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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?

#471

Post by cscurmudgeon »

concordDance wrote: post #454
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

> Yes, that has been discussed thousands of times in the literature. Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad. EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.

> Yes, and that's why the strawman is bad.

No, thats why it is good. It is discussed thousands of times *because* none of the solutions are satisfactory.

> EA folks don't in practice follow or advocate for any form of ethical system that leads to doctors killing people for their organs.

But the axioms they evangelize imply that. And this is essentially what Bankman has done financially.

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

#472

Post by tptacek »

riezebos wrote: post #470
tptacek wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, EA seems like an obstacle to that kind of common-sense thinking. I could donate to charity. But: if holding on to the money made it more likely that I'd earn more money later, I could donate even more money to charity. I'm thus ethically obligated not to donate. See, for this, William MacAskill's conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried where he urged him to take a job at Jane Street to maximize his income.

If you have an idea which cause to spend on and you have enough savings to live for 6 months in case of problems, EA generally recommends to donate: https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/

... so does Catholicism. It's the rest of what EA (and Catholicism) has to say that gets us into trouble. (I'm Catholic, fwiw).

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

#473

Post by bioemerl »

concordDance wrote: post #442
bioemerl wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All those traits of humans are advantages and disadvantages.

Have you ever heard of the concept that science processes when experts die? Churn and recreation breed innovation and copy stamping the smartest people since the 1800s would not have benefited us that greatly.

Bad ethics breeds bad science. To recklessly experiment with things we don't understand the consequences of almost always ends badly. We have processes for things like this and those processes generally do not get in the way of process.

Also, it's unlikely our ethics will allow AI to do anything we do not. If they can, they're already out of control.

> The third is observability. People complain about how much of a black box modern AIs are

Self improving AGI will be just as much if not more of a black box than current ones or humans. You can see what's there, but you can do what with humans as well. The problem is the complexity, not observability.

The complexity and physical nature of the human brain lets us do a lot with very little. Our brain uses what, 100 watts? It's more advanced than all modern AI at a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the power.

And Moore's law is slowing down. Chips are getting bigger. Power consumption going up. Our chips will eventually go the direction of our brains. They will be larger, more specialized, more dynamic.

A race of humans with incredible traits would be an astounding addition to our society and the livelihoods of everyone in it. This future does not scare me at all, should it ever happen.

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

#474

Post by edanm »

tptacek wrote: post #465
edanm wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a variety of ways in which such a person could be less moral than the pitifully ineffective non-billionaires. I think we might be talking past each other a bit. I'm saying, given no other information, someone who has given away billions, effectively, as in saved lives, is "morally ahead" of someone who hasn't similarly done so. Of course they could've done other things that make them morally worse. Of cou…

I'm saying, given no other information, someone who has given away billions, effectively, as in saved lives, is "morally ahead" of someone who hasn't similarly done so. We're not talking past each other. This is false. Your problem is that you're using the concept of incomplete information, rather than that of ceteris paribus . Compare two billionaires, identical in every respect other than that one donated more than…

> Your problem is that you're using the concept of incomplete information, rather than that of ceteris paribus.

You're right, that's what I meant and I misspoke.

> The logic is shot completely to shit as soon as we're trying to compare the marginal sacrifice of a billionaire's giving pledge to the moral decisions people make every day of their life. And yet that's exactly what Scott Aaronson does.

Well I think that he was more comparing crypto vs non crypto and saying there's not much difference, but fine.

> I feel embarrassed just typing this stuff out. This is, like, philosophy 101 stuff?

Sorry to be embarrassing, I guess? :Shrug:

> The logic I'm arguing against here is on its face one of the cases moral philosophers make against Bentham's naive utilitarianism --- that it leads people to believe stuff like this.

I'm curious; I think utilitarianism is true broadly speaking (though not naive utilitarianism). Do you?

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

#475

Post by tptacek »

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.

But even virtue ethics got parts of this right that EA seems to get wrong. From the very beginning, Aristotle caught on to idea that minmaxing a particular moral virtue gets you into deep trouble. That's precisely the hole EA falls into; see again Sam Bankman-Fried, and MacAskill's advice to him.

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

#476

Post by yifanl »

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.

This line of thinking leads to some problems. There's always some threshold of likelihood where if it provide some arbitrarily high enough good/harm reduction that lets you rationalize basically any possible position. For instance, give me all your money, I'll give you 8% monthly returns!

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

#477

Post by riezebos »

tptacek wrote: post #472
riezebos wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an idea which cause to spend on and you have enough savings to live for 6 months in case of problems, EA generally recommends to donate: https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/

... so does Catholicism. It's the rest of what EA (and Catholicism) has to say that gets us into trouble. (I'm Catholic, fwiw).

I'm not very close to the core of EA, so maybe my perspective is not the most accurate, but one thing that I feel sets EA apart from other movements is that EA people generally are happy to disagree and change their mind based on good ideas/arguments/evidence from anyone inside our outside EA. For example:

https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistake... https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-flaws-80000...

I expect and hope that people within EA will keep learning from mistakes and changing their views.

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

#478

Post by tptacek »

edanm wrote: post #474
tptacek wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying, given no other information, someone who has given away billions, effectively, as in saved lives, is "morally ahead" of someone who hasn't similarly done so. We're not talking past each other. This is false. Your problem is that you're using the concept of incomplete information, rather than that of ceteris paribus . Compare two billionaires, identical in every respect other than that one donated more than…

> Your problem is that you're using the concept of incomplete information, rather than that of ceteris paribus. You're right, that's what I meant and I misspoke. > The logic is shot completely to shit as soon as we're trying to compare the marginal sacrifice of a billionaire's giving pledge to the moral decisions people make every day of their life. And yet that's exactly what Scott Aaronson does. Well I think that h…

Consequentialism says that the ends justify the means. They do not.

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

#479

Post by no_identd »

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'd buy that shirt if the backside read "But Philosophy of Statistics is", or something like that

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

#480

Post by martopix »

riezebos wrote: post #477
tptacek wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... so does Catholicism. It's the rest of what EA (and Catholicism) has to say that gets us into trouble. (I'm Catholic, fwiw).

I'm not very close to the core of EA, so maybe my perspective is not the most accurate, but one thing that I feel sets EA apart from other movements is that EA people generally are happy to disagree and change their mind based on good ideas/arguments/evidence from anyone inside our outside EA. For example: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistake... https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers…

Well, right today there's an article on the economist, one on the guardian, two things on the front page of hacker news, etc. This is a debate, with clear criticism of their current views. Let's see.
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