So, I agree with the claim that EA has a lot of aesthetic-identity-elements going on that compound (and in many cases cause) the problem. I think that’s really important to acknowledge (although it’s not obvious that the solution needs to include starting over)
But I also think, in the case of this particular post, though, that the answer is simpler. The OP says:
Either charities like the Gates Foundation and Good Ventures are hoarding money at the price of millions of preventable deaths, or the low cost-per-life-saved numbers are wildly exaggerated. My former employer GiveWell in particular stands out as a problem here, since it publishes such cost-per-life-saved numbers
Which… sure uses language that sounds like it’s an attack on Givewell to me. seems:
[edit] The above paragraph
a) dishonest and/or false, in that it claims Givewell publishes such cost-per-life numbers, but at the moment AFAICT Givewell goes to great lengths to hide those numbers (i.e. to find the numbers of AMF you get redirected to a post about how to think about the numbers which links to a spreadsheet, which seems like the right procedure to me for forcing people to actually think a bit about the numbers)
b) uses phrases like “hoarding” and “wildly exaggerated” that I generally associate with coalition politics rather than denotive-language-that-isn’t-trying-to-be-enacting, while criticizing others for coalition politics, which seems a) like bad form, b) not like a process that I expect to result in something better-than-EA at avoiding pathologies that stem from coalition politics.
[double edit] to be clear, I do think it’s fair to criticize CEA and/or the EA community collectively for nonetheless taking the numbers as straightforward. And I think their approach to OpenAI deserves, at the very least, some serious scrutiny. (Although I think Ben’s claims about how off they are are overstated. This critique by Kelsey seems pretty straightforwardly true to me. AFAICT in this post Ben has made a technical error approximately of the same order of magnitude of what he’s claiming others are making)
My comment was a response to Evan’s, in which he said people are reacting emotionally based on identity. Evan was not explaining people’s response by referring to actual flaws in Ben’s argumentation, so your explanation is distinct from Evan’s.
a) GiveWell does publish cost-effectiveness estimates. I found them in a few clicks. So Ben’s claim is neither dishonest nor false.
b) So, the fact that you associate these phrases with coalitional politics, means Ben is attacking GiveWell? What? These phrases have denotative meanings! They’re pretty clear to determine if you aren’t willfully misinterpreting them! The fact that things that have clear denotative meanings get interpreted as attacking people is at the core of the problem!
To say that Ben creating clarity about what GiveWell is doing is an attack on GiveWell, is to attribute bad motives to GiveWell. It says that GiveWell wants to maintain a positive impression of itself, regardless of the facts, i.e. to defraud nearly everyone. (If GiveWell wants correct information about charities and charity evaluations to be available, then Ben is acting in accordance with their interests [edit: assuming what he’s saying is true], i.e. the opposite of attacking them).
Perhaps you endorse attributing bad motives to GiveWell, but in that case it would be hypocritical to criticize Ben for doing things that could be construed as doing that.
a) GiveWell does publish cost-effectiveness estimates. I found them in a few clicks. So Ben’s claim is neither dishonest nor false.
While I agree that this is a sufficient rebuttal of Ray’s “dishonest and/or false” charge (Ben said that GiveWell publishes such numbers, and GiveWell does, in fact, publish such numbers), it seems worth acknowleding Ray’s point about context and reduced visibility: it’s not misleading to publish potentially-untrustworthy (but arguably better than nothing) numbers surrounded by appropriate caveats and qualifiers, even when it would be misleading to loudly trumpet the numbers as if they were fully trustworthy.
That said, however, Ray’s “GiveWell goes to great lengths to hide those numbers” claim seems false to me in light of an email I received from GiveWell today (the occasion of my posting this belated comment), which reads, in part:
GiveWell has made a lot of progress since your last recorded gift in 2015. Our current top charities continue to avert deaths and improve lives each day, and are the best giving opportunities we’re aware of today. To illustrate, right now we estimate that for every $2,400 donated to Malaria Consortium for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, the death of a child will be averted.
