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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?

#381

Post by coldtea »

ethanbond wrote: post #370
coldtea wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming (1) "consuming and pumping oil" is a bad thing, and not a complex win-some/lose-some thing, which gave us huge progress and benefits in the 200 years we've used fossil fuels to pump the industrial revolution, (2) and that we can just absurtly stop consuming and pumping it right now, and there won't be huge disastrous 2nd order effects (in economy, society, ability for people to heat themselves etc) un…

It doesn’t assume either of those things. In fact it accounts for exactly those points under the heading “incentives.” We are engaging in clearly self-destructive behavior because, incentive structure accounted for (your points), it very well appears to be the best option. It wouldn’t be a hard problem if it didn’t. It should be obvious that it’s entirely possible to follow your (real) incentives all the way into a v…

>We are engaging in clearly self-destructive behavior because, incentive structure accounted for (your points), it very well appears to be the best option

Well, if it's the "best option" then it clearly isn't self-destructive... It's just something with side effects, but which also yielded huge benefits.

Kind of how alcoholism is self-destructing. But a side-effect from taking a drug that helps us perform betetr or treats some condition we have, is not self-destructing. It's more of an unforseen issue, that we can't immediately correct (e.g. because of the condition worsening if we do it abruptly).

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

#382

Post by bondarchuk »

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…

If we're gonna make vaguely sweeping comparisons to religion, I would like to point out that much of this kind of instinctive aversion to EA probably comes, itself, from the secular protestantism pervading US culture.

- Outcome matters more than the intention of the person trying to do a good act? Absurd; here, I can even prove it with an absurd example!

- Trying, at all, to build a framework for good and bad different from that handed down to us? How dare they.

- Artificial general intelligence? Pointless to worry about, only humans can be really intelligent because [strikethrough]they have a soul[/strikethrough] there's something about consciousness that we don't yet understand.

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

#383

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

Tenoke wrote: post #316
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You describe all religions. Read some scripture, perform some simple devotions, and call it a day. I don’t mean to overstate the religiosity of EA but it’s not structurally different.

You can reduce everything to being religion if you do it this way to the point of the comparison being useless. HN? Religion. Weight lifting? Religion. Dental hygiene? Religion. Voting? Religion. Functional Programming? Religion. Punk? Religion.

Judging the comparisons as useless before making them and evaluating their use? That's a common religious belief and practice that hides this truth:

Belief is an arbitrary choice and a tool.

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

#384

Post by aeneasmackenzie »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #322
notahacker wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard....But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism I don't think it's the idea of giving to charity that's being criticised here. Its the idea a rich person giving an absolute…

Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.

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.

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

#385

Post by endominus »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #359
notahacker wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, nobody in this subthread is arguing that outcomes have no relevance. We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays…

I don't fully agree with Aaronson's take, I just think it's underappreciated. I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. And I think there is an argument to be made that getting rich people to donate is a thing that a moral system that tries to lead to good outcome…

>I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes.

If you'll forgive the glibness, isn't that just deontology with extra steps? Sorry, it's just been on my mind since I learned (from Resident Contrarian article[0]) that many rule-utilitarianism is a functional reskin of disfavored deontological thinking.

[0]: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/the-weird-world-of-the-...

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

#386

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

> 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

This is the part of EA that triggers a lot of red flags for me. Making money, or rather making significant money, necessitates participation in a system of exploitation that is largely responsible for the ills the charitable donations are meant to alleviate in the first place. Maximizing that money necessitates optimizing the exploitation.

the whole thing just seems like an exercise in morality-washing one's own greed. Lies, damn lies, and statistics perpetrated with "rationality".

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

#387

Post by in3d »

froggychairs wrote: post #218
devilsbabe wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re your last sentence: why do you disapprove of funding research into AI safety

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 (…

They are right. Climate change is absolutely not an existential risk.

“In a high-emissions scenario where little is done to curb planet-heating gases, global mortality rates will be raised by 73 deaths per 100,000 people by the end of the century”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/rising-globa...

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

#388

Post by bnralt »

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…

> 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.

"If killer GMOs have even a 1% chance of happening this century and donations to Greenpeace reduce the risk of them killing everyone by 1% that's still money well spent." Would you find that argument compelling? My guess is that most people would find the "even 1%" much too high for both cases. And that's with technology we could, theoretically, do bad things with today if we really wanted to for some reason, not some far off technology we might not get to for centuries.

The made up statistics "rationalists" like to use are pretty similar to certain sales techniques you see from less reputable quarters. For instance, multi-level marketing companies - "You probably know, what, 100 people at least? And if even a small amount of them, say 5%, sign up, they get a small amount of their friends - ~5% - to sign up, and they get a small amount of their friends to sign up - well, soon you have 125 people you're getting money from while you're hardly doing any work!" The sleight of hand is pretending that a percentage is small, because in most cases a percentage of that size is considered small, when in this particular case it's orders of magnitude larger than reality.

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

#389

Post by edanm »

simonh wrote: post #247
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 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.)

I personally think that, given the chance of AI systems being an existential risk, we should be putting way more resources into it than into other things. The same goes true for preventing pandemics or other biological x-risks, etc.

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

#390

Post by martopix »

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 should keep standing.

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