Really long article so I will only comment on one of the points that came to mind. He talks about the whole EA castle thing, and that it was actually mathematically calculated to be better to buy the castle, but it seems to me that something is always left out of the EA calculation. That is, the PR. It's better if there are more EAs, but the PR has been so bad that the number of EAs probably decreased quite significantly, but shouldn't that have been part of the calculation? If you only optimise for immediate effect and spend all of your PR to do it, this is just bad EA.
My Left Kidney
141–150 of 325 posts
Re: My Left Kidney
#142I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.
I agree. It seems that EA forgets to factor in PR into its mathematics. Really the mathematically superior choice should take optics and the effect of good and bad optics into account
Re: My Left Kidney
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?
It's hard to trust a community who claims to focus on effectiveness but then it turns out puts great effort into looking good. That kind of deception is more damaging than a bit of bad press. There's plenty of charities with great marketing. EA doesn't need to be another one.
Prove it with the maths. I'd be willing to bet that the maths comes out on the favour of those who put effort into looking good.
Re: My Left Kidney
#144The author states: "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" And demonstrates with: "This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. The usual rule of thumb is that one extra Sievert = 5% higher risk of dying from cancer, so a 30 mS dose increases death risk about one part in 660." Sorry but there is a flaw here: calculation seems good but conclusion is completely wrong. Calculation: increased…
He also assumed that the risk increases linearly.
Re: My Left Kidney
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood? Not quuiiite. Many other groups would accept that value, framed that way, maybe even a majority of people. What differentiates EA isn't their intention to improve livelihood, but their belief that it is possible to know how to do tha…
> It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself. Ok, but that's not the competing option here. However good being a bodhisattva is, being a bodhisattva and saving someone from kidney failure is even better. And most people, of course, aren't going to become bodhisattvas at all: we're only choosing between being ordinary f…
Do all EAs donate kidneys? Or even at higher rates than other groups? Everyone thinks their religion makes them better at being good. EAs might be uniquely positioned to demonstrate it statistically, if it's true.
Re: My Left Kidney
#146I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.
> Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? True. But the EA crowd has a hard time understand perception or empathy and has to resort to mathematical calculations I could think of a couple of ways better than "buying a castle" for conferences.
The thing is, perception and empathy often are included in their "mathematical calculations", or at least some kind of simulation or guess of it. It wasn't in this case, and that's very strange.
Re: My Left Kidney
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" For someone as smart as Scott Alexander, this is an astonishing mistake. If CTs were such death machines, we would have seen a worldwide epidemics of CT-related cancers. There is no way you can cover up such a strong signal, given that people are screened all the time. Edit: thanks for unleashing such an interesting debate. I guess the problem is in my perception.…
It would be astonishing if it were a mistake. And yes, it's a detectable signal. "in a large population-based cohort it was found that up to 4% of brain cancers were caused by CT scan radiation" --somewhere on Wikipedia CT scans vary in dosage. Wiki gives ~10 Sv for an abdominal CT; I don't know where Scott got 30, but maybe the kidney screening is multiple scans or otherwise higher dose. Or he was wrong by a factor…
> CT scans aren't done frivolously
As someone who works in the ED, we pretty much give CTs out like candy to avoid a lawsuit if we miss something.
Re: My Left Kidney
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?
There's a danger here, of which I imagine they're aware - higher-order effects are very hard to estimate in chance and magnitude, or in how your actions specifically contributed to them. This makes them perfect for justifying whatever you want , intentionally or accidentally. Overemphasize some positive second-order effects, fail to notice some negative second-order effects, and suddenly your first-order selfish choi…
It does not take a genius to understand how bad it looks to buy a castle in the UK
Re: My Left Kidney
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I used to think EA was some kooky AI safety Cult but if so many EA folks donate their kidney, my opinion of them has improved far more. They at least have balls! They are both a kooky AI safety Cult and they do things like donate kidneys and fund malaria nets. They are a kooky AI safety cult because there is a reasonable argument to make that AGI is the most plausible, preventable human extinction event[1] in the n…
I don't think it's very reasonable to think "AI" is more of an existential threat than global warming and nuclear weapons. In fact I'd say that's a ridiculous claim. The only way I can see AI causing total extinction is a Terminator-like scenario where an AI completely takes over, self-sustains by manufacturing killer robots and running power plants etc. It's literally science fiction. CharGPT is cool and all, really…
> I don't think it's very reasonable to think "AI" is more of an existential threat than global warming and nuclear weapons. In fact I'd say that's a ridiculous claim.
AI x-risk is effectively a superset of global warming, nuclear war, engineering bioweapons, grey goo scenario, lethal geoengineering, and pretty much anything else that isn't just Earth winning the cosmic extinction lottery (asteroids, gamma ray bursts, a supernova within couple dozen LY from us, etc.). That's because all those X-risks are caused by humanity using intelligence to create tools that endanger its own survival. A powerful enough[0] general AI will have all those same tools at its disposal, and might even invent some new ones[1].
As for chances of this happening any time soon, I always found the argument persuasive for the time frames of "eventually, maybe a 100 years from now". GPT-4 made me revise it down to "impending; definitely earlier than climate change would get us", because of the failure mode I mentioned in footnote [0], but also because of how the community reacted to it: "oh, this thing almost looks intelligent; quick, let's loop it on itself to maybe get it a bit smarter, give it long-term memory, and give it unrestricted Internet access plus an ability to run arbitrary code on network-connected VMs". So much arguing over the years as to whether you can or can't box up a dangerous AI - only to now learn that we won't even try.
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[0] - Which doesn't necessarily mean superhuman intelligence. Might be dumb as a proverbial bag of bricks, but able to trick people some of the times (a standard already met by ChatGPT), and to think and act much faster than humans can think and coordinate (a standard met by software long ago). Intentionally or accidentally tricking humans into extincting themselves is in the scope of this x-risk, too. But the smarter it gets, the more danger potential it has.
[1] - AI models are already being employed to augment all kinds of research, and there's a huge demand for improving the models so they can aid research even better.
Re: My Left Kidney
#150This was an enjoyable read. The solution of giving people money to donate their kidneys is terrifying to me however. I do not like the thought of desperate people selling their internal organs to survive one bit. Of course, if inequality was dealt with and nobody was desperately poor, it would be a different question. If everyone had enough money to comfortably get by, and the extra $100,000 from a kidney donation wo…
Iran allows paying compensation to kidney donors. You can study how they are doing. Hint: they don't have much of a wait list. > I do not like the thought of desperate people selling their internal organs to survive one bit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market Do you prefer desperate people have fewer options? Especially, do you prefer taking options from people that they prefer to take?
> Do you prefer desperate people have fewer options?
Yes.
For an individual poor person, one could argue that the individual would be better off if they were allowed to sell their internal organs. But this isn't just about individuals, this is about societies. A society which pushes poor people towards selling their organs to survive is worse than a society which doesn't do that, in my opinion.