Your last point doesn’t make much sense to me. I agree that we should be concerned about purchasing as much impact as we can, but the amount of impact you’re purchasing from AMF is minuscule compared to the far future. It seems like your concern for something being ‘proven’ is skewing your choices.
It’s like walking into a shop and buying the first TV (or whatever) that you see, despite it likely being expensive and not nearly as good as other ones, because you can at least see it, rather than doing a bit of looking on Amazon.
If you look for TVs among Amazon, they give you specific prices and you can reliably buy them. Now imagine you walked into a TV shop and saw some that were a good deal (say $100), but others where the price was set randomly?
I don’t think we can make a case that we’re actually purchasing some known, larger-than-AMF amount of impact from far future work, because so much far future work is likely to not actually do well at affecting the far future. I just don’t think we have that much control over how the future unfolds.
Some interventions have no impact, some have low impact, and some have high impact. ‘No impact’ doesn’t help anyone/do any good, ‘low impact’ helps some people/does some good, and ‘high impact’ helps a lot of people/does a lot of good. Because of the size of the future, an intervention has to help a lot of people/do a lot of good to be ‘high-impact’ - helping millions or billions rather than thousands or tens of thousands.
We’re fairly sure that AMF is ‘low impact’, since we have evidence that it reliably helps a decent number of present people. Which is great—it’s not ‘no impact’! But it’s unlikely that it will be ‘high impact’.
I agree that we don’t have a clear sense yet of which interventions are actually high-impact. That’s why I don’t donate to any direct x-risk reduction effort. However the appropriate response to this problem seems to be to invest in more research, to work out which interventions will plausibly be high-impact. Alternatively, one could invest in improving one’s position to be able to purchase more of the high-impact intervention when we have a clearer view of what that is—putting oneself one a good career path or building an effective movement.
I don’t understand why you think the response should be to purchase low-impact interventions.
I agree that we don’t have a clear sense yet of which interventions are actually high-impact. [...] However the appropriate response to this problem seems to be to invest in more research, to work out which interventions will plausibly be high-impact. Alternatively, one could invest in improving one’s position to be able to purchase more of the high-impact intervention when we have a clearer view of what that is—putting oneself one a good career path or building an effective movement.
I definitely agree with this, and that’s what I tried to articulate in the section on value of information. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Your last point doesn’t make much sense to me. I agree that we should be concerned about purchasing as much impact as we can, but the amount of impact you’re purchasing from AMF is minuscule compared to the far future. It seems like your concern for something being ‘proven’ is skewing your choices.
It’s like walking into a shop and buying the first TV (or whatever) that you see, despite it likely being expensive and not nearly as good as other ones, because you can at least see it, rather than doing a bit of looking on Amazon.
I’d reject your analogy.
If you look for TVs among Amazon, they give you specific prices and you can reliably buy them. Now imagine you walked into a TV shop and saw some that were a good deal (say $100), but others where the price was set randomly?
I don’t think we can make a case that we’re actually purchasing some known, larger-than-AMF amount of impact from far future work, because so much far future work is likely to not actually do well at affecting the far future. I just don’t think we have that much control over how the future unfolds.
Some interventions have no impact, some have low impact, and some have high impact. ‘No impact’ doesn’t help anyone/do any good, ‘low impact’ helps some people/does some good, and ‘high impact’ helps a lot of people/does a lot of good. Because of the size of the future, an intervention has to help a lot of people/do a lot of good to be ‘high-impact’ - helping millions or billions rather than thousands or tens of thousands.
We’re fairly sure that AMF is ‘low impact’, since we have evidence that it reliably helps a decent number of present people. Which is great—it’s not ‘no impact’! But it’s unlikely that it will be ‘high impact’.
I agree that we don’t have a clear sense yet of which interventions are actually high-impact. That’s why I don’t donate to any direct x-risk reduction effort. However the appropriate response to this problem seems to be to invest in more research, to work out which interventions will plausibly be high-impact. Alternatively, one could invest in improving one’s position to be able to purchase more of the high-impact intervention when we have a clearer view of what that is—putting oneself one a good career path or building an effective movement.
I don’t understand why you think the response should be to purchase low-impact interventions.
I definitely agree with this, and that’s what I tried to articulate in the section on value of information. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.