Further update on this. Givewell has since posted this blogpost. I haven’t yet reviewed this enough have a strong opinion on it, but I think it at least explains some of the difference in epistemic state I had at the time of this discussion.
A few years ago, we decided not to feature our cost-effectiveness estimates prominently on our website. We had seen people using our estimates to make claims about the precise cost to save a life that lost the nuances of our analysis; it seemed they were understandably misinterpreting concrete numbers as conveying more certainty than we have. After seeing this happen repeatedly, we chose to deemphasize these figures. We continued to publish them but did not feature them prominently.
Over the past few years, we have incorporated more factors into our cost-effectiveness model and increased the amount of weight we place on its outputs in our reviews (see the contrast between our 2014 cost-effectiveness model versus our latest one). We thus see our cost-effectiveness estimates as important and informative.
We also think they offer a compelling motivation to donate. We aim to share these estimates in such a way that it’s reasonably easy for anyone who wants to dig into the numbers to understand all of the nuances involved.
These phrases have denotative meanings! They’re pretty clear to determine if you aren’t willfully misinterpreting them! The fact that things that have clear denotative meanings get interpreted as attacking people is at the core of the problem!
I wonder if it would help to play around with emotive conjugation? Write up the same denotative criticism twice, once using “aggressive” connotations (“hoarding”, “wildly exaggerated”) and again using “softer” words (“accumulating”, “significantly overestimated”), with a postscript that says, “Look, I don’t care which of these frames you pick; I’m trying to communicate the literal claims common to both frames.”
Claims to the contrary are either obvious nonsense, or marketing copy by the same people who brought you the obvious nonsense.
In most contexts when language liked this is used, it’s usually pretty clear that you are implying someone is doing something closer to deliberately lying than some softer kind of deception. I am aware Ben might have some model about how Givewell or others in EA are acting in bad faith in some other manner, involving self-deception. If that is what he is implying that Givewell or Good Ventures are doing instead of deliberately lying, that isn’t clear from the OP. He could have also stated the organizations in question are not fully aware they’re just marketing obvious nonsense, and had been immune to his attempts to point this out to them. If that is the case, but he didn’t state that in the OP either.
So, based on their prior experience, I believe it would appear to many people like he was implying Givewell, Good Ventures, and EA are deliberately lying. Deliberate lying is generally seen as a bad thing. So, to imply someone is deliberately lying seems to clearly be an attribution of bad motives to others. So if Ben didn’t expect or think that is how people would construe part of what he was trying to say, I don’t know what he was going for.
I think the current format isn’t good venue for me to continue the current discussion. For now, roughly, I disagree with the framing in your most recent comment, and stand by my previous comment.
I’ll try to write up a top level post that outlines more of my thinking here. I’d have some interest in a private discussion that gets turned into a google doc that gets turned into a post, or possibly some other format. I think public discussion threads are a uniquely bad format for this sort of thing.
So, I agree with the claim that EA has a lot of aesthetic-identity-elements going on that compound (and in many cases cause) the problem. I think that’s really important to acknowledge (although it’s not obvious that the solution needs to include starting over)
But I also think, in the case of this particular post, though, that the answer is simpler. The OP says:
Which… sure uses language that sounds like it’s an attack on Givewell to me. seems:
[edit] The above paragraph
a) dishonest and/or false, in that it claims Givewell publishes such cost-per-life numbers, but at the moment AFAICT Givewell goes to great lengths to hide those numbers (i.e. to find the numbers of AMF you get redirected to a post about how to think about the numbers which links to a spreadsheet, which seems like the right procedure to me for forcing people to actually think a bit about the numbers)
b) uses phrases like “hoarding” and “wildly exaggerated” that I generally associate with coalition politics rather than denotive-language-that-isn’t-trying-to-be-enacting, while criticizing others for coalition politics, which seems a) like bad form, b) not like a process that I expect to result in something better-than-EA at avoiding pathologies that stem from coalition politics.
[double edit] to be clear, I do think it’s fair to criticize CEA and/or the EA community collectively for nonetheless taking the numbers as straightforward. And I think their approach to OpenAI deserves, at the very least, some serious scrutiny. (Although I think Ben’s claims about how off they are are overstated. This critique by Kelsey seems pretty straightforwardly true to me. AFAICT in this post Ben has made a technical error approximately of the same order of magnitude of what he’s claiming others are making)
My comment was a response to Evan’s, in which he said people are reacting emotionally based on identity. Evan was not explaining people’s response by referring to actual flaws in Ben’s argumentation, so your explanation is distinct from Evan’s.
a) GiveWell does publish cost-effectiveness estimates. I found them in a few clicks. So Ben’s claim is neither dishonest nor false.
b) So, the fact that you associate these phrases with coalitional politics, means Ben is attacking GiveWell? What? These phrases have denotative meanings! They’re pretty clear to determine if you aren’t willfully misinterpreting them! The fact that things that have clear denotative meanings get interpreted as attacking people is at the core of the problem!
To say that Ben creating clarity about what GiveWell is doing is an attack on GiveWell, is to attribute bad motives to GiveWell. It says that GiveWell wants to maintain a positive impression of itself, regardless of the facts, i.e. to defraud nearly everyone. (If GiveWell wants correct information about charities and charity evaluations to be available, then Ben is acting in accordance with their interests [edit: assuming what he’s saying is true], i.e. the opposite of attacking them).
Perhaps you endorse attributing bad motives to GiveWell, but in that case it would be hypocritical to criticize Ben for doing things that could be construed as doing that.
While I agree that this is a sufficient rebuttal of Ray’s “dishonest and/or false” charge (Ben said that GiveWell publishes such numbers, and GiveWell does, in fact, publish such numbers), it seems worth acknowleding Ray’s point about context and reduced visibility: it’s not misleading to publish potentially-untrustworthy (but arguably better than nothing) numbers surrounded by appropriate caveats and qualifiers, even when it would be misleading to loudly trumpet the numbers as if they were fully trustworthy.
That said, however, Ray’s “GiveWell goes to great lengths to hide those numbers” claim seems false to me in light of an email I received from GiveWell today (the occasion of my posting this belated comment), which reads, in part:
(Bolding mine.)
Further update on this. Givewell has since posted this blogpost. I haven’t yet reviewed this enough have a strong opinion on it, but I think it at least explains some of the difference in epistemic state I had at the time of this discussion.
Relevant bit:
A friend also recently mentioned getting this email to me, and yes, this does significantly change my outlook here.
I wonder if it would help to play around with emotive conjugation? Write up the same denotative criticism twice, once using “aggressive” connotations (“hoarding”, “wildly exaggerated”) and again using “softer” words (“accumulating”, “significantly overestimated”), with a postscript that says, “Look, I don’t care which of these frames you pick; I’m trying to communicate the literal claims common to both frames.”
When he wrote:
In most contexts when language liked this is used, it’s usually pretty clear that you are implying someone is doing something closer to deliberately lying than some softer kind of deception. I am aware Ben might have some model about how Givewell or others in EA are acting in bad faith in some other manner, involving self-deception. If that is what he is implying that Givewell or Good Ventures are doing instead of deliberately lying, that isn’t clear from the OP. He could have also stated the organizations in question are not fully aware they’re just marketing obvious nonsense, and had been immune to his attempts to point this out to them. If that is the case, but he didn’t state that in the OP either.
So, based on their prior experience, I believe it would appear to many people like he was implying Givewell, Good Ventures, and EA are deliberately lying. Deliberate lying is generally seen as a bad thing. So, to imply someone is deliberately lying seems to clearly be an attribution of bad motives to others. So if Ben didn’t expect or think that is how people would construe part of what he was trying to say, I don’t know what he was going for.
I think the current format isn’t good venue for me to continue the current discussion. For now, roughly, I disagree with the framing in your most recent comment, and stand by my previous comment.
I’ll try to write up a top level post that outlines more of my thinking here. I’d have some interest in a private discussion that gets turned into a google doc that gets turned into a post, or possibly some other format. I think public discussion threads are a uniquely bad format for this sort of thing.