548

Post by Chilko »

xorfish wrote: post #401
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longtermism and QALY do not seem compatible.

EA and Longtermism are not the same thing.

However the linked article makes a pretty strong case that the two are increasingly interlinked, especially in the EA institutions.

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

#549

Post by michaelmrose »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #328
michaelmrose wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the poster but there is no reason to believe that we possess the tools to contemplate AI safety worse it may be a fools errand to contemplate how to control something much smarter than you are. Ergo at this point in time money spent to pay people to contemplate it is almost certainly entirely wasted.

Maybe we should try to acquire the tools before we build systems much smarter than we are

Current AI seems to be just a box of math churning out correlations that we can put to effective use but not understand wherein the ability to actually act is entirely reliant on us deliberately wiring the machine into the world in a way it can even have negative effects or any effect at all wherein said negative effects are entirely and trivially predictable and avoidable. This is true whether its a robot that accidentally breaks a kids finger or a system that bakes in the inherent racism of prior decisions into future sentencing or mortgage approvals. In most cases the logical thing is just don't use AI for that.

Its not at all clear that future actual AI will be GPT7 now with 10,000x as much processing power. In fact not much seems to be clear at all. It would seem that the insight to control future tools will come from the experience in building said tools with little chance that it will just accidentally suddenly become skynet. If we doom ourselves thus it will be a long laborious process with years of striving, setbacks, and thousands of people involved.

We should focus on the basic science and let it become clear what avenues exist over the probable decades it will take to even reach the vicinity of our goal. Money spent specifically on paying PhDs to imagine how to secure a technology we don't have and don't remotely understand is probably wasted.

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

#550

Post by Akronymus »

dekhn wrote: post #545
dang wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I tell you that repetitive railing against Marxism is tedious and off-topic, does that make me a Marxist? what if I tell you that repetitive railing against capitalism is just as tedious and off-topic? Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). This you're-just-moderating-me-because-you-don't-like-my-opinion percept…

If you're bored, tired, and profoundly don't care, you should stop doing this job. We don't need the moderation on HN any more.

I strongly disagree. Without dang, the site would devolve, slowly at first, but steadily accelerating, until it reaches the lowest common denominator.
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