Thanks for your detailed comment! I certainly agree that, if one takes into account ripple effects where saving lives leads to reduced existential risk, the disparities between direct ways of reducing existential risk on the one hand and other efficient ways of saving people’s lives on the other hand are no longer astronomical in size. I learned of this argument partway into writing the post, and subsection 5.5 was meant to address it, but it’s quite rough and far from the final word on that subject, particularly if you compare direct efforts to medium-direct efforts rather than to very indirect efforts.
It sounds as though, to model your intuitions on the situation, instead of putting a probability distribution on how many DALYs one could save by donating a dollar to a given charity, we’d instead have to put a probability distribution on what % of existential risk you could rationally expect to reduce by donating one dollar to a given charity. Does that sound right?
I would weakly guess that such a model would favor direct over semi-direct existential risk reduction and strongly guess that such a model would favor direct over indirect existential risk reduction. This is just based on thinking that some of the main variables relevant to existential risk are being pushed on by few enough people, and in ways that are sufficiently badly thought through, that there’s likely to be low-hanging fruit to be picked by those who analyze the issues in a sufficiently careful and calculating manner. But this is a pretty vague and sketchy argument, and it definitely seems worth discussing this sort of model more thoroughly.
I think the number one issue is that in so much as the beneficiaries are putting a lot of effort to advance selectively the lines of argument which benefit them personally, there is a huge issue that the positive components of the sum are extremely over represented (people are actually being paid a lot of money to produce those), whereas other options (money in bank + a strategy when to donate, donations to charities that improve education, etc) are massively under valued.
Keep in mind also that the utility of money in bank also becomes enormous, for people who do not quite donate to a bunch of folks with no background in anything (often not even prior history of economically superior employment!) but would donate to existential risk charity founded by people who have clear accomplishments in competitive fields, who poured in their own money, quitted lucrative jobs, and so on, whose involvement and whose dramatic statements are not explainable by self interest alone in absence of any belief in the impact. (Note that existence of such does not even require selfless people, when we are speaking of, among other things, their own personal survival and/or their own revival from frozen state)
Thanks for your detailed comment! I certainly agree that, if one takes into account ripple effects where saving lives leads to reduced existential risk, the disparities between direct ways of reducing existential risk on the one hand and other efficient ways of saving people’s lives on the other hand are no longer astronomical in size. I learned of this argument partway into writing the post, and subsection 5.5 was meant to address it, but it’s quite rough and far from the final word on that subject, particularly if you compare direct efforts to medium-direct efforts rather than to very indirect efforts.
It sounds as though, to model your intuitions on the situation, instead of putting a probability distribution on how many DALYs one could save by donating a dollar to a given charity, we’d instead have to put a probability distribution on what % of existential risk you could rationally expect to reduce by donating one dollar to a given charity. Does that sound right?
I would weakly guess that such a model would favor direct over semi-direct existential risk reduction and strongly guess that such a model would favor direct over indirect existential risk reduction. This is just based on thinking that some of the main variables relevant to existential risk are being pushed on by few enough people, and in ways that are sufficiently badly thought through, that there’s likely to be low-hanging fruit to be picked by those who analyze the issues in a sufficiently careful and calculating manner. But this is a pretty vague and sketchy argument, and it definitely seems worth discussing this sort of model more thoroughly.
I think the number one issue is that in so much as the beneficiaries are putting a lot of effort to advance selectively the lines of argument which benefit them personally, there is a huge issue that the positive components of the sum are extremely over represented (people are actually being paid a lot of money to produce those), whereas other options (money in bank + a strategy when to donate, donations to charities that improve education, etc) are massively under valued.
Keep in mind also that the utility of money in bank also becomes enormous, for people who do not quite donate to a bunch of folks with no background in anything (often not even prior history of economically superior employment!) but would donate to existential risk charity founded by people who have clear accomplishments in competitive fields, who poured in their own money, quitted lucrative jobs, and so on, whose involvement and whose dramatic statements are not explainable by self interest alone in absence of any belief in the impact. (Note that existence of such does not even require selfless people, when we are speaking of, among other things, their own personal survival and/or their own revival from frozen state